Challenging the Stories We're Told About Each Other - Traci Ruble

 

Airdate: March 19, 2025

Traci Ruble: I really want to listen to as many people's stories as I can because in hearing somebody's story, I remember the goodness in people, and they remember the goodness in people, and that is deeply important for our mental health. If we keep telling these stories that people are dangerous and scary and bad and the other, it makes us sick.

Julie Rose: Hey, it's Julie. Welcome to Uncomfy, a show about sticking with moments that challenge us even when they're uncomfortable. And you're probably wondering, "Why would anybody choose to be uncomfortable?" But I know from personal experience, and you probably do too, that sometimes a little discomfort has benefits if we can manage to stay open and curious in those moments. And that is what we're here to explore, so let's get Uncomfy.

I'm joined today by Traci Ruble. She's a therapist and founder of a project called Sidewalk Talk that I am really excited to speak with her about. So, Traci, welcome.

Traci Ruble: Oh, thanks, Julie. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for your show, too, and for getting all these great, I learned so much from listening to your podcast. So, thank you.

Julie Rose: Oh, I love to hear it. Well, paint the picture for us, because Sidewalk Talk, as far as I understand it, is sort of the definition of being deeply uncomfortable for a lot of us. How does it work?

Traci Ruble: Yeah, it's really uncomfortable. So, backstory, I am a licensed psychotherapist. I've been practicing for 21 years. And 10 years ago, I actually had a dream that, "What is this thing that we do in therapy, and what are people like if we just listen to them?" So, I got 28 of my pals to go put our chairs out on the sidewalk in San Francisco, and I thought it was going to be a one-time thing, and we just held signs that said, "Free Listening." We did lots of planning. We did lots of preparation. Like, "What would we do if somebody had an emergency?" We thought through a lot of stuff, and I had such a great experience, but it was edgy and uncomfortable at really listening to people without trying to be therapeutic.

Julie Rose: Yeah, because you aren't, you're not trying to solve anything for them or even give advice. So, I mean, again, I'm just trying to imagine. So, you're in an office building in San Francisco, and you're like, "Actually, let's roll our office chairs, and we're just going to post up on the sidewalk with all the people going by," and was it difficult to get anybody to stop and talk to a random stranger with their office chair on the sidewalk?

Traci Ruble: Well, let's talk about the first thing that made me uncomfortable doing this: how much we got rejected.

Julie Rose: Oof.

Traci Ruble: Yeah, it's, it's very humbling. It's like, "Wow, I'm offering, I'm offering my amazing, good listening self here," and people are like, "Oh, you're weird. That is weird," right? And that actually has really strengthened something in me. I'm like, "Oh, I don't actually need to be, have people like me." So, that was the first uncomfortable thing is to be so exposed. It's so vulnerable to sit there with an empty chair across from you. We'd bring down two camping chairs and our little sign that says, "Free Listening," and it's vulnerable and have people walk by and keep walking by, put the earbuds in so they didn't have to talk to you. Some of them thought we were, you know, maybe trying to ask them from, you know, how there's the canvassers for different political causes. Like, "Oh, they're trying, yeah, they're trying to ask for money for something." Yeah.

Julie Rose: And what was it that you thought you were doing here? Like, what was the good, or what were you accomplishing with this exercise?

Traci Ruble: Nothing. No, look, I'm the, I'm the kind of human that, um, doesn't believe what other people tell me about other humans.

Julie Rose: Hmm.

Traci Ruble: And so, at the time, I think there were a lot of things that we were reading in the news about who us humans were that maybe we were a little more dangerous or a little scarier or a little more mentally ill or a little stranger. I'm like, "You know, I don't know." Now, certainly the first event, because it was all therapists, it was all therapists in the first event, um, there was this desire to say, "Hey, therapists are normal people, and taking care of your mental health is an important thing," um, but the project's intention has changed for me, which is I really want to listen to as many people's stories as I can because in hearing somebody's story, I remember the goodness in people, and they remember the goodness in people, and that is deeply important for our mental health. If we keep telling these stories that people are dangerous and scary and bad and the other, it makes us sick.

Julie Rose: If I've got the story, uh, the timeline right, this was, uh, I mean, 10 years ago, roughly, right? 20, 2015, 2016, so of course.

