Episode 10 – Slow on the Intake (Tanya)

You're not supposed to be diagnosed with a personality disorder until you're an adult because your personality and your identity and everything about you hasn't fully developed. 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.

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Topics related to mental health.

Hey, everyone. Tanya here. Today's episode talks about. Well, it talks about me and my mental health journey. Honestly, this was pretty difficult to record and even harder to edit. Olivia and I go through the events that led up to me seeking help and my quest to find the right therapist. Throughout all of this, Olivia provides brilliant clinical analyses and passionate opinions in regards to some of the experiences I went through. And although we already have a content warning, I'm going to add another. I get into some heavy topics such as abuse or mistreatment of a physical, sexual, and emotional nature. Our hope is that this episode brings value to you and your own mental health journey. Take care. How do we start? I feel like I'm doing an intake with you right now. How did you get here? What would you like to talk about? Actually, that is a good question. When someone lands in your chair, they sit down and then what I usually.

Start with, so what's bringing you in? What's making you seek counseling right now? What happened that made you pick up the phone? Because a lot of times there's a thousand different reasons that they could be seeking counseling. But what made them do it at this moment? What was so triggering or intense or traumatic that they had the inflection point of, no, I need this now. And that's usually very helpful in getting to the root of what brought them in.

I'm going to dry snitch on myself because I've talked about my stuff a million times now, but to do so, you're not just info dumping or trauma dumping on a friend or a person at the grocery store. When you're sitting down with the intention of speaking openly about it, it is hard. And yeah, what brought me there? I suppose we start with my childhood. To sum it up, it was a number of traumatic events or an environment of trauma and abuse that got me in the therapist's office in the first place. So I was born to chinese immigrants and my mom escaped the communist revolution and got herself to Canada. It was a very classic story where she worked four jobs and brought her entire family, including my dad, over. Childhood was for the most part pretty happy. I was surrounded with a lot of relatives and a lot of happy memories, such as going to dragonboat races or various festivals or going to the chinese restaurant with the whole family. So that was really nice, and I think it was pretty peaceful. Although there were still instances of abuse happening. My mom tend to hit us again. It's a very classic chinese immigrant story, and it sucks. It is a shitty part of that story, just so I don't deflect it and be like, everyone does it. Just because it's normalized doesn't mean it's okay. And my dad, he worked delivering pizzas because he worked the night shift. He slept all the time, didn't see him. So that was the overall gist of ages. Zero to nine. Oh, this does feel like a weird therapy session.

It's so hard. It feels like it. Yeah.

You're trying not to theraputize me, and I'm trying not to clientize myself.

Well, I'm like, okay, well, I don't want to say anything because you're doing your podcast spiel of it. But then I'm like, the more I'm silent, the more I feel like a therapist.

I'm definitely including all of this because this is actually really fun, authentic part of it, where I'm trying not to do a classic trauma downplay spiel, but unfortunately, for the sake of brevity, it has to be kind of compressed.

You're doing a great job.

Thank you.

And I do that during intakes where you say something and my brain latches onto it, and it's like that's a pattern you could follow. There's all these roads you could go down. And so I'm trying to stop my brain from doing that as you're talking.

And I'm trying to stop my brain from doing the classic spiel. So my mom wanted our family to have a better life, and so she was looking for a restaurant to purchase, and she found one in a tiny little town in British Columbia. I was very excited to move to trail, and then I realized what I was leaving behind as we were driving down the mountain pass and just looking at this dinky little town compared to the relatively large city I grew up in, and I realized I left all my family and friends behind, and I was really quite upset by that. For a few months, a few weeks, I can't quite recall, things were pretty good. My parents did their best in spending time with us, and then eventually, the stress of owning a restaurant got to my mom and my dad, and they were fighting a lot. And while there was still corporal punishment back in Calgary, things got worse. And there are many instances where I'd be falling asleep, she'd come in, see the house was messy, rouse us out of bed and just smack the shit out of us for what felt like hours. And that was really scary. That was very confusing because before that, I had a really close relationship with my mom. So, yeah, the abuse went from occasionally to nightly. So that was home. School was not great. The white kids were pretty racist towards me. And because home was bad, school was bad. I actually ended up hiding the library for hours, just reading and reading. That's part of why I know all the stuff that I know is because I spent so much time there. And props to the trail public library because the librarians didn't say anything. I would just hang out there for hours. They would actually just recommend books and get me in the summer reading club. And I'm going to start crying because I'm hormonal, but I'm not going to ruin my makeup. So we're squashing that down. You get to see unhealthy coping mechanisms play out in real time.

