Nancy Loitz: The Alba Method, physical induction of emotion, and more

[Jim] Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Jim Kleiber Show. I am obviously Jim Kleiber. And today with me, I have a good friend named Nancy Loitz. And we are going to be having quite a raucous discussion if this is reminiscent of conversations we've had before in the past. And just to give you a little layout of the call, I like to do a a quick intro where I'll introduce myself, she'll introduce herself, and say what we expect to happen or hope to happen. And then we will go into the discussion. And then at the end, we will just do a quick reflection to see what we learned or what shocked us or surprised us. So just to start off, for people who have never heard my name or heard one of these episodes, I'm Jim Kleiber. I I have done a lot of work in emotions for the last 12 years, since about 2012, when I quit two innovation consulting firms to move to Colorado and build an app called iFeelio. The idea of iFeelio was to basically give us a private space to journal on our phones about how we were feeling. And when I say we, I mean me. It was mostly about giving me a private space to journal about this and get better at being being honest with myself about how I was feeling. From there, I moved to California, fell in love, then broke up and created a class called Emotional Self-Defense with the whole idea of being how do I deal with rejection and guilt tripping and being accused of manipulating and all these different things and still respond in a loving way. And yeah, I've run workshops in Germany and Africa and I used to live in East Africa and Latin America and, you know, been around. But just really grateful that I'm still interested in this topic after 12 years. So I actually met Nancy because a very good friend of ours named Anne introduced me to this work called Alba. And she told me probably in I think I was still in California in 2016 or 15. Hey, you really need to do this Alba thing. I was sure, sure. She's like, no, no, you really need to do this Alba thing. And then finally, during COVID, I had an opportunity to take Alba with Anne, with Nancy as the instructor trainer and was so grateful to go out to Illinois to take that class with Nancy. And from there, I have just been really grateful for what Nancy has done and really admire a lot of the work that she does as well and would like to pass it on to Nancy. So, Nancy, if you could just say a few words about yourself.

[Nancy] Yeah, I am a professor of theater arts at Illinois Wesleyan University, which is right smack between halfway between St. Louis and Chicago.

I've been here 37 years and I have about six weeks to go and then I'm retired. So retired from this position at any rate. Um my heart and my passion um is really in the album method and that's what i hope to continue teaching uh away from campus in other locations after i've retired and i began uh working with with the Alba method in 1983.

So 31 years present.

And I grow to love it more and more as I work with it. So that's me in a nutshell.

[Jim] Oh, great. Yes. And we'll get obviously much more into the Alba method as we go.

What I hope to happen in the conversation is that, yeah, we dive deeper into Alba, not only what it is and your experience with it, but how it impacts your life, how it impacts the lives of other people outside of the acting sphere, which it's often used for.

[Nancy] Yeah, absolutely.

[Jim] And how it maybe intersects with conflict and other things that are happening for us. So trying to see the integration of it from my side more so. Is there anything specific that you're excited to talk about or?

[Nancy] I think that's, I would mirror that thought, its application outside of theater. While it was developed for actors primarily, and I've taught actors primarily, I've taught other people from other walks of life as well. And that's where I think its power lies more so than, I mean, it does have a lot of power in acting because it's so good for the human being. So it's good for all human beings. And a more emotionally available actor is going to be a better actor. But it's not just beneficial for them by any means.

[Jim] All right, let's jump into it. So Nancy, what is Alba? Besides the Spanish word.

[Nancy] Yeah, exactly. Well, Alba, briefly, we have a lot of time to talk, so I'm sure we'll go into it in more depth later. But kind of the short version is that it is an entirely physiological approach to the development of emotional intelligence, I would say. That's kind of a catch-all phrase, but it at least helps people, I think, who aren't aware of what it is to get a starting point on what we're talking about. So as I said, it's completely physiological. It's not psychological in any way. It's totally physiological. Psychological and Through learning the album method you become more, Emotionally aware not just of your own emotional experience, but the emotional experience of others And for actors in particular, It allows you to enter and exit emotional states in a way that is safe and predictable, and, And fluid, I guess. It gives you complete control over the emotional journey of a character.

[Jim] Do you think that is similar in one's normal life, that it allows you to exit and enter emotional states?