Traci Ruble: 2015, we started planning it in 2014. So this is when, it's when you start to see a real uptick in gun violence in particular in the United States. There had been the Boston Marathon shooting. There was a movie theater shooting. There was another school. It was a few years after Sandy Hook. And we had more police shootings of black men.

Julie Rose: Hmm. Um, and, do you remember one of the first people who sat down? Like, was there an encounter? Because, uh, I mean, spoiler alert, you've continued to do this, and now, like, it exists

Traci Ruble: all over the

Julie Rose: the world.

Traci Ruble: Yeah. I, I've sat and listened all over the world, too.

Julie Rose: Yeah, yeah. So, what happened in that initial event that led you to say, "Okay, well, I'll do this again?"

Traci Ruble: Yeah. Oh, it's taken me back. I'm like literally dropping into the whole moment. So, the first thing that happened, the very first person that I listened to was a young woman who came up, and she looked like she had maybe been sleeping on the street. And I really had this intention, I have this mantra that comes from Pema Chödrön that, "Compassion happens between equals," which means that I am not here to fix anyone or be better than anyone. I am here to really be deeply human with you. And she shared that she had been, uh, in town to visit a girlfriend, a romantic partner. She was gay. And the girlfriend, um, they, they, met over the internet, she flew in, and the girlfriend rejected her, and she said, "Now I have no place to sleep, and I have no money, and oh, by the way, I'm bipolar, and I didn't bring my meds."

I went, "Ooh, this is very dangerous You're a young woman sleeping on the street." And this is the other side product of Sidewalk Talk that came out of that first experience. I'm like, "Oh, because I'm a therapist, I know of all of the mental health resources in town," so I literally said, "Okay, if you get on the 29 or whatever bus it was, and you get off at that stop, you can get to Access Institute and get some free meds for your bipolar, and they're going to help you find a place to sleep and get on a plane to get back home." And so, now part of Sidewalk Talk is we carry those community resources with us. So, now our listeners aren't therapists, but we are a conduit to all of the city services in the city. So, that was my first experience of like, "I was just a good community member, helping someone out,"

right? But then I don't want to, like, just finish with this negative story. I also had a guy that day sit down and tell me his falling in love story

Julie Rose: and how he met his wife, and that's what he wanted to share. And so, there's this idea that what we're doing is helping some mentally ill person, and I'm like, "I've heard," I had this one story.

Traci Ruble: I was listening in the sidewalks in Nashville, Tennessee, and this man walks down the street, and he is beaming. I said, "What are you so happy about?" And he sat down, he said, "I'm going to pick up my first puppy." And these stories matter, like, to, to, for him to be able to share that with another human who might think that's a trivial story, but in the end, he felt super excited to tell someone, "I'm going to pick up my first puppy."

Julie Rose: Why? What, what is, what is it about just being able to say it to somebody, even if it's somebody who you're never going to see again?

Traci Ruble: Yeah, well, there's this quote that I use, I, sorry that I don't, it's not mine, it's deeply psychoanalytic and nerdy therapy speak, but we, we become a self; our whole self knows that we're a self when we're held in the mind of another. It's hard to completely feel, we are just interconnected, tribal, herding animals. We herd. We like to live in packs. And babies need parents to mirror their smiles and their giggles and their coos and their sadness. That's how a baby starts to know who they are because they're held in the mind of their parents, and that need never goes away, and so we all start to get really sick when we don't have enough of that. That's why Dr. Vivek Murthy and others are talking about the loneliness epidemic. It's deeply in our limbic system. We need this as humans.

Julie Rose: Is there something that we get from telling it to a stranger that's different from having someone we know and we know who loves us, right? Like, do you think, is it, is there something even different about just being heard by, being given the gift of, sit down and tell this stranger on the sidewalk your thing, whatever it is, um, that's different than, you know, calling up a loved one or a friend and telling them that same thing?

