October 24, 2022 • 57 mins
This week is Part 1 of an ongoing series that Kat and her friend, fellow licensed therapist, Tara Booker created called “The Difference Between.” In this series Kat & Tara discuss different terms, diagnosis, and concepts that originated from the mental health field and how they have been bent and twisted in meaning in pop culture. This week, they deep dive into the meaning of abuse and abandonment. We hope that this series offers more detailed language in hopes that we can all identify, understand, and process our unique experiences in ways that feel validating to ourselves.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hi guys, and welcome to a brand new episode of
You Need Therapy Podcast. My name is Kat and I
am the host. Welcome everybody, and welcome to people who
are new. Glad you're here. Like the usual, I like
to give a little disclaimer at the top of every
episode that although I am a therapist and we're talking
about some mental health things, um and things that you
(00:31):
might talk about in therapy, this podcast does not serve
as a replacement for mental health services or a substitute
for actual therapy. But it might help you get to
where you need to go. It might help, um you
find a therapist or find something you want to actually
go to therapy forre so um, or it might not
do any of those things, and you might just like
this podcast. That's also fine. Anyway, now that we have
(00:53):
that out of the way, I am pretty excited about
I feel like I say that all the time, which
I do because I am excited a lot about the
episodes that I put out. But I'm specifically excited about
this episode slash episodes because I had my friend Tara
Booker here and I met her and we talked about
(01:15):
this in the episode. So I won't go too long
winded into it. But I met her working at a
treatment center years ago when I was an intern, and
then I got a job there, and so I've known
her for a really long time. I've known her for
almost the entirety of my career as a therapist, and
she's pretty good at what she does. She has been
on the podcast before. UM, we've talked about spirituality together,
(01:37):
We've talked about trauma in general together. We've talked about
a couple of things, and we started talking about stuff
that we could do together more in ways that she
could actually help on the podcast more often, because she
does have one away with words when it comes to
mental health and therapy in general. And also she's an
(01:57):
expert expert therapist, like she's very good and anyway, so
she came over to record a couple episodes about a
couple of different things and what happened, which eventually you'll
hear it happen live on the on the podcast. UM,
I think in not this episode, but another one is
(02:18):
we decided that there is so much in what we're
talking about that it actually deserves to be kind of
a mini series. And what we do in this episode
and what we're going to continue to do is we
talk about some terms, some that just have to do
with mental health and some that are actual clinical terms.
We talk about them, we talk about kind of how
(02:40):
they've been misconstrued in popular culture and what they really
might mean. And it's a way for us to help
kind of give you guys more language to describe the
experiences that you're going through or having or seen. So
we don't use words that mean one thing for blink,
get statements or or experiences that actually means something else.
(03:04):
And so I'm really excited because there's a ton of
stuff that we can talk about. And the reason that
we're actually going to make this into a series is
in the second episode we were actually recording together, I
felt like I was like rushing it because I wanted
to get through a couple of things, and I was like,
wait a second, I don't really want to rush this,
because rushing this is what has got us kind of
(03:25):
in this place in the first place, this place where
we're not really clear on what things mean, but we
kind of might know enough. So we're just going to
use this word, or we're gonna um categorize this as this,
or we're not going to care that much about the
real meaning of this word, because it kind of fits
for this, and there's some harm being done to other people,
(03:46):
and there's some harm being done, I think, to ourselves
because we don't actually know what we're experiencing. So I'm
excited because this is really a series about empowering us
and giving us more language and more understanding about things
that we might be going through or our friends and
neighbors might be going through. So all that to let
you know that this is not just the beginning or
(04:08):
the only episode I have with Tara. This is actually
the beginning of um many episodes that I am going
to be having with her in the next couple of
weeks slash months. So I hope you like her, because
she will be back and she'll be back again. And
I just want to say thank you Tara for doing this,
because she does this because she loves actually being helpful,
(04:31):
which is really nice coming from a therapist, because that's
kind of our job is to be helpful in some way.
So thank you for taking the time to do this,
and thank you for being just like so brilliant at
what you you do and having such good language and
just away with explaining and expressing things that I know
I can get tripped up with because I get a
(04:51):
little bit anxious. Even on this podcast, even though it's
my own I get anxious kind of talking about certain
things because I want to make sure that I'm I'm
saying what I mean um and meaning what I say,
And sometimes this stuff is just a little bit tricky
and convoluted and very nuanced. So I hope you like this, Tara,
Thank you for being here and being a part of this,
(05:14):
and get excited for more conversations like this one with Tara.
If you have any questions, concerns, thoughts, feedback, you can
send up to me Catherine You Need Therapy podcast dot com.
