Why it's so important who your rolling partners are in life. Because if you have people who in jujitsu, you can't trust to roll with them and have them not be trying to hurt you, or the opposite, have them not try at all because they don't think you can be challenged, those are not people that are going to help you get where you want to be.

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 co host, Tanya. The term upward spiral was something I coined in regards to the process of progress. Oftentimes, I felt as though I kept repeating the same mistakes over and over. But my therapist Catherine told me that she viewed it similarly to circles on a record player. That is, while similar situations may occur, every time we choose differently, we progress outward. We also introduce a section called General Banter, which ended up turning into an epic discussion about infinity and how we get mad at physics. So we are coining this one general relativity banter. Enjoy the episode.

I was setting up this podcast, and things are going wrong, and my one cat decided to just become a demon because I'm recording a podcast. So of course he has to become an absolute demon, and I think everything is going wrong. I've got some weird curse on me. And then I realize there is 8 billion people on this planet. This or considerably worse is happening to someone somewhere. And it's taken me therapy and chilling out my nervous system to teach me to begin to accept that I'm an imperfect being with fluctuating moods and energy and concentration levels, navigating a weird, chaotic world. And things are imperfect. And you can't get mad at physics, Tanya, for dropping my laptop. You can get mad at physics, but it's not entirely helpful. That was strangely philosophical thing, as I'm, like, fumbling with my podcast equipment, and the other person in the house is like, what's up? And I'm like, I'm an imperfect creature just trying to navigate on little sleep, and I'm hungry and have to accept that the world is chaotic and imperfect, and I have to just do my best with the things that I have, and they're like, okay, got it. Big philosophical info dump first thing in the morning. But that was helpful because therapy, I'm able to at least verbalize that because typically I just start screaming like, a little kid, where I'm like, all right, I can't. So at least I can confuse them with philosophy instead of just unadulterated rage.

Yeah, no, something about dropping something is just the most humanizing experience. Like, I want to say dehumanizing, because that's how it feels when you have to pick something up that's fallen. But I think that is the definition of being a human, is dropping shit. And it just making you feel insane.

I like that we're just kicking off the morning with some very deep ponderances on us dropping shit. For me, it's just a reminder that I'm just this creature in a meat suit that is prone to not behaving exactly the way my brain would like for it to. And it reminds me how out of control things are. I can't manipulate time and space and physics, unfortunately. So that is occasionally, oftentimes enraging. So this general banter is very deep. Is a general relativity banter, yeah.

And when I was in grad school, you have to choose what theory you think will fit best for your counseling work. And obviously, I was drawn to existential theory, and it was pretty easy to reflect on why I was choosing it, because I've been having existential thoughts keep me awake since I was six years old.

I feel seen right now because I will lie in bed and just ponder my entire existence and mortality and just the frailty of human existence. And when I really want to freak myself out is think about the vastness of the universe. And then I don't sleep ever again.

Yeah. I was the weird kid who would say, no, mom, I can't fall asleep. Because I got into the spiral of. What do you mean, when we die? Well, okay, it's not comforting if there is an afterlife, because you're saying that's forever. What do you mean, forever? Where's the end? And if there's not, then what does that mean? And I was such a small child. I didn't even know the words for these things. And I was just spiraling every night. Couldn't sleep. It was brutal. Never went away. But at least now I understand it.

Yeah. I think understanding at least takes the bite off of it, so to speak, of the anxiety. It takes the edge off where, okay, I'm feeling this, but I at least, have an idea as to why I'm feeling it. And I'm just trying to picture your poor mom, because she's not Oppenheimer. She can't be. Like, this is what forever exactly is. I don't even think they can properly explain. Just. I'm struck by what tiny Olivia must have felt when she had all these big thoughts and these big feelings and not even the vocabulary to express it. That's hard, I would imagine. Hell, I mean, that ties into a lot of therapy and a lot of. Honestly, a lot of why there's Karens in the world, because they just have these big feelings and they just can't explain it. Much like circling back to my frustration at physics in regards to setting up my podcast, historically, I would have just had a meltdown because I wanted to express and be understood, and I had all these big feelings and thoughts and know where to put them. But now I can at least verbalize them in some sort of pseudo philosophical info dump, and that is a release valve of some sort.

