In this episode, host Tony Passalacqua and guests Dr. Charlotte Howard and Dr. Tori Olds review how to get the most out of therapy; what to expect when seeking counseling; and generally how healing through therapy works. (28:25)
Also available on Apple, Google Podcasts, and Spotify. A transcript of this podcast is found below.
Additional episodes in this series:
Episode 1: Physician wellness and burnout
Episode 2: Mindfulness
Episode 3: The science of self-compassion
Transcript:
Tony Passalacqua: Today we have our special guests, Dr. Charlotte Howard and Dr. Tori Olds, who are both sisters and are licensed psychologists. They started Deep Eddy Psychotherapy in 1994. It's currently the second largest psychology practice in Texas. Deep Eddy helps thousands of clients work through such issues as anxiety, stress management, relationship issues, depression, trauma, and grief.
Dr. Howard currently serves on the Deep Eddy Board, and Dr. Olds leads an international training group. You can search for her on her YouTube channel by searching for Dr. Tori Olds, or you can look at the link at the bottom of our page. Our topic today is physician healing, and it's part of our physician wellness series.
Charlotte, can you go ahead and tell us a little bit more about physician healing and physician wellness?
Charlotte Howard: Sure. So, this whole series is about physician wellness. A lot of that is preventative and, you know, self-care. But we wanted to come back to, around to, healing because a lot of people, well we all actually, have deep things that are already really wounded in us and we need to understand how to heal and to get out of those things and to, you know, how to respond to what we're going through basically right now.
And of course, the self-compassion that we talked about and mindfulness are huge. Um, helping in feeling your feelings. Um, but we wanted to all, you know, touch on therapy and different approaches. Um, and also a little bit more about how to be with yourself in a healing way. So, I think the good news is, in terms of therapy, that doctors get more out of therapy than the general population, according to the research.
Tori Olds: Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah, pay attention to that.
Charlotte: Yeah. Um, therapy already has good outcomes for, for everyone. It's about the same effect size as aspirin. And most medical interventions are about the same effect size as medical interventions, but it's even better with doctors. I can think of a lot of reasons that might be true.
One of my clients who is a physician comes to mind where she, you know, is just being a physician is so much a part of her identity. And I think this is true for a lot of physicians. that she never feels like she can let her guard down from that role. So, if she's out in the community, she's thinking, any of my patients could see me, or anybody who knows I'm a physician could see me.
Like, she doesn't let loose, ever, really. Maybe a little bit with her husband, but I think even there, like, she is so identified as a physician. And it's so important for our nervous systems and for life fulfillment, as we've talked about, to be authentic. But how much more important in that scenario, that you have a confidential space to talk about yourself, even with friends or, you know, you know, when you are a leader in your community, it just makes it harder to be vulnerable. And I would still vote for doing it and being vulnerable, um, because people actually like it when we're not perfect and they want to be close. They want to see a physician who's not perfect and who's authentic and down to earth.
But I just do think it is hard for many of the physicians that I see. And that's why they cherish having a confidential space where they can actually talk vulnerably and really be honest about their suffering and what they're going through and their problems in their life. I think one of the major things they have to get past to come into therapy is stigma.
And that's going way down in our society. I mean, I know all my friends and colleagues and my kids’ friends and their parents and everybody talks about, “Oh, I've got to run to my therapist now.” And they're you know, everyone I think it's much more common that everyone has a therapist and sees…
Tori: Or at least a coach which is like an alternative.
Charlotte: Yeah, and that's a sign of taking care of yourself and that, you know, you're actually a responsible human being. (Laughs.)
Tori: Folks in therapy are a neat group. Like, you know, those are the people who are like mature. They’re like willing to like, they want to have a deep life and do the, make the most of things.
Charlotte: And I think that is becoming more and more cool, um, and not stigmatized these days. During COVID, you know, we had just an overflow. We were turning away, at Deep Eddy Psychotherapy, um, our company, you know, we were turning away 150 people a week and, you know, we were really…some of whom that we even called them back. You know, because it's just so much work. You know, [we have] have many full-time people just calling people back and trying to find places for them to get into therapy.
