Episode 4 – Therapist are human, after all

Yeah, I have actually lifted cars.

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. Today, Olivia and I talk about the nuances of showing up to work as a therapist when you're sick, tired, or having a bad day, as well as what to do when your clients'lives start feeling way too similar to your own. She and I also start to unpack common misconceptions people have about therapy, and believe me, we're going to get into those a lot more often in the near future. We had a great time recording this, and we hope you enjoy the episode.

Something that came up just before the cameras started rolling and we started recording was that Olivia was sick and she had clients to see and to do therapy with on what the word is, therapy ties. So how do you handle that? Because you're a human, you get sick, you get tired, you get frustrated, but you still have to be there for that person who is also going through their own respective set of emotions. And, yeah, I would love to know kind of how you work with it and try to navigate that.

Yeah, definitely. And it's a hard line, and I don't think there's a this is right, this is wrong with it. If you're feeling sick, you need to be able to use the skills that you tell everyone else to use and listen to your body and decide if it's something where you're capable of being present for your clients. And I think it's very similar to how parents feel when they get sick of, like, well, you still have to be a parent. It's a little different for me because I can choose to call out and they can't. But I think it's similar in that when you're in that position of being a therapist, what your job is is primarily to be present, listen, validate, reflect, basic skills like that. Whereas if you're feeling sick, you can still do those things to an extent, but if you're so sick that you're not able to have a clear head and be able to understand what they're saying or ask questions or respond, well, then you probably shouldn't be working. But it is really hard because if you're sick for a while or if you're sick two weeks in a row on the same day, you can't be abandoning your clients that way as well. So it's a lot of there's people who are chronically sick, and sometimes that requires referring out, but in terms of basic, okay, you have a cold or whatever, I think a lot of it is just using your best judgment of are you capable of being present for your clients, and obviously they're going to notice. People can tell when you are congested or whatever. So I think the best way to navigate it, at least in my experience, is just kind of tuning in and saying, okay, am I capable of doing this? And also the extenuating circumstances, like, for me, this week, I was on vacation last week, unless I was gravely sick, I wasn't going to cancel clients two weeks in a row.

I was just thinking to myself, unlike, say, teaching, you can't just call a substitute and have them come in and yeah, I remarked on something that you had said in regards to the clients notice, because I have noticed when Catherine, my therapist, is feeling under the know. And I wonder if that happens with your clients, where they kind of almost abandon their therapy just to kind of care for you, because I'll be like, do you need soup? Do you need a minute to get tea? What can we do? Do you want to stop the session? And that's my own triggers and whatnot, but I imagine it may involve a bit of almost diminishing how sick you may sound or you may appear just so you can hold space for your clients.

Yeah, and that definitely happens where if they hear you're sick, they'll say similar things of, Are you okay? And you can tell sometimes they will maybe not start off as heavily as they would have otherwise. And that's on me to, one notice, and two, assure them that I am in a place where I can still hear them to the full extent that they need to be heard, and that if I wasn't able to do that, I would not be on the call. And I think sometimes that is difficult to do because clients care about you. Like you said, they feel bad about, quote, unquote, making you be there when you're sick. And so it's really hard because it's not like I'm going to pretend that I'm fine, but I also have to do the work of saying, like, yeah, I'm not feeling great, but I'm still here. I'm present. Let's guide back into what I know you want to be working on.

A thread of something I'd like to follow is that you said it was like parenting in how you have to show up even when you're not feeling your best and you have to be there and care for these people. I imagine it can be kind of healing, it being actually rather quite healing, because for me, growing up, I had to spend a lot of time caring about the emotional state of my parents, because when they weren't feeling well, they didn't regulate or didn't filter that well enough. They can snap at you and get very angry. And this is with the giant caveat that everyone they're human and everyone can get cranky for a second or a minute. But it was very scary when they would lose their temper at me. So to just have a therapist who in a parent kind of role and to have them not feel great, it's healing for me to just be able to be with them and be with their not feeling great and know that it won't bleed over into their behavior towards me. And I imagine that's where a lot of my like, are you okay? How do I make you okay? So you're not potentially scary?