Yeah. I mean, tiny Olivia was. Yes. To my poor mom. I did not sleep my entire childhood. It wasn't like that. I wasn't tired. I think I just didn't want to miss out on anything. It also probably had something to do with all of the existential feelings that I was having, because then when I'd fall asleep, I'd have these super abstract nightmares about boxes multiplying until they took over the whole room. Like, it was so strange. But I think that was the only way that my brain knew how to make sense of the huge things I was feeling. And that's why being a therapist is so cool and such a privilege, because I feel like I'm able to hold space for those same multiplying boxes of thoughts and make it so that the experience of, oh, my God, I'm a human, this makes no sense. Everything is hard. This is insane. And knowing that there's other people who feel the same way and that when you tell people that, they can hear you and say, oh, yeah, I felt that way, too.

Connecting and relating to another person about shared struggles or shared experiences is very much the fabric of what makes humanity wonderful. And just hearing you talk about tiny Olivia having box related existential nightmares, it makes me feel seen, because I don't quite recall a lot of my dreams, and they weren't nearly that abstract or existential. I think mine were pretty simple, like, show up to swim class without my stuff. But just hearing about someone having such complex thoughts and lying awake and struggling with sleeping, yeah, that makes me feel less alone and just more seen. And it's kind of cool. Apparently, we can't do very light general banter, guys. It's got to be super existential and deep.

This is as light as it gets.

Yeah, this is light. Like Dostoevsky light.

Yeah. I mean, what you're talking about, that experience of, I can't make your existential thoughts and trouble to sleep go away, but I can tell you that you're not the only one feeling that way. That's like, the whole value, I think, of therapy is that you're sharing these really deep fears and parts about yourself that you don't know if anyone will relate to or love or see. And you're saying, yeah, that's a normal feeling. People feel that way all the time, and not in an invalidating way of like, oh, relax, everyone feels that way, but in the opposite of, yes, you're a human being experiencing human emotions, and you're not wrong for feeling that way.

Which does lead us to a segment that we're playing with in this segment. It's going to be postgame recap or analyses of my therapy session that I just had. The most recent one was actually a funny one where I was becoming frustrated at someone for not giving me essentially undivided attention. And then I had done exactly the same thing where I was just doing something or moving around the room as someone was really needing attention from me. And she's like, there's a little bit of a hypocrisy in there, isn't there, Tanya? And it was a good gut check. I'm like, ah, shit. I've gotten to that blue belt, purple belt level in therapy as a client where she can now push harder and push for the more subtle things. So it was very interesting because when she mentioned the hypocrisy, it was immediately met with shelling up. And one of the things that I've been learning from Catherine is how old am I when this happens, when I have this emotion or when I do the behavior? And in this case, I felt like a little kid. I felt like, no, like when your hands caught in a cookie jar and you're like. And also recognizing that the age I felt when I got frustrated at that person for moving around the room and having to do some other things when I'm essentially pouring my heart out about something vulnerable. For me, that was a very young place that a didn't exactly ask if this was the best time to do so, which is, that's on me. And it also stemmed from just childhood things. Because my parents were working all the time, I often felt very neglected. And there is a very reactive, very sensitive nerve inside me when I feel like that thing is repeating, and then I feel like that child self just comes up and just goes, no, we're not doing this. Again, I'm going to have a big feeling versus showing up like an adult. And again, a asking, is this a good time to have this conversation? And b, explaining to my child self, be like, you do the same thing and you don't mean any malice. So I don't know if it's entirely fair to attribute malice to that person. And yeah, that was my little post game analysis.

I love that. And I think it's so helpful to have and to really sit with and it's not always possible, depending on when your therapy is scheduled for, if you have to immediately switch into doing something else. But there's a lot you can process in the session. But then I think there's also time that you need afterwards to really just sit with yourself and go over everything you talked about and really think more about whatever it is you brought up and how you want things to change as a result of what you talked about. So the post game analysis can be really useful for the client. And also as a therapist, the few minutes I have in between clients, I'm often thinking about, okay, how did that session go? Are there things that I did well or that I could have done differently? And also, what are the overall takeaways that I think the client got out of it that I remember that for the next time?

So in regards to postgame analyses, is there anything in particular, like a recent session as a therapist, as a client, that you learned something new or something deeper?

