TUYT 58

Amy Hoyt31min

Amy Hoyt

00:00

We believe in functional mental wellness, a holistic approach to mental health. We know that there's hope for those of us who have experienced trauma, even profound trauma and that's why we created the universe is your therapist podcast, we believe whether you call it God, the universe, source, unity or love that there is something much greater than us that conspires for our good, we envision a world of healing and connection and we teach you simple but powerful practices that integrate your mind, body and spirit so that you can come home to your highest self and your truest identity. You are not broken, you are loved, and you can heal. My name is Amy Hoyt, and together with my sister Lena, we will take you on a journey of healing and self discovery. Welcome back to another episode. Today's episode, we are so excited to welcome an Emmy Award, documentarian Eric Christiansen to our show, and we're so excited to talk to him about his work. It's very heart centered, and his latest film, which he is promoting unmasking hope, and it centers on recovering from trauma and building resilience and that grief process. So please help me welcome, Eric to the show. Hello, welcome back. We are so excited to have Eric Christiansen here with us today. And Eric, thank you for joining us. It's so wonderful to have you.

Unknown Speaker

01:29

Thanks, Amy. I'm excited to be here and chat with you.

Amy Hoyt

01:33

Absolutely. I was very intrigued when I read about you and asked you to come on the podcast with your work as a documentarian and how your project seemed to be very heart centered. And I was wondering if you could kind of talk about how you choose your projects and what draws you to a particular topic,

Speaker 1

01:53

I laugh because it doesn't feel like I have a choice. And I mean that in a good way they find me. I mean, I found this calling almost 30 years ago, when my home burned down in the panic cave fire disaster in Santa Barbara. And I was I was editor and filmmaker. I've been making films since I was eight years old. And my work was very different before the fire. And then after the fire, I'm like, I should make a movie about this experience. Because it was very unique. The survivors could speak to other survivors. But it was very difficult to communicate the whole experience to outsiders. And that's that's how this whole thing started. I did a film called faces in the fire. And it was about that experience of surviving a disaster. But it was about the recovery afterwards. And it won my first Emmy Award. But more importantly, it was picked up by the National Institute of Mental Health, and put it into their catalog to help other survivors. So that it kind of found me, you know that that fire turned out to have a very big silver lining for me. And now 30 years later, I'm working on my fourth film, unmasking hope. And as I say, they just kind of find me it's been a logical progression of film since I did faces in the fire.

Amy Hoyt

03:18

That is wonderful. And I love that what I think what that speaks to is how those experiences that we now as a society know are what we call trauma, that those can really reshape us. And not just in ways that are maladaptive, but also ways that are adaptive where we can take what we've learned in that experience and use it to reach back and help other people.

Speaker 1

03:46

I'm a huge believer in that I believe in any sort of tragedy, trauma, or even inconvenience that we're faced with that. Somewhere after that we're faced with a fork in the road. And we can either go down the, you know, the entropy, road and just become full of ourselves and live the pity. Or we can turn and go into where we can really use it to help others because of what we went through. And we can reach out because of that experience, because of the experience that we had.

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