Yeah, absolutely. On the flip side of that, sometimes I notice that when I am sick or I'm having a bad day or whatever it is that's happening outside of the therapy room, I find that I'm almost a better therapist because I'm not so focused on, oh, my God, am I doing the right technique for them? Am I giving them the best skills? Am I structuring the session? Well, I'm not overthinking it because I don't have the brain space to. And that allows me to be more present and just focus on those basic skills of listening and validating. And I think that happens a lot when parents who are able to regulate are feeling sick and show up for their kids. They're probably not going to be able to be like, okay, let's go to the park and let's work on this together, or do this probably going to be way more subdued in what they're able to do with them. But if they're still able to show up in the space and say, maybe we can watch your favorite show together, or we can do a puzzle together, or why don't you tell me about your day? And I can just listen. Those similar skills of just being there with them and giving them the space and not yelling or not being cranky or whatever it looks like can almost be more healing. And so that's something that I learned very early on when I was in grad school, because we had to do role plays throughout our counseling skills classes and the first half of the semester, I had a really hard time with not overthinking it. I was so focused on just trying to do things by the book that I wasn't able to really be there. Then I had a lot of hard stuff happening in my life, and when I came back to class the next time, the reviews that my professor gave me were so much better. She was like, yeah, you finally let go, and you were able to just be present with them. And it was so mind blowing for me of like, but I'm not following the structure. I'm just there. But that, I think, is the really important thing that people don't realize about therapy is that it's a person that is just there and they're only there for you. And it is your space to show up fully as yourself. And they are going to be able to handle whatever it is you say to them or throw at them.

Man, there's so many points that I want to go on here. It kind of sounds like some improv with very deep consequences, if that makes sense, because you're being given a situation, and you have to yes, and but also use the set of skills and being evaluated. And also you're kind of dealing with someone's psyches and emotional well being. So no pressure, but I guess that's where practice that's what practice is for. So I remember reading it's not that love truly matters when it's difficult to, but it is one of the more meaningful instances because when a kid is being happy or well behaved, it's very easy to love. But when they're destroying your stuff or when they're having a bad day and losing their shit in the Walmart, it takes a lot of practice. And tuning into your own body, I imagine, to just be like, okay, I have to show this person love and understanding and compassion and help guide them through their emotions. And especially in the beginning, I was focusing on her and kind of wondering what's she doing. She's probably writing down notes and examining and kind of dissecting me. And there was a fair bit of wariness for a while until I kind of realized that, yeah, she's just there there with me, and she's not listening exactly to what I say, but how I say it, how I sound in my body, or if I'm live in session, how I am sitting in my posture. And she kind of helped translate what I'm experiencing. And that was really big because growing up, love was very, very conditional. It was you had to be good or you were bad, and then bad things happened to you. And the notion of just caring for someone just because of their inherent goodness, it didn't make any sense to me, especially in the beginning, and it took me a long time to get to know that. And one instance was she had kind of noted my I don't know if it's a transactional nature of my relationship, a very conditional transactional nature, and that's how I kind of keep myself safe. She just said, Tanya, you pay me for my expertise and my knowledge and my experiences, but I care for you, and you don't actually pay for my care. You don't pay for my being there with you emotionally. Because she could just simply be prescriptive and be like, this is your whatever, mood disorder. These are the symptoms, and here you go. But instead, she's with me. She's showing me that I can show up, however, and that I will be met halfway. And I remember she pointed that out to me, and then I was just like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's not get emotions involved in this. And that's something I think a lot of people navigate or I don't know how they feel about it. There's misconceptions about just emotions between client and therapist because you grow to care for each other, right? And if you want to talk more about that, that's such a big topic, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, for sure.