It's interesting being on both sides of it, because as a client, I go into the session and I'm very concerned that nothing will help it. I'm like, okay, well, I know it'll be useful to process this, but I don't know that they're going to be able to do anything that will really sustainably help. Which is funny, because also then doing that on the other side and really hoping what happens will help the client. But I think I often have the experience as a client where at the end of it I'm like, oh yeah. Once again, I have underestimated the power of talking things through in a safe space. I think what has happened from that end that helps me on the therapist end is that I realize afterwards that the answers and the direction were things that had to come from me, and a good therapist will pull that out of you and will ask the right questions and give you the right amount of space to sift through it. But the direction has to come from me. And that made me think of that when you're saying, oh, there's 50,000 places that you want to go with things, whenever someone says something, and I have that same experience as a therapist where after the session I'll say, oh, man, we didn't get to these things that I thought were important, and I bookmarked them and I wanted to remember to say them, and I didn't get to them. And so I will try to jot those down or pay attention to those for future sessions. But I think what's been really helpful on the client end is realizing that you will get where you need to go when you need to get there. And if it's something that didn't come up in session, or if it's, we went a different direction than I had planned to go as a client or as a therapist, that's just where it needed to go. And so I think on both ends, it's been really helpful analyzing things post game of like, I don't need to overanalyze what happened. I can just acknowledge that if I'm the client, my body knows when it's ready to go places, and if I'm the therapist, the client is the expert in their own life. If that is where the conversation took us, that's probably what was most beneficial to them. So I think for me, a lot of times the post game is just giving myself that permission to say, okay, what happened is what needed to happen. And on therapist end, I'll obviously think about if there are things I could have done better or differently. But I think for the most part, it's mostly just me kind of grounding myself in that things don't need to go perfectly.

Today I'd like to talk about what I'm now referring to as the upward spiral. I remember in therapy that I would be getting really pissed at myself for having gone to therapy for such a long time. At the time, it was six months. Such a long time and still encountering the same issues over and over. And it's taken me a while, and I'm only starting to really be able to reframe it now, but when I would berate myself constantly for fucking up over and over, Catherine, she mentioned how to regard it more like a record player. There's one point, but then slowly it circles outwards. And while you may be repeating things, there is a progression. And I'd like to hear your thoughts on it in regards to your life, in regards to therapy, in regards to just your overall opinion of the topic.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think that's something that clients come with a lot in session of. We've been doing this for all this time. We just talked about this last week. Why am I still having a problem with this? Or why am I still doing the same thing that I don't want to be doing? And I think it's a lot like driving in the snow or the rain or any bad conditions when you're new at something, it feels impossible. And then even if you're practicing it all the time, right, like if you live in a place where it's rainy or snowy all the time, you're going to get way better at driving in it, but it's never going to be easy. And so I think that helps a lot of recognizing that, yes, you're getting better at something and you're improving, but it's not in a way that is going to feel drastic usually at first, because it is like that, the circle, you're still going to be hitting the same stressors and the same triggers because that's what life is. But you're going to get increasingly better and better at managing them so that they're not impacting your functioning as heavily. So it might be a situation where you have an argument with somebody and normally you would react so terribly and the rest of your week would be ruined. And now you're at a point where, okay, maybe you have the same argument, but you're able to down regulate and calm yourself down and within three days you're feeling back to normal. That's a huge improvement. You've just cut in half the time it takes you to feel grounded after conflict. And yeah, the goal might be to be able to communicate in a way that the argument doesn't escalate to that point or that you can calm yourself down very soon after, but that doesn't mean that you're not still doing a hard thing and doing it way better than you would have. So I think that's something that I try to drive home a lot, not with clients only, but also in my own life, that really true progress happens slowly and often without notice to the person it's happening to. And I'm sure that comes up all the time with jujitsu of you have no idea if you're doing any better day to day. And you don't really find out until one someone else points it out, especially if it's someone you're like, oh yeah, I remember rolling with you six months ago and you have done so much better at this now or now you're in a competition again and you're able to handle it much better, or even that your nerves are much less. There's so many little points that you can see improvement, but it's really hard to notice it. One, when you're doing it all the time, and two, when you're so focused on a larger goal, you're not able to notice as much, just small things that are building.

