Episode 3 – The cost of not feeling your feelings

Because it's really, really hard to raise a human and it's truly the most out of control experience because you're creating a human being who is going to grow and change in ways that you can't predict or control.

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 Tanya. Today we delve deep into the full spectrum of human emotion and why it's worth letting sadness in the room. Also, I wanted to mention that in this podcast I use the term hooker in a jokey way when I know the appropriate term is sex worker. So that's on me. And I'm going to work on balancing my off color jokes with being mindful that our listeners will be coming from all different backgrounds. Lastly, this podcast was recorded in my old apartment, which had a lot of construction noise outside. So once again, the audio isn't ideal. Thankfully, it gets better in the upcoming episodes. So thank you guys and please enjoy the episode.

Hey guys. So there's mad construction outside of my window and it's all chaos, but we're just going to do our best. I was thinking about the cost is the topic for today, not just financial, but the cost of things like going to therapy in terms of what you gain and the cost of not going to therapy and how that affects your life. I guess a lot of people talk about not wanting to do therapy. What does it cost in a bad way to not start therapy?

Yeah, and it's very similar to the conversation that I think happens a lot with medical health care, right? Of if you don't have the money to get larger procedures done or to get preventative care done, then you're going to end up having to spend more money because the issue is going to get larger. But that's also not the fault of the people who can't afford to get the large procedure right away because it's, well, I have to feed my family or pay for rent or things like that. And so I think that happens often where even if someone's copay is small, spending an extra $20 a week could be going towards gas money or food or utilities or things that are objectively more necessary. And like looking at the hierarchy of needs, if those basic safeties aren't met, therapy is not going to be all that useful because you can't focus on attaining a higher level of self if you're freezing cold because your heat's not on or you're starving because you don't have enough groceries. So there's like a systemic issue there, but just in general for people who can afford the extra cost and say, oh no, it's final, I can deal with that. On my own or I can just shove it down and ignore it. The cost of it ends up being way bigger than financial. The more you shove things down, as we talked about last time, the more it's going to come up in bigger ways and affect you in a much more serious way. So I think the cost of not doing it is that you're going to have to do more if you do decide to do it.

That makes sense. And I guess it's only right for me to speak personally rather than what are examples of the cost of others. For me, it has, in a way, cost me a lot. Therapy isn't cheap financially. I have to pay out of pocket or had to pay out of pocket for a long time. But not going through those emotions has cost me relationships. It's cost me quality of life. It's cost me my sanity in some ways, having constant little burnouts and breakdowns and not actually being able to properly recover. And over time, those things accumulate and accumulate. And I found myself ending up in similar situations, similar abusive or toxic situations, and in a sense reinforcing, hyper vigilance or trauma borne behaviors and then those kind of snowballing on top of each other because now there's more and more evidence that the world is up to get me. And then I become more and more anxious. And then I wouldn't say I attract situations, but I did end up in worsening kind of situations and worsening mental state until I reached a breaking point. Yeah, I just found that it cost me intimacy with people I can't or couldn't. And I still struggle with connecting with others in a really intimate basis because for most of my life, people equal danger. And honestly, intimacy is one of the big things. That's one of the things that makes life worth living, in all honesty. Like the human condition is just the connection with others is how we make it all bearable. And if you are unable to enjoy that, it is brutal and it is hard. It is hard to justify paying 80 or $60 to $80 an hour to talk about my feelings. It's about like, what the fuck is this? It's so frivolous. But I remember talking to a friend about this, about it's being so expensive. And she turned to me and she was just like, this is worth more than anything in the world just to feel okay. You don't have to feel amazing, but just to feel okay in your body with yourself. Yeah, no, I realized that she was right. And I would pay several times over just to feel all right and to feel safe. And I find it interesting because one of the other hidden costs of this is that when you don't address these things because you think it's expensive, you end up paying a lot of money for other things that you feel are helping like cocaine and hookers, which are considerably more expensive than therapy. And it feels like the kind of good that you're looking for, but it doesn't solve things.

