Episode 2 – "I'm Emotionally chinny"

Emotionally. I was Dan Henderson's Chin. Everyone said how strong I was, and I held that like a badge of honor. And then I got hit once, and it knocked me down, and I could not get back up.

Welcome to Therapy Is My Therapy, a podcast where licensed counselor Olivia and unlicensed client Tanya delve deep into real and raw conversations in order to demystify what really happens in that 50 minutes hour heads up. This podcast contains strong language and sensitive topics related to mental health. Hey, everyone. This is your cohost, Tanya. And today we get into the pros and cons of having a high pain tolerance and how that can show up in different areas of your life. There's a bit of noise and echo in the audio, so thanks for bearing with us. Enjoy the episode.

So the first thing I think we wanted to talk about was the body and its role in therapy. Because whenever I go into therapy, especially my current therapist, Catherine, I go in with the spiel, right, of someone who's been properly traumatized over the years, just very, very familiar with having gone to counselors and other mental health professionals. And anyone who's been through it enough has their spiel. They got their big talking points like, this death happened, this happened, this happened. And I know XYZ, and you kind of, in a sense, try to act like an expert on yourself. You're like, this stems from here, and this trauma stems from there. But then Catherine, very quickly, she would be like, but how do you feel in your body, right? And for me, I was just like, what the hell does that have to do with anything? What does stuff that happened 20 years ago have to do with how I feel in my body now? And yeah, Olivia, if you want to just talk about why why do you guys care about the body?

Yeah, definitely. And I think there's such a disconnect between mind and body and to the point where, like you said, we don't realize that one could affect the other. But we see it all the time, right? Like, sports have team psychologists now that come with them, because we'll see in this huge moment in playoffs or final games, things like that, athletes just crumble, and their bodies are working great, but their minds are terrified. And so we know, in that sense, mind and body are connected. But I think a lot of people are hesitant to really go there in therapy because it means a deeper level of healing, rather than coming in with your checklist and saying, okay, so here's what my mom did, here's what my dad did when I was 16. This guy was mean to me. I was bullied. You have a whole list of things that have hurt you, and we say, okay, let's just go down the list and check them off, and I'll tell you the sad story. And then we'll move on. And that's also hard to do, but it doesn't really equate usually to that deeper sense of healing until we really look at, okay, well, how is your body feeling when you think about these things? What ways has your body adapted and responded when it has been traumatized? And people notice that when they're in certain situations, their whole body tenses and they don't even realize it, and different parts of yourself can't function properly. We'll favor one side over the other or we literally won't be able to unclench our muscles. And that has a lot to do with things that happened to us in the past and especially things that happened to us when we were kids and we don't have the language to explain what's going on. And so our bodies take the brunt of telling the story.

Right. And for me, I've been in sports or, like, a martial arts long enough, and there is kind of a heavy emphasis on just honestly, a disconnect from the body. Because I've learned that I used to kind of brag about having a high pain tolerance, and my physical therapist is like, oh, that just means you've gotten really good at ignoring pain signals from your body. And while that's good to some extent, there is a point where you kind of have to be like, oh, this thing is hurt. I've broken my nose and kept rolling. I've sprained or torn ligaments and just kept going. And that can cause more damage later on. And it's hard. It's hard, especially when it is kind of put up on a pedestal to be tough in that way, but you don't realize the repercussions that it has. And where else was I going with this? Yeah, just disconnecting from my body has kind of been like a really big thing my whole life. I remember my first Dissociative episode where it was just during a particularly, I guess, a bad beating by a parent and I just started looking at the couch and being like, I'm not here right now. And this is kind of how I'm dealing with this because I can't understand what's happening to me. And then while working with my therapist, I can actually feel the sensations of that nine year old girl. And it's kind of crazy what tuning into your body instead of just focusing on your mind does.