I really like the comparison to jiu jitsu because honestly, it does feel like a jujitsu journey. I went in as a white belt, where I didn't have much awareness of my body. I didn't even know the point of Jiu Jitsu and had to have it carefully explained to me and to be shown techniques, and then I didn't understand what to do with them. I was like, why are we doing this? And some context. I came from a Moitai background, so I'm like, why don't I just punch them in the face? As I'm saying this, I'm realizing how many parallels there are in my therapy journey, because again, I went in there not understanding what the point of it was and also trying to. Trying to still do the same things I always did. It did feel like I was just getting crushed every day in therapy and on the mats. And I found that if I focused on the process and the joy of learning and exploring a new technique, instead of focusing on how I am failing or tapping in regards to both jujitsu and therapy, it went a lot smoother. If I tried to win every role by doing only the things I knew, I would learn far fewer things. And what you had said about how it's very hard to tell when you're in it. And I find that to go in an interesting direction in terms of my thoughts, because if I regard my currently maladaptive coping mechanisms or reactions to things as rolling partners, instead of some assailant trying to hurt me and kill me, if I regard them as rolling partners who will crush me, they'll give me hell. But they are ultimately there to give me a chance to learn and to grow. I find that my bouts of self doubt or shame tend to be far fewer because, yeah, this is the process. It is going to suck. It's not going to be fun. It involves facing a lot of narratives that you had created in your head, and also the limbic friction of having to choose differently, of having to remember that technique your instructor showed three weeks ago, like, how do I do this thing again? How do I hit it again? And that comes slowly but over time. What took 30 seconds to remember. Now it's taken 15, now it's taken ten, now it's taken five. And then suddenly you're hitting it like you were born doing it. And I found that to be the case with therapy. Although I don't know if I'm there yet. I think I'm getting closer. It's not entirely innate, but one of the biggest changes I did notice was in regards to my self talk. As we had mentioned earlier, I was having a cursed day setting up this podcast. And normally I would just berate myself for being clumsy, for not being able to control physics like I wanted, and honestly, wasting a lot of time and energy like a white belt, just putting a lot of effort in the wrong direction. Whereas now I go, oh, my body's giving me signals. I'm about to freak out. Let's use the skill of slowing down breathing. Let's use our words and describe to somebody else what you are feeling and what you may need. Four years ago, I would have melted down and just started crying, and I would have shown up to this podcast red and puffy faced. But now I can pause for 30 seconds and collect my thoughts and go, what do I need to do? And also, what do I need to do to feel more steady in my body? So it is very much a karate kid, wax on, wax off, where seemingly pointless exercises and a million hours of repetition are starting to culminate in me, crane kicking people in the face. But, okay, so maybe that analogy doesn't go perfectly, but essentially, essentially it's starting to come together. One of the seemingly pointless wax on, wax off skills was, okay, but how do you feel in your body right now? At first, many years ago, I was like, why the fuck does that matter? And now I go, how do you feel in your body? And what does tiny Tanya need right now? Which is another pointless, stupid bullshit question, I thought, but I'm able to apply those and start to flow with the chaos that is life.

I love that. And to that point, that's why it's so important who your rolling partners are in life. Because if you have people who in jujitsu, you can't trust to roll with them and have them not be trying to hurt you, or the opposite, have them not try at all because they don't think you can be challenged, those are not people that are going to help you get where you want to be. And the same applies in life. If the people you surround yourself with are not able to challenge you while still being a soft place for you to land and have your growth in their mind as something that they care about, not that they're responsible for it. But if those people that are surrounding you don't want those things for you and aren't excited for you when you're doing well and aren't holding space for you when you're not doing well, then you're probably not going to reach where you want to be. And that's hard because I think a lot of times the response to pain is, well, I'm going to do it all by myself. I don't need anyone. Human beings need connection. They need other people to help them get where they want to be. So I think that's a really relevant crossover that I think can be helpful to recognize of if you're doing all the right things and you're not progressing. It might also be helpful to look at the people around you and see if they're the kind of people that you feel like really want you to progress, or if they're benefiting from you not progressing.

I found that to be the case. My mom had sent me a fairly touching voice message about how back in the day, she was too harsh on me and too soft on me in the wrong areas of life. And we've covered it a bit with our parenting podcast. But I found that being enabled, say, by my mom in regards to things like cooking. I don't learn how to cook, and I think cooking is this impossible, opaque task that only she can do. And yeah, I don't develop that sense of autonomy. I also, unfortunately, develop a fear, because as the years progress, it becomes this very daunting task when, if I had learned cooking and learned and assumed some responsibility from a younger age, then I could have gotten a start. But now, as a college kid who has now moved out, I missed out on all of those foundational things, and that makes you more nervous, and then you don't want to learn it even more. And so that cycle perpetuates. So it is so important to really analyze the people who are with you, not in a transactional sense, but very much like jiu jitsu partners. Are you helping them grow in the way that they need, and are they helping you grow? And there is a channel of communication that is needed because I've been telling people, I need you to crush me in a very specific manner and in a manner that doesn't harm me. But it also sounds weird. It also teaches me a lesson. It truly does teach me, oh, this technique I'm trying that's not working out and I have to find a different avenue. I can feel myself growing, and all of these small acts of consistently choosing differently are starting to culminate.