And I know that's because a lot of people are in an exceptional amount of pain and all the issues were exacerbated. But, um, it's really continued that most people are in therapy or see therapy as not that big of a deal and kind of a normal thing. But I find that my physicians are the kind of holdouts on this.
And that my physicians still feel a little bit embarrassed to come to therapy a lot of times that there still seems to be that stigma in the field that you shouldn't need this. But when I asked them about it, they say one of the main things that drives it is that they're worried about their license or their reputation.
Tori: So horrible.
Charlotte: Yeah…I checked with Dr. Brian Sayers who runs the Travis County Mental Wellness, Mental Health Center, you know, mental wellness program. Um, Deep Eddy Psychotherapy provides four free sessions for physicians through that program. And that's now been extended to TMLT members, um, that if you're a member of TMLT, um, you can get four free sessions with our therapists.
Tori: Specifically, [at] DeepEddy.
Charlotte: Yes, at DeepEddy Psychotherapy. You can just go to DeepEddyPsychotherapy.com. And there's a few other, actually there's a few other independent practitioners who are able to provide that as well.
Tori: I checked with Dr. Brian Sayers, and you know, he said that's actually not true anymore in terms of the license renewal.
I don't know if it ever was true or exactly what it used to say, but I think now it's more like, is there something affecting your mental health that would interfere with your ability to give good care? And so, it's a pretty easy question to say “no” to, whether or not you've been to therapy. And so, I think there's just a lot of fear around it that's actually not even founded in reality around what it would mean.
Um, you would have to be pretty, uh, non-functional in terms of how mental health is affecting you to have your license removed or to have, um, people take action to take you out of your practice. So, finding therapy is, um safe. It's safe. It really is safe for physicians. But I think a lot of people don't feel that.
Part of why TCMS is providing these free confidential sessions, they're kind of, they're calling them coaching sessions, um, so that people can even feel like they're not getting counseling. But when you show up, it's confidential no matter what. You know, we're doing therapy
Charlotte: Yeah. Therapy is always confidential.
Tori: But they make it an extra step confidential, like. Yeah. Really confidential.
Charlotte: And it's, it's anonymous. When you access, they make it anonymous. Yeah. Yeah. You access those programs. Um, TCMS and TMLT pays for those sessions, but they do it anonymously. We just tell them we saw a physician, um, and yeah, we assign a number, but you know, we don't get back to them about who accessed the program except for some basic demographic information. But in any case, there is a rising number of mental health issues, um, that are affecting physical health. So, we wanted to talk a little bit about how to get the most out of therapy, but also and kind of what therapy is, but also just talk about how to be a healing presence with yourself and how to heal in general, like how healing works, like why does therapy work basically?
Um, I know that also in a lot of medical training, they highly emphasize CBT and DBT therapies. Um, that's what physicians are taught is kind of the thing you should go to. And that sort of, it harkens back to my training, um, you know, in grad school 20 years ago. That was the most manualized and easy to research approach.
And it's not that those approaches are wrong or bad. Um, in my personal opinion, they just may not be as deep, and the latest research tends to support much more experiential therapies, and so the best
Tori: Well, from the, from the brain perspective, you can make an argument for what I call experiential therapies. But I think that I just want to highlight what Charlotte's saying, this is the bottom line of what the research says, is that there's no one type of therapy, you know, among like the major models, it may, you know, common models out there, there's no one type of therapy that does better in the research, has better outcomes than another.
And maybe it's important to say this to doctors because every once in a while, I will hear someone say, “my doctor told me to do CBT particularly because it has more research.” It has, there are actually more studies on CBT. There's like thousands and thousands, but all of these studies have, all of these forms of therapy have way more research than is needed to prove the point.