Yeah, and like you were saying, with learning in sports and martial arts, especially of you have to keep going even when you're in pain. And that's really useful when you're trying to win, but it's not useful long term for your body because when you're continuously putting yourself through intense pain, the only way for your body to survive that is to shut off Dissociating is the best way to stop feeling the pain. But all that's doing is making you feel more pain longer. And it's different in a situation where you're not in control of the pain that's happening. Right when you're a child and you're being abused or hurt in some way, you don't have control over it. But then as an adult doing a sport, or even when we talk about emotional pain, we have more control over saying, no, I want this to stop. But when what you're used to is, oh, pain is coming, I'm just going to go to another place and then I can handle it. And that makes it really difficult long term for healing. And I remember when that happened to me a couple years ago, I made the analogy to my therapist at the time that I felt like emotionally I was Dan Henderson's Chin.

Yes.

And that for so long I was able to handle nonstop hits. I never fell down. Everyone said how strong I was. I was able to just withstand enormous amounts of damage, and I held that like a badge of honor. And then I got hit once and it knocked me down and I could not get back up. And then every time it felt like things that had never bothered me before just were knocking me out. And I remember I said that to her and she just sat there and she paused and she said, but when you get knocked down, you get a break. And I was like, that's it. This whole time I've been thinking that there's something wrong with me for now, being damaged more easily. But when she said that, of, yeah, you get knocked down, you stop getting hit, you get to take a break. Yeah. You didn't win, but you're no longer getting hit. And I remember that hitting very strongly, no pun intended. Of, yeah, when I'm experiencing this much damage, I should knock down because that's not normal and I should be able to stop getting hit. And that shifted me from a state of just constant dissociating to, okay, well, I'm going to make myself feel this because if I'm feeling this much pain, it's a sign that something needs to change.

It's actually really funny that you made this comparison to Hendo's Chin, because, yeah, I was very much the same, know, starting from honestly, as long as I remember, I've experienced a fair bit of violence. And that day I shut off. Yeah. I thought I could take anything, like just the abuse at home and then abuse at school, and then abuse from partners, and also the abuse in my own brain and just taking more and more of it on, and just almost yeah, priding myself on it and just seeing how much I could physically take. Until one day I think my first mental breakdown was grade eleven. So I was like 1617 and I broke and I didn't get back up. And I had so much shame about it. Like, what the hell? I used to be able to handle all this now literally actually happened. I dropped like a box of pop or soda. I guess Americans call it, on the ground. And I just started crying, sobbing uncontrollably and just like going, what the hell's wrong with me? I used to take so much more. Just only recently did I start to have a way to explain it. I actually call it emotionally or psychologically chinny. Yeah, you lose your chin. And I used to yeah, I used to get so hard on myself about it until I kind of started viewing it that way. I needed a break, I needed to stop it way before it got to that point and I didn't. And now I have to start to learn to listen to the signals. And like any fighter that just relied on their chin, now they have to develop different things like footwork or head movement or just ways of mitigating the risk because, yeah, you just have to accept that in some ways you're I wouldn't say fragile, I don't know what the right word is, but you're just chinny. Your body just is trying to protect itself and being like, we're shutting this down, we're just going somewhere else. And yeah, it took me a while and I can see how the work with Catherine helped me tune into my body because I can feel that dissociating start to happen and it has been really helpful, but god damn, is it painful. The first time I really talked to her about it and I started feeling things and I was just yelling at her, I'm like, why am I feeling things? Feelings suck. I just had manic ish not like diagnosed actual mania, but like very manic. Pixie dream girl. And I had angry or sad. Those are my three major emotions. And I know you touched on it. Why feel the full breadth of human emotion when there's what does that teach us?

That's a really good question and I think a lot of people prefer not to feel the full range because it means that you're getting both sides of it. When you really tune into your body and into your emotions in general, you are going to feel the absolute, quote, unquote, worst feelings of heartbreak and loss and disappointment and embarrassment. Right. Like, the only way to allow yourself to feel the full range of joy and excitement and love is to also let in the counterparts. And the idea is to recognize that neither feeling is worse than the other or better than the other. They're all parts of being human. And I think people who have been through a lot are able to recognize, well, yeah, this joy means so much more because I know what I have experienced and I know how heavy and deep grief can be and that makes this sense of love and safety and belonging so much bigger. But that initial step towards the full range is really hard to take because things that you have shut down your whole life are going to surface. And I remember in therapy talking about how I was really worried that if I opened that door and let those feelings in that I was going to drown. And she looked at me and she said, what if you're already drowning now and opening that door will give you air?