Yeah, I mean, that's a really great point. And I think it all ties together, too, of I think that happens a lot with kids who have experienced trauma or have had difficult lives for one reason or another. I know this happened with my mom, the same thing you're talking about where she was. Like, you have been through so much at such a young age. I don't want to have to burden you with more by making you do these extra chores or learn how to do these other tasks. But then that doesn't help for when I go out into the world. But at the same time, that narrative that, oh, if you baby your kids, they're never going to know how to handle the real world isn't going to be nice to them. That's also not an effective way to think because if you just get sent out into the ring with no training, you're going to get crushed and you're never going to learn how to fight. Same thing as if you are never even exposed to the fact that there is a ring and that there is fighting that needs to be done. You're not going to know how to handle it. So it's not like, oh, you have to either be super soft and sheltering of your kids or you have to just throw them into stuff before where they're ready. There's an in between of like we were talking about of, oh, this guy's just going to keep me in mount the whole five minute round, and I'm never going to learn how to get out of mount versus, oh, he just lets me out and doesn't really try that hard. You have to be able to find the middle ground of allowing kids and people in general to be in that growth zone where they're challenged, but they have the space to learn because if you don't have the practice with the hard things when you face them, you're not going to know what to do. And I know that happened to me when I was learning how to skateboard, and it was so hard. The skateboard that I had been given, the wheels were so there's different types of wheels. I won't go into it too much, but there's different types of wheels that you can use with skateboarding, depending on what kind of ground you're on. And so the ones that I had on were taking me so fast that I couldn't get myself to stay on the board. And I just kept being told, like, no, just keep practicing. I was like, but I can't practice because I can't stay on the board. And I remember him saying, if you use slower ones, you're not going to be able to transition because it's going to be too hard to learn the fast ones. And I was like, no, you don't understand how my brain works. I need to practice on the slow thing so that I know the mechanics to go fast. So I think that is the same idea that you need to have the right level of challenge to learn the basic mechanics of the task, whether it is sports related or mental health related or whatever. And you also need to have somebody there with you who is willing to challenge you and also know how to support you if you need it to be lighter.

Yeah. There's so many facets of it that resonate with me. I find that it's very easy to misconstrue the message that you can't raise your kids to be soft and they have to face adversity. People take that to an extreme, or parents internalize that the world is a scary, unsafe place and then teach that to their children without teaching them the skills to navigate that. So, for me, my mom, she didn't want me to be soft like she was in regards to her sensitivity. She wanted to harden me up because she didn't want me to go through what she went through, or she felt that the world was going to be very tough and cruel. So she had her methods of doing so, but without adjusting them to my developmental level or without meeting me where I was at, that was very confusing and disorienting and also not providing skills. Because, yes, the world is not particularly friendly, but like you said, it doesn't mean that you need to make your home a very hard and strict place, especially a very hard and strict place with no real structure to the rules. Like, what are the rules of the game? What are the goalposts? Because if you keep moving those around, that's very, very confusing for an adult, let alone a kid. And you can't grow because you try something and then it gets shut down, but then you try something again, and then it works, and you can't build a proper framework. And I find it fascinating, your skateboarding story, because a lot of people think that you need to learn the hard way to really be able to adapt to a number of different circumstances. And in many ways, I would agree, but not in the hard way that they think, like, say, the wheels, they may have been harder to learn on, and in a sense, you could be able to adjust faster, but then you don't learn those foundational skills that come with a slower set of wheels and you need training wheels. You can't just throw someone in a ring with a golden gloves champ and be like, learn how to fight. You'll figure it out. You have to start small and you have to start slow. And I've been applying that to my relationships if I'm going to tie it back to therapy is I was getting into an argument about something fairly pointless, and it's never about that pointless thing. But the other person was like, I don't want to talk about this. It's not a big deal. We don't have to. And historically, I would have been inclined to agree, but I paused and went, actually, no, this is the best time to practice arguing because I would rather argue about this stupid pasta sauce or whatever it is and learn how to communicate with you and learn how to practice things like active listening, nonviolent communication. I'd much rather do this now than a really heavy conversation where the stakes are really, really high. I also want to do this in therapy because therapy is, it's an arena where I can throw out ideas, different skills that can occasionally be very grueling, but very specific level of adversity. Very specific types of adversity, and most importantly, a level of attunement.

