Meet Dr. Doug Shirley, Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology

Introducing Doug Shirley, EdD, one of our core faculty at The Seattle School!

Watch the video below to hear some of this professor’s story and also understand the pedgogical importance of storytelling in the classroom.

Connect with Dr. Shirley and Dr. Jermaine Ma on February 12 at our Admissions Coffee Hour.

RSVP to the Coffee Hour

Transcript of Video:

I am Dr. Doug Shirley. I have been here as core faculty since 2016. I’m associate professor in the MACP program. I’m also an MDiv grad, proud grad. So I was the first “child” to come up into the full-time faculty ranks, which I’m proud of. And it gives me a special kind of bird’s eye view into what it is like to be a student here. So my wife is also a grad, so we are a lover of the Seattle School. We are ones who have benefited from this place very deeply, both personally and professionally. I am the father of three boys, Noah, Luke, Eli, 16, 14, 9. And so when people, I’ve had students say to me, they think of me first as father and next as scholar or whatever, that’s about right to me. So I’m always glad to be introduced as my kid’s father. So that’s who I am, and I’m my wife’s wife’s husband, and then an academic and a practitioner and somebody who does research in the area of counseling.

So that’s why probably the place where I listen most to music in the car. I listen to podcasts oftentimes, or audible books, and I could even tell you about another book. But when I’m listening to music is mostly when I’m at the gym. And so then I’m looking for something with rhythm or beat. So sometimes it’s just drums, circle music. Sometimes it’s Celtic bagpipes. Sometimes it puts this together. When I was in fifth grade, every night I would listen to either Lionel Richie or Kenny Rogers. So Lionel Richie put together an album. This is a little bit dated by now, maybe like 2012 or something called Tuskegee, where he had country music. It was country music, and he had country music folk come through and sing his songs. And so often my Apple music wind up on Tuskegee, especially by the time I hit the sauna.That’s what I’m listening to at that point. 

Our brains are story machines, anticipation, meaning-making machines, and a lot of times the stories that we tell are kind of primitive and they’re unconscious and they’re not necessarily honoring or kind or generous. And so even the move from that which is less conscious to that which is conscious and intentional storytelling is a big part of how we do that. It’s how our minds and our brains and our hearts and our souls organize even to have stories that are bigger than us that we step into. So again, this group class that I just left off speaking with, we were speaking of resilience as being that which is shared between people, not that which is in one person. And so when one person shares a story with another, it’s an opportunity for resilience because that story then becomes shared.

And in the sharing of stories, we find each other. You tell your story, I tell my story. I find myself in your story. You find yourself and my story and off we go. To me, this stuff that we do, this sort of intersectional work, this theological work, this psychological work, this relational work has to be in storied and has to be embodied. And so if it’s just theory and abstraction, it’s no good. So it has to be story. And it just came out of a group theory therapy class where we talk about work groups and this idea of staying on task and a leader being willing to be the first among equals. So if we’re going to ask students to share and be vulnerable and engage their stories as they engage content, we as faculty have got to do the same thing. So I try to be not necessarily first among equals, but one among equals in the classroom who is telling stories.

And so often the stories have to do with my kids. My kids really like my chicken marsala, which the recipe is kind of straightforward. I don’t make my own marsala wine. I just buy it. And so I dredge the chicken a little bit, pick a kind of pasta that I want. My family likes extra mushrooms. But here’s the thing, my wife has figured out that she’s allergic to mushrooms because mushrooms communicate too much, which is kind of interesting. They communicate irritation in the body. So my extra mushroom chicken marsala, I probably can’t do anymore. Her favorite meal for me to make is what she calls a wok meal, which is I throw a bunch of vegetables into a bok. You might put glass noodles on it and some sort of sweet and sour sort of sauce. I really don’t like cooking from recipes. So usually it’s a looking at, it’s sort of like I watch a lot of chopped and a lot of beat Bobby Flay.