But for now, I hope you just dive into this
episode and learn something because I know that I learned
something talking to Tara this day. So here to my
(05:34):
conversation with Tara Booker. All right, guys, welcome back to
a new episode of You Need Therapy Podcast. I have
a what do we call this your third time there?
Maybe fourth time, because you've been on some couch talks.
I have a repeating guest. You might be my most
frequent guest. I can't wait to see what I get
(05:57):
for I haven't thought about that yet. But terror Booker
is here, and she is somebody that I met. If
you haven't heard the episodes with her before we met,
but this beyond two thou so, yeah, that's six seven,
eight years ago. Okay, So she's also a licensed therapist.
(06:17):
Year background is clinical social work, which really isn't that different.
We want to literally do the same thing. Yeah, So
she's here because I want to talk about and you
guys have heard me talk about this kind of stuff before,
but now it's nice to be here with another therapist
talking about this and getting her perspective. But we're going
to have a couple of conversations about some common misconceptions
(06:42):
in the mental health world. And like I've discussed before,
I think because we have more access to information, which
is a great thing, but we have more ways of
getting information out, whether that's through social media or podcasts
like this one, or there's more people writing books. It's
just we're trying to kind of reduce the stigma that
(07:02):
has been connected to mental health. But at the same time,
because we're getting more information and it's more I think,
from my perspective, generalized and oversimplified, we get a little confused,
and that is for the most part, nobody's malicious fault.
It's just something that happens. And so we're going to
(07:23):
talk about a couple of different things. Um, and then
we're going to actually break this into two parts. So
we're gonna do two of the things, which might end
up being like a lot of things under the things.
And then, UM, we're just gonna give you more information
and more language that might help you more accurately understand
or describe the things that you've been through, whether you
(07:45):
see or that your family and friends go through. Let's
do it. I want the audience to be like, Okay, cool,
we're going to fill in. Okay. So the first thing
we're gonna talk about, which is very overarching, is the
reality of it abuses, whether that's emotional abuse or psychological
(08:06):
abuse or spiritual abuse. I think I hear that word,
and I think I use that word a lot, and
you know, sometimes I might use it in the wrong way,
but I hear that word more than I've ever heard
that word. I feel like it used to be something
that and not to say this doesn't still happen, but
it used to be something that people didn't want to
(08:27):
use that word, and it was like, no, that's my
experience as a therapist. I think actually in the beginning,
we would work with clients and in my head a bit,
oh wow, this person has gone through a lot of abuse,
and that word was not wanted in that person's vocabulary.
But now I feel like I see, not even just
with my clients, it's more just in the world, every
(08:49):
other description of not great behavior is abusive. And so
I want to hear you and hear your thoughts on
how you've seen that kind of like abuse, the word
kind of transform in the past couple of years, and
then we can dive into like, okay, so what's abuse,
and then if it's not abuse, what is it? Yeah,
(09:10):
it's I mean this obviously we talked about this, but
it's such a delicate topic, right because I think what
happens with all things that we are like under educated,
or are neglecting as a culture, or are ignoring and
non addressing, like mental health has been for a long
time in Western society, then we do an overcorrection, We
(09:33):
like swing to the other end of the pendulum with
most things. Right, So it's like whatever rights issues that
were you know, denied it's like I'm swinging way over
here to where, well, specifically mental health, Like we didn't
talk about it. It was something that was taboo, stigmatized,
a bad thing or not a real thing, or all
(09:54):
the things that people would use. And then we swing
to the other side. People are like, no, it's real.
I'm making a stand. And I feel that's similar, like
abuse goes in that category where we didn't talk about
abuse of things people in power and people who were
oppressed and victimized, very neglected, and most population to experience
(10:15):
that because they're vulnerable populations, their marginalized populations for the
most part, you know, people of color, women, poor, impoverished people.
So people aren't voicing those people's issues. And so it's
like we swing to the other side and say everything,
you know, this is abuse. We're calling it abuse. This
is an issue, this is a problem, this is a problem.
(10:35):
That's a good way of describing it and painting the picture.
Because I was listening to talk about this podcast all
the time, the Man Enough podcast. I was listening to
the it's actually I think maybe this isn't like the
intro to their new season or their like episode intro,
but they talk about how somebody. The whole podcast is
about like how to like equality and undefining this like
(10:59):
very strange masculine, like this is the whatever. So one
of the hosts says, like, I think women are better,
and one of the other hosts says, well, no, that's
still not equality. That's not really what we're fighting for.
That's not really what we're working for. Going that, okay,
men are now under women does not fix the problem
(11:19):
that women feel like they're less than compared to men.
And that's kind of like the same thing. It's like
you're swinging this pendulum and it's like, wait a second,
we needed to put that kind of in the center.