So, CBT just got popular to research. But they all have plenty of research and the outcomes, which actually is what matters more than the number of studies. So, they're all equivalent. So, if you are searching for therapy, just finding the type of therapy that's most likely to help you. I'm actually just started writing a book about, about this, how to find the right therapy and find the right therapist because it's complicated.
The, I, the way I'd like to compare it to is like, If you imagine, like, all the ways to improve someone's physical health, there are like a million ways to improve physical health. You could change your diet, you know, you could go to a nutritionist, you could go to a trainer and start working out, you could have, like, a surgery that could help, you could have, like, a medication.
There [are] many ways of changing, you know, improving physical health and they all are valid. Same with mental health is a broad, you know, many things impact our mental health. There [are] things we can do, there's, you know, skills you can learn, there's deep healing work, there's many completely valid ways to approach just
feeling better in this life. And so that's why there's many types of therapy. And interesting, it's really interesting that none has like, risen as the gold standard. Um, and there may be many reasons for that, that has to do with how we do research, but it doesn't matter. But what has been shown true is that when you choose a therapy that is your preference, versus random, being randomly assigned, um, you get more out of it.
So, the more you can educate yourself, like, what are my basic options and what's, what do I want? What am I comfortable with? Like, what kind of process do I want to go through? So, I'm just going to generally break those down into kind of what we might think of as like symptom management or more short-term work, although you can do deep work short term, but definitely there's some types of approaches to therapy that are more symptom management versus healing.
And I don't want to, of course, Charlotte and I are like really passionate about healing work. Especially if it's done experientially, and I'll mention why I love experiential work. But I really actually don't want to lean into, like, that's, that's what would fit us as clients. But everybody's different and wants something different.
And so, and some things will just appeal to you, and some won't. So, if you want to just say, “Hey, life is hard. I don't need to like talk about my childhood”. You know what I mean? Like, “I just can't go there right now. I, I'm, I'm kind of spinning out of control or something.” You know, then just having a therapist help you slow down and make just some common-sense behavioral changes. Like, okay, hey, are you exercising? Like, are you doing self-care? Like, what can you do differently? Can we reach you out to connect you to some community? Okay, great. What are some things you can do in motion and in the moment to regulate your emotions? Can you, uh…and some are even incorporating self-compassion.
There's a new form of therapy called self-compassion, no, excuse me, compassion focused therapy, which builds on CBT. And incorporates some of these more cutting-edge things like compassion training versus just like trying to be rational, which is the traditional CBT way. And, and also many forms of CBT and, and, uh, are incorporating mindfulness, but all of those types of, so that would be CBT, DBT, ACT, which stands for acceptance and commitment therapy.
There [are] many kinds of, uh, solution focused therapy. There's plenty of therapies out there that are just going to help you get a handle on things without necessarily going into your pain or into any kind of self-discovery. You're not going to like to come out understanding yourself a lot better, but you'll have some tools.
So that's great. There's a plenty of therapies like that. Those are actually easier to find probably. And then you have a whole other set of therapists who are trained there it's called sometimes called depth approaches. You know, traditionally it was called long term because it can be more long term.
Although now with new cutting-edge techniques, we can do it in a short-term manner, which is amazing. But those are the ones where you're actually going to try to explore and discover the things you're not conscious of inside yourself. And that could be conditioning. Like we talked about conditioning in the other podcasts.
We have all sorts of conditioning. We have conditioned, I think of them as like unconscious beliefs, because they're not usually like consciously mediated. Like, “I believe I should, I'm, I am of no value. I'm a bad person, you know.” But on our felt level, we do devalue ourselves. Like our unconscious mind, our subcortical, like we talked about before.
Our subcortical brain has those imprints that say, that just map reality in a certain, uh, certain way through our experiences, that teach us things that actually impair our future functioning. So that might be things like, “I have to be perfect to be loved,” or “I better never have my feelings. You know, if I do, I'll be overwhelmed” or “Mom can't handle it so other people apparently can't handle how I feel.” Or, um, “Only if I'm like really tough” and like, you know, like if I was for instance, like maybe I have a learning that tells me a deep subcortically, like limbically imprinted learning, that says the only way not to get bullied is to be super tough. So, “I'm gonna be like tough and hard all the time,” you know?