This is really cool, though, because there are so many parts of your story that I don't know. As a friend, it's cool seeing how many similarities we have and things like, obviously for different reasons, but I still am. But was as a kid a huge reader and I didn't know it then, but it was very clearly to escape my own reality. And I would just stay up reading until five in the morning. I would always be asking to go to the library. It was the only time I was ever really, truly calm and just like, okay, I'm in this other world. I don't have to deal with whatever's going on at home or at school or anywhere else.

Yeah, and please feel free to interject with your own. I know this is about me, but I also can't stand to hear 50 minutes of just me talking, so please interject. I have a very big soft spot for libraries and that was also one of the only places I felt safe. So, yeah, that's elementary school and most of middle school. My parents worked from 08:00 a.m. To 03:00 a.m. Downstairs in the restaurant. They worked all the time. And then when they come home, they would beat me and then go to sleep and then wake up and do it again. And so I didn't get to see them a lot. I remember I started warping my personality in understandable and drastic ways and being a very intense, angry kid and not quite understanding what was happening, what was going on in my body and what was going on outside of my body. Yeah, I just remember becoming very analytical, very almost machiavellian, as machiavellian as an eleven year old or twelve year old can be. I was motivated from an early age to learn how people tick in order to essentially manipulate them to do what I want. I used to have guilt about it, but it was more how can I stay safe? How can I say or do the right thing in order to not experience violence?

That's a good point, because that happens a lot where parents accuse children of being manipulative or of doing things just for attention, or, oh, well, they're just trying to trick me into getting out of school or not having to do chores, things like that. And I hear that a lot. And really, truly, if a child is being those things, it's generally because their needs are not getting met from them, just being alive. If you have to analyze other people's behavior to figure out how you could get what you need from them, that's not your fault. You should be able to just say, hey, I need this, and the adults in your life that are your caretakers should be able to provide that. Obviously you can't get everything that you want, but you shouldn't have to, quote unquote, manipulate people to get what you need.

I just want to pause here because I think this is actually an interesting angle that we're starting to get a rhythm and find. As much as I don't wish for Olivia to therapeutize me, there is a lot in pausing and using that as a teaching moment for others.

I think doing that, deconstructing the intake from what you've mentioned so far about your childhood, early teen years, the dynamics at play, where I would go next at an intake is point out the fact that it doesn't seem like help was often available to you when you asked for it, such that you stopped asking for it and started doing whatever you could to get your needs met in other ways, which is where maybe the feelings of manipulating people, or basically what it sounds like was recognizing patterns of other people and using that to figure out how you could get what you needed. So I would point that out and kind of get along the talk track of if you spent so much of your early life learning that asking for help is not going to yield anything, how did you go from that to getting yourself in this room? What happened for you that either it got so bad or something shifted in you that you realized, one, that you needed help. Two, that someone was willing to help, and three, that you deserved to have it. So that's where I would go next to bring it back. Because I think a lot of times at intakes, people get really caught up in telling me the story, and I have to reel them back in sometimes. Because as helpful as it is to know the story, at least in the beginning, I need to understand how you got here so that we can figure out how the stuff that happened is affecting you now.

