Head Inside Mental Health
Todd Weatherly, Therapeutic Consultant and behavioral health expert hosts #Head-Inside Mental Health featuring conversations about mental health and substance use treatment with experts from across the country sharing their thoughts and insights on the world of behavioral health care.
Head Inside Mental Health
Supportive Immersion: Healing Through Experience
What happens when young people grow up deprived of essential experiences that previous generations took for granted? Dr. Danny Recio, TedX Pura Vida Speaker, Co-Founder of New Summit Academy, Program Director for The Bridge CR Young Adult Gap Program, and Co-Founder of the Supportive Immersion Institute in Costa Rica, introduces us to the concept of "experiential deprivation" and its profound impact on mental health.
Our brains evolved to learn through direct experience—the more enriching the experience, the more neural connections form. Yet many young adults today struggle with anxiety and insecurity because they've missed crucial developmental experiences that once came naturally.
Through his work with cross-cultural immersion programs, Danny has developed a powerful approach called "supportive immersion". When young adults enter an entirely new cultural context like Costa Rica, they discover that "not knowing" becomes acceptable, even expected. This creates a liberating environment for growth, where contribution to community replaces the American fixation on independence. One student powerfully described the program as "based on failure, and that's a good thing," highlighting how safe exploration builds resilience.
Want to learn more about addressing experiential deprivation through supportive immersion? Visit bridgecostarica.com to explore Dr. Recio's innovative approach to mental health and development through cross-cultural learning.
Hello folks, thanks for joining us on Head Side Mental Health, featuring conversations about mental health and substance use treatment, with experts, advocates and professionals from across the country sharing their thoughts and insights on the world of behavioral health care. Broadcasting on WPBM 1037, the voice of Asheville independent commercial free radio, I'm Todd Weatherly, your host, therapeutic consultant, behavioral health expert. My guest today comes to us from across the continent and over the water a bit there in Costa Rica, dr Danny Resio, co-founder of New Summit Academy, a therapeutic boarding school for adolescent boys aged 14 to 18, and program director for the Supportive Immersion Institute and the Bridge Costa Rica, a supportive gap year community for young adult men and women. Danny has his master's degree in clinical psychology from the University of West Georgia and his PhD in integrated ecology. I think I see a theme here.
Speaker 1:He is a published journal author and a speaker, including the TEDx Pura Vida, educating parents, professionals and communities on topics from mental fitness to cross-cultural transformative experiential learning. His work centers on guiding young adults through experiences of transformative experiential learning, a process he and his team call supportive immersion. This approach is at the heart of the Supportive Immersion Institute, which involves designing experiences that help individuals gradually expand their abilities and understanding. Participants in these programs explore and discover their optimal learning zone and how to contribute to their own well-being as well as that of others. Danny's inspiration stems from his own gap year in South Africa, where he developed a passion for understanding people's cultural and psychological worlds and recognized the growth potential of traveling abroad to build adaptability for self-awareness.
Speaker 1:Danny, welcome to the show. Something that you and I have been kind of chatting about, and when I had the privilege of coming and visiting your program and seeing you there in Costa Rica which was fantastic really, and I think I have a picture on the screensaver that's one of the views that I took from your campus for the bridge Just a fantastic place, and at the time we just got our version of the cicada.
Speaker 1:We were there when the cicada were going as well, that's true Costa Rica itself as a country and as a culture, not to say that we don't have it here in the States, but you're very rich in mountain, rich in coast, rich in environment, rich in fruit. You know there's just so much that's there to be involved in and I think you can probably speak to this better than I can. You've got a culture there that embraces the connection of community. It seems to me people really rely on community in ways I think we have lost to a lot, to a large extent in the United States, um, in the continental United States a lot. And the thing that you and I were talking about, which I love this term and I want to, I want us to explore it a little bit. I'd like to see more of it out there so people understand it.