And those kinds of conditioned ways of being become automated and they're usually based on knowings or learnings that are not conscious. So, now we have plenty of science to explain what back in the old days we used to call the unconscious mind and its basically implicit memory.
You know that just like Charlotte was talking about [in] the other podcast, not [in] all memory do we have to be conscious. We're remembering something. That's what is what makes explicit memory explicit. We're consciously recall, “What did I have to eat yesterday?” or “What's two plus two?” You know, we are consciously trying to remember. It's a whole other type of memory called implicit memory that most of our psychology rests on. So, if we want to change ourselves, if you're going to depth model, you know, especially if you're doing experiential work, you're you want to try to understand like, how did it get conditioned?
What kind of like marching orders about how reality works, what to expect, what kind of suffering to predict is about to happen, and how do I prevent it? And that's, we sometimes we call those learning schemas. So, we have these unconscious schemas of how, you know, what to expect, what things mean, and how I should respond.
And we just do them automatically, and, and I can tell you when you know one is working, is when you find yourself doing something and you don't know why you're doing it. Like I can't, I consciously, like you could have a behavioral therapist tell you, try this new behavior. You're like, okay, great. I'm going to start exercising, you know, and like, and then you don't. You know, because you have some learning that says you cannot do that, or you will actually be in a worse position if you do that.
Um, a lot of people have that around self-valuing. Like they think I'm going to love my, I'm going to value myself, but there are plenty of people that have unconscious reasons and implicit memory that say, if you start to value yourself, you're in trouble. Maybe you were, you were in an abusive family that [in] the second you rose your head and [showed] some pride, that targeted abuse.
Maybe you were compared to your brother, and they were doing really really bad. So, if you ever felt good about yourself, you felt guilty because your brother was suffering. You know, maybe you had a, maybe you were young and you're like, “Oh if I don't take all the burden onto myself, and it's my fault that my parents got divorced,” let's say. I might blame my parents and I really want to love them. I need to love.
There [are] all sorts of deep reasons. That's just to give an example of some of the unconscious inference we can take on about, like, loving ourself. But everything we do -- letting people close, procrastinating, trying our hardest, all of these things -- usually rest on deep imprints. Um, and there's so much, there's a lot of exciting, exciting science about that.
And if, if you don't mind me just, I know I'm kind of talking quickly and I'm talking a lot, but if you don't mind me just pointing to some really exciting science, we used to think that you couldn't change implicit memory. Like once we'd done fear conditioning, a rat in a lab, if we give them electric shock when they hear the bell or whatever, we thought, okay, that's always in there.
You can do extinction training, but as soon as it's triggered again, it'll come back. Under stress, it'll come back. You can't really erase the original learning; you can only overwrite it with new learning. And that's why a lot of things like CBT, they're like teaching you how to override those limbic, you know, driven like impulses, right?
“Hey, just calm, don't do it automatic, calm down, regain control,” which is a great skill. We do need that skill. But the problem with that is you're always then having to regulate all the time and control yourself all the time. Whereas now we know you can actually go into the subcortical brain and change the original learning that launches that feeling state or that behavioral impulse, that compulsion.
And if you do that, then you don't need any tools and skills ongoingly because you no longer want to drink, you know, or smoke, or rage at your kids when they're bad or whatever the thing is that you're stuck with. So that, um, if you're interested in that science, I have a YouTube, um, video on it called Memory Reconsolidation, because that's the name of the science. It came out about 2004, and then it was like slow, and then it started having a lot of studies now, um, on, including on humans. But the memory reconsolidation science shows that we actually can update, either erase or update, old neural imprints.
