• 25 Sep, 2024
• Daniel McMillan

From storytelling to Remote Work to Spirituality: Psychologist Daniel McMillan on Building a More Compassionate World Beyond Stress and Trauma

Magazica: Dear readers, today we have Daniel McMillan with us. As a registered psychologist in and as the director of Assured Psychology, Daniel brings years of experience and expertise to his practice. His approach is compassionate, informed, and deeply rooted in human connections. Daniel’s work is grounded in the belief that every individual deserves a warm, caring, and competent experience. He has been practicing for 19 years, starting with teens, then couples, and now adults, across various fields of psychology. We are very honored to have Daniel with us today. Daniel, welcome.

Daniel McMillan: Thank you for having me and for the kind introduction.

Magazica: Thank you for joining us. Our readers are curious about how mental health impacts their lives. Can you share a brief overview of your experience in mental health and your areas of specialization?

Daniel McMillan: Sure, I’ll start with an overview of my experience. I am currently in private practice as the director and owner of Assured Psychology. I work with adults and couples on mental health and relationship concerns. I’ve worked in various clinical psychology settings.

Magazica: How does mental health impact a person’s day-to-day life?

Daniel McMillan: It makes me smile because we experience the world consciously through our eyes, mind, and being. Our mental health is everything. Without it, we don’t experience the world. I’m always a little surprised by the old idea that there is no such thing as mental health. Your inner experience is how you experience the world. It is absolutely everything. Anyone who has suffered knows that when you suffer, the world is hard, and when things are good, the world is a little better. This isn’t always determined by the outside world; it can be determined by the inner world as well.

Magazica: In simple terms, for those who are not specialized in psychology or mental health, how do you define mental health? Is there a clear boundary or definition?

Daniel McMillan: The definition of psychology is how you think, feel, and behave. Your mental health is your inner experience of the world, specifically how you think and feel. These two aspects guide what we do in life.

Magazica: Life can be stressful. How can our readers distinguish between normal stress and anxiety that might benefit from professional help? What is the tipping point where one should seek professional assistance?

Magazica: You mentioned trauma and relationships. Can you elaborate on how past experiences and our connections with others impact our mental well-being?

Daniel McMillan: Past experiences, especially those from our early years, are fundamental building blocks. The earlier and more substantial the past experience, the more it shapes our mental development and worldview. Our developmental progress and the system around us that either repairs and heals or doesn’t play a significant role in forming our sense of self and how we respond to stressors.

I like to think about our experiences in life as either car crashes or lead paint. This metaphor works well with my clients. If you get in a car crash and break your femur, it’s noticeable, and you remember it. You go to the hospital and get treated. If I asked you about a car crash, you’d tell me about it as a significant event. The earlier it happens, the more concerning it is. Breaking your femur at 40 is significant, but if you were a baby, it would be more concerning.

However, there’s also the lead paint of our lives, which is often underappreciated. Lead paint represents the normal experiences we have every day without knowing they’re shaping us. It’s in our walls, homes, and the temperature of the waters we swim in. If you broke your femur and had lead paint exposure, it impacts your ability to heal. It’s not just what happens to us but also what we don’t have. No human being or family system is perfect, so there are unmet needs for everyone.

When injuries happen, are we able to get what we need to heal? At what point did the rupture happen, or when was it not enough? This impacts how we see the world and interact. Babies as young as eight months start to notice which emotions their parents are less okay with and change their expression accordingly.

Magazica: Fascinating metaphor—car crash and lead paint. It will stay in anyone’s mind the way you explained it.

Daniel McMillan: I want us all to consider what we don’t see, what is our normal, and how we develop around that. Is it still serving us or not? When we go through something, we often focus on the event itself, but we should also consider the emotional and attachment systems that support us and how we can deal with those feelings and who we can turn to.

Magazica: Sometimes, because whenever there is lead paint, we are not conscious about it, but it is silently impacting us.

Daniel McMillan: Yes, until maybe years later, you’re sick and don’t know why. Then you find out, maybe a decade later, that this is why. It begins to make sense.

Magazica: But for those 10 years, I was in it like it was normal for me, but it wasn’t normal.

Daniel McMillan: Exactly. It becomes your normal. There are many layers to this—your intimate family, immediate community, larger culture, and systemic issues in all cultures. All these factors impact people.

Magazica: Beyond therapy, are there any practical strategies our readers can incorporate daily to manage stress, improve communication, and build stronger relationships?

Daniel McMillan: Thank you for the reminder. People always ask me that. So, I go back to the fundamentals of our being. You need to move your body—exercise, even 20 minutes a day, decreases symptoms, especially for anxiety. You also need to be connected to others. How that looks depends on the person, but you need to honor your need for other people to a reasonable degree. You need to express your emotions responsibly. We have emotions for very important reasons—they’re not weird things to be ignored. You need to be outside. We haven’t lived inside walls for very long in our evolution. We need to spend time in nature, with others, move our bodies, and care for our experience of the world. We need to stop believing that changing external things will make us happy. Yes, external factors matter, but we experience them through our inner world. We have to look inward at how we experience things.