I love that next question, because eventually the abuse and the racism and everything all got to be too much. So around grade eleven, my methods of dissociating or pattern recognizing others, it was only getting me so far. And I just had what could only be described as a breakdown. And that was when I realized I needed to go talk to somebody. Thankfully, I did manage to foster a decent attitude towards mental health, primarily because it wasn't really talked about in my household. So going to therapy was okay. So I went and talked to my doctor, who prescribed me antidepressants, which I don't regret. They were what I needed at the moment, at least to level me out enough because I was so emotionally volatile that it's very hard to build anything on a foundation that's just constantly experiencing earthquakes. I remember talking to my best friend at the time in high school. I divulged to her that I was going to therapy and she got really upset and angry that I was, quote unquote, taking the easy road by taking medication or going to therapy mean I was very taken aback. Thankfully, I wasn't that devastated because even a teenager could see, whoa, this is a you problem. This is not a me problem. I don't know where this is coming from. She apologized shortly afterwards because she had been going through a lot of things herself and did not feel brave enough to seek treatment. Those were her words. And she actually remarked that she got angry at my bravery, essentially, that I was able to go and ask for help.

It's just such a common thing that happens when someone gets help in any way, not just with therapy, but if it's people that you bonded with or were close with that had similar issues or that also felt that sense of like, yeah, the world has screwed us and everything sucks and we hate this, and kind of living in that mindset of, yeah, I'm hurt and that's how I'm going to be, and that nothing can fix it or change it, which I think is very common. Especially for teenagers whose families are not making them believe otherwise. It's very scary when one person stops the dance and says, no, I don't want to feel like this. I want to get help, because it does, I think, for the other person, feel really isolating of like, wait, what do you mean? I thought we were going to be sad together. And so I think there's that side of it of really feeling isolated and feeling like, all right, we were treading water together and you just got on the boat, and now I'm alone in the ocean. Then there's the other side of it, of almost envy, of, well, I want that, and I don't feel like I can have that or I don't have the resources to get that. I want to be brave like you, but I don't know how. And it's really sad when that happens, but I hear it all the time.

At the time, it felt like a betrayal, a slap in the face. As an adult, when you're looking at what essentially is a girl who felt that her best friend was getting on that lifeboat, you're able to cultivate so much more compassion. And what has always been somewhat unusual with me is I had a state of learned helplessness simply because of. I was helpless. I was a kid being mistreated by my primary caretakers on whom I depended for survival. But I also had this fascinating growth mindset, and over time, it has gotten healthier. At the time, I figured I was broken. I'm too fucked up to actually figure out what's going on. I can't do this. And that's the learned helplessness. So I'm going to look to someone who can. Ultimately, it was a mix of, I can't do this anymore on my own. The building is on fire. So much around me that I can't. I need to do something about this, and I'm dumb, so I'm going to look to someone else to figure this out. So it was a mix of healthy and less healthy things.

That mindset is really common where people come in the office and they say, I'm broken. You fix me. I can't do it on my own. You can do it for me. Having that mindset, hopefully, will change once you get in the space and really work through things. But part of my job is the empowerment piece of getting you from a place of feeling broken to that space of understanding. Yeah, my house might be on fire, but I have the power to get a fire extinguisher or throw water on it, or if the house is burning, and I can't go back into it, or I don't want to go back into it. I can build a new house. I can move somewhere else. I don't need to stay in this burning building for the rest of my life. So being able to make people see that they are their own cure and that it's not going to be some other person, even if they're an expert in their field. I can't change anyone's life unless that's something that they want to do. And so I think the fact that you pointed that out is really helpful because I'm sure over time you realize that I think that's a thing that makes a lot of people not seek help. People that I know have gotten very frustrated with me because they say, well, tell me what to do. I need your advice. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. You fix it. And I say, I can't do that. That's not my job. And I'm with you once a week, Max. I don't know what's best for you. I can't give you advice. You're with you twenty four seven. I don't know how to fix things. I can give you tools and ask you questions and help you explore things so that you can figure it out. But I think a lot of people get really turned off from therapy because they want a concrete answer of how to change their life, and I don't have that. It's okay if you feel that way and that over time in therapy, your mindset will likely change and be able to recognize that it's not that you're broken, it's just that you could use some tools and processing and a safe person to get you that point of feeling empowered.