Yeah. I mean, numbing a problem is almost always going to be more expensive than dealing with the problem. And I think it's hard because the buy in for therapy is it's so unknown, right. And it's such an individual experience. You can have one person seeing the same therapist as you who says, they changed my life. This was the best thing ever. And the other person can be like, didn't really work. Didn't really click with them. Yeah, it was fine, but I didn't learn that much. But this other person is the best therapist I've ever had. There's not, like, a huge ability to predict on whether or not a certain therapist is going to be worth that buy in for you. But in general, the process of it is so impactful for people that once you're in it, like you said, you're like, oh, yeah, I would pay so much more for this. But if the cost had been higher when you started, it might have prevented you from learning that, oh, absolutely.

If the cost had been $300 an hour or whatever some people charge, I'd be like, I can't do it. I don't want to. I'm just going to stick to cocaine and hookers. I'm going to beat a dead horse. I love beating dead horses. But it is super important to reiterate that this is essentially an investment in yourself, and it's an investment in teaching you skills, how to better show up for yourself. And as a result, it'll reflect to the rest of your life, because me not handling my shit resulted in me treating myself poorly and then my health suffers or my sleep and treating others poorly, which then reinforces whatever traumas and whatever narratives I've got in my head. And there's just further ripples of not addressing the inherent I wouldn't say inherent problem, but the inherent injury. And humans as a species, we tend to have an outcome bias. Like, I ain't dead yet, so why should I go to therapy if my kids still talk to me? But you don't realize that if you don't work on, say, your anger, they might not talk to you 20 years down the line, and you could have saved yourself a whole lot of heartbreak on your part or on their part, if you had just sat on that couch and just actually worked through your stuff.

Yeah, and it's the same as physically, right? Like, oh, well, why do I need to strengthen my knees? They work fine. And then your ACL tears, and it's too late to just strengthen your knees now. You have to go through all this rehab of learning how to use them again. I think a lot of people don't realize that therapy looks at all aspects of wellness and affects more in your life than just like, oh, your parents didn't love you. I think that's kind of the box that's put in of, oh, well, we have to address this really serious trauma. And if you grew up with good parents and you don't need any help and it's not worth it, but it really does affect so many other things. And even looking at okay, financial wellness, if you don't have the assertiveness skills to ask your boss for a raise or to set boundaries in the workplace so that you're not dreading going there, your financial life is going to suffer. That's something you can work on in therapy. It doesn't have to all be one set thing. It's addressing the areas of your life that you feel are in need of work and also helping you figure out what does need work. Because we don't always realize, especially if it's something we've done forever or oh well, that's how my parents do it, that's how I'm going to do it. You don't realize that maybe you communicate in a really passive aggressive way that prevents you from having deeper connections or that keeps you from getting a job because your coworkers don't enjoy working with you. There's so many ways that things you don't even know are happening can impact all these facets of your life. And it's something that, again, the buy in is tough because people don't realize that all of those things can be addressed and can also be healed.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And it definitely resonates with me because it is hard not only to do the buy in, but also to realize that like I said, it is a feedback loop. So you're speaking passive aggressively. You end up lonely. You end up lonely and you're like, everyone is being awful and I don't know why. So I'm going to isolate and become more and more passive aggressive. But one thing I wanted to discuss what's the cost of believing that this is how my parents did it? Because that is a common like, my parents hit me and I turned out just fine. If you wanted to talk about in terms of cost, what happens when people just stick with those narratives?

Yeah, I mean, you never get to be your own person. There's a process, it's called differentiation of when you get to your kind of early mid twenty s and you really move out or start living your own life, you realize like, wait a minute, I don't know if I agree with everything my parents do. I don't know if I have the same beliefs as them with politics, religion, worldview, even things as simple as what grocery store do I want to use? Do I really want to cook things the same way they do? Even simple things like that. But being able to have that process of, okay, I can be a separate person from my parents and that's okay is a really large part of growing your identity and becoming an adult. I think a lot of people get stuck in the feeling of, well, I have to do things the same way that my parents did, because if not, I'm not honoring them or they're going to be upset. And a lot of times they're right. Parents will be upset if you do things very differently. And also, when you're choosing between disappointing your parents or disappointing yourself, the choice needs to be them the same way with everyone else in your life. But it's something that a lot of people shy away from because there's a sense of guilt if you do or believe something different than what your parents do, and it requires a lot of inner work of now, you're deconstructing these beliefs that you've always had and having to ask yourself, okay, when I am thinking this thing, whose voice am I hearing? Is this actually what I believe? Or is it just what I've been told for 30 years?