Speaker 1:But is this this idea of experiential deprivation? We know we have, we have experiential education right, and we see that very prominently in the treatment world and a lot in kind of the camp worlds and ancillary worlds to education. But as a person who came out of a graduate, you know my graduate degree being in Outdoor Education Administration. Walking up to the school systems, going, hey, where's all the experiential? You guys are just sitting these kids down in chairs. No wonder you're having behavioral problems and education problems and academic struggles and all the other things. You're leaving out 20, you're leaving out 70 to 75 percent of the learners in the room and they're just frustrated and anxious about the fact that they're not picking anything up. You talked about this in your TEDx. Tell me what your definition is of experiential deprivation. Like, what does it mean to you? How are you trying to fight it in the world? Like, tell me a little bit more about this concept and your exploration of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, yeah, I'm going to try to narrow it down as much as possible, right, because I could talk about it for hours, but I'm so what's coming to mind right now and I'll land at a definition shorter here. But one of the issues with experience is that it's almost hard to say what is not an experience because we are so immersed in. It is the water we swim in. It's like asking a fish to describe the oceans, like everything that happens to us. In some ways it is an experience, right. And so to say that you're experientially deprived is to say that the quality of your experience is below the threshold of what's good for you, right, because if you're awake, if you're not in a coma, then you're having some kind of an experience.
Speaker 2:But it turns out and this is somewhat obvious, but people know, if you know a little bit about how the brain learns is that it learns through experience, and so the more enriching the experience is, the more the brain learns.
Speaker 2:And so, if you think about the, you know the power that something like you know, I don't know, tinkering with some neurons in the brain, versus the learning that can happen if you're, I don't know, grasping a cup or something like that, the wiring of neurons is way more powerful. If you're grasping the neurons I mean, sorry, the cup instead of you know some kind of you know, you know, tinkering of the neurons. And what I'm saying through that is that the brain requires experience to adjust and learn and so on and so forth, because evolutionarily, that's the way that we develop, especially human brains, because we're not born like a little zebra that, just you know, starts walking on like the first hour of being born. Our brains are designed to attach to particular experiences so that it can actually perform in a world that is quite varied, especially for us humans because we inhabit all these landscapes.
Speaker 2:And so I guess what I'm saying yeah, and so the big advantage that we have as humans is that we have this malleable brain that can learn and this, going back to the conversation, we're having at nervous system, a body of the adequate experiences to navigate the world insecure, that feels anxious, that feels, I don't know, timid when it comes to navigating the world.
Speaker 2:And so the issue that the reason I think about experiential deprivation so much is because there's, it doesn't make that much sense sometimes to speak about, you know, how the old generations were better and the kids now and so on and so forth. There's a, there's a part of it that is just not as important. But it is important in the sense of looking at the factors, uh, the environmental factors, the social factors that younger generations are encountering, and what's helping and not helping. And I think that experiential education is much more important now because people are not having many experiences that were completely natural before. Before we got on, we were talking about how people didn't used to think it was important to go to the gym. The gym was a ridiculous concept way back when you lived all day right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, why would you go to the?
Speaker 2:gym, but now you actually have to intentionally get up and go to the gym. And likewise, I think that young people are growing up in a world where certain experiences that were just the natural way in which you learned they're just not existent anymore and so you have to be intentional about it. And there's other examples, like food, for example. Right, Like you know, we talk about organic food now because some food is not, but when it was all organic, it was kind of silly to say that food. You know, I got to eat organic foods Like that's all there was.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like it was organic, we call it food.
Speaker 2:And so now you know, if we land at the concept of experiential deprivations, like you know, it used to be silly to say you know that you're deprived of experience, until now that we live in such highly technology mediated worlds where there's so much that you're missing and that people then used to think was important.