That is big.

Yeah, that just really stuck with me. And I think that there's not an easy way to get there. Right. You have to go through all of the hard feelings and the heavy ones if you want to experience the fullness of the ones that are desirable.

That makes sense. And I think I use a lot of what's it called metaphors in therapy. And I remember liking it to, like, whitewater rafting. It's a good one, except I don't have a life jacket. I barely have any training, and I'm just like, oh, God, let's just try to not capsize or fall over. I don't know anything about rafting, but just try not to drown. And you also don't know where the river goes. And my therapist mentioned that she is kind of the guide or a rudder, and she can't do the paddling for me, but she can at least kind of give me a lay of the land. Like, there's going to be a waterfall over there and just let's not go there.

Yeah, I think with the example you're using, right, like when we get into that place of, okay, I'm ready to feel my feelings, and I have this guide with me. I think the overwhelming feeling usually is isolating of, I'm the only one feeling this, or no one else is going to understand, or I look on Instagram and everyone else is happy, and I'm now entering this river of grief. And that's obviously not true, but that's how it feels in those moments. One of the ways to help with that is seeking out support from other people of, okay, who else has been through heavy things, and who do I know that when I'm feeling this isolated will have that hand held out of it's not just you. And like you said, they can't go through it for you, but because they've also been through it's the same thing of, they know when there's going to be a waterfall and when there's going to be different things. And I think that can make it a little bit easier to stay in your body because, you know, it's not just you. Right. I think instinctively when our bodies experience something new evolutionarily, it just associates it with danger of, I don't know what this is. I don't know what could be hiding our bodies. Just say, no, absolutely not. Can't go there. Whereas our minds might be able to wrap our heads around it. Our bodies are just really stuck. And so I think being able to have people who have been there make it, at least for me, allows my body to relax a little bit. It's still on edge but allows me to continue to take the steps forward rather than, okay, this is just me. I'm the only person who's been here. It's really hard to, I think, let go of that false sense of control, right?

And circling back to the spiel. A lot of ace adverse childhood experience, high scores. We use that as a means to protect ourselves because it is hard to trust, especially when you have had terrible childhood experiences. Adults equals danger. And I know now that I used to protect myself by going like, blah, blah, blah, this happens. Let's see if we can make therapist make a face, which we can talk about later, about performance and therapy, but, like, trying to shock them enough so they stay away, essentially. Like these big, scary things that happen. That's terrible. I'm sorry, but I didn't actually let those feelings in. I could just talk about terrible things happening to me and just be like, I'm talking about the weather. And I remember priding myself on that until I was asked, how do you feel about it? And you're like, I feel sad. I barely had a vocabulary for my inner states, right? And I think a lot of therapy work is just correct me if I'm wrong, but some schools do reparenting, and parents will be like, oh, you're feeling sad or you're feeling hungry. You pay attention to your kids, see if they're hungry, tired, overstimulated, whatnot kind of reflect that back to them and what to do about it. And if you didn't have parents that did that, then you're just like, I'm on my own. I don't know what the shit I'm feeling, but I'm going to feel so much of it and have nowhere to put it. And I just remember the trouble I had in naming what I was feeling. And yeah, if you could just talk a bit about what is the purpose of naming these things.