[Nancy] Not so much. Because when we teach Alba, we're teaching the physiological aspects of the emotion separate from content, separate from context.

And so that's what makes it safe to learn it because we are not tying. Let's take anger for an example. We are not tying the anger that we are accessing to a memory, to a relationship, to an imaginary circumstance. It's totally physiological and it has no context. Therefore, when I'm guiding a student to leave anger, they can leave it with a clean mind and with a clean heart. Whereas if in life, emotion has context.

You're angry for a reason. You're angry at a person. You're angry at a situation. situation. So I could guide you through the exit of the Alba piece of what you're doing in your anger, I suppose. But I'm not a therapist, so I don't do that. But the situation is still going to be there. The context is still going to be there. And I can't, Alba's not going to erase that from your life or from your thinking process.

Alba is physiological. It's not cognitive. And it's not psychological. And in life, the cognitive and the psychological go hand in hand with the emotion. motion.

[Jim] So when I was talking with Mary the other day, who is a therapist counselor, she had an article about how it's not just mental health, there's also the physical component, and how they there's the interplay between the two. And it sounds like what you're saying with Alba is that it tries as much as possible to be just the physical, just the physiological contributor.

[Nancy] It doesn't just try to be, it is just the physiological.

That's what I love about it because it's so disciplined and so specific that that is what it is.

[Jim] Which can, as somebody who has taken it as a student and not so familiar with it, which can be disorienting in a way.

[Nancy] Absolutely.

[Jim] Because so often we have both components. We have the body shouting at us for a certain emotional state, but then we have the thoughts coming into mind to reinforce that or escalate it, sometimes deescalate, but sometimes to reinforce it. I'm feeling angry and then I say, ah, he's such an idiot. And then now it goes deeper and deeper.

[Nancy] Yeah, absolutely. And that's what makes this distinct from other approaches that actors have used to create an emotional state. Now, going back to what you said, though, about can, does it, I can't remember how you phrased the question.

[Jim] Easily enter and exit or whatever.

[Nancy] No, no, no. Back when you talked about in real life, can it give you a safe entry and exit? Yeah, that's right. Safe entry and exit from the emotion in real life.

No, it can't completely, you know, eliminate it because it's got these other things going on. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have a positive impact, because what it does do is allow you to sense in your body an emotion sometimes before you would recognize it psychologically or cognitively. So I'll be in a faculty meeting, for example. I always use that as my example for anger, because there's a lot of stuff that goes on in that room. A lot of laughter, too. You know, a lot of joy. Well, maybe some joy. But anyway, when I'm in a faculty meeting, I can start to sense in my body that I'm feeling anger at very tiniest level, because I know where my breathing sits in anger. I know what happens to my eyes in anger. You know, I know what happens to my jaw in anger. And so I will sense it and I'll say, wait a minute, what is that? All very quickly, of course, because we think very quickly. And then I'll say, I'm angry. And then I can intellectually very quickly go, why am I angry?

And then I can make a choice what to do with that anger. You know, for example, if somebody just said something very offensive, then that anger is justified, right? And it gives me time very quickly and much earlier than it would otherwise to decide to call that person out and say, you know, what you just said was very offensive and I don't appreciate it. Or I think you owe John over here an apology because that was really out of line. However, I might sense the anger and sense, go into my head and say, I said, why am I feeling angry? And I might say, you know what, I'm defensive.

He just said something that I took umbrage at, and it's not appropriate for me to be defensive.

So I need to kind of calm this so that I can listen. And then I can choose to modify my breath a bit or my posture a bit. Doesn't mean the anger is necessarily going to go away completely, but I'm making a choice about how I'm going to respond to it. And I don't articulate it.

[Jim] And so almost in a way it is physiological but the you get better at recognizing, cognitively the physiological so it does help bridge the gap between the two it it's not you're not just feeling it in the body you are aware you're feeling it in the where in the body at which point at which level intensity etc exactly.

[Nancy] And so as soon as i feel it it in my body, then I recognize that I'm actually feeling the subjective emotion. But I'm, but I'm recognizing it earlier. And anger is a good example, because in life, sometimes anger can come very quickly, sometimes it sneaks up on us very, very slowly.