Traci Ruble: I love this question. It's maybe one of my favorite questions because I didn't know the answer to this question when I first started, but I think I have some answers because I've been doing it a while. When you talk to a stranger, you're freer, because when you're in relationship to your partner, or your children, or to a friend that's known you a long time, usually we start to take on a role in that relationship, and we don't even realize, but it becomes habituated. And there's something very weird and fantastic about telling your story to a stranger where you are totally free. They don't need anything from you. They don't need you to behave. You don't need them to like you or you to like them. I mean, it's, it's a very weird experience of this listening to strangers bit. You get to have this experience of freedom that it's pretty hard to capture anywhere else. I love it for that reason. So, what is it that you have to bring to the table as the listener, right? Now, I guess anybody can sign up to do this. Is there, is there some training that's required, and what is the challenge for the listener? Well, I don't have control over what every listener does, but we do have an online listener training that we make folks take, including some safety protocols for risk assessment if somebody is going to be a harm to themselves or someone else.

Julie Rose: So, you're training them to know how to respond if suicide becomes part of the conversation, or if there are serious mental health concerns that might get raised?

Traci Ruble: Correct. Yeah, so there's a whole protocol that we've developed over the years. But I, if I'm going to give you the shorthand without getting into the long, boring details of the training, I say, "Look, when in doubt, delight in this human. Don't listen for what their wound is or what's wrong with them, or... when you're sitting there, literally fall in love with their humanity and listen like that, with that energy," because we're still in this habit of listening transactionally, which is trying to learn something, trying to get something, trying to serve the person in a particular way. There's always this exchange happening in the listening. I'm like, "Don't. Give yourself a gift. When you're listening, in your whole body, fill your," I, I'm saying this to you for the first time, so get excited! I'm saying it for the first time. "Fill your whole body up with love, and when you're listening, listen from love, and not this kind of pandering, pejorative kind, but like real, the real deal kind, like, I'm a human just like you and here we are together," right?

Julie Rose: So, what if the story that I'm hearing is, uh, tragic, or, repulsive, or I'm thinking like, "Oh, you really made a big mistake, or that seems like," you know, maybe someone's telling me a secret that has really been weighing on them, and I'm thinking to myself, "Yeah, you really blew it, Buster," you know, and like, having, like, it would be difficult to not also sort of have all these judgments kind of coming in as well, and the desire to sort of distance myself a little bit from this distasteful thing that I'm hearing, or that's challenging, or that's painful, right? So, how do you stay present in that, full of love, when those things are inevitably going to be pushing in on you?

Traci Ruble: Yeah, I love that you're calling me out on that toxic positivity. "Oh my gosh. Why?" Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, this is a great question. Look, what happens when we're listening from this place of love is that our listening actually changes so that we're not disgusted by pain and suffering, and we're also not minimizing of pain and suffering, that we actually deeply undo this person's aloneness. Because when we're in pain and suffering, what we most want is company to say, "I'm not weird, I'm not screwed up, and it sure means a lot that you still respect me even though I've had this really bad experience in my life." To me, when we can sit in, when we have this energy of love, we reduce the volume of judgment, we reduce the pressure to fix, and we reduce the tendency to other, but the love is not this kind of using positive thinking to bypass real pain. It's simply saying, "You're not alone. I'm right here with you," and I can even, you don't necessarily say it to the person, but you usually resonate with a time that you might've been in a painful spot like that, too.

Julie Rose: Is the expectation that it's not actually a, the listener is not encouraged to say, like, "Oh, I know what you mean. I've also had that experience." Like, it's not a two-way sharing. It's a, it, for the Sidewalk Talk project, it's really the focus is to be a listener.

Traci Ruble: I, it's not like we're militant about this because, I don't know about you, but for me, I usually want to open up more to someone if they tell me a little bit about themselves. So, yeah, we do share enough about ourselves to sort of say, "I'm a safe place." But we are centering the other person's story. And for the listener, the second thing that we're bringing is a real intellectual humility. Like, "I don't know any better than you. I just want to deeply resonate and be curious about your human story and the whole story arc of your life." I say to the listeners, "Don't ever think you're going to be good at this. It's your practice. This is your practice. We're practicing listening. We're not necessarily," we have one, one guy has a sign says, "I'm a great listener," and I always chuckle when I see it, but I'm like, "God, I've been doing this a long time. I'm still not a great listener."