And these are just like connection, that's like, so like any memory, it's a pattern of neural firing, right? That gets wired together to, to remember something, like “Remember that I'm crap,” you know what I mean? Like those, that is a pattern of neural firing in your brain that happens, you know? We actually now know we can awaken that neural network and change the way the neurons are connected to me in something different or erase it all together.
Um, and let me just give you the quick science of it, the quick steps of that. So, in the research, what they show is the first thing you have to do is make that learning network, that, that network, that memory kind of labile, what's called labile. So that means it's open for editing instead of like consolidated.
Cause you know, like short term memory to long term memory, memories get consolidated. I'm sure you all know this, but we can actually open it so that they reconsolidate differently. That's why it's called memory reconsolidation. So, we can deconsolidate, we can open the memory and we do that through bringing it online.
So, we need electricity running down that neural network. And that happens simply when the expectation, like, oh, I'm about to get shocked, you know, when the brain is making that prediction, like, or even the prediction I'm bad, or I'm, it was my fault, whatever that thing is, we need it online. And then to witness at the same time, some information that disconfirms that knowing, that proves our prediction wrong, we're actively predicting something and something else happens. Or we witness some evidence for something else in a very potent, believable way, not just a thought, right?
So, how we were doing this in many forms of therapy are now trying to do this. Um, I thought I might touch on something called Internal Family Systems, IFS, today. Coherence therapy is all built around this, and basically all the experiential therapies are trying to do this.
Charlotte: And Tori has videos.
Tori: And I have all videos and series on all these kinds of therapies. I just put one out on how to do it through emotional processing.
Charlotte: Search Tori Olds on YouTube. You'll get videos on this.
Tori: So, the therapy version of that would be, we have to actually be sort of in an embodied, alive way in touch with the knowing, the deep-felt sense of truth. Sometimes we call it emotional learnings or felt truths. And I hope you know what I mean by that, because we can have felt truths that are very different than our cognitive truths. Like, we can rationally have the idea like, I believe every human is worthy of love and belonging. Like, that's just like, it's, it's, I get that intellectually.
And on a felt level, we feel inferior, and like, we don't deserve it. Just, just as an example.
Um, so, in therapy, the, it is important, and this is a little bit how to get the most out of therapy, if you end up going the depth route. You, it, it's not just intellectually talk about your issues. There has to be a way, we, it's almost like the, we want to open that file of learning.
So that means using mindfulness, actually. This is a whole other reason mindfulness is wonderful, which I'm hopefully going to make a video about soon, beyond as a regulation and, and resilience tool. It actually helps us safely and deeply explore ourselves, because if we can, if we can take a moment, like that moment I, I have trouble setting boundaries with my boss, and I just say yes to them no matter what. If we can go back in our mind to that moment and then just mindfully notice, like, what's happening in my mind right there? Like, slow that moment down. Like, don't talk about it intellectually, like, oh yeah, I have this thing, and it's probably because of this, and it's my culture, and it's my training, blah, blah, blah, and me talking about it.
That does nothing to the lower brain. And it's not going to open those memory systems to change them. But if you take that moment and say, okay, let me just notice, ooh, there's a tightness in my chest. Yeah, it's almost like as I slow down and just attend to it, I can really feel that I expect, like I see her getting mad at me. She's going to yell at me.
And then we begin to notice like, oh my gosh, unconsciously I'm walking around making the prediction from my subcortical brain that to set a boundary means you're going to get punished or shamed or fired or whatever. So, if we can slow that down and really bring it online.
So, we're having electricity run through that neural network by, I mean, one way is just putting it towards like, yeah, it's like, she's going to yell at me. Yeah, that feels true. I didn't realize I was predicting that. And then at the same time, witness some kind of information that disconfirms that. Whether another person we were able to set boundaries with, or maybe we have a new experience with our therapist, or with our group, or with ourselves.