And it's a complicated topic because there's so many moving parts of it. And I don't think it's possible for a therapist to love their clients because that's a reciprocal feeling, right? Like love is, I know you, and I see you and you know me and you see me. And that's not possible in therapy because you are there for them and you're showing up for them, but they don't know you. And so I think love is not the word I would use for that. But of course, care therapists deeply care about their clients, and they think about clients that they don't see anymore and always wish well for ones that are not in the office anymore. And it's very common for clients to attach an idea of their therapist to someone in their past, right? So it often happens where clients will have almost that parental feeling towards a therapist, and the therapist will remind them of a parent or someone else from their past. And the same thing can happen for a therapist where a client can remind you of someone in your life. And so that's called transference and countertransference. And they're not bad. They're just things that you need to be aware of and need to bring into the room. And for therapists, if you're experiencing countertransference and you're feeling really triggered by a client or you're having a really hard time being compassionate for a client, that's your work that you need to do with a supervisor and consultation with peers, things like that, because it's bound to happen, right? Like, we're talking to people who have had everything under the sun happen to them. And very consistently, people who get into the therapy profession have had hard things happen to them. And so it happens to me all the time where I have clients come in that I'm like. The things that you've gone through are the same things I've gone through in the sense of the general experience. But I am doing a disservice to my clients if I assume that they're feeling the same way or that their experience is the same as what mine was and just use that to relate. Right? Of like, oh, well, I know what you've been through, so I don't have to ask you these questions or really do any digging on my own. I just can assume like, you're feeling this way. That's so ineffective. That's the same reason that we're not giving advice to clients, because we don't know the right answer for you. Even if I've been through the exact same thing as you, I have no idea what your experience is, and I don't know what's right for you because I'm only with you an hour a week.

That is one of the tougher misconceptions I've had to dismantle. In therapy. Oftentimes clients can go in with the idea that it is a coach, in a sense, like, fix my brain, make everything okay, make every relationship in my life magically perfect. And I've had instances where I'm like, what do I do? How do I make this okay? And she's like, I can't really ethically, I assume, can't tell you too much. It'd be too prescriptive. But here's some guides. It mostly involves, again, tuning into my body and my needs. And that's a whole journey as how difficult that is. But I have found that most therapists tend to be, in a sense, hands off because you only see us for 50 minutes to an hour. And it's not fair to have wide reaching implications in someone's life through your prescriptive advice. So transference is really interesting. I became aware of it fairly recently with someone whose mother and their history with their mother reminded me of mine. And I found myself just unable to give impartial advice. And I'm like, I'm just essentially copy pasting my mom's face onto their mom's face and not seeing them for the complete, flawed, wonderful human being that they are. Even if it's for a few minutes at a time. A few minutes can cause a lot of damage if you completely lose sight of things. Right. So I'm not sure if I can ask this, but have you had instances where clients come in and yeah, their hurt is very similar or sounds very similar or feels very similar to what you went through, or that I don't know how to call it. I don't know if I call it an antagonist abuser. A person, another person in their life has very similar, very it's hitting a very tender spot in you. And I'm just wondering in terms of how much you can talk about it, what you did to sort of navigate it.

Yeah, I mean, it happens often, and I've talked about that. So to back up when you first start working in the field after graduating, you need to do, at least in New Jersey, you need to do 4500 hours that are under supervision and before you can get your professional counseling license during that period, you have to be seeing a clinical supervisor for an hour a week. And what you do with them is you go over your thesis, you talk about help that you need, maybe with certain techniques or skills, but also with clients like that where you're like, I don't know what to do. They basically just recited my life story. And it's so funny because my supervisor and I would talk about it often where every couple of weeks I'd come in and be like, I have another one. And she would just laugh at me because she was like, why do you always get these cases? And I was like, I know exactly why. It's because this was my own life. And now it's coming back. It's something that I've talked about with other therapists. It's just this phenomenon of, like, the clients who are drawn to you, they know in some sense that you have been through it, and obviously you don't tell them that they don't really know. But I've had so many clients, and I work with a lot of kids, so that comes up. A lot of experiences I had as a child, but I've just worked with so many people where I'm like, your story feels so familiar. And I had to do so much work with my supervisor. And even now that I have my professional counseling license, that work doesn't stop in terms of consulting with peers and having supervision, because you have to be constantly looking inward and saying, okay, how am I potentially putting images on these clients of my own life? And how do I make sure that doesn't happen? And it's an ongoing process of really just assessing and getting deep into, okay, why am I being triggered by this person? What's coming up for me? And how do I make sure that I can bracket that in my session so I can stay focused on them?

And I don't know if you can tell us a bit about the dark arts, but what is one of the example methods of bracketing such an emotion?

Yeah, I won't say easy, but one of the most simple ones is doing mindfulness work. So a lot of times before or in between sessions, you only have, like, five minutes in between sessions generally. But being able to just sit there and kind of ground myself and meditate for a minute and really get myself back into a very present state of, okay, this is this person's time. This is what I'm going towards. Sometimes even just like, reviewing notes of that client, reminding myself what they're working on, looking back at their goals and the treatment plan, things like that, to really just ground myself in their life and setting aside my own. So having that kind of separation is really useful in the simplest form, but obviously it gets larger into really just spending time with a supervisor or whoever else and processing and noticing or, okay, maybe there's pieces of my own life that I now need to bring to my own therapist.