But in many instances, circumstances it's out of our control before we you know and we act on it before we've had time to process why i'm feeling angry and what i should do about it um you.

[Jim] Know the metaphor that came to my mind is almost like an early warning system that we have for hurricanes or tornadoes or it's like hey hey this thing's coming like it's coming and sometimes sometimes it's coming whether you want it to or not like so even if you become aware of it it's maybe sometimes you can't slow it down so much but you can be aware that it's about to come and you don't punch them in the face you go punch a wall or whatever you know yeah yeah you can redirect the hurricane yeah yeah.

[Nancy] And what's what's also nice about it unlike the hurricane warning it's private.

[Jim] And it's subtle you know.

[Nancy] It's not an announcement i'm making to the whole room it's private and I get to choose whether to make it public or not, This all happens very, very quickly. So it's not like I'm stopping everything saying, hey, wait, everybody, I'm having an emotional awareness. Give me a moment.

[Jim] Pause. I feel anger slowly creeping up.

[Nancy] Yeah. So it's not like that. It's instantaneous. instantaneous.

[Jim] So that's for, so it's private when you feel it and recognize it in yourself, but Alba also helps us recognize these signs in others as well, right?

[Nancy] Absolutely. Yeah. So when I say it's private, maybe I should backtrack a little bit. It's private in terms of the, the, the thought, the thinking part in terms of I'm feeling this, why am I feeling this?

What am I action. That doesn't mean the emotion itself is necessarily private.

[Jim] Physiological. Yeah.

[Nancy] Well, not, not just, yeah, just, um, a lot of the external parts. Um, if somebody is very keenly aware of emotion or, or have strong emotional intelligence, they may pick it up too. They may pick it up that I'm, that I'm feeling a little angry and then they have their own thing going on in their head Nancy's feeling angry now if they are emotionally aware they get to choose how to respond to it the same as I'm choosing how to respond to it if they aren't very emotionally aware they may say what what's going on over there Nancy are you are you pissed at me or what you know because they may just feel that that small piece of it so it goes both ways, Yeah, I don't know.

[Jim] Oh, yes. I mean, what I'm really curious about is, so one thing I've struggled with in my life is that as I became more aware of how I was feeling, I became more aware of how other people were feeling.

[Nancy] Absolutely.

[Jim] Absolutely. other people weren't so aware of how they were feeling. And I'd be like, Oh, it looks like you're angry. I mean, the story I tell over and over again, is my buddy, he's like, getting into a heated discussion with a friend. And I said, Oh, it looks like you're angry. And he stands up, pounds his fist on the table and says, I'm not angry.

And so I try to tell people, I try to remind myself that me staying aware, me staying connected to emotions is actually for my safety. Because if somebody gets really angry and they're unaware of it, they might punch me or stab me or do something like this. And so, but at the same time, it can really frustrate me and other people when something is so obvious to me that they're feeling something. I don't know exactly what they're feeling or exactly what they're thinking about. But I have a, you know, I have pretty good intuition that something is happening.

[Nancy] Absolutely.

[Jim] And they deny it strongly. How do you, how does that impact your life?

[Nancy] Well, I guess I would.

In terms of the scenario you gave me, there's another choice you could make when you recognize that in somebody. You don't have to call them out. And so let me give you my example that I always go to in terms of that heightened awareness. When I first learned this technique in 1993, I learned it in initial, my initial training was in Chile. And when I came I came back to the States, it was during a sabbatical. I came back to the States and I was teaching.

A group of young actors, newly out of high school in their first acting class.

And, of course, my, my, my awareness of emotion was highly peaked, right? I was seeing it everywhere. And, you know, some of my students now say, as they're walking down the street, though, in their head, they're going sadness, anger, joy, fear, you know, they're just recognizing it, like, like people are wearing it written across their foreheads because our ability to read it just becomes hypersensitive. So I'm back in, I'm in acting class, right? And I had not figured that out yet. And I had not realized what I was doing. But at one point, I said to Karen Lachelle, I still remember who it was. And I said, you seem to be angry about what she just said. And she said, would you please please stop doing that. She said, constantly, it's like you're reading our minds and it's making us really uncomfortable.