You know, like maybe the, the feelings, I can't handle it. But then, oh, learn some self-compassion. Wow, now that I have self-compassion, I actually can handle it. Everything changes, you know. When we, we can witness the new truth at the same time, it opens up about a five-hour window where the memory is labile, and we can actually really rewire our unconscious expectations.
And it's a change that only takes two or three seconds for the brain to complete. And it's what we used to call a therapeutic breakthrough. We just didn't know how to get there. And now we're more and more consistently knowing how to get there now that we have a memory consolidation science. But there are plenty of experiential, um, types of therapy out there.
You know, somatic experiencing, you know, somatic forms of therapy, emotion focused forms of therapy. I mentioned coherence therapy, although there's, it's harder to find a coherence therapist, but you can find an IFS therapist probably- internal family systems. I have a series about that if you want to check it out, that has some very clever ways of making these imprints conscious in a way that's not emotionally overwhelming and can be sort of reworked internally so that a new truth is wired in.
Charlotte: Honestly, just really even interpersonal therapy, like basically any…
Tori: Anywhere you're having a new experience, you know? That's different than what you expected. (Laughs.)
Charlotte: What Tori's basically saying in my language is you have to be having your feeling in order to actually heal it, which is kind of what we've been saying on the, on the other previous podcast and what any good therapist is going to want you to do.
Um, that's why in a way I see kind of the shorter term or the problem or problem-solving approaches, that maybe CBT could go into that category. Um, it's kind of like, you know, with Sisyphus, how he had to push the rock up the hill every day, and then it would roll back at the end of the day. It's like, basically, okay, whenever you think this, think this other thing.
Or now we're going to be better, do that. It's almost like telling someone to push the rock harder. And, you know, they can get the rock up the hill a lot faster. But it's still going to come down.
And there was a comedian, I can't remember who it was, but, um, my dad is a psychologist as well. He always makes, he thinks it's really funny, so he always brings it up, but they're, they're doing a, like a mock therapy session and, and the client's talking about all their pains and the therapist just keeps saying, “Stop it!” “Oh, well, but my, but I always love, well…” “Stop!” (Laughs.)
Tori: “Stop it.” It's a very powerful treatment. (Laughs.)
Charlotte: So, I think if, if, if what, yeah…
Tori: …If you don't deal with the underlying learning that propels you, like, it's like, no, I'm going to be harmed if I, If I eat well or if I lose weight or, you know, they can be really deep learnings that know that it's a bad idea to do that healthy thing.
Charlotte: I mean the point is, if we could stop it, we would. And that's why we're coming to therapy. So, someone telling you [that you] need to work out more or making the plan, you know, it, the, where that is really helpful, and the research shows it's helpful.
As Tori said, all these therapies actually are about equally helpful. But where it's helpful to me, in my opinion, um, is that it's the, the social resource that we've been talking about. You've got a whole other nervous system there to help you like where it's safer to unpack and put everything out on the table and, and problem solve it.
But where I would go beyond the problem solving is just that if you can access your feelings, then you're doing what Tori was talking about, um, because she's talking about there has to be electricity flowing through those neural webs.
Well, how do you get that? You feel it. So, I could talk about, you know, “I really hate myself and blah, blah, blah, blah.” But I'm not accessing anything where we can actually change it. But if I'm sitting here going, “Oh, I hate myself. I feel it right here. I just feel so much hate for myself.” Right there, you've opened the file.
And that's what Tori's talking about when she's saying open the file or get to access that part of us.
Tori: But that is not the only way. And that's for you to figure out sort of, like if we're talking about that, it's like that sounds like a crazy like amount of work. It's too scary. I'm just not ready for that or I don't [have] the mental bandwidth.
That's okay. You know, in fact, sometimes when people are really like just struggling to get like their bearings, one of my favorites is DBT. It teaches some really good skills for people who tend to emotionally flood and…
Charlotte: …especially the borderline [personality]. I mean, it's incredibly helpful.
Tori: Yeah, if you're, if you're someone who has really volatile relationships, I mean, it's sort of for people diagnosed with borderline [personality], but for anyone who has chaos in their life, you don't have to be borderline.