We don't need to be on um one side or
the other. So where mental health was like taboo, now
it's like if you go to therapy, you just better
wear a sign on your forehead that says I go
(11:40):
to therapy, when like you could. But that doesn't mean
that that you have to or you need to. Yeah,
And I think that is actually a natural part of change.
People who get sober, for instance, right, it's like they'se
change their whole world around. I. I can't do any
of these things. I live in this type box and
then they find their way to a middle as you
(12:01):
get better, and like, I think all change has to
kind of happen that way, where we have to swing
really hard out of something dysfunctional to kind of get
it out of our system and to normalize it. And
then hopefully this is a conversation because we've been a
few years in I like mental health is way more
open that we are, even us therapists starting to see
(12:21):
we need to come back to the middle and so
we can hopefully be a part of like Okay, yes,
now we're open about it, and let's put it in
its right place and its right size culturally, so okay,
the wrong way. Yeah, Okay, listen up if you've been
having these conversations with me too about when it comes
to like recovery, specifically in disorder recovery, because there's a
(12:43):
lot of confusion with that right now too, because the
anti diet culture all that movement has become very very
loud where it's also swinging the other way and it's
confusing people who are in their own recovery process that
then once they get in that for a while and
they're like, okay, wait a second, now I don't know,
if I'm making decisions because I have to be anti
(13:04):
diet culture, if I'm making decisions because I'm listening to
my body. And that's the same thing. When you're going
through eating disorder recovery. You have to like take out
a lot of parts of your life that somebody who
is just like moving along with their life who doesn't
have disordered eating or eating disorder doesn't have to do.
But once you kind of recalibrate that, then you get
(13:25):
to come back into this niddle ground. And I think
that's the part that we don't talk about is that, Okay,
we do this extreme thing, like think about like somebody
going to treatment, to whether it's for anything, you got
to treatment. You are cutting out so many things, like
socially just like you're not going to work, like you're
you're not many things out of your life. You aren't
supposed to live that way forever, but you need a
(13:47):
period of time where you can like clear up some
thing so then you can actually reintroduce the parts that
you want to reintroduce. So I think this is the
same thing of like we're opening up this box that
like abuse is something we should talk about. Abuse is
something we need to start to recognize because I think
for a long time, if it wasn't somebody when it
comes to physical abuse, if it wasn't or any abuse,
(14:10):
actually physical abuse was the only real abuse. And if
somebody wasn't pushing you down a flight of stairs and
giving you like broken bones, then like it's not that
bit of a deal, which is like feels ichy and
my body to even say that. But now we've kind
of opened up this box and now we need to
kind of bring it back into that middle ground, not
saying that some of the things people are experiencing aren't
(14:33):
bad or harmful, but it might not go into that
category of this is abusive behavior. Yeah, because the language
does matter. I mean, it's really all we have. It's
like one of our primary methods of like living in
the world. So I'm gonna be careful in the way
I say this, so I want you guys to hear
(14:54):
what I am trying to say. But language does matter,
and when we categorize human beings as abusive, we can't
really take that back because somebody's heard it, and so
not that I am trying to like victim blame or
like protect an abuser by any means, but it always
brings me back to that West Elm guy. What was
(15:16):
his name? I didn't get too deep into it, but
there's this jerk guy. I don't know too much, but like,
I think he was just being kind of like a uh,
for lack of a better word, douche bag to a
lot of people on like dating apps and stuff like that.
And I'm saying this not knowing the whole story. So
if I'm wrong, somebody please correct me. But he got
categorized as and he became a huge thing. He was
(15:37):
all over like different platforms as this like narcissist, abuser
kind of person. And I read one article about it
and she was like, I think this guy was just
like a jerk, Like he was not like he didn't
have good intentions he x y Z. But now he
is literally labeled as this person with a personality disorder
and that's out there and people. Caleb did I say
(15:59):
that without the name? I said, I think what's west Elm?
Caleb was the story, but I used as an example
because I think that because we have a lack of language,
we want to be able to say and talk about
our experience and speak up for ourselves. And at same
time we have to be careful because it's affecting a
lot of people's lives. Yeah, I think, yeah, we could
(16:19):
talk about this forever. But another frame is like, if
we're just beginning to really understand educate and have it
as like a broader part of cultural awareness mental health,
then we're like babies, you know, like we're in elementary school,
and so our language has been representative of that. You know,
you think about the language that you learn to describe
(16:39):
certain things when you're like a smaller child versus it
grows and it expands, it gets more detailed and more specific,
But a child brain can't really differentiate all those things
at the beginning. You know. It's like that was main
is what you say when you're like very small, And
then you might say, well, you know that was selfish
(17:00):
or that you start to get more specific, and kids
can do that when they get older. So I just
think like we are at the beginning stage of like
it really being a known educational awareness sort of thing.