Magazica: So true. How we look at things shapes our understanding of the world. Now, let’s shift the conversation to your contributions. We were discussing your YouTube channel, “Badger and Turtle Face the Storm.” What was your motivation behind it? What did you want to achieve?

Daniel McMillan: In case people aren’t familiar, I created a YouTube video called “Badger and Turtle” and a children’s book called “Badger and Turtle Face the Storm,” meant for parents. My motivation was that I am a couple’s therapist and have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of couples. I follow emotionally focused therapy, which looks at the dynamics of how people connect. There’s almost always a dynamic called pursuer-withdraw, where one person in disconnection tends to come forward, often harshly or critically, and another person tends to pull away, shutting down or withdrawing. This is a common dynamic in 9 out of 10 marriages or relationships when they’re not doing well.

I began trying to teach my couples using that language and explanation, but it didn’t land. Then, one day, I started telling them a story. I grew up in the prairies and always saw these big badger holes with dirt far behind them. I thought they must be ferocious diggers. So, I told a couple one day, “It’s kind of like your dynamics are like…”

When disconnection hits and alarm bells go off deep inside, one of you tries to close the space and get close, while the other notices that life isn’t feeling safe and starts to pull away. It’s like you’re walking along the prairies holding hands, and a storm starts rolling in. One of you is like a turtle, and the other is a badger. The turtle drops down and goes into its shell, thinking, “This is scary. I want to let it blow over.” As a natural turtle myself, I understand this. I used to think, “Why are people screaming and yelling? Just chill out and leave me alone.” I didn’t realize that this made my relationship worse.

The turtle sees the storm coming and goes into its shell. The badger sees that life is stressful and reaches for a partner. But the partner is down in their shell, trying to get through it. The badger feels abandoned and starts to dig at the turtle’s shell, trying to get close again. This can come off as critical, demanding, or anxious. The more the turtle sees this, the less safe it feels and pulls back. Occasionally, the turtle will snap like a snapping turtle, but mostly it pulls away, and the badger continues to pursue. This creates a cycle.

Couples often fall into this dance. When I started telling this story, couples would come back and say, “I was totally turtling, and I badgered here. What do we do about it?” They began to own their pattern. This was crucial for me because, as a natural turtle, I only saw the problems of the badger. I didn’t realize that my withdrawal was fueling their panic, and they didn’t realize that their attempt to reconnect was creating a lack of safety for me.

Magazica: Thank you for encapsulating this. It’s fantastic to hear. In my mother tongue, there’s a proverb that translates to, “Whenever you want to teach a child, teach the parent. The outcome of teaching the parent is that you are essentially teaching your grandchildren.”

Daniel McMillan: That’s incredible. Thank you.

Magazica: When you create these books and videos, you’re teaching the parents, and it will likely impact at least one generation.

Daniel McMillan: That’s my hope.

Magazica: The way you shared that couples or parents would come back the next week and immediately say, “I was turtling” or “I was badgering,” shows that stories connect immediately. Stories stay with you and carry lessons.

Daniel McMillan: I completely agree. In psychology’s attempt to be validated as legitimate and like medicine, we’ve lost some of that. We have different camps—clinical, cognitive, behavioral, psychodynamic—but they can be confusing. Down-to-earth language helps people understand that their way of being isn’t weird or pathological; it’s the human experience. As therapists, we have a responsibility to help people understand and change their human experience. Stories and metaphors are powerful ways to do that.

Magazica: You’re putting your heart in a cerebral environment.

Daniel McMillan: Exactly. People come because they don’t feel good, but if we only match them with cognition and thought, it doesn’t help. Compassion is fundamental to healing. We can’t eradicate the human experience from healing. We need to become experts at both—understanding neurology, clinical, and cognitive aspects, and delivering it through a human-to-human system. It’s a difficult job to find people who can have that cross-section. When I hire staff, that’s what I’m looking for.

Magazica: With the same spirit and innovative approach, how do you see this helping or serving programs with remote work? The parents and professionals with remote work facilities, because now there are no boundaries—offices are inside the house. We are always engaged. How do you see that?

Daniel McMillan: I think you’re referencing that on our website, we do some remote work. For us as a company, Assured Psychology, these are our core values. The first thing our webpage says is “warm, competent, caring.” That holds the lens through which we approach everything and the accountability to our team.

We offer clinical services, therapy, and assessment in Calgary and Alberta, both online and in person. An interesting program we fell into a few years ago is flying therapists to remote sites. Currently, we serve remote work sites for the energy sector, but we’ve been approached by mining and other companies as well. We fly therapists to remote sites in high-strain environments because these sites tell us the culture is hard. People are under a lot of strain, away from family, lacking sleep, working long hours, and facing high-demand work. This impacts their mental well-being.