Yeah, and I think that's a great example going back to what you were saying with, if you're a world champion or if it is your job to train jiu jitsu, that means it is not your responsibility to be helping lower level belts unless they are your direct teammates. And that's part of the deal. But if you go into that and say, oh, I'm going to get better because I'm training with someone who's high level, now you're putting a role on them that they cannot fulfill because they have to focus on, this is how they make their money, how they live their life. And that's a totally different. Even if you are also, that is also your job. It's a different level if you have someone in your life who you've never been to therapy and they have been in a long time where they've been doing a lot of mental health work and you have not done much, it's not their job to walk you through how to do it. And so that can create really unhealthy dynamics where it's like, oh, you know how to do this? So I'll learn from you, and that'll be great. And I think it's important to really recognize that we need to be able to be around other people who are on similar levels as us in general and not just put the emotional labor or the physical labor on someone else who has done the work to get there to say, okay, I'll learn through you. I'll get your reflection, I'll get all of this. And not have to go through the process. No, you have to do the work, too. You have to go through the same steps that they had to go through to become a world champion. And that grit that it takes to keep showing up day after day and not always having it go well and still having conflicts over stuff that feels stupid, that's really important because like you said, you're practicing things with lower stakes. If your first conflict with your partner is, do you want to have kids or not, that's going to be way harder to navigate and makes it really likely that you're going to fail. And then that's going to make you be like, okay, well, there's no point, why are we trying? So practicing things on a smaller scale is the most effective way generally to get the confidence, like you said, to really learn how to do things well.

I can't imagine how many times you may or may not have heard, I don't need therapy, I have you. And you're like, cool, thanks. No. And the other thread is that some people have bad habits or techniques that don't work ever. And when they do it on an inexperienced person, they tap and they go, great, that worked. And then they roll with someone with more experience and they go, why doesn't this work? My entire paradigm is now crumbling, and I feel that in regards to parenting or personal development, when you don't have people who challenge you, especially when you are engaging in behaviors that are more. For example, Karen's screaming, I scream, I get what I want. And people will do that from infancy, and then one day they meet someone who may push back in a very violent manner. And that is not when you want to learn the lesson that this doesn't work. You want to do it as a young person. You want to be able to have those foundational skills and also a means of checking your behavior. You need to have that, such as my therapist checking me and be like, hey, that's a glaring hypocrisy that you may or may not have noticed. And as surprising and embarrassing as that was, it was also very beneficial because that is a higher belt going, that's a bad habit that is going to bite you in the ass later on. Let's sort that out now in this nice, safe area before you go out there and you try that move. And I think that would be the summary of what I wanted to say. I don't know if you have any other closing remarks, I'd love to hear yours.

Yeah, I mean, just wrapping that all up, it's way more effective for parents to be able to teach kids. If you scream and yell, that's not going to get you what you want. And not just ending it there, but then adding, here's how you can effectively get your needs met. Here's what you can say, how you can communicate it. Here's the space you can take. Here's how to self soothe. It's way easier to learn that as a kid and have that be natural by the time you get to adulthood than having to unlearn it all. When you reach your first relationship or your first college roommate or friendship, and they do something you don't like and you yell or you shut them out or you blow up whatever it is, and then you've just ruined something that you really care about because the other person's like, this is not okay behavior, what are you doing? That's. I think the exact point is that we want to be able to learn things when there is equal footing and not high stakes, so that when it gets to the things that matter, when you're in the relationships and the friendships and the career that are important to you, you know how to communicate and how to feel and exist and have had practice with that, rather than feeling like you're just getting thrown into it with no skills.

Absolutely. That is me. And I feel that, yeah, both therapy and Jiu jitsu were started around the same time, and it would have been a very different experience had I learned it as a kid. But anyways, thank you so much for having stayed for so long. That was fun.

And that concludes this episode of therapy is my therapy. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider subscribing 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.