That last sentence of Whose voice are you hearing? That was something Catherine, my therapist, has asked me, especially in the beginning, because we don't realize how thoroughly we internalize narratives fed from other people. I had so many different scripts in my head, so many different things said in my mother's voice and my dad's voice. Classmates, shitty partners, that the signal to noise ratio was very, very one sided. And I heard all their voices, but not mine. And one of the things I went through in therapy, one of the reasons I went to therapy, rather, was that I feel kind of fake. I feel false. I don't know who I am. And that is one of the costs of just not having the tools to differentiate whose voice you're hearing. And this is an aside, but after I left toxic partner number two, he was always on me about my clothes, about the way I looked. We'd go out for lunch, and he would just talk about how the other women, the other tables were dressed better and why I didn't measure up. And I'm just sitting there eating my food, trying to not cry. And I remember going shopping after I left him, and I was looking at sweaters, and I was just hearing his voice like, oh, that's ugly. That's too baggy, that's too what have you. And then in this one wonderful moment, I paused and like, oh, that's not my voice. That literally sounds like him. And I don't have to listen to you. And I'm like, Shut up, dude. I'm going to grab this sweater, this ugly sweater, and I'm going to wear it and enjoy it. And that was liberating, and also, that was terrifying. It is very, very scary to shed these narratives, especially culturally, because from my experience, being Chinese Canadian, to go against that is huge. It's a death, in a way. It's very scary from a collectivist cultural background. And I see so many people willingly keep themselves in that box for the sake of their parents because yeah, they feel compelled to just keep doing these things for their parents. And it's hard. I do point out that at the end of the day they're going to pass away, but you're still generally going to be living and you have to look at yourself at the end of your life because you only have yourself to answer to at the end. And I guess the circuitous route to my point would be change is always like a little form of death. There is always a loss and it's scary and it's terrifying. And what do you do to support that person as they kind of venture out on little bambi legs out into the world and try to start to become their own person? Because that is a very vulnerable place for someone to be.

Yeah. Even though it's something that long term will help you, doesn't make it any less hard or any less terrifying to realize that you believe things differently than your parents or anyone in your family. And so being able to go through that process requires a lot of figuring out in all the ways what you want your life to look like. So not just in the heavy ways of what do you think happens when you die, but things like, well, what hobbies do I enjoy? What foods do I like eating? What music do I like listening to? So I try to do a lot of starting there of. Okay, well, what are some things maybe your parents didn't like cooking growing up that you want to try or what music or what movies or was there anything? They didn't let you watch or didn't like listening to or things like that that are a little more benign of exploring and that can help with the mindset shift of recognizing. Oh, well, my mom doesn't like eating bananas, and I do, and that's okay. And then it can slowly build to, okay, maybe these are some ways that she wants to live her life and that's not what I want to do. And how can I fit both of those things? And really being also able to shift the narrative to the whole purpose of evolution is we have to do things differently than they were done before, otherwise we're never going to evolve as a society. Imagine if back in the day it was, my mom never went to work, so I'm not going to go to work. But you don't actually think about if you want to. It's just, well, she didn't do it and her mom didn't do it and her mom didn't do it. If everyone had that same belief that, well, I'm going to do exactly what my parent parents did, society would never change in a lot of positive ways. And so I think remembering that too, that you are doing your own evolutionary duty by being different than your parents because that's how innovation happens. That's how we find more effective ways to do things and beliefs that are more conducive to connection. But that's really hard because to get there, you have to really acknowledge the fact that when you're not just a total mirror of your parents, that means that there's part of you that's alone. And that's usually the part that trips people up.

Yeah, definitely. And I know we got seven minutes, so I'm going to bust into a hardcore philosophical question.

Sure.

Why do parents do that? And then I guess the yeah, we'll start there. Why do parents do that?