Speaker 2:Like people thought, oh, you got to go to school to learn your math and your science and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2:And now we're realizing, well, but it turns out that it was really important that you actually bike to school and that you walk to school and all the things that happened in between going to school and getting there. That is also really important. So people call this life skills or soft skills or whatever the case may be. But the point is that now I think we need to look very closely at those things that were natural at some point and that are not anymore, and that I think, or at least partially, explain the reason why younger generations are more anxious, more insecure and, let's call it, less resilient, which means that they feel less equipped to deal with the challenges of life. And so the challenges of life, one can say that are higher or lower, I don't know, but I think without enough experiential nourishment then people are going to feel less equipped to deal with whatever life throws at you, because you need those neurons to wire to the actual experiences and challenges that you go through as you're growing up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, and they're also just to your point. There's so much out in the world that still needs to be done and I think one good example that I've heard from my kids, their peers, parents of their friends, is that kids don't want to drive. It's overwhelming that you know it. It's. It's overwhelming, it's. You have to be responsible for this, this thing. You know 203 000 pounds worth of metal. You know, careening through the world. Uh, yeah, it, it is. It is scary, it is a big responsibility and it's also something that people just do every day.
Speaker 1:But a lot of the and and then I have two children, one's almost 19 and the other one's almost 22. So the 22-year-old, you know, he's got friends that have kind of gone over the hurdle where they went ahead and learned how to drive. But when they drive, they feel incredibly anxious, like they try to drive in such a way so they don't have to change lanes. They, they, you know they do things to really try and limit their experience, and it makes them ill-equipped when they're suddenly, you know, in the face of something that is difficult to navigate or manage. Um and and and then they get high anxiety responses and those kinds of things and I, you know I don't know how it is in Costa Rica, but the, the driver's training which we used to have in school and it was just a part of the curriculum and you were required to take it and it was just there and it was expected that you were going to at the appropriate age and and and grade you would be taking driver's ed. Nowadays you have to schedule it, you have to go find it. It's limited and short. There's a lot less experience actually doing driving. They resolve it in the test areas. They try to put it on the parents to say, hey, you take them out and give them enough hours.
Speaker 1:We know how that works and so you're getting the results of that in the world and I think that you know that's just a small example, a microcosm kind of example, of what we're seeing in the larger world where it comes to education, where we've got a lot of screens, we've got a lot of interactions that are not rooted in experience. They're just, you know, handing down information and hoping people pick it up. I mean, I think that that's been a problem for a long time. But you mentioned something else and I'd like to hear your thoughts about this. But it's almost.
Speaker 1:It's not just the way that we're getting our information, and that's important. We've got this experiential deprivation Our information is coming to us without experience. We've got this experiential deprivation Our information is coming to us without experience. We're watching it, we're witnessing it. In your talk you did the. I was really hoping you would pull the handkerchief, watch the guy two or three times and see if you can pull the tablecloth out from underneath the glasses. But at any rate, it's also the kind of information that people are getting. They're getting information in much tinier chunks and so there's less to kind of grab onto. So not only are they getting it in a deprived environment, they're getting a deprived content as well. When you aim because you've got New Summit Academy, you've got the bridge, both there in Costa Rica when you have students coming to your program and you see all this having taken its effect and they're coming away with behavioral problems and anxiety, everything else, where do you start to work with them in reconciling some of these things?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, um, there's a lot to say that I think that, um, two, two places to go with your question is that, um, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to kind of jump right to the heart of methodology. You know we were talking about supportive immersion and your introduction, and so, yeah, we people know this from sort of popular culture that you know. People say life begins at the edge of your comfort zone, right? Or something like that, right?
Speaker 2:right um and um learning does as well. And so where? Where you begin is right at the edge of where someone is capable, and the course, the environment that we provide is very enriching, not just in the senses that you were talking about, but just in all kinds of ways, right, different language, different traditions, and in terms of the landscapes it affords and the culture and so on. But what you have to do is provide people with the very next level of supportive immersion that we call connecting, which is very common in all of psychology, but it's the sense of understanding the world of the person and understanding where they're at. What are they capable of? What are they interested in? What moves their dopamine? I guess, what will get them going? Just to have this, uh, what, um, what, uh?
Speaker 2:James clear called the entry point, right, when you try to build habits like what's this sort of minimal level of challenge that you can take up?