They said, “We have gyms and nutrition on-site, but we need something more to help people.” So, we started flying therapists to these remote sites. They are literally in the lunchroom, at the toolbox meeting, and have an office where someone can book an appointment or walk in and talk. For example, someone might say, “My wife and I just had a huge fight on the phone about our kids, and I’m going into a 10-hour shift overnight driving a big rig truck. Can I get an hour of your time?”

I grew up in Alberta and had no idea how this would go. Many of my friends and cousins work on these sites and are more traditional, masculine types. I warned the company it might take a while to build, but in our first week on-site, we had a 97% utilization rate. Last week, we had a 120% utilization rate. The need is there, and it’s great that if we remove barriers, we can support companies in improving their cultural well-being, retention, hireability, and psychological safety by providing the care people need.

Magazica: That’s an excellent vision. In HR, there’s a field called Occupational Health and Safety, which is closely connected to this. You are laying the foundation by healing people from the inside, which will improve external performance.

Daniel McMillan: Exactly. We’re helping them manage their well-being. It’s not new—the military does it, the RCMP does it. If you’re going to give people hard hats and ergonomic chairs because you’re worried about their physical well-being, you also have a responsibility to look after them psychologically, especially in high-strain, long-hour environments. It’s good for business. Studies, especially from Australia, show up to a 15:1 ROI. It’s just good business. My hope is to promote this within those industries and more broadly.

Magazica: Definitely. Another thing from your website—what is the “Donate a Meal” program?

Daniel McMillan: Part of our values is making a difference for those who can’t afford services. I worked 13 years in the public sector, and it meant something to help those in need. In private practice, we wanted to continue that. For every appointment, we donate one meal to the Calgary Drop-In Centre, a homeless shelter. We’ve donated over 10,000 meals in the last few years and will probably reach 18,000 this year. We don’t promote it much, but it’s our way of making a difference while running a for-profit company.

Magazica: You are making a difference. Let’s scratch the surface of this last topic. How do you see the intersection of spirituality and therapy?

Daniel McMillan: It’s a complex topic, probably deserving of a multi-part series with experts like Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. I’m not an expert, but I’m curious about it. When working with people on a deep level, it feels more than clinical or medical—it feels spiritual. People who have encountered incredibly difficult experiences have taught me about our incredible healing ability. Carl Rogers called it self-actualization. We have a tiny flame in us that never gets extinguished, always trying to heal under the right conditions. Even parts of us that want to harm us are trying to care for us in another way.

We have these deep parts that are trying to take care of us. We’re incredible survivors. There’s something in that natural healing and the depths a human being can go. If I’m learning how to play basketball, I can always get a little better, but I’ll plateau. However, there’s no end to the depths of insight, awareness, and exploration that can happen. It would be a boring life if at 30 you went to a few retreats, did a bit of therapy, and then knew everything about yourself. You can never stop that—it’s so deep.

The combination of those depths and the places people can access to heal themselves is not formulaic. They have this detailed, in-depth ability and map inside themselves that we help guide them with, but they have to teach us about it. We haven’t done a good job of understanding the depths of what therapy and psychology can really be. In the fight to legitimize it, we’ve almost put spirituality into a different camp. Sometimes they meet, like in Buddhist psychology, but those aren’t the norm.

We need to bring the spirit and soul back into therapy and psychology practice. Yes, we can work with cognition and behavior, but that’s on the roadmap to this deeper part of ourselves. It’s hard to put into words, and it might be beyond words or my ability, but I’ve been humbled time and time again by clients who touch a part of me that feels deeper than just the cognitive part. I witness something that seems to come from a deeper place, and they naturally know how to do it in a way that humbles me as a clinician of 20 years.

Magazica: True. With that deep and universal note, I was reminded of the book “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. You are unbreakable. Anyone facing trauma or hurdles in life can understand that everyone is unbreakable. You just need to find that help, motivation, and encouragement. People like you and other great minds can help.

Daniel McMillan: Viktor Frankl created that book in his mind while being in a concentration camp for years, with his family having all died. The brilliance, beauty, and kindness that came out of that suffering are striking. How does that happen? It’s beyond comprehension.

Magazica: It’s always fascinating to hear you. You encouraged our readers to prioritize mental health and relationships, emphasizing that seeking help is a sign of strength, not weakness. You also expressed the belief in the power of human connection and the importance of creating a safe and supportive environment for personal growth. On behalf of our readers and the whole team at Magazica, thank you very much for being here.

Daniel McMillan: Thank you for having me. I enjoyed our discussion very much.

Daniel McMillan’s Company Website: assuredpsychology.com

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Keywords: Mental Health; Relationships; Trauma; Stress Management; Emotion-Focused Therapy