And so it’s this, here’s what you have, here’s the ingredients you got 20 minutes ago. That’s my favorite kind of cooking. So I’m very interested in systems work. So this term has been really lovely. I’ve taught family systems and group therapy together. So thinking about what it means to take this western notion of ego and self and dismantle it and put it in service to social identities and more of a collective whole and framework. That’s what I care a great deal about. And it probably comes in part from lots of years of living without that, lots of years of living in leadership where that isn’t the case. I oversee the pre-internship process where students go out and do self-observation in new and different contexts. And I also lead sections there and then group and family systems. And then, the last two years, I’ve had a chance to teach a class called Practicum Three, where students got to observe my counseling work, my clinical work students get to see me work with those folks in recorded sessions, they get to hear me speak about my mind.

I had other leaders in the course who would interact with me. In my mind, we brought in outside consultants who would also watch the footage and interact with me in my mind. So it becomes this thing where students get to see one clinical mind do its thing over the course of a small handful of sessions. And never is it Doug’s way is the right way. Doug’s way is just a way to do it. And so to me, it was me being clear about how and why I chose the work that I did with these particular clients in this particular time. That way students could decide, oh, I like this part. I don’t like that part. Oh, Doug, for students that don’t identify as a manner as male, for instance, how in their own social location, how would they do the work if they were sitting across from the same client?

So asking folks to see me in context, to compare themselves, what are the contexts that they bring into any theoretical and therapy moment? And then to use their own minds to say, what would their work look like with these same clients? Never is the goal to teach a way. The goal is to set a table where multiple ways can come together and be in conversation. My critique of counseling programs is a lot of times people like me, faculty will talk about the thing but not actually do the thing. And students need to see people doing the thing to say, oh, that’s what it looks like. And really to debunk the mystique of the thing. I’m just a guy over here trying to make sense of things myself. A lot of times my goal is that I am the same person before a therapy hour, during a therapy hour after therapy hour.

And so even for folks to see, oh, that’s the same, Doug that’s teaching the course is also doing therapy this way. Also maybe telling a story about his kid. So that level of continuity and what I hope is integrity, they get to see that back to even your question around storytelling. If I act like I’m immune to the stuff that I’m trying to teach them, the struggles and such, then I’m of no use to anyone. And so even to think about, it’s my own loneliness that I’m working out when I teach about loneliness. So one of the women that I probably referenced in that podcast, I think you’re referencing Dr. Louise Hawkley, psychologist who studied the impact of loneliness and check this out. Her findings were that the experience of loneliness is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So in other words, the physical toll that loneliness takes is the equivalent of smoking nearly a pack of cigarettes a day.

I used to smoke in my twenties. I miss it, but I chose to give it up when I became a dad. And so this sense of, for me as a man, for me as a leader, for me as a therapist, I have experienced a great deal of loneliness. And so even our surgeon General has recently declared a pandemic around loneliness, right? Loneliness was spoken of, especially for middle-aged men. I got more white, your cameras are going to show more white. So people like me had been so very lonely for so long, and this began to be the conversation before the pandemic comes up and sort of sweeps changes the conversation. Now we come back to where a surgeon general says, loneliness is everywhere. Sherry Turkel speaks of how if I had my phone, I would grab it and say, I’d bring it up and say, we’re alone together.

That is alone together. And so that’s the stuff that I care about and that’s the stuff that I’ll put in myself and I’ll tell stories of my own loneliness, my own sensitivities. So as to say this isn’t an us and them, it’s not clients who come who experience the loneliness. It’s us as providers who even in our work and in the systems we have to interact with in doing our work, will experience a great deal of loneliness on behalf of the people who are coming to us for help and for care. And so if we’re not about better village to each other, I speak of this movement from the gotcha that is so often a part of the fantasy life of therapists where they’re so afraid of getting caught for doing something wrong, to the gotcha of being held by a village and a community that loves and cures for each other, has each other’s back. When one is struggling, one doesn’t come in and wag a finger, but one comes in and says, we see that you’re struggling. Let’s do this together. That’s the stuff that I care about. That’s the stuff I tell stories about. That’s the stuff that I need. I think we all sing the songs we need to hear. That’s the song that I need to hear. So that’s the song I sing in the classroom.