Ron Villano Transcript

December 3, 2007

Announcer: Back to Dr. Kent and friends.

Kent Gustavson: Welcome back to Sound Off Radio. Today, again, is the birthday of Tom Sawyer’s creator, Huck Finn’s imaginator. It’s Mark Twain’s birthday. Although he was the ultimate satirist and consummate writer, he had a dark side. He dealt with very much depression, he lost his wife, he lost his two daughters. He eventually coped in some way by writing but he was a very dark individual despite all of his humor.My next guest is Ron Villano who lost his 17 year old boy in a car accident about eight years ago. Since then, he has devoted his time and energy to helping others and he’s a dynamic inspirational speaker. Welcome to the show.

Ron Villano: Thank you for having me.

Kent: Your new book is called “The Zing”?

Ron: ”The Zing”, and it represents living life two levels above passion.

Kent: So “The Zing” is an especially passionate word.

Ron: Yes.

Kent: OK. What is your life story? What drove you to write “The Zing”? What drove you to this place?

Ron: Well, I think, me included, a lot of people in our society — and I see a lot with my own patients — we’re not living life fully. We’re not enjoying the moment, we’re not extracting all the joy that surrounds us. With so many different tragedies… me living with the tragedy of losing my son, Michael, in July 22, 1998. He was killed by a tractor trailer. It ran into his car and killed him and his friend, Anthony, and that turned my whole world around.I was depressed for many years, and any of your listeners I’m sure if they’ve been through it or if they know of someone who’s been through something like that, most people don’t even come out of it. I’m very fortunate with the work and the blessings that I’ve had, so I’m able now to have a message to let people know that they can go from living life to loving the life they live now.I’m just a walking testimony to this, and it does take a lot of awareness, of understanding that all we have is the moment and understanding, when you have great loss like this, that if my son came back or any of your listeners out there — if they’ve lost someone — if that person was able to come back, I’m almost sure, just like my son, he’ll look at me and say: “Dad, I want you to live. I don’t want you to stay depressed. I don’t want you to be down. I don’t want you to be out of life here. I want you to start enjoying. You’ll see me, I’m here, I’m fine.” So, with that message in my head, it then allows me to feel free, to move on, to move on in life but move on with him, with him in spirit.

Kent: Now, you’re a therapist. How do you connect, in your work, your own feelings to the feelings of your clients? How does that relationship play out for you? You felt this loss, how does that help you work?

Ron: How it helps me is because I’ve done my own personal work so I don’t have any transference and I’m not doing my own counseling in my counseling sessions. How I utilize it is if I feel that it will help the patient, by them understanding that I’ve been to a major tragedy and that I understand what it feels like to go through a major tragedy. However, I don’t know what they’re feeling. But at least, there’s someone on the other side of them who they can look at and say: “Wow! You’re part of this club, which is one of the worst clubs you can be in because the initiation is the worst part of it.”How does that help? It helps. Some people it will help because it’s going to allow them to relate to you and then they’ll be able to speak freely and know that you’re not just another person looking at them and saying: “Gee, you know, you should try to move on, you should try to live.” Well, guess what? If you didn’t lose a child, you have no right to tell me that. It’s easy to say that if you didn’t lose someone.On the other side, if there’s a patient who went through a loss and I feel sharing my story will create more of either a sympathetic response or feeling from them which isn’t good, or if they’re going to some other kind of loss… say they lost a pet or they went through a break up or a divorce or a mother or a father and they’re very down about that.If I say it was my son, that might make them think: “Oh, my God, why am I complaining? I didn’t lose a child.” So, you have to be very careful when you have a patient across from you because it can go either way and you have to be as sure as you can before you bring it up.

Kent: Your book is called “The Zing” and it’s been out on the market for a little while now. It’s called “Embrace the Power of Change to Self-discovery Guide.” What is the difference for you between one-on-one therapy and then going out and speaking to people or writing a book that people are going to pick up and, hopefully, change their own lives? How is that different for you?

Ron: Well, that’s a great question. Let me see, I would say the one-on-one: someone’s coming to me as a professional, they were either referred to me or they heard about me from somewhere else and they’re coming for counseling specifically.You’re in a different seat then. You’re looked at much differently. You’re looked at in almost such a professional level that whatever you say, the people, they hang on to. When you go out and you speak to a crowd, they don’t really know you. There’s really no time for them to get to know you other than what you’re going to present.You just want to be sure that you have a message that’s coming from the heart and the motivation isn’t to make me famous or to get me to sell books. It’s really: I have a message, my son and I, to give out to people. And I think what separates me from many other people who go out and speak is that I really mean that. I really mean that if I touch a person and their life changes even a little bit, then I’m content, I did a great job.