I remember being really frustrated and annoyed with my therapist in the beginning because, exactly I would ask her. I would tell her to tell me what to do or how do I handle this, or any other permutation of those words. And she wouldn't. It was such a contrast from, let's say, my parents, who would tell me what to do, tell me how to be, or my abusive partners, who would do exactly the same thing. And while those abusive situations were stifling and oppressive, they were at least structured and known. And I didn't have to actually tune into my emotions because my methods of dissociating and other coping mechanisms had built walls of concrete so thick around what was essentially a very hurt child just screaming that I couldn't really hear them. And I'm very certain. I contemplated quitting therapy. I couldn't understand why she wouldn't help me until where I then had a wax on, wax on moment, where wax on, wax off moment. Rather where I went. This is why she was doing this. This is the method to her madness. And, oh, God, it turns out that I actually do know what I want and know how to solve the problem. It's also really fucking annoying because I have more agency than I initially thought, and building that locus of control within was rewarding and again, occasionally enraging at times. But it's necessary even as a therapist.

Knowing that's how it is as a client, it still has driven me nuts when they don't have direct things to tell me.

It is nice to know that you have experienced that even in your sessions. So it's age 16, landed in therapy because I broke, thought I was broken and in need of help. So therapist number one was a very nice older man from Somalia. And because I was an academic nerd and knew things that happened in somalia, I actually felt mildly uncomfortable talking to him because saying, oh, I'm sad because kids at school are mean to me. While I knew the genocide, the strife that he had very likely escaped, it made me clam up. And he was a good psychiatrist, therapist, and he didn't divulge any of these, obviously, but I imagine that is one of the issues when you know a little bit too much about your therapist, because it can impede you from really inhabiting that space as a client.

That happens a lot because they know that I'm talking to tons of other people and they know that really tough stuff they've brought to me. Other people have also probably brought those things to me. And so I have that a lot where clients will say, like, I feel guilty even talking about this with you. You must think this is so annoying or stupid that I'm complaining about something this small when I know you hear much bigger issues. And so I'm glad it's brought into the room because it allows us to talk about that and explore where that comes from for them and validate that every problem is an important one if it's something that they are bringing to me. But that's got to be hard as a new client, as a teenager, when you're already living in that space of my problems don't matter, and then having that experience. And I'm sure at that point you're not going to think to bring that up to him and talk about it.

No. He was mostly what I needed in the sense of just a sympathetic parental figure who would just sit and listen because I didn't have any of that at home. So he left therapist number two. He took over for the previous doctor and just asked me a number of questions out of the DSM four at the time and diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder before my ass even began warming the seat and then suggested medication. I was like, good talk. No bye. Not that I was against medication, but I was frustrated by the fact that you barely know who I am. And suddenly you've summed up all of my issues. I'm sure even at that age, I knew my issue wasn't entirely my brain. It was the fact that I was surrounded by abusive assholes.

Don't get me started on male doctors diagnosing teenage girls with borderline personality disorder because they grew up in an abusive home. It's a whole thing. I won't go into it.

Okay. But for the record, there is a thing to go into.

Yeah, it's a whole thing. And it's really frustrating because borderline personality disorder is one of the most stigmatized disorders, and it's grown a lot of traction in social media and things like that. And it's a lot of times deeply misunderstood. And it's really frustrating when I hear teenagers talking about receiving that diagnosis, because you're not supposed to be diagnosed with a personality disorder until you're an adult, because your personality and your identity and everything about you hasn't fully developed because you're a child. So it's very frustrating because it puts a label on people that, again, is very stigmatized by other people. And not that it's bad if you actually have it. If you actually have that, it's great to be able to learn that. So you can reduce the shame and work on the specific skills that are helpful. But it's often, historically, just been thrown out as like, oh, well, here's this teenage girl who is mad at the world and is naturally afraid that people are going to leave her because everyone has harmed her in her entire life. And this will fit. Now I don't have to do any work because I can just say, well, those disorders are really hard to treat. That's just kind of who you are. Good luck.