Speaker 2:That's going to get the wheels turning. And then, of course, you want to scale up from there and in a way where it's almost like I'm going to use a surfing analogy just because I like surfing and this may be just completely foreign to most people, but when you're riding a wave, it's not going to work as well of stay in one place. You kind of have to go up and down and take advantage of the slope that the wave is providing so that you can kind of catch some speed. And then, you know, go up and get more and come down and so on and so forth. And so when you're in a learning process like this, you want to tap into that zone of optimal learning where you're challenged in a way that's enough for your skill level, and then you want to up the challenge and then lower it and kind of dance that way. But your question was about where to start, and you definitely want to start at a place where it's doable, I guess, for the person.
Speaker 1:Right. It's doable, I guess, for the person Right At the edge of their already existing competence and to a certain extent competence, and then give them experiences, obviously where they can push that envelope just a little bit. But I think that also kind of takes us to this other piece, because you know, as a person who's got a lot of training in experiential education, you know the experiential cycle. You have an experience, you reflect on it, you try to generalize and then you go apply it in the real world. There's this cycle of learning that happens for a person when they engage in real experience. But one of the things that I thought that I think is just super cool first of all is this cross-cultural experiential learning component that you've got.
Speaker 1:And you know, I think that you know, in treatment, regardless of where you are in treatment, you could be in adult addictions treatment or primary mental health care or in boarding school. You know therapeutic boarding school community, we know is a huge piece and that includes, you know, people having community of folks that they're in, they might be in treatment with or they're in school with or what have you. But you've taken that to a next level. You've really, I mean, you really have. You know I I would say that you see a lot of, you see a lot of programs doing things like service projects.
Speaker 1:Okay sure, and that's really good. I encourage a bunch of that activity, but you guys have really gone out connected to local community, having a cross-cultural experience and it's causing, you know, one of the things I got to listen to a couple of the guys talk about their experience and one of them said something that was pretty profound. He said that he, you know all the other environments. He was kind of surrounded by people who already knew what they were doing and he came into this environment and it was the first time he had something to give and it was profound for him. Like you know, he could walk out and he knew how to do something and that was something that somebody else needed, that they didn't know how to do, and it was the first time in his life, in his early twenties, that he'd ever had an experience like that.
Speaker 1:And it's one of these kinds of magic gems that occurs out of this aspect and specifically, the location and the nature of the environment that you're in, this cross-cultural experiential learning that's happening, this ecosystem that you've immersed them in, that's part of what your degree is in, that's part of the thing that you're passionate about. Tell me about, like, where's the design, where's the? Where's the? Where's the, the stuff that you started with, and how did it grow into what it is today like?
Speaker 2:tell us a little bit about that journey god, you ask great questions, stans, but they're so hard to I'm making you don all the work, for sure you know.
Speaker 2:All right, so yeah, so there's a couple of pieces there. One is that, generally speaking, of course, there's a couple of mistakes from my perspective that are made in some of the way that we conceptualize psychological healing, and one is that we tend to think that when someone is hurting, they need attention, they need to focus on themselves, and there's plenty of literature that tells you that when you're hurting and you feel down about yourself, you don't need more attention on you, you actually need to turn the eyes out to the world, and so for us it's really important, not just in the sense of becoming a contributing member of society, but to also realize that there's a whole world out there. And that leads me to the second piece, which is that when people sort of a trademark of psychopathology, people sort of a trademark of psychopathology is some kind of behaviors and so part of engaging people. So one of the things that I think about and sometimes this happens right Like the people that are referred to us will say, oh no, you know Costa Rica, that'd be too much. Or like, why costa rica if they're going to live in the united states? And I think to myself well, I, it's not the point, like we're not turning people into costa ricans, it's just that we're we're providing them with nourishment of the kind that they need to um, to kind of loosen up some of these patterns and to see, like, oh, I thought the world was such and such, but it turns out it's not, there's other worlds. Oh, I thought I was this person. But I guess that's also a construction, because here, in this environment, I, you know, I'm this different person, and so dislodging people, I guess, from this sort of diet of them and their environment, actually allows for new ways of seeing themselves and seeing the world that are, I think, are super useful, because then people can just choose Okay, so how, how do I want to be then? What is the person that that I want to become, and so on and so forth, and it provides this sort of opening landscape.