And so what I had been doing is what you described with your friend is that I was taking this new skill I had and just displaying it for the world. And that was a choice I was making. And it was a choice that was not helpful to these students. Instead, I needed to take it in and decide what to do about it. And usually it's nothing. But if somebody is particularly angry, and I feel it's an unjustified anger or an anger that is not constructive or that is potentially dangerous, instead of saying, stop being angry, or you're being angry, which can fuel the anger because it feels like an an accusation is I can then change my emotional state.

Which can help to deescalate the situation.

And before I went to, as a further explanation of that, before I went to Chile and learned this work, my course evaluations that students do at the end of every semester, 95% of them described me as intimidating, frightening.

She scares me. And I could not figure out what that was about, you know, because I cared about these students deeply. And after I learned Alba, I realized that there are certain elements in the way my body enters a space or enters a conversation that has elements of the anger pattern in it, even though I wasn't feeling anger. anger. And to give you some examples, the anger pattern, and we haven't even talked about what patterns are yet, but the physiological aspects of anger has this real forward energy. It's got this narrow focus and it's got some tension in it. Well, there's something else that has that. Okay, they had those same things is drive is focus is determination, passion. A goal, which are all the things that are part of my personality is that I'm very, very focused and driven. And if I have a goal, I go after it. And what I realized is those qualities were being perceived by my students as anger. because they were receiving it that way. And it, it created a, a fear response in them. And suddenly it all made complete sense to me. And so then I made a choice to modify those elements or to tone down those elements that I was physically doing, but still do everything else I was doing in terms of my pedagogy. Didn't change anything about what I was teaching or how I was teaching it, I was just relaxing a bit on my physical manifestations of that drive or focus or passion that I had about the subject that I was teaching. And it's been transformative in terms of the student response to me. So course evaluations now are Nancy cares so much about us. I love her passion. You know, so I figured out a way to, you know, I've learned so much about about myself. It becomes much more about their experience with me as opposed to me and my energy in the room, if that makes sense.

[Jim] Yeah, it's what came to mind is that we don't have to change everything about what we're doing. Sometimes just small tweaks can deliver the message even more clearly.

[Nancy] Absolutely.

[Jim] And I think a lot of times, you know, I thought about love, which often I think we perceive as tenderness. I want to talk about the patterns in a second.

[Nancy] Yeah, that's fine. No rush.

[Jim] But I think we perceive it as just being soft. And I'm like, no, love can be really strong. Yeah, soft and weak and passive and basically lacking the anger pattern, you know, like missing a lot of that drive and that determination and focus. And so, yeah, I really appreciate you saying that because maybe there are just simple ways to change it. I mean, it can be even in branding. ending. I know Elon Musk, I listened to a podcast interview about him and said that he switched from Twitter to X because he wanted it to be more hardcore. He wanted it to be more extreme. And so sometimes just thinking, okay, maybe if we just tweak the name or the brand, the colors, you know, so not, not even just about our physical being, but other ways that we manifest in the the world that can have enough of an impact to break the barrier you're talking about, where people don't feel so much fear and intimidation from what you're doing. There's still some, because this stuff is intense.

[Nancy] But see if I can find my train of thought here. Oh, back to the the thinking, the ability to think about something.

So not just in that faculty meeting example where I'm making a choice about what to do about my emotion in the classroom example, it's also what do I do with their emotion? And I have time to, because I can identify it in them at a very small level or unless it's an immediate outburst or a very sudden thing, if it has any kind of build time, or if it's at a very small level, I can perceive it and make a choice about how do I respond to it, the same as I can make a choice about how do I respond to my own. Sometimes I want to, if I'm talking about a student in particular, I want to have them keep on going with it. You know, I want if they've got an idea, but but, you know, they're kind of, you know, I want to kind of rev it up and get them going. And so I'm choosing that if they're are going down a wrong path and emotionally wrong paths or whatever we're working on in the acting class, then I can dial my own energy down and that can, can bring them back. If that makes sense to a lower level of the experience.

[Jim] Well, it's again, it's kind of this higher resolution monitoring of what's happening. It's more of a, Instead of checking in every five minutes or every two hours, it's checking in every five seconds.