I love that point of like, yo, my guy, I can't even drive yet. How is my personality formed enough to be disordered? So that was therapist number two, and he tainted my view of therapists, which is unfortunate because a lot of people will say therapy didn't work for me, and they see one or two, and a bad experience can absolutely shape your whole stance. So luckily, I had a decent enough first therapist. Second therapist was, I could see that again. That's a him problem, not a me problem. So I'm sure I just floundered around emotionally, mentally, psychologically, until I believe things broke again. Therapist number three. I don't remember much of that time, but she listened and she would do her best to encourage me sometimes maybe a little too much as a friend, maybe trying to appeal to me as a teenage girl. But at that time, I wasn't hearing it. By then, I already had mild, thick armor, and I wasn't really into being emotionally vulnerable unless I was, so to speak, cracked open and my emotions couldn't hold it in anymore. So at that time, I had my spiel already worked up. I'm like, all right, well, here's the cliff's notes of my trauma, and, cool, I'm fixed. See you.

Bye.

Let me know if I'm dragging on too long again. It's hard to pace this and be interesting.

No. And it's hard because, yeah, we don't want it to be boring. But also, the whole point is to educate what it looks like. And the journey of finding the right therapist is so hard. If it feels like, oh, wow, this is dragging on. Yeah, that's probably how you felt. Imagine how terrible it is to be dealing with that much pain and to still be like, okay, this one's not working, this one's not working. When is this going to happen? So I think it's useful.

It can be difficult to find a suitable therapist with whom you vibe. And it is absolutely worth finding that individual individuals who can become part of your healing. So I went off to art school, thought my life would be fixed. Turns out, yes, leaving that area helped. But unfortunately, I carried a lot of things with me and got myself into new situations that were repeats of the old. But they're remixes. I got a lot of remixes. And then therapist number four was more a counselor at the art college I was going to. And I went to her, interestingly enough, because the aforementioned best friend, she sent me a very touching email apologizing for her behavior after a while and had told me that she was being, or had been sexually mistreated by her boyfriend at the time. When I was reading her story, I went, oh, shit, that sounds very familiar to what I went through, especially of the shame and the pain and the self hatred. Another dam broke up, and I couldn't hold all of it. So I knew that I had to go get help. And I saw a counselor, and I had a fair bit of trepidation because I foolishly thought, she's a student, she's still doing her hours. Can she handle all this? Super unusual, once in a lifetime, never, ever happened to anyone else trauma. So at first it took a bit for me to warm up to her, but working with her was great. I don't remember the specifics, but I remember a feeling of being seen and heard. And there was never a sensation where I had to hold her feelings because while the previous therapist was good, I felt, I have to comfort you. Of course, I'm sure therapists will have an emotional response to some of the things they hear because they're not easy, but you can't spill over to the client where the client's like, are you okay? And then it becomes therapist therapy sessions. So in college, that was good, and it was also really good for me to have a healthy presence in my life, because at that time in college, I was actually in a very emotionally abusive relationship. I really knew how to pick them. For the listeners, it never starts out that way. They always start out very lovely. And you think that that's what you're looking for. And then behavior gets worse and worse and you get more isolated. It's important to understand that when you go through a lot of these experiences, especially as a child, your calibration gets kind of messed up. So I figured, well, he's not beating me like my parents, and I'm not sobbing in the shower yet, like the first boyfriend. So we're good, right? And thankfully, the counselor. Yeah, I started listening to her. I started trusting her and doing things like yoga and tuning into my body, as terrifying a prospect as that was. And it changed my ideas of what therapy could be. It didn't have to be me feeling uncomfortable talking about my things because the other person came from a war torn land, or didn't have to be me taking care of the other person's feelings, or it didn't have to be some guy mansplaining and throwing pills on my head. So I think that's. Yeah, therapist number four. And yes, it's a whole slog. And this is 23. I'm 23 at this point. No, 21. I was 21 and then moved to Montreal. At 23, I entered the first healthy relationship of my life. It was fucking terrifying. I spent at least five years being paranoid that his kindness would change, that there would be a turn, and I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. So that hyper vigilance began building into anxiety, began building into just sheer panic when he'd enter the room. And that's not very easy when you're dating somebody. So that, coupled with stress of work and burnout and severely undiagnosed ADHD. I sought a therapist after a number of breakdowns. She wasn't a great fit and kept having little breakdowns. And I found my current therapist by going on a Facebook group for trauma and healing, and the rest is history. And I was very easily fixed, and it was smooth sailing. I wasn't guys, but it has been a wonderful process. And over time, my stance towards therapists began to sour because of shit experiences. And also I began internalizing the stigma of therapy or of medication. I know for a good decade I didn't go with medication because people said you could just go outside and go jogging. And to that I say, motherfucker. I was running 6 miles a day and lifting, and I would stare at a beautiful sunset and go, I feel nothing. I would honestly rather not exist. I was healthy, but I was also very sick at the same time. Anyhow, I've been working with Catherine for seven years now, and I suppose that's my whole therapy story.