Yeah. And you make a good point of now as kids are being parented, more mindfully with resources that parents of previous generations just did not have access to. When we're asking kids, Are you hungry? Are you tired? What are you feeling? Are you sad? Are you angry? The key is, when we ask that question, the answer is in your body, right? Because I think previous generations were when you're asked, especially with women, when you're asked, Are you hungry? If you're in a group of people, you look around at your friends and you wait for someone else to answer, oh, I don't want to be the only one who's hungry. Or, oh, if everyone else is feeling okay, I don't want to be the one who's not not being the first one to fall asleep at sleepovers. Like little things like that that don't seem that huge as a kid, but what they're teaching you when you say, no, I'm not hungry, just because no one else is, or you try to shut off what you're feeling because it's not what the group is feeling. That just teaches you to turn off your internal cues and focus instead on what's going on with everyone else. We all know how that ends up in adult relationships. So I think that as adults, it's really tough to relearn that. And really, when we ask those questions of, am I sad? Am I angry? How am I feeling? We have to look at our body, not just our mind, because the extent to which we can feel emotions only goes so far when it's brainy, right? We can intellectualize, well, I am sad because this person is doing this, or I don't like this weather, so I'm feeling upset. But when we really sit and say, okay, well, my hands are shaking and my face is getting flush and I can't sit still, that's how I know I'm angry and I'm feeling really small or I'm feeling really tense and I'm sweating, and that's how I know I'm scared, right? Like, when we're really able to ask ourselves our feelings and sit with them, a lot of the answers of how we know how we're feeling come with how our body's feeling. But for so long, we don't listen to those that when we're asked the question, we just say whatever we can think of. Intellectually, we don't go deeper.

I found that to be the case. Like, I'm chronic people, pleaser, and just, oh, yeah, whatever works. And my body's screaming, no, we hate this. We hate this. And you just go, no. Shut up, body. We're not doing that. We're ignoring it. We're going with the flow, so to speak. And people, I don't think, talk enough about the I guess the emotional turmoil that happens when you're essentially being gaslit, right? You're as a kid, I'd be crying or I'd stub my foot and I'd yell and then just be told to shut up, like, it doesn't hurt that much. Or I'd be being hit and crying and feeling just awful, but being told to just stifle that no matter what, just to stifle it, you're not feeling that it doesn't matter. And then I end up learning, like, my needs don't matter, like, my physical needs. I have trouble remembering when I'm hungry or sad, and then that behavior kind of goes out into the world, and I'm like, what the hell happened? But there were signs all along the way, like, all along the way to a meltdown, there were symptoms in my body or signals, and I didn't know how to read them, so I just kind of kept going, and I'm like, how did I end up in the same place once again? And at least for women, I find we're kind of encouraged to ignore these things and encouraged to just work hard, tirelessly, without complaints. But sometimes complaints are just like, hey, I don't feel good. And that's just a boundary. It's not me trying to whine it's just this thing is hurting. Can we modify this? Can we change this? And then it is like a terrible lesson that we teach people to not be able to ask for a modification or pause or stop.

Yeah, I mean, even we look at it with athletes again, if you're in a sport or doing some kind of physical activity and you experience a small amount of pain, you're told, keep going, push through it. And then that just escalates more and more to you believe that if you don't push through even the worst amount of pain and just continue training, that, oh, now you're not going to reach your goals, you're not going to win that championship, you're not going to be the best. And there are times when you do need to push through discomfort, and there are times when you need to stop because you're going to create worse injury. And there's no way to learn how to discern those two if we're shutting off our connection to our body.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And my physiotherapist friend, Dr. Jen Crane talked about she teaches circus people, and those are tough people because they do crazy, wild things and injure themselves in spectacular ways. And there's a lot of, yes, circus is pain and just learning to ignore these things. But like you said, when you just cut off, you just close that door completely, nothing can get in. And then if you don't have that information, which is what pain is, it's data. You don't have that information. You can't tell you can't tell what she calls productive discomfort from unproductive discomfort, which is pain leading to injury. And I did learn that ignoring my body, ignoring my body and having a high pain tolerance led me to horrible things. Like I had an inflamed appendix, and then I was like, oh, probably fine. I went sparring and wrestling. And then I wake up at three, I'm screaming with something that I really should have addressed. And when you don't have a I guess nomenclature for your body's sensations, you don't know what to do with them. You don't know what's good and bad. And I found that most people essentially, they don't know where to place that emotion. And then you end up hoisting that onto somebody else and be like, you deal with this. As much discussion there is about childhood trauma and things. There's a lot of exploration in therapy, at least for mine. I guess that's our main goal for this podcast is like, what happens in the therapist office? Is it always about dragging up childhood stuff? Or it can be about happy things, too, right? And how to process happy. You know, I remember once she just said, what if, say Olivia, what if Olivia wants you to be happy and just loves you for who you are? And I just remember and she's like, how does your body feel? And I'm like, I'm going to be violently ill. I would rather have you be horrible to me because my body recognizes this. Right? Like, it's always a familiar feeling. I know what it's like to be treated poorly. And I found that even positive emotions, they ended up being wired as, like, terrifying to me.