Speaker 2:And then the other, the other two pieces there are, that that a crucial concept for us is the concept of mattering, which I'm just going to use Prelatensky's definition because it's the simplest one, the one I like the most. He says mattering is defined by feeling valued and adding value, and I feel, like I was saying before, that in the world of psychology we tend to focus a lot on okay, let's value you and not so much in adding value. And so we try to focus a lot on this side of mattering. And I tell my students and I teach a class on young adult wellbeing at a university locally and the students take my class and so one of the things I said to them is hey, what do you think, how do you define being an adult? And so people say these kinds of things like oh well, you have to be financially independent and make your own decision and live on your own, and so on and so forth. And I say that's true, and that's a very sort of Western way of looking at things and that's you're going to find that definition quite a bit.
Speaker 2:But there's other places, um, and we support this one where, when you become and this is not like one day you wake up and you're this way.
Speaker 2:But the degree to which you become a contributor is really sort of, uh, one of the bigger, um, I guess, needles that you move when it comes to becoming an adult. And that's kind of the challenge where the, the, the goal is how much more can I contribute to the world around me? How much can I prepare internally so that I have something to contribute and and there's a um, a huge source of, of, of uh, motivation and wellbeing that that comes from that Um. So those are some pieces there's not those pieces of how culture is important to what we do, but certainly it comes from this concept that to be healthy, to exercise well-being, a sort of a balancing act of what's happening in an environment, in your environment, as it's coming up well, phone, and how you act, and so it's this sort of dance between the environment and you, in a way that it's inseparable, and I think that's an important, crucial piece of the ecological way in which we look at well-being.
Speaker 1:Well, if you think about this kind of and you stated it well an independence model that we have here in the States, which is I have my own, this, I have my own, that I can take care of my own, I can do my own, and it's almost the antithesis of contribution you know what I mean Like it's, like there's nothing about that. There's nothing about that particular model that's given to young adults here. That includes and how much can I help my community or my grandmother or my family, and and be a member and be a part of what's supportive and I, to our detriment, we're also I mean, you see it in other cultures around the country, and I ran into a friend of mine who and he's like you know, we, we grew up in the first thing.
Speaker 1:The first thing that you do when you graduate from high school is that you, you serve two years in the military and a lot of that is service projects and community projects. It's not battle, we're not at war, so, but they're, they're going out and doing a lot of service work. So the first two years of your life out of school is service work and it's required of everybody. I'm like we need to do that. You know what I mean at. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:I don't know if it needs to be driven by the military, but some form of service work where you feel part of something, that's your ability to contribute, is really important. The other thing that I don't know if this was a component that you spent a lot of time naming, but it was in there and something that one of your students reflected on in his experience which he came to an environment where, um, he was coming from an environment where you knowing things was valued, so he didn't know anything and he walked into a group of friends or a situation and he's supposed to know something. It feels embarrassing not to know something.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and then you know he's got to either be quiet or find a way to hide or find a way to not show that he doesn't actually know. And of course, I see that all the time People are talking about things and everybody acts like you know what you're talking about, but I have no idea what we were just talking about actually, right, imposter syndrome, right, well, but we don't, we don't know. You know, it's not okay to not know, even though somebody, nobody's ever told you what this is or how you should act or what it's about or any of those other things you're not supposed to not know, because you should have been told and you should be ashamed for not having been told. That's kind of the thing, and what he said about his experience and coming over there was that none of us know anything. It's a brand new culture. It's totally okay for me to not know something for the first time. Um, and there was this relief and I thought that was. You know, I got chills listening to him talk about that. It was so cool and I think that you know there's a we could spend a lot of time talking about.