So it appears that while you have a lot of hours in working with a supervisor and building the skills to combat transference or countertransference, rather, it is perishable, over time, it will fade, and you might think that you still have it, but you can get rusty. And if you don't keep up with the mindfulness or whatever practices, you can get really wrapped up in that. And yeah, that's tough because I think of therapy and how you guys hold so many emotions all day, every day. Like I had told my therapist, I recently had a difficult conversation. I held space for some people and, okay, so that was a bit over the weekend and on Monday and then Tuesday I had the session and I'm like, I'm still tired. I feel like I deadlifted 4000 pounds. And I don't know how you do this. It's like you waltzing up and just throwing a car on your shoulder and just walking away. Because you guys do this all day, every day, even when you're sick, rain, snow, sleet or hail. You have to care for people. And that's really remarkable. So I find that to be almost underappreciated. They think you just listen and you take notes and go and play crossword puzzles on your phone. But therapy I've experienced over the years, it is just truly being there with somebody to circle back to what we were talking before and truly being there and also still being technical, if that makes sense. That's mastery jujitsu with anything. It's that loose, free, but also highly technical ability in any situation with any type of person. That is a sign of a champ, that's a sign of a professional or a master. So that's really cool to learn more about Defense Against the Dark Arts.

Yeah, and just going off of what you said about oh, it feels like lifting a car with ease. And two points on that one. When you've trained in it for so long, it doesn't feel the same weight. When you're lifting weights and you're practiced in lifting weights and you do it often, you can lift 200 pounds. And it's not that it's easy, but it doesn't make you as sore, it doesn't knock you out for as long. You can do five reps with it and feel okay because you've been training it versus someone who's not used to doing it is going to try to lift that and it's going to knock you out for a few days. And so in that sense, it doesn't feel as heavy when you do it often because it's just one I'm doing it with good form. I know how to do it, I know how to have boundaries around it, I know how to have self care afterwards. And then on the other side of it, I am lifting that car with them for an hour. But they have to lift that car every day, every hour, every second. And so that helps put it into perspective too, of like well, if it feels as heavy for me listening to it, how heavy does it feel for them living it?

And just for everyone out there, olivia has actually done badass strong man stuff, so she knows a thing or two about lifting heavy shit.

Yeah, I have actually lifted cars.

Oh my God. I did not know that part. I saw you with the giant Atlas Boulders or something.

The one event I did it was a truck pull. My weight class was just a car, not a truck.

And my ADHD brain is trying to now visualize what trauma is which class of vehicle, of course it is absolutely relative to the person and the situation. Some feel like a toy car and some feel like a semi truck that you're pulling with a shoestring.

Yeah, and I think that's actually a really good analogy too, because I think a lot of times the only trauma that people recognize is what we call big T trauma. So like, abuse, neglect, giant acute events that happen and people don't as easily recognize small T trauma, which is chronic feelings of invalidation, not being paid attention to or having subtle comments sent to you. And like, yeah, one might feel like you're pulling an 18 wheeler, but the other might feel like, yeah, you're pulling a toy car, but you're doing it back and forth every day, your whole childhood. Both are exhausting. It's just that one often gets treated more because people can more easily notice. Yes, this was trauma, I want help with this. Versus, oh no, it's not a big deal, it was just a toy car.

Yeah, and I've had that happen. I mean, like I'd mentioned before in previous podcasts, where there was the spiel that I would bring into the therapist with big T trauma, these are the really memorable things that had happened to me. That was what I or most people would recognize as therapy worthy situations. But the other things, such as the small T traumas, the really insidious racism that I experienced growing up, that did a number on me and I recognized it as an issue, but I didn't have it properly contextualized. So, say at school, the kids were not very nice. They saw that I was Chinese and apparently had an issue with it. And the chronic belittling or racist comments coupled with being in a new town where people would just scream things at me down the street, racist things. And my therapist was able to contextualize how no matter what situation at home, at school, just walking down the street, just minding my own business, I wasn't able to actually have a safe space. And the small T little T traumas were as destabilizing and I guess damaging as the big stuff. It was just like you said, it's pulling a small car every day, it's just chipping away at you and it's causing a narrative about the way you experience the world to form and it's doing it in a much more insidious way than just like a terrible, terrible event. And it didn't make sense to me why she was talking about that. I'm like, yeah, it's bad. I mean, it's not fun. But when she explained how it fit into the rest of my life and I'm like, oh shit, that's not good. Yeah, I can see how that would cause a lot of issues and a lot of different narratives to show up in my head.