[Nancy] Just constant.

[Jim] I mean, it's just like every one second or millisecond. You know what I mean? It's just it's constantly checking in. And so you're like, OK, they're getting a little more angry. They're getting a little more angry. But I think it's OK. Like they can deal with this. Let's see if they explore this. OK, they're getting a lot more angry. OK, maybe now we need to.

[Nancy] Exactly. Exactly.

[Jim] Which from someone I used to teach salsa dancing. dancing. And with partner dances, it's very similar. It's monitoring, okay, are they going too far in this direction? I will be fine. Oh, they're going way too far. I need to guide them a little closer back in so somebody doesn't elbow them in the head, you know, so they get bumped by somebody. And so, especially on a dance floor, when there's a lot of different people dancing, there's so much monitoring of where I'm at, where she's at, where everyone else is at. Okay, okay, that person is doing, you know, they're separating. Uh-oh, that person might come and do a spin right into us.

[Nancy] My daughter is a figure skater. And so, yes. And so when they have practice ice and there's all these different people doing these different programs in the same time, I think it's very similar, it sounds like, to the salsa dancing.

[Jim] Yeah. But I think life is that way too. But a lot of us are so lost or so kind of overwhelmed that we're not paying attention to these things. And so I try to tell people this is like a martial art. It's keeping us safe, you know. A lot of people think closing off and disconnecting from how we feel is to keep us safe. And I said, that's not going to keep you safe. It's going to make you more delusional in a way.

[Nancy] Well, and unsafe because then we're no longer listening to our instincts. You know, that weariness that you feel in your stomach, you know, when there's something that, that you should be concerned about. You know, the classic example is a woman walking down the street at night. And, you know, you have this little awareness in your in your belly all the time as a female walking down a dark street, because you're hyper aware that something might happen.

But in a normal interaction with somebody, you meet somebody in a social setting, and normally, you'd feel completely fine. But there may be something in your stomach that says Is there something not right about this person or somebody that you're working with? And you have that gut feeling, you know, and mothers always tell their daughters, right? Trust that. Trust that gut feeling. Well, we have those gut feelings about every all kinds of things, not just fear. That's an easy one to illustrate because I think we all recognize that. But we have them in all of our all of our emotions. And we're born with them. We're born with them to keep us safe, as you said, and to keep us connected. So not just safe, but to keep us connected as human beings, right? I mean, joy and tenderness and love and all of those things are designed to keep us connected. And we're born that way. You know, babies are born with all of those because that's how they have to communicate their needs to their caregivers when they're babies. They don't have language yet. And so they're communicating through their emotions. You know, they're crying when they're hungry and they're laughing when they're happy. And, you know, when they start to smile to let you know they feel secure and safe, their emotions are their communicative device. They wouldn't survive without them. But then over, you know, from birth to birth.

You know, think of 12, think, you know, junior high and all the trauma, potential trauma that goes on being a junior high student.

We're learning in those years what emotions are bad, you know, and we start to push them down and we lose touch with that instinct that we were born with. And we're constantly judging our emotions and judging our behavior and going inside to our our brain into our thinking and losing that connection to our to our body and to the bodies of others because we've been untrained from that tool that mother nature gave us do.

[Jim] You think as we push down the bad bad i always do quotes on that bad.

[Nancy] Feelings please but uh.

[Jim] We also push down the good ones as well like do you think it's kind of a good it.

[Nancy] Depends on the personal experience You know, some people and that's why it's so interesting working with so many people as I have over the years is that each person comes in with a new challenge for me because everybody's emotional journey is unique. And so there are some people who suppress joy. There are some people, you know, some people I've had who suppress joy because people have laughed at their laugh. You know, so they have suddenly put a cap on it because they have a funny laugh. And they were told that since they were little or they don't have good teeth and they're embarrassed about their teeth So they have unlearned a certain large smile So it's not just those things we think of as bad that people have suppressed, you know, it's not just sadness or anger or fear which tend to be the ones that people label as negative and, Um, any, any emotion can be suppressed, um, or mixed together. You know, some people, every time they get angry, they start to cry. You know, that's a very common mixture. And when you're born, they're not born mixed. You learn to mix them. Okay. Um, and so some people are just afraid of feeling anger or feel guilty about feeling anger. And so they start to cry and it's all become hardwired. They don't know that that's why, but that's the origins of it. But it becomes hardwired that way.