Yeah, they are. Positive emotions might actually be scarier because how often do we have a moment of joy or rest or excitement? And the immediate second thought is, oh no, when is this going to get taken away? We can't even enjoy it when it's there because there's just this nonstop fear that we're not going to have it anymore. And I think a lot of people then get comfortable in sitting with feelings like sadness because they're like, I know this. I'm used to this feeling. I know how this is going to go. I can just sit in this and never have to leave. Because joy is terrifying and sadness is comfortable.

Yeah... Is it...Somatic therapy is what this is called? With that practice, you learn in a safe environment as to what to do with all sorts of different feelings. Right. Like this happy feeling. I said I wanted to be violently ill and then she just chuckled and she just guided me through that. And for me, working with my body helped me not just put a finer point on emotions. Because when you've had depression, you play is this a slight blue period or am I on the verge of a mental breakdown? And you always have to play that game, and it creates a sense of anxiety, which doesn't help things. And as a therapist, at least mine, she's just like, it sounds like you're sad. And I'm like, what's? Sad. I only know despair, but I don't know what sad is. And is that the sort of work that you've had to do throughout therapy is just kind of name and normalize things for people?

Yeah. And going back to earlier when you were talking about naming emotions and the importance of that, a lot of it is being able to discern the difference between clinical depression, clinical anxiety, and just normal human sadness, normal human nerves. I do a lot of psychoeducation with people of recognizing that hard emotions are not inherently a diagnosis. Humanity is really strange. Life itself is very absurd and super existential, and there's no way to get through it without experiencing this whole range of feelings and being able to learn the difference between, okay, this is true, a depressive episode, or this is anxiety that is beyond functional. And that's I think usually the difference I try to help people understand is, is this emotion serving me or is this something that is preventing me from doing things right? And sadness is healthy. We're supposed to feel sad, but depression makes it hard to function. It creates this distance and this isolation that doesn't allow us to feel the rest of the emotions. And same with anxiety. A lot of times I have clients who come in because they do have an anxiety disorder, and then they'll come in a session and they'll be like, well, I have this test on Monday, and I'm so anxious about it, and I feel like I haven't made any progress. And I'm like, yeah, you have a test on Monday. Of course you're anxious. I'd be anxious, yeah. It's raining and you have to drive far. That's never going to not be hard. There are so many instances of functional anxiety, and I think as a society, we're trying to figure out where the line is of, no, this isn't good, or, yeah, this is normal. So I try to do a lot of work of, okay, what's the difference in your body between when it's typical anxiety and when it feels like you're totally just unable to function?