Yeah, and it makes it so that no one feels safe because if you've had this, like, some of the things you described are not microaggressions. They're pretty obviously aggressive macroaggressions. Right. But having that long history of people saying small and big things to you over time as a child, that leaves an impact where even if no one said anything to you for months, there's always that voice in the back of your head that's waiting for it to come again, because it's always happened. And that makes it really difficult to believe that anyone can be safe.

Right? Even now, I feel fairly safe in my body when it comes to race matters. But I do notice that I still protect myself in a way, because people would yell, like, hey, Chinese girl. That was one of the nicer things they would say. I still will forget that that's not my reality anymore, where my race is the first identifier of who I am and that I'm colorblind when it comes to race, isn't the most helpful thing. Most people just yeah, that's not their top of mind. That's not going to influence how you address or treat somebody. And I will still say, I meet you, Olivia, and at a party. And then we part ways and I message you. I'm like hey, I'm that Chinese girl that you met and then people are like, Why are you mentioning this? This has absolutely no bearing. I mean, it helps me identify you to some extent, but most people are confused. People in larger cities, they're just like, I've met lots of Chinese people all day, every day. It doesn't matter. This is not noteworthy. And even something as small as that caused me to realize that I have internalized certain behaviors, and they're not serious, but they still live in my head even to this day after the work I've done.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's something that's really important as a therapist to recognize, right? Because especially with marginalized groups, the experiences that you have growing up and having those constant pokes of you're different or you're less than has such a large effect on how you view the world. And if I, as a white therapist, don't take the time to ask you about that experience and have a better understanding of what that meant for you and how that impacts you, I'm not doing my job. Like you said, the colorblind thing isn't effective. Right. If I say your race does not matter, I'm just talking to you about your emotions, one, that's wrong, and two, how are you going to then trust me to be seeing you when I'm ignoring part of your identity?

It is something that people overlook. They think that therapy is a very clinical, freudian psychoanalysis sort of situation. It can be. But oftentimes it's very much about showing the client that you're there for them, that you're doing your best to understand them and reflecting that you do. Because, honestly, I think a lot of people land in therapy because they don't feel understood or. Seen or no one's really taken that time to be like, hey, you're here and you're good, and I want to get to know you. So that's awesome that you do it. And it is important. It is part of trust building across the board. It could be therapy, it could be in real life, is to take the time and get to know that individual and show them that they matter and that they're worth the time spent. So trying to think what else? Oh, in regards to countertransference, I guess that's from you to an individual. How do you not fight everyone's parents? Because I just want to throw hands. My therapist has suggested me going into therapy, and I imagine after training, I could combat that desire to combat them. But man, parents and people hurting other people, and you grow to care for your clients, and you're like, yeah, I would just fight the urge to show up at someone's house. It's hard.

And I think it gets easier when you're able to look at things with the therapist lens, because it's not something that just stops with them. Right. I don't want to believe that anyone is choosing to cause harm to their children. That is not an effective worldview for me to have with my job. And I need to believe that it's coming from their own pain, and that's probably coming from their parents pain and back and back and back. And we talk about generational trauma and those cycles, and it's not an excuse. Right. There's still accountability of if you are causing harm to your children, that I'm going to talk to you about it and suggest things for you. And if it's at the point of abuse, obviously I'm mandated to report that. But in the sense of being able to work with the parents of children I work with and try to not come from that place of just visceral anger, of, like, I need to protect your child, it really comes. Down to okay, well, if I'm able to find the pain in the child, I have to be able to find the pain in the parents of why are you acting this way? And clearly, if you've brought your child to therapy, at least part of you acknowledges that you love them and care about them and you want them to feel better. And so I try to just focus my energy there and say, okay, how can I get at least this part of you that is in pain to hear what I'm saying so that everyone can have better outcomes?