[Jim] I think John Gottman or the Gottman Institute talks about meta emotions and the emotional reaction we have to emotions, like you're talking about, you know, feeling joy, but then feeling embarrassed or ashamed because of the smile or, you know, the reaction. I think I dated a girl once and she seemed, she like took a nap and she looked so safe and comfortable and relaxed. She woke up and she freaked out. I was like, huh? But I think maybe, you know, people sometimes in their lives, when they feel safe and comfortable, something bad happened. And so if we let our guard down, I can't let my guard down because something bad is going to happen. And so there can be, safety is bad. It's like, well, safety is bad. So this is why I get frustrated when people sometimes will say, oh, good feelings and bad feelings. All feelings are helpful. They can be helpful and useful, depending on the context. Absolutely.

[Nancy] But you have to re-educate them. And because we have been told that, not all of us, but many of us have been told that since, you know, infancy. And to just tell someone, you know, emotions aren't bad and to try and expect that statement to correct all of that history, it's not going to happen. And you'll get resistance and you'll get you'll get defensiveness about it. Because don't tell me now that the way I viewed the world is completely wrong. So the way you enter that conversation with a student is very important. How do you talk about that so that it doesn't create more resistance or more physical tension that gets in the way of openness to whatever it is you're teaching?

[Jim] I think from my standpoint, I feel confident in my ability to do that in a class because there is kind of the overarching, we're here to learn. Right.

[Nancy] They're more open.

[Jim] Oh, anger is bad. I'm like, no, anger is fine. Oh, anger is bad. I'm like...

I struggle. How do you approach this sometimes when you're dealing with people just in your life and they're not your student?

[Nancy] Well, I don't think I talk about emotions in my life in the same way as I talk about them in class. It's not my job in my personal relationships to fix someone's understanding of emotion.

They're on their own emotional journey. I mean, they are doing their They're doing their thing. If they're in my classroom, I'm in a different role. And that's something that's taken me time to learn because you want to take this knowledge. You want to take this new understanding and you want to gift it, you know, to everyone. Right.

But it's not my place to necessarily undo all of what their life is. They figured out how to cope. You know, when I when I do character analysis with with my students And they're dealing with, I had worked on a play this fall where both the characters are severely damaged, severely damaged individuals. And when they first read the play, they judge these characters. You know, he's rude and he's this and she must have a mental illness. They start labeling them with these different things. And after they've studied the play long enough, what an actor has to understand about their character is they are the way they are because they need to be to survive. And so the trick is to understand them, not to judge them, and I guess I think the same thing about people in real life, not characters, but for the most part, people are doing the best they can with what they have, and I don't think it's my place to go in and say you're living your life emotionally wrong or your emotions are not the ones that you should be having because it's much much more complex than that. And, and over time I've learned that it's not my place, but it's taken me a long time because when I first came back, as I said, I was saying, Oh, you're so angry. Oh, you're sad. Oh, what's wrong? You know? And I was, I was nosing my way into, into anger. Their personhood, it's private, you know, their emotions are their emotions. And so it doesn't, but if they come to me for advice, or if I'm counseling a student through an advising session, and I'm seeing something, or I'll ask a question and see if that can start a conversation that's, that's helpful. And within the boundaries of our relationship, I guess it's about boundaries.

[Jim] You know. So this brings up actually something I was really excited to talk about.

So you say they are their emotions, our emotions, kind of boundaries, kind of the separation of emotion, yet there's a lot of evidence, I would say academic and personal evidence of emotional contagion, that emotions don't just stay within one person, they transfer and we start to harmonize. And so one exercise that I remember doing class with you was one person being in the anger pattern and one person being in the sadness pattern and then just rotating different patterns, but typically the two people being in different patterns.

What is your experience with kind of emotions not staying self-contained and merging and harmonizing?

[Nancy] In life or in Alba?

[Jim] In life.

