Bouncing Back: The Personal Resilience Science Insights Podcast · Life Management Science Labs

Dr. Paul Dunion: External Referencing vs Internal Referencing | Bouncing Back #79

·46 min·3 clips

Paul frames life as a relationship by asking, 'What am I asking of you, Life?'

1. Bouncing Back: The Personal Resilience Science Insights Podcast focuses on external referencing versus internal referencing and how those frames affect resilience. 2. Host Joanna interviews teacher, author, and professor Paul Dunyon, who says he has 45 years in private practice and uses an existential and somatic approach to trauma. 3. The episode asks whether resilience comes from adapting to other people’s expectations or from finding more control inside oneself. 4. Dunyon defines resilience using Brian McLern’s line: “the capacity to withstand and recover from hardship and difficulties.” 5. He defines denial as “a lack of readiness to notice what’s important,” and treats it as a helpful agent in the psyche. 6. External referencing, for him, is a strong focus on roles, external mores, norms, expectations, and demands. 7. Internal referencing is curiosity about the inner world, including sensations, truth, and self-trust. 8. Dunyon says concepts like love, belonging, trust, and authority are usually described between people, but he wants to turn them into internal experiences. 9. He names self-loyalty, self-belonging, self-authority, and self-trust as the internal versions of those concepts. 10. His definition of self-trust is two beliefs: “I’ll let myself know my own truth” and “I believe I’ll be kind to me.” 11. He says excessive adaptation can become self-betrayal, which makes resilience less useful than it first appears. 12. In teaching, he tells students to notice comparison, competition, and being impressive, then choose whether to continue or interrupt each one. 13. He says psychological safety helps people become more internally referenced because internal expression carries more risk than quoting authority. 14. For boundaries, he recommends pausing, breathing, and noticing body cues like a tight gut, shallow breathing, or shoulders coming up and forward. 15. If someone feels unsafe and cannot use an advocate or an adequate boundary, he says compliance and adaption may be advisable temporarily. 16. He warns that being too internally referenced can become a way of postponing action or avoiding risk. 17. The interview style is reflective, personal, and practical, with Joanna often connecting the ideas back to her own externally referenced habits. 18. Paul answers with concrete stories from teaching, marriage, and a manuscript on “the generous moment,” so the conversation stays example-driven. 19. People interested in boundaries, self-trust, and workplace psychology would likely get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a fast motivational pep talk without theory may skip it.

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