That's beautiful, and that's why you're doing this job. And I'm not. No, I'm fairly certain I wouldn't set anybody's house on fire, but I can't.

Guarantee that it's hard because you care about them, and they're kids. Right. I've had kids as young as four, and feeling them in pain is brutal.

And that's something I've noted with the healer and even the warrior archetype is you guys care. You guys care a lot. And you are, in a sense, almost very tender hearted and that allows you to be excellent at your job, but it also can be a liability in the sense of it just hurts. It hurts so much. And listening to a four year old talk about heartbreaking things and trying to maintain enough, in a sense, emotional distance. So compassion doesn't turn into empathy in this definition, where empathy is you are feeling exactly what they're feeling, no filter. And compassion is more like, hey, I can see and I can understand and I can feel some of it, but I'm not lost in it with you, so I can help. That's really challenging. And so I imagine your training, your self care and your own therapist comes into play and I'd love to hear more about your therapy because that's something a lot of people don't get, is therapists usually often have therapists?

Yeah, it's highly encouraged. I can't even count the amount of times that I've gone to my supervisor and I'm like, I just feel so sad because I can't help them. They are in this home that's not working for them and I can't get them out of it and they have years and years left in it. I just feel so sad that I can't do more. And the response is like, well, I am helping because I'm giving them the space for them to just be a kid and I'm with them in it and I'm holding space for that time period and that's all I can do. And that has allowed me to look back at my own childhood when there were those moments of feeling so alone and isolated and none heard. Like how much of a difference it would have made if I had had someone to just sit with me in it. And even if they weren't able to get me out of it, or give me some breathing technique that would make it easier when someone was yelling, just to have had someone there in it. I'm treading water in the middle of the ocean and they are just handing me a life jacket. And that's something that being in my own therapy has been really helpful with. Because again, when you're working with kids who are going through really hard things and you used to be a kid who was going through really hard things, it can get really blurry if you're not careful. And so being in therapy and working through my own stuff is monumental. And being able to still, like you said, show up for those kids and not be dragged into it, that's such.

An important thing for people to know because it's not just a one and done. You don't just graduate and then you are now a complete therapist with all of the skills forever and ever. It's always a constant state of work on yourself, not just the learning new modalities, but just learning different ways of processing and also having your own therapist to make sure that the rest of your life is going well. And it hit right here when you talked about how when you were a kid feeling isolated and what it would have meant for you just to have a person sit down for 20 minutes an hour and just be there or even better, teach you the skills to handle the situations that you're experiencing. It was what I needed and in many ways, it was what I got. Yeah, the abuse had been going on pretty much my whole life, but it was okay, that's not bad, if that makes sense. It's tolerable it's unpleasant, but it made sense. And then once I moved, it got to the point where it was damaging me and that continued. And I didn't have any skills until honestly, at grade nine, I stepped foot into a Moi Thai gym, of all places. And there I had for at least an hour and a half a space where I was praised for traits inherent to myself. I'm very physical, tomboy and just very rough. And I liked hitting stuff. And to be taught skills, and not just to be taught skills, but to be coached when I'm sparring and I hate getting hit. I was very uncomfortable with it. But he would guide me out of those difficult situations and that gave me so much nourishment and guidance and discipline and it gave me all the skills that I needed to handle the rest of my life. So it may not feel like much, but especially to a kid when their world is really, really small. Yeah. One adult to show them how to move through such a scary world and scary situations, it made a difference. Like, it made a difference for me. And then also had an art teacher who encouraged that side of me and yeah, wasn't more than an hour, didn't need much more than that. And it's something that is, again, overlooked just the difference that one person can make.

Yeah. And it's a good point. That's not just therapy that can provide that. It's very useful, but it's not going to be for everyone. It's not going to be effective for every kid, especially a kid that's already super angry and is not in a place to hear you and doesn't mean it's not worth trying sometimes. But there are tons of kids who have things like Moi Thai or I have a ton of clients who are in karate or kickboxing or things like that. And it depends on the kid and what's going on and what they need and what they have access to. But any period of time where kids can get that attention and the space to just be a kid and learn how to regulate anger and other emotions in the space that's structured and that's guided is really helpful.