Like if you have, you know, trouble with relationships where there's a lot of volatility and you're, you know, err on the side of big feelings and anger and all those things, you know. DBT can really be a lifesaver for people. It, it grounds things. It teaches them to slow down, and it guides sort of what to do through that.
So, you know, I do want to just say that you know, there are options in there. And it doesn't matter what method your therapist is using, if you don't feel a good, safe connection — where you like them, they like you, you feel safe with them, you feel like they care — then the therapy probably isn't going to go as well, and the relationship is huge, and you can have a good relationship with any kind of therapist.
Charlotte: So, with that Sisyphus metaphor, what we really want is to kind of hammer away at the rock and start to get the rock to get smaller and smaller. And that's deep work, but you've got to heal the underlying issues so that then there's just no rock to push up. And so, you don't have to learn techniques to push harder or manage your life better.
You just don't have that resistance there because you healed it. Yeah. And to heal the underlying issues is what Tori is saying, is you have to open the file by feeling them and then, um, have a reparative experience, which that's why having someone with you, whether that's a really good friend or a therapist, or, you know…
Tori: You don't need to be with yourself that way through self-compassion.
Charlotte: Exactly. You, you have to be with yourself in a different way where you can really feel at the same time as you have a rubbing.
Tori: More hopeful, more resourced, more potential, kind of, “Oh, I can see this way of being with it now, so that everything can be rewired.”
Charlotte: Yeah, exactly.
Tony: Well, thank you so much for helping us through physician healing. What's the one thing that you'd want our listeners to leave with?
Charlotte: Well, just, you know, that we hear the same things from a lot of our physicians, and there's so much suffering and pain, and that's also it's normal for not only physicians but everyone and um, and you really don't have to do it alone. And I think a lot of physicians think that there's a lot of pride in having to either push it down and just buck it up and be tough or figure it out themselves, okay?
And really, that's just, it doesn't make sense in terms of your resources. You need to put your energy toward what you're good at. And lean into other people to, to help you with, with something that there's, you know…
Tori: …their expertise. (Laughs.)
Charlotte: Why not get help so you can speed that part up and get back to helping others? Um, so I really do feel like getting some, getting some support in your healing process. Yeah. We know that. Social resource, again, is like, is huge in your healing process, so both feeling your feelings and social resource and having someone else with you to do this work, whether it's a therapist or it's just a friend or a family member, someone you trust and feel safe with, is incredibly important, and so you just have to really do the very brave work of letting yourself be vulnerable.
Tori: Yeah, yeah, I guess I would just add, you know, it's really easy for our brain to get kind of tangled up with these different learnings, especially if we've had trauma. But even just, I mean, who hasn't had some kind of, you know, small traumas, or just more stress than really is what we're designed for, etc.
So, it's just easy. It is easy to get tied up. I think what we expect people to do is just kind of be dealing with that in the background while they're doing putting most of their focus on just life. But why not bring our intelligence and turn it toward our own mental process so that we can improve how we mentally process things? Like why not be just bring a life resource bring resource that bring some time bring your intelligence Um, and your intuition and your care toward your mind?
There's no reason not to do that. I know we don't have spaces in our culture. That's not normal, normalized in our culture. We learn math. We learn theses other things. There's no reason we can't bring our intelligence to our own inner way of processing things and improve it.
Charlotte: Mm. So, bring your attention to your mind and your inner world. Yeah. That seems to be the theme of this whole thing. Yeah. And feel your feelings. Yeah. And rely on others. Yeah.
Tori: That's the end. Thank you so much for listening. (Laughs.)
Charlotte: Such a pleasure, yeah, being with you. Thanks for having us.
Tony: Thank you guys for coming on the podcast. And thank you for listening to this podcast. If you are a policyholder, please feel free to contact us with any questions by calling 1-800-580-8658, or check out our resources at tmlt.org and clicking on our Resource Hub.
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