Kent: Tell me about the garage, the dumpster, the battery, the light bulb, you’ve got all these great concepts. Your book itself isn’t about your own personal struggles as much as it’s a guide to help other people and I think it really will. Tell me a little bit about this sort of sub method within the book.

Ron: Well, the garage is the common thread to the book and the garage is something that I came up with. I come from a big Italian family of seven, you know, with very little money. At times, as any of the audience out there know, anyone who’s an Italian, they know that the garage is probably the most important part of the house to the father.We had this big garage we’d go out there with my three brothers, they’re all older than me and bigger than me, and we’d go in the garage, we’d take everything out of the garage, then we’d sweep it with this big brooms, because Italians only use big brooms. We’d get this thing spotless and then, we would put everything back in, just in a different position.So, what did we really do? We didn’t really accomplish anything other than sweeping the floor. Now, the reason why we didn’t throw things out is because of guilt or sentimentality or we’d think, you know: “My Rose has been passed on for a while.” And we would think if we took whatever she gave us out that we will be struck by God, you know, we’d have that guilt feeling. So, we would keep everything in there which means there was no room for something new to go in.Now, think of your mind as a mind’s garage and a lot of the stuff that’s been put in there has been put in there by our parents, teachers, etc. etc., from maybe six months old to about six or seven years old. A lot of stuff we retained from then, so our mind is full of a lot of these things. So, I believe we need to empty out the garage and we need to get rid of stuff that is no longer useful and yet, not condemn who put it there or the reasons it was there because when it was put in it was appropriate information for appropriate time.But we need to get the stuff out and that is so that we could put new stuff into our heads. As we grow, we go through the journey of life, then we’ll be able to enjoy it more because we’ll have more tools, we’ll have more information, we’ll have, you know, a more open mind to things. I think that’s why I love people, especially New Year’s coming in, they all make the resolution and the whole thing that they want to do this, they want to do that and then aren’t able to, after a month or two, not because they don’t want to, it’s because there was no room in the mind’s garage for that new information to stick, so the old stuff backs it out.So through my book, I give this analogy as a common thread as we go through the dumpster and the battery and these old personalities in there to let people know that in order to have change and accept the changes in life, you first need to know who you are and you need to do a personal inventory of what’s in your mind’s garage and start to pull it out and I think it takes a lot of tools to do that. In my book, I give the tools on how to go from one side of the tunnel to another. Actually, one of the chapters is called “The Tunnel”.So, it’s a lot of fun and I made it very simple and the dumpster part is that person that we all know — and we may be one of them - who, when you say: “How’s it going?”, they say: “Terrific!” They never have a problem. However, they’re always willing to help you. So, they’re the dumpster person, always willing to take other people’s stuff in and I feel because they don’t really want to deal with what’s inside of themselves. So, it’s easier to keep taking other people’s stuff in.And a lot of people don’t even know they’re doing that. They don’t even know that they’re just taking stuff in and just avoid their own stuff. They’ll find out later, and anyone who is a professional in my field knows that people who have anxiety and panic attacks and depression and OCD, a lot of times, it’s stuff that they were stuffing in and a lot of things they weren’t aware of that was going on within themselves.So, the dumpster personality is good to know about, but are you one of them or are you one of the people dumping in one? You know, the batteries, the connectives of the cables: “Am I one of those people connecting on to a big kit battery and draining someone or am I the one who’s being drained?” I just put the book out because I thought that people need to know and have an idea of what these different personalities were? I think coming from me, after the great loss of Michael and becoming more aware of my own life, I’m a witness that these tools and understanding this kind of stuff that’s going on out there, you know, different personalities, different stresses of life and understanding it and putting it within myself, has given me the ability to accept change. Now that I accept change, and that’s one of the big things, I’m able to let go of things that I can’t control and attempt to control more things that are in the present moment.

Kent: It’s a beautiful book, it’s called “The Zing”. We can all look for it on ronvillano.com. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you. I think you are really inspiring the world, and I hope we can all embrace the power of change.

Ron: Thank you very much, Dr. Kent.

Kent: My next guest on the show is Marion Orem who gives voice to unique sort of travelers, “RV-ing Women”. We’ll be back with you in a couple of minutes.

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