[Nancy] Safe? Well, of course they do. We are almost never in a pure emotion. Well, I wouldn't say almost never. First of all, we're never neutral. We're always in an emotional state. And we're usually in a complex emotional state. We're usually in a mixture. And I was just talking with one of my actor friends in Amsterdam the other day. She reached out to me. She's starting to teach Alba. And she was struggling with how to design the next phase of the course that she's teaching because she's working with students who have some experience and she wasn't sure how to take them to the next place. And so I talked with her about how to teach mixtures because we live in mixtures. We live in a combination of things. It's very, very, very, complex, the emotional state of the human being. So that's happening all the time. I think it's just the natural state of affairs and that somebody else's mixture, you know, I might only pick up one aspect of it. If somebody's angry and sad, depending on how emotionally receptive I am, I might just pick up the anger and I'm missing the sadness, you know, and this person could be be carrying a lot of hurt with them. And if I respond only to the anger and ignore their hurt, then I'm not doing them any favor by acknowledging what I see because I'm missing a bunch of it.

[Jim] And when you say respond, do you mean feel it or what do you mean?

[Nancy] No, no, no. I mean, if I were to comment upon it or if I were to, no, I feel what I feel. You know and again i don't judge what i feel i don't judge what i feel i will acknowledge what i feel i will take note of what i feel but i'm not saying oh you shouldn't feel angry it's i'm feeling angry why is that what am i going to do about it but not i shouldn't feel angry or i shouldn't feel sad you're staying in.

[Jim] The conversation with it and recognizing it yeah.

[Nancy] Right absolutely and the same with it with the person i'm talking to i'm recognizing it I'm processing it both intellectually and emotionally emotionally first right so I'm processing their emotion but I'm not sure if we're still on the topic so yeah so in.

[Jim] In Alba in class when you're doing trainings um what do you notice when one person is in let's say a pure pattern and another one is in like a different pattern because I think what I noticed was there's some type of mixing from other people like I was absorbing some of the emotions that they were feeling.

[Nancy] Well part of it is is the difference between being an alba class and being in life okay so alba, because it doesn't have context and it's totally physical those exercises are designed for a lot of different reasons so the the exercise you're talking about is we call an emotional opera where you're experiencing the space with emotions, the same as you might singing or an improv in acting where you're using text or whatever. But it's like an emotional improvisation where you're going back and forth. And when I, at the very early stages where I'm teaching it, and I'll say, I want you in this and I want you in that. And I don't want you to have an empathetic response to it. I want you to stay with it. I do that.

For a pedagogical reason in that this work in order to keep it safe and to keep it for you to learn over time that you have control over it as an actor. We're talking right now.

You have to learn to discipline yourself, not to go to an emotion just because you're feeling an empathetic response. You are choosing to go to sadness. You are choosing to go to anger. Um, in order to learn anger and to learn sadness or to learn joy. If you, cause, cause our instinct is going to be to start mixing them. I mean, that's what we do because we live in mixed emotions all the time, as I said. So that's where we're going to want to go. But this work in order to learn the work and learn your instrument and get rid of those, those, those mixtures that we started, like the junior high person or the, the anger, or sadness person or whatever. We need to unlearn those, right? So I can't just let students move back and forth from emotions when they're first learning it because then they're not learning the technique.

[Jim] What I find in real life is that, like you said, we mix them. I think a lot of times we don't want to mix them and we actually want to have, well, I want to be happy and you're making Stop making me feel sad. Stop making me feel sad. And, you know, I just think about one relationship where it was, she thought I was sad all the time, because, you know, we weren't having physical intimacy or something. And I'm thinking, I'm mostly sad because you're sad. Like, I'm feeling a lot of the sadness that you're carrying. But then comes in the denial of I'm not feeling that sadness. It's like, ah, but it's written all over your body. it's piercing it's a piercing sadness in a way and, Yeah, I think Alba helps maintain that discipline so we don't have that deeper empathetic response, especially in class. In class, in class.

[Nancy] In class, yeah.

[Jim] But I think it's really, like you said, when the context is added in and the mixed emotions, it's really hard not to feel mixtures. It's really, really hard.

[Nancy] So now you're talking about class or you're talking about life?

[Jim] Life.

[Nancy] Of course not.