Speaker 1:You know the, the, the concept of, and the use of risk. You were talking about comfort zones, the use of risk and experiential education. You know it's like you want to throw somebody into the red, but you know taking risk promotes learning and but if you are so afraid to take any risk at all, you're gonna find yourself stunted in your learning and in a experiential deprivation state Because you're not seeking anything, you're not going after things, you're avoiding things. This isolation which is at the root of much of the mental illness our young adults experience is rooted in isolation, rooted in experiential deprivation.
Speaker 1:And so is that something that you thought of intentionally? Is that something that you thought of intentionally? Like, how do we, in forming the program, in looking at environments, in studying ecology in the degree and teaching at the university, did it occur to you as a component? It's like, how do I make people not afraid to take risks? Again, like, did that live in there somewhere or did it emerge in the program? And how and where? What are the other cool stories that you have for where you're seeing this show up?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's crucial. And you know, again, going back to supportive immersion, that's the supportive part of the whole thing, right, it's like 50%, right I? You know, sometimes when students I'm interviewing students that want to come to the program and and I tell them that, um, we take turns cooking and students cook for everybody in the house, and they're like, okay, am I gonna? So I'm cooking for 13 people, uh, and they're like I've never done that. And I said you, you don't have to know how to do that, you just show us what you can do. And if you can do 5% of the meal, we'll do the other 95%. But guess what you're doing next time you cook, you're doing six or 7% and then we'll take care of the rest.
Speaker 2:And what this does is it just allows people to actually have an experience of the maximum level of contribution possible for them, um, without the full expectation that they have to go from zero to 100. And you know that I feel like the issue with young adults a lot of times is that adolescents can be pretty devoid of these kinds of contributions or independent life skill kind of activities, and then all of a sudden, there's this expectation that you're going to do that as a young adult, in the United States in particular, move out, go to college and figure it out on your own, and then this huge disparity leads to a lot of anxiety and a lot of people, you know, failing out of college and so on and so forth. And they maybe not. They don't leave because they don't know how to do the math work. They don't leave because, once they leave the classroom, they don't know what to do with themselves.
Speaker 1:you know they leave, because they don't know how to leave the room.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly, yeah, and so um, so, yes, in the design. This piece about um providing as much support as the person's capable of is really important. But then there's another piece. There's two other pieces that are really important, and one is that I think you have to be brave in the design of programming. That involves these experiential elements, in the sense that you have to budget in the mistakes and the failures and see them as as part of the learning experience.
Speaker 2:And the more the world becomes sort of uh because it's not just young people, it's just a whole society that becomes more anxiety driven and more control driven, and so the more we have access to these technologies, the more we feel like we need to control everything. And so you have to be a little bit brave to say you know, allow someone to catch a public bus in Costa Rica and teach them how to do that, and so on and so forth. But the opposite is more of a risk. Right, well, what if you don't? You know, and this is the risk that people are running into is like, well, okay, so you're safe, but you're not. You don't, you know, and this is the risk that people are running into. It's like, well, okay, so you're safe, but you don't know how to navigate the world, and so that's pretty risky. And so I think that people feel this sense that it's not just that you're in a country where nobody knows how to navigate the area, it's not just that Costa Ricans see you and they don't expect for you to know because you're from somewhere else, but it's also that we're designing a program that is looking, that the goal is the experiment, is looking, that the goal is the experiment, and so we're.
Speaker 2:You know, if we use the analogy of climbing a mountain, like we may or may not get to the top of the mountain, what we want to know is how we hike, what kind of hiker am I? Is ultimately the question. You know not if we reach the top of the mountain, or who got there first, or whatever the case may be. And in that, in order to know these kinds of things, we just have to explore. And sometimes, you know, we'll kind of find the wrong alley or find ourselves I don't know at a river that we can't cross and we have to backtrack, and you know. But like it doesn't matter, because all of it, the process of it, is what's teaching us. So if you're paying attention to the learning that's happening while you're doing all of that, then you're actually getting somewhere, and so you take the pressure off of these result-based, these outcome-based types of therapeutic processes where like, oh, now you've reached, you know, this particular, I don't know milestone, or whatever the case may be.