Right. When I was in a stage where I referred to it as my inner child, was like an inner infant where it's screaming, and I'm like, I don't know what you want. I don't know how to fix this. And I had no channel of communication. I tended to view emotions in a very, I guess, trigger happy kind of way, where I'm like, oh, this feeling of sadness, shoot it, because it's going to be depression. This feeling of happiness, shoot it because it's going to be disappointment or anxiety. When I shut my body off from the rest of me or me from the rest of my body, so to speak, I thought it made me stronger, but it made me weaker because it just made me completely intolerant of anything that life brought to me because I just did not know how to handle that load. And I was reading this podcast book, like Building the Elite in terms of physical training, and I found a lot of parallels to that and emotional training. They said that you have to train for particular ranges of motion or positions because avoiding them won't help, because life will put you there. Life will put you in that spot. And when you are in that spot, you won't have the capacity or the skills or the coordination to do what needs doing. And I found that to be the case. I'm nervous for a test, and I'm like, I have no idea what to do. So I dissociate. Or one way or another, I dissociate. Whether it's starving myself asleep, food, drinking, sex, anything. You have one tool and you're like, I'm just going to bash this and hope this works. And if it doesn't, I'm just going to bash it harder until you end up in a really bad spot.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of individual experiences, but generally the goal of therapy is to build your emotional muscles such that when hard things come up, you are equipped to lift them. They're still going to be heavy, you're going to be sore, you might. Need some help. You might not get it on the first try, but the function is so that when you face something that feels impossible, which everyone is going to, it might be losing a person, losing a job, experiencing some kind of physical, emotional setback. If you live long enough, you're going to experience really hard things, and if you shut down your feelings about it and say, no, that's just not going to happen to me, you're never going to grow the skills to deal with it when it happens. So it's like saying, one day you're going to have to run a marathon. Who knows when, but someday someone you love very deeply is going to die or something horrible is going to happen. That's the marathon. Are you going to start training for it when it happens? You're never going to be able to just run 26 miles. You're never going to be able to just lift 200 pounds without training. But if you start now, you don't have to rush into learning it. You can do it slowly and develop those skills in a way that is not overwhelming, so that, you know, when you reach that point of, wow, this feels so impossible. It's still going to be hard, but you're going to be prepared to cope with it in a way that you wouldn't have if you just shut off and pretend it's never going to happen.

I found that to be exactly the case. Like I said, I thought I was strong. I thought nothing bothered me. But no, what I did was just avoid or prevent myself from building those skills and then try to learn them on the spot. Like you said, it's okay. Figure out how to lift 200 pounds while your kids trapped under a car. That's not the time you want to learn it. And it went as well as you thought, and you fall back to the level of your training. And I think what happens in therapy is that you retrain them, right? You start to rewire those muscles or those automatic responses, especially when it comes to traumatic things, because once again, emotionally chinny my body's, like, hey, this worked. This got me out of this situation. It's like, you're not dead. Gracie moral victory. But it can't tell the difference between surviving and actually navigating through it properly. Three and again, the biggest thing I want people to know about therapy is it can be hilarious and just weird moments, and I think I just do really weird sessions. I like to think that my therapist, I'm one of her favorite clients, but I think we all do.

I'm sure she's never bored.

She has moments where she just actually bursts out laughing. Because I remember we had gone through a particularly nasty memory and she kind of kept me there, right? Because all I wanted was to intellectualize that was my defense mechanism was, oh, it happened because XYZ and this and it's from this book. And look at this citation. Look at how smart I am. But she was like, yeah, that's cool, but how are you feeling? And I'm like, kind of a goodwill hunting sort of moment where I'm like, I'm fine, I'm fine. It's cool. And then she's like, no, you're not. We're staying here. We're staying here. Keep scanning your body. And I'm like, oh, God. Okay. I feel this, and I feel like a little kid again. And the waterworks happen. And at the end, she guided me. And I remember pausing and being like, you know what this feels like? It feels like you're Tyler Durden and I'm the protagonist, right? And you kiss my hand, and you pour the lie on it, and then the water or something, and it starts burning and burning, and I'm going into my cave, finding my power animal. I'm not here. I am Jack Skullbladder. I am somewhere. And she's, no, no, we stay here. We stay here. And then she finds this moment where, like any good coach, you find that person's breaking point, so to speak. And you're like, okay, we dial back, and we hang out here. And then she kind of, like, lets off the gas, so to speak, and then shows me that I did survive. Eventually, I was just like, oh, emotions don't kill you, do they? And I make these very silly observations. I'm like, emotions won't kill you. She's like, no, they won't. And that was the first step in me. I wouldn't say gaining mastery, but just being less afraid of experiencing any sort of emotion.

And that concludes this episode of therapy is my therapy. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider subscribing to our podcast so you never miss an update. Once again, thanks for tuning in. The content discussed on this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only and does not act as a replacement for therapy. Although we may share tools that have worked for us and talk about symptoms that we've experienced, it is not meant to be used for diagnostic purposes and does not constitute medical advice.