It's a heavy one. I think a lot of times one of the reasons that people have kids is to do things better than their own parents because it's, here are the things they did that didn't work for me, I'm going to try to do that. But then that makes you really attached to what you think is better. So if you say, oh, well, my parents never did this for me, so I'm going to do this for my kid. If your kid then doesn't like what you chose to do, that can be really jarring, because it's well, no. I was trying to keep you from having this happen. And it might not work for the kid, or it might not have been executed. Well, because it's really hard to raise a human, and it's truly the most out of control experience because you're creating a human being who is going to grow and change in ways that you can't predict or control or you can obviously influence things, but you don't know what direction things are going to go in. And so I think a lot of times parents just want to feel that own sense of healing, of I'm going to try to do it better than the last people. And when that doesn't pan out the way they want, I think that can be super jarring.

Yeah. I think of my mom who was born and raised during the communist famine in 61. She was born during the height of it and she grew up without she grew up not having much money, if at all. And she was one of the wealthier ones. And she decided to do differently and give all that she could to me and my brother and want to shield us from suffering and hardship. But it has an unintended result of just not rendering me capable of handling what life brings me. Because you've done your best to shield them, they now don't have the muscle or the skills to be like, oh, how do I do this? How do I handle finances? How do I do things around the house? I've never had to. I mean, that was a first year of college, was a rough wake up as to how cooking is apparently really hard and not learning how was interesting, but it also was jarring for her. Not only did she want a demure, delicate girly daughter. She also wanted one that didn't experience hardship. And then this crazy child of hers goes and signs up for Moi Thai at age 14, and she walks in and just sees her sweet baby getting punched and kicked in the stomach by men, gently, obviously, but she's like, this is not what I wanted for you. Why are you doing this? And for me, it was jarring because signing me up for ballet lessons or these little soft things, that's not me. And the inability to handle that ambivalence and that uncertainty is hard, and I guess I'll just wrap up. For me, one of the things that therapy has also given me is the ability to handle ambivalence. And that has been a wonderful, wonderful end result of some of the therapy, is to be able to tolerate that level of uncertainty to a point or develop more tolerance and to try new things and possibly fail. I don't have kids, and I imagine once that baby shows up, that ability to tolerate ambivalence and uncertainty just flies out the window for a while. Also, not only that, by going through and growing, it's very promethean in the sense of, I can bring that fire back to the people. I went out and I did the hardship of some as much self actualization as I've managed up until this point. And then I can actually show my parents and be like, hey, there's a different way of doing things. Sometimes it goes over terribly. Sometimes it's like, oh, that's actually really useful. Thank you. Tanya. It's never a bad thing to have a wider skill set and an ability to handle ambivalence and the understanding that what you want for someone and what you're thinking is good for someone, it might not be right for. It doesn't mean that you love them less. It doesn't mean that you're failing. It just, yeah, I didn't have oranges as a kid. I'm giving all my kids oranges, and suddenly kids allergic to oranges, so it's not good for them. So you can't just keep doing that. You have to find something else.

Yeah, I mean, exactly what you're saying, too, is your mom, it sounds like, was trying to protect you from things that didn't exist in your world. She was trying to give you things that she didn't have in hers. But that time is not what you grew up in. So it may have been useful if you were growing up without everything, but instead, it feels like it's smothering you because it's preventing you from getting to breathe and figure out what life is like. And that's I think, a lot of why that stuff happens, because parents are using the information from their own life and from their own childhood of, well, I didn't have this, so I want to give you this. But times change so quickly that by the time you're raising a child, what they need and what the world around them is going to do in response is so vastly different that you can't use that as your only basis. And it doesn't mean that you can't pass things down. Right. That's so much of humanity is passing down what we've learned, but it needs to also be in the context of, well, the world is so different now. What are my kids going to need that I couldn't have predicted? Especially in the age of technology, we have no idea what people are going to need ten years from now. So I think just in general, there's that whole sense of we don't know, and that ambivalence is really, really hard, and therapy can be really useful in having both of those things exist at once. Of your mom did the very best that she could, and she tried to raise you in a way that in her time may have been super effective. And also the things that she did didn't have the intended effect, and the impact of that has hurt you as an adult. And so feeling both is something that we do a lot in therapy, and it's very helpful, but it's also very infuriating.

Oh, it's enraging. Yeah. There's been instances where I'm, like, so mad at you right now, but ultimately, it was exactly what I needed. And it's amazing about therapists is that sometimes you have to be gentle and sometimes you just have to be tough.

But yeah.

So I know we've got to wrap up early today, but it was a lot of fun and thank you so much. And we got some quiet now because the construction guys are on break, finally.

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