Yeah. And the structured and the guided is a big one. The chaos is what makes abuse often what makes abuse abusive. The last lack of guidance, the lack of structure and care, that's what makes it really scary. But I just will just roll on the floor with people trying to strangle each other and break our bones. But the boundaries, the guidance, the mutual agreement to care about each other's safety, that's huge. Yeah. Access is a big one. Like we discussed, therapy is expensive and it's kind of poo pooed. There's like, why do I need this? And it's going to lead to my other point in a minute. But I found, much like medication and therapy, physical activity that's structured, and therapy and if needed, medication, they're an amazing combination because as wonderful as therapy is, it sometimes isn't quite the right combination of things. And I've always found, like, human minds and emotions are very complicated and it might take a little bit from a number of different sources and eventually those add up into something that is really effective. So one thing I wanted to get into, the last time we had covered the cost, one of the things I didn't get a chance to ask is, when do you nope. Out of therapeutizing something? Not everything needs to be treated. Not everything needs to be fixed. Sometimes I don't know if there's instances where, if there's a situation where opening that door is actually going to cause more problems than good. How do you discern that from another situation? And how do you, I guess, handle it?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely right. If your body and your mind are not ready to feel all of that, it's going to cause a lot of issues. If you're still in that point of living in survival mode where you don't really have the skills to self soothe or regulate, opening up the door to deep old trauma is probably not going to be effective at that time. And I want my clients to trust themselves more than me. So I don't know when you're ready. You know when you're ready. And I let clients know that in the beginning of like, I'm a stranger right now, and you're going to know when you're ready to open up about anything with me. And however long that takes is however long it takes. And at least in my experience, clients know when they're ready. It usually means that you have skills that you can access that when you start feeling overwhelmed or start feeling like you're hitting that panic zone, you can, one, recognize it, and two, know how to down regulate and deescalate from that. But if you don't have those skills, you can't just go up to someone and be like, okay, darkest memory, worst trauma, start spilling. It has to be done in a way that feels safe, otherwise it's not going to work.

I've found that the media doesn't help because anytime someone goes to a therapist, that therapist just tries to rip that worst memory out of them in the first session. And also, people are usually going to therapy for a big or medium t trauma. Then they don't feel safe with a stranger, and they tend to assume that you're just going to try to drag my deepest, darkest, insecurity or trauma out of me before I'm ready and for myself. I went into therapy because I was with a partner and I was terrified to be in the room with them. Not that they did anything. They were never, ever harmful to me in any way. But I, again, was waiting for the other shoe to drop where the honeymoon period to stop and the abuse to start. That's what landed me on the couch. When I would talk about that partner, I would put them in the good column and I'm in the bad column where I'm the problem. They're amazing, they're perfect, they're sweet, and they are all these things. I get the sense that my therapist was like, that's something. We're going to just leave that for now. And it took a great many years until I had the self regulating skills, until I had the trust in both her and, more importantly, myself to go, hey, wait. I don't think they're that perfect. And not that they're bad, but I don't think I'm entirely super happy in this situation. And, yeah, they seem to have flaws, too. And then Catherine almost responded like, oh, thank God. Okay, we're here now. We have arrived at this thing. I have been professionally tiptoeing around for years, and not that she was like, let me spill the tea about am girl. But I could sense that there was I don't know what the feeling is relief, but it was something in the sense of, okay, we are here now, and this can happen for any situation. Like I said, it doesn't have to be someone with a repressed memory that is traumatic. It can be someone with a narrative that could do with a little dismantling or at least a little examining.

Yeah, absolutely. And I've had clients where I've asked them a question, and they literally will say back, I'm not ready to go there. I'm like, cool. Who am I to say that I know better than you about where you're ready to go? You're the one who has to hang up this call and go on with your day. So it's something that I think can be hard when it is that excitement of, oh, I think I know. I think I know where this pain point is and how this can help. And they might not be ready to go there, and it might take a day, a month, a year, but if I push them to open something that they're not ready to deal with, I'm not helping.

Again, it drives on the fact that you guys are here for us, whereas most can feel like we're just lab rats being examined by some omniscient individual with just the right bit of advice that allows for you to solve every problem in their life. And that's not the case. These are human beings who, as we said earlier, they get sick, they get frustrated. They also understand the responsibility that they're only here for an hour and they're not going to just fuck up the rest of your life just because clinical curiosity or they think they know better.

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 actual advice