Julie Rose: So, how does this work, Traci Ruble? So this exists, uh, across the country. Is it, like, are they, are there chapters? I do know, I'd love to have you tell me a little bit about a bus tour that I think you guys are planning here in,

Traci Ruble: yeah,

Julie Rose: the not-to-distant future.

Traci Ruble: Yeah, so, the way that we've organized Sidewalk Talk, we're still, we have like two paid people that work part time, like five hours a week, but this is an entire elbow grease movement. And we thought, "Well, how could we maintain the integrity and safety of this project?" So now to listen, you sign up and you become a chapter leader, and we background check you to make sure that you're a safe human, and you agree to the safety protocols that we've put in place. Um, we really want to make sure that folks aren't selling services or making money or trying to, you know, become a famous speaker from being a part of Sidewalk Talk, um, that you're really here to be a practitioner of listening. And we've had, over the 10 years, we've had 108 chapters, uh, across 20 countries now. Um, we had a huge downfall of chapter leaders during the pandemic, but thanks to Amazon and Paramount Studios and Nickelodeon Children's Network, they start, started giving money directly to people that wanted to start chapters last year, and so our numbers are back up again, and it's just beautiful to see.

Julie Rose: Is right now a moment where you feel like it's easier or harder than it was, say, a decade ago, to get people willing to listen and to talk, kind of on, yeah, both sides of the coin?

Traci Ruble: Yeah, so I'm, it depends, you know, if I, when I listened in San Francisco, I listened in the same spot, at the same time for five years, and the community knew us.

Julie Rose: You were the listening people. I, that's interesting.

Traci Ruble: We, they knew us, they knew our name. I remember I was out grocery store shopping one day, and I had my Sidewalk Talk t-shirt on for whatever reason, and someone screams across the street, "Sidewalk Talk, Sidewalk Talk!" And I look, and I'm like, and the guy gives a thumbs up and he says, "Good work!" So, people in our town know who we are. Um, we're planning a bus tour again across the Midwest for our 10th anniversary for mental health awareness month. And there's a little more suspicion, like, "Are you outsiders coming into my town, and why," right? And for me, I have to really get clear on, "We're here to reweave the fabric of our country. We're here to learn about people that are from different parts of the country." Remember my, my curiosity about, "I don't want to believe what the media tells me about someone from the Midwest. I don't buy it. I want to go listen." So, the political climate has made mistrust at an all-time high, but we're still doing it because I think that it's really good for our mental health for us to remember, "Oh, yeah, we're good. We're good."

Julie Rose: So, how do I find a chapter in my community or connect with you on the bus tour?

Traci Ruble: Yeah, we try to make it super easy. You go to the website. It says, "Start Here." You click the Start Here button.

Julie Rose: All right.

Traci Ruble: And you can become a listener, and then if you want to come on the bus tour, there's a bus tour, a page for the bus tour. And by the way, if you don't want to come on the bus tour, you can help out. If you have any contacts in the cities we're going to, there's a Help Out button. I've been really touched by how many people have clicked the Help Out button, say, "My church will put on a potluck for you!" I'm like, "Excellent,"

Julie Rose: yeah, so, the website is sidewalk-talk.org. Traci Ruble, thank you so much for the work you're doing and for your time today. I've just been really inspired.

Traci Ruble: Thanks, Julie.

Julie Rose: And thank you for getting Uncomfy with us today. I'm actually kind of tempted to figure out if there is some sidewalk talking happening in my neighborhood. I think that would be a really good, Uncomfy experience for me to have. I'd love to hear your thoughts as well if this episode sparked something for you. Reach out, uncomfy@byu.edu.

And in the meantime, if you love diving into thought-provoking discussions, thinking about things from different perspectives, check out my other podcast, Top of Mind with Julie Rose. Every episode tackles tough topics in a way that pushes us to grow and think deeper and feel more empathy. Just search Top of Mind with Julie Rose on your favorite podcast app.

Uncomfy is a BYUradio podcast. Samuel Benson produces it, and the team includes Jake Hasleton, James Hoopes, Isabella Sosa, and Sam Payne. Our theme music was composed by Kelsey Nay. I'm Julie Rose. Can't wait to get Uncomfy with you again next week.