Speaker 2:And so for us, it's much more important that people understand themselves and how they function in this very sort of visceral, applied way, like this is how I navigate the world for real, and I have experience, I know it and I can speak about it, but, more than anything, I have proof that that's something I can do.
Speaker 2:And then I would add another layer which is important to the Costa Rican culture in particular, which is that I mean, this would be a long discussion about how the country is set up in comparison to, say, costa Rica continues to be a country that, um, that prioritizes community, and, and so what you're going to find if you come to Costa Rica is that people want to talk to you, people want to engage in a relationship with you, and so it's not as important who you are or like your accolades or whatever the case may be, because ultimately they just want to connect with you, and so that is somewhat secondary, and so I think our students start feeling like there's this sort of inherent, unconditional positive regards, I guess, to use Bergerian language to just who they are as people, versus feeling like you know.
Speaker 2:They need to kind of come with some kind of label that validates them as people like you know, what are you doing, are you going to college? You know, what have you accomplished, are you summa cum laude Like, or whatever the case may be, versus you know, I don't really care, you're just a person.
Speaker 1:Who are you?
Speaker 2:You're a person let's hard to kind of create a sense of community when people are moving around so much, and Costa Rica because it's smaller and the economy just kind of is kept to a particular area, then that just makes it a little bit easier for people to stick around and so that helps perpetuate the sense of community. So there's a few factors there that contribute to people feeling the sense that I can give things a try and it's okay. There's a student who recently said I don't know if you met him because I think he had left by the time you came, but he said to me in a short interview I did with him he said you know, I would say that the bridge is based on failure and that's a good thing.
Speaker 1:So, wow, that's one of the biggest compliments I've ever gotten.
Speaker 1:That's great. Yeah, well, you know the safe exploration of failure. I mean, that's you're not learning if you don't fail. The thing that, the thing that occurs to me a little bit about the cultural aspect of it is something that Dave Bone talks about. You know, in dialogue, where you know the purpose of dialogue is dialogue If you're, if you're, you know you can make it the person of your dialogue to like, get something or earn something or establish, you know, a path for success for yourself or what have you.
Speaker 1:It's very difficult to build a trusting or even effective performative relationship, one where you can get things done, because you haven't, you haven't done the basics of just getting to know each other. Yet you see a little bit, you see it. You see that in cultural aspects, certainly in Costa Rica and other areas, areas I think that you used to see it a lot more in the south. You know you talk about the weather first before you, before you talk about anything else, and we're losing a bit of that, and part of the cost of that is the is the fear of connecting, and then, without connecting, you end up once again here, we circle back around to a deprived experiential environment. Well, I tell you, danny.
Speaker 1:I was grateful to have the privilege of visiting your program and hear some of these stories and see some of the interviews with the students. I'm so glad that you're out there doing what is ultimately with experiential education being unique and, of itself, a version of it. That is kind of taking things to the next level and using cross-cultural experiences to bring experiential work into a new place, and hopefully we can figure out how to bring more of that back to the States. But thanks so much for being on the show today. I really appreciate the work that you're doing and I hope that what we get to do is talk about it again sometime.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, we could do like 10 of those in a row.
Speaker 1:I'm sure we could just keep going for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll do this again and I hope to have you on and maybe you bring some of your team, but this has been Head Inside Mental Health with Todd Weatherly, Dr Danny Arisio my guest today with the Bridge and the Supported Immersion Institute. What a cool name. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:We'll see you again next time. Outro Music. I found the illegal illegal illegal illegal illegal illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal, illegal. Thank you, I'm so lonely and lost in here.
Speaker 1:Bye I feel so lonely and lost in here. I need to find my way home. I feel so lonely and lost in here.
Speaker 2:I need to find my way home. Find my way home.