It's such an interesting story, hearing how you got there and also seeing the range of therapists you were working with and what that process felt like to getting there. And I think it's really hopeful to hear for people that you had all those really shitty experiences and then you ended up with a therapist who you have felt safe with for seven years.

I would say so. And sometimes it could take many, many therapists I think I've been through. I wouldn't say a freakishly high number, but a higher number.

I think there was at some point, I read research that said it, on average, takes three therapists to try before you get one that's a good fit. And in my experience as a client, I think that's accurate. I've had ones that even if they weren't doing anything wrong, I was like, this is not for me. And I always tell that to my clients. If I'm not a good fit for you, I'm not going to be offended. There are things that are just part of me that might not work for you, and that's fine. You deserve to put your time and energy and money into someone that you feel safe with or that you at least feel like you could feel safe with over time. So I think that's a really important thing for people to recognize, that finding a good fit is not always easy, but it's 100% worth it for you to really get the most out of the process.

So, I'm curious, how do you know when you found the one? My take on it is that it's a feeling, so to speak, for me. It took a while for me to trust. Trust her. There was a lot of built trust when she helped me through a PTSD flashback or trauma response. But before that, there was a curiosity about how she operated because it was different and it felt supportive, but it felt supportive, but it was also really fucking uncomfortable. And I think it's that sweet spot. I've never experienced it. And I know a therapist. I don't know if they're obligated, but I imagine they are motivated to always advocate or be on your side, so to speak. But I wonder where the line of enabling or coddling. And that may be mostly media messages that perpetuate a stereotype of a therapist that says everything you do is right and that you are okay and you don't have to change a damn thing.

Yeah. And I think it's my job to balance making you feel held and challenged and knowing when to do each and also how to go about it. Right. Because there's a difference between telling someone, hey, I actually think you were the asshole in that situation. That's not really conducive to people hearing you, but also not saying 100% you're right and everyone else is just screwing you over. Neither of those are therapeutic answers. So if your therapist is doing either of those things to you might not be a great fit. But being able to point out things without even necessarily having to say that you're wrong, because I'm only hearing your perspective. I have no idea what's right or wrong. But being able to point out in situations of like, okay, well, there's this pattern of you having this behavior in your relationships. How has it been working for you? Even if they don't think they're doing anything wrong, they notice that the behavior is not getting the result they want. And so that's a really good angle to get into that work of. I'm not telling you that you're wrong or you're bad, because that's not necessarily true. But I can get you to think more about and explore other behaviors that might be more effective to you getting your needs met, and especially if you grew up in a way where you felt like you had to manipulate situations to feel safe, that's going to be really hard to know on your own how to, in a healthy way, have the people in your life meet your needs and how to meet your own needs. It's definitely a process, but I think that's something that's a really good indicator that you are with a good fit for you, is if you feel like they support you and they're not judging you and they're in your corner, but that they're not just, yes, manning you. That they're able to point out things that don't sound like they're working.

