All Up in It with coach SB Rawz

exploring the heartbreaking humor of Alzheimer’s with Eric Larson

Episode Summary

Eric Larson has been exploring his own complex trauma through creativity for some time now, dipping into disciplines as diverse as songwriting, improv, clowning, and cross-stitch. These days, he’s co-creating a theater piece that he hopes will evoke both heartbreak and laughter even as it grows from his experience of his mother’s death from Alzheimer’s Disease.

Episode Notes

About Eric Larson |Coach, coach supervisor, musician, crying-on-the-inside clown

By vocation, Eric is a Mental Health Coach and a Mental Health Coach Supervisor. He's been doing this for long enough that he starts to feel old when he thinks about it. By avocation(s): Eric is a sometimes singer-songwriter, sometimes theater artist, sometimes cross-stitch enthusiast, sometimes long-distance walker, and ... lots of other stuff.

Eric highlighted The Mattering Movement, an organization shaped around answering the questions: What can we do to combat the pandemic of loneliness and despair that are harming our youth? How can we combat today’s widespread mattering deficit? Learn more at https://www.thematteringmovement.com/

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All Up in It is a project by coach SB Rawz focused on telling stories of growth and change from the thick of learning. Learn more about SB, coaching with her, & her projects at https://rawzcoaching.com

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Key moments in the conversation include…

…how Eric describes himself as a human:

• Understanding himself as patterns set in motion way back then and that the more he explores the things that set other things in motion, the richer he becomes. We noticed together that this is akin to karma, the complex original version, not the snappy bumper sticker version
• He finds this exploration one that will always be a deep mystery yet still worthy of exploration
• Eric parsed out the cause from the meaning, noticing that they’re interconnected and both important yet unique from one another 

…what Eric is all up in:

• He describes himself, too, as compulsively always asking the big questions like the core question that he circles around, “What the hell is going on around here?”
• Making theater and healing from complex trauma
• The theater is maybe about an exploration of his mother’s death from Alzheimer’s in a co-creative and playful process with a creative partner; he’s not sure what this project will do for him but he knows he wants the audience to feel their hearts break while they are genuinely laughing, akin to the tradition of the tragic clown

…his tools include:

• Relationship and the coming together regularly beyond his usual habits of cutting and running
• Similarly: crawling toward what he wants to run from
• We noticed together that collaboration is counter to the popular story that creativity et al is accomplished by brilliant individuals working alone