[Jim] In class, when we're focused on it, it's hard. Like when somebody is, when I'm in sadness and I'm crying and the person across from me is laughing, it's very hard. I remember.

[Nancy] Of course it is. It is because that's what we're instinctively doing in life is receiving, responding. Yeah. And you shouldn't judge that. I mean, that's okay in life. That's what we're programmed to do. So I would hate for you to judge yourself because you're having a mixture. I mean, you're having a mixture because you're having a mixture. It's not a bad thing to feel both sadness and fear at the same time.

[Jim] I think the challenges in life, like you said, we all come with different backgrounds on what our feelings we are or are not supposed to feel. And so when somebody, we start to absorb the emotion that somebody else is feeling and we don't want to feel that thing, it can cause a lot of friction. friction. Like I don't want to like, for me, I think a lot of times I can be really tender with people. And they are afraid of being tender because of so many reasons. Right? And then they're like, stop making me feel tender. I'm thinking, what? Should I be angry all the time? Do you not want me to be tender? It's hard. I like feeling tender, too. too.

Yeah. Okay. So I think we've talked about tender anger. Can we talk more specifically about the patterns just so people understand the language that we're using?

[Nancy] What we're talking about?

[Jim] The language because yeah, go ahead. Yeah.

[Nancy] So every emotional theorist has a group of emotions that they consider the basics. Okay. And different emotional theorists will have different basics. So that that can be a whole other conversation that would be an interesting episode of your podcast I think is you know why are Paul Ekman's basics different from Susanna Bloch's basics different from whatever because they are very different and they're actually I was just reading an article the other day about they're adding one.

Somebody just added one to their basics. But anyway, so for Alba, we use the basics outlined by the originator, which was Susanna Block, who is a Chilean research psychologist or was. She's retired now. But so her basics, she has six basics. So the six basics in Alba, the Alba method also called Alba moding. So I might accidentally go back and forth between the two are sadness, joy, fear, anger, tenderness, and erotic love. So those are the six basics. Now, we also teach neutral. So there really is a seventh pattern. It's not an emotion, but it is a pattern. And that's really what distinguishes it from most other emotional trainings, particularly in acting and probably in psychology as well, is teaching what is neutral and learning neutral because we don't experience neutral in real life. We just don't. We're not programmed to. We just don't. And that's one of the reasons that exercise that you were talking about is to...

Well, let me backtrack a little bit. The neutral pattern is taught in order to give an actor or a student, good talking that way, a student control, all right, that you can always come back to neutral, you can always come back to neutral. If I've got you in a very deep state of sadness, for example, physiologically, we can get you back to normal, and it's gone. So that exercise that that you were talking about, the emotional opera, is in part designed to reinforce that control because it's the control that makes it safe and makes it controllable and predictable.

So those are the seven patterns that we teach.

[Jim] And just, I believe you agree, but the idea is that these are physiological patterns And these are just the words that people chose to attach to them. It's not, the words aren't the most important part. It's the physiological pattern. Because like you said, anger, for example, could be determination and focus.

Or no. Because there's also, there's a lot of people who talk about, there's a woman, Anna Wurzbika, that comes from the linguistic approach of emotion more so. And so a lot of times the word anger doesn't exist in all cultures, but something maybe similar does.

[Nancy] Something similar. Well, I would not use the example that I gave you of determination and focus and those things because the similarity is that there are, it's a degree. It's a degree of anger. Okay. So determination has a low level of anger in it.

I mean, that could be a matter of debate, I suppose, that determination also has a cognitive element to it. So it has a low level of anger, along with the cognitive of I'm going to get this done. I'm going to do this.

[Jim] Okay.

[Nancy] All right. So you might not identify it as anger, but in terms of physiologically, it is anger at a very low level.

[Jim] Okay.

[Nancy] And once you learn the anger pattern and you start to do determination, you say, oh, yeah, I guess that that is that is a small level of anger. It's in a very low level of anger. I remember. Who was it that it might have been Susanna? I can't remember who it was, but that if you see that if you're if you're going to to start a race and you see a rate, somebody that's beginning a race and they've got that forward energy and they've got that focus, that is anger that's being just before it's expressed.