Initially, I wanted Catherine to, quote unquote, fix my crazy or let me indulge in venting about how my mom was just the worst. And she, like a good therapist, would do it to an extent, but it's all about dosage and timing, and oftentimes, she would pause and gently guide me either into my feelings or into a different state than what I was entering in. Also, she would spend a lot of time highlighting awareness of my biases, not telling me that I'm wrong, but above all, she just wants to cultivate a sense of awareness. Yeah, it has been a really fascinating journey because I see her use a lot of different methods, such as reparenting. I imagine she did a lot of reparenting in terms of helping me get in touch with my own emotions, I guess, is the best way to put it, because that's what parents do. We've mentioned it before where a kid is screaming or crying or something, and you can help name their emotions and then help them develop problem solving or self regulating skills to work through it. So she became my anger translator, and, yeah, then she would move on to asking what little tiny Tanya needed in that moment and planting that seed of how I, as an adult, can actually see to these things and things like journaling and eventually moving on to parts work and internal family systems, I believe it's what it's called. And so I guess that would be the gist of it. I'm not sure what else to add.

Yeah, I mean, I think that you did a really good job of covering the major points that shot you off to different paths. When you're a kid who's had any level of abuse or neglect, there's a lot of paths that open up, that go down really difficult roads. And I think a lot of times people feel like, well, I got such a shit hand at life that I'm stuck on this road. And I think that every kind of major pain point you talked about, you showed the different routes that you could have gone, and in some ways, you ended up on paths that were really not functional. For you. And so I think it's really useful to be able to hear, like, yeah, I started on this really tough one, and seeking therapy helped adjust the options that were present. Oh, I don't have to just be a traumatized kid forever. And then, oh, shit, I'm getting stuck again in the toxic relationship realm. And then, well, wait, that doesn't have to be the end. There's still this whole world that's open of healing, that if I choose to turn and switch directions, I can. And so I think that overall, is a really good way of showing what the journey can look like on the client end of the process of seeking help. Even if it doesn't always end up working out on the first try or the second try or the third try, it opens up a bigger universe than the current narrative that you're living in. And that's part of what makes any kind of mental health healing, not just therapy, but it really does help you shake out the belief that you're stuck on the path that you're on.

Definitely. I could see how trapped I had become in various narratives, primarily out of survival. Either they were narratives imposed upon me by others and it was unsafe to shake those off, or they were narratives that I told myself in order to keep myself safe through therapy. It has been a very rewarding, painful, intense, confusing journey in understanding that they are my narratives. And you can broaden your perspective and see that there's a number of different ways to view these. And over time, I had explained to her once that I can hear those tracks play over and over. And when I was very in my trauma or in my major depressive episodes, they sounded real. They sounded as though my brain was genuinely saying those things. And with therapy, you start to see that they're not quite as hyper real as you thought. I likened it to hearing a gramophone. At first you go, wow, this sounds just like a voice. And then over time, say you give a 13 year old that now, and it sounds like a tinny, robotic thing that sounds nothing like a human voice. And that has been the process with me, is I'll hear narratives, but I go, oh, you're not real. And I feel all sorts of shame and pain, and those deserve to be cared for and heard, but they don't have to utterly taint my behavior moving forward. And it's with therapy, it's with amazing friends that have helped recalibrate my compass. It's through that work that I've been able to do that. So I think that would be it.

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 purpose 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.