So we're gonna we're gonna grow. Okay, so let's talk
about this just in a more basic tense. Can you
(17:26):
tell us this doesn't have to be a exact like definition,
but I do want to hear from your perspective, how
do you differentiate between abusive behavior? And then I don't
want to like give away the other words yet or
something else. Sure, sure, well, I did some reading or
looked at some little notes about it, because it's kind
(17:49):
of can be an ambiguous thing to try to nail down.
And I think that is part of the struggle of
talking about it and why it can get kind of
co opted or misused or thrown around is because it
isn't always super specific. You named things like physical abuse
sexual abuse, which can get hairy, but also those are
(18:10):
categories that can feel a little bit easier to define,
so tangible they're like behavioral, whereas spiritual, emotional psychological are
not so specific to every time someone punches you in
the face, like that's physically abuses. We know that, we
know it, we get it. We can like put a
(18:30):
picture on that definition of a behavior that works pretty
much every time. I mean, I guess unless you're are boxing,
it's not abuse, but there's a context. We get it.
But things like emotional, psychological, spiritual, like they get kind
of confusing. But I think some of the things that
might come up for me, are like an explit explicit
(18:55):
manipulation of power of resource, Like if someone has a
different kind of resource than you, maybe that's literally a
physical They're bigger than you, they're stronger than you, um,
they make more money than you. They're in a cultural
position that's higher than you, like a male versus a woman,
or a boss versus an employee, a parent versus a child,
(19:17):
those different kind of advantages or privileges or resources, and
they are specifically using those kind of resources to cause
harm to I think that's a person to cause harm
because I think about like the word manipulation and the
word manipulate, like I can manipulate somebody, But am I
(19:39):
being abusive? Maybe not? And I even as like a therapist,
there could be an argument for sometimes I have an
idea of where I want to go with somebody, but
I'm going to kind of like scaffold them there and
and kind of like create a process that lets them
get there on their own. And yeah, would I be
manipulating the experience work because I have a knowledge or
(20:02):
or expertise or something like that, But in no way
am I doing that in order to control the person
long term? Right? So like, I'm actually trying to give
them more freedom, and I'm not trying to harm them.
I'm trying to help them. So I think that where
somebody's coming from is really important. Now, if you're good
at manipulating, you can manipulate somebody's experience of being manipulated.
(20:22):
So you're right, it gets really hairy. But I think
it's important to look at, like what is the gain
of the person who is doing the manipulation. I get
no in my own life gain from a client, getting
to ex point, like that's that gain is for them
versus if I am in a position of power in
(20:43):
a church leadership role, and I might gain I've never
been in this role, but like I might gain a
larger following that might lead to money or notoriety, which
might lead to more avenues for me to have a
certain agenda that I want, Like think about politically, like, um,
I've might be pushing a certain agenda to get certain things,
and those feel very different to me. I think about
(21:05):
words like abuse are health like if we're putting it
next to addiction, so people um misuse and unhealthy relationships
with substances or with food or right, but people are
very very cautious to call those things an addiction unless
they are really high level disruptive to their lives. So
(21:29):
I think even abuse, you would want to look at
the consequences of the abuse that's happening to you. What's happened?
You know, what are the impacts on my life? Am
I literally not pursuing things that are good for me
or healthy for me? Am I isolated from my community,
from my friends, from my family? Have I abandoned jobs
(21:50):
and don't have my own financial kind of independence or security?
Am I becoming depressed? You know? Have I needed to
seek mental health, treat meant or medication or so? I
think you can look at like the severity of the
impact on the person who's being abused, and that would
really start to qualify this is abuse, you know what.
(22:14):
I like that descriptor because I think a lot of
people don't want to classify their behaviors when it comes
to substances like that as abuse at all, and so
they might say like, oh, no, that's not abuse, But
then like, wait is saying it is affecting X y Z. Yeah.
I just like the way that that is actually giving
you more what's the word responsibility? Yeah, that's the difference, right,
(22:39):
And this is where again with all sensitivity, but we're humans,
and it might feel a little bit easier to name
a person as abusive instead of my relationship with a
substance abusive, because then who's the culprit? Oh my god,
the other person feels like the culprit instead of me,
(22:59):
And I'm only one who can change my relationship with
the substance, you know, like that's not a living, breathing thing,
so it feels a lot harder to reckon with that. Yeah,
that's yeah, that's a whole responsibility. And we've even talked
about having a conversation on here about just like being
a victim, and like, I think that I'm not gonna
We're not gonna go down this rabbit hole. But I
(23:19):
have to say this because it's just on my head
and I cannot. We think that we don't want to
be victims, and I think depending everybody has their own experience,
but there is also this large experience of we don't
want to be called victims. But it's actually feels nice
in certain situations to play a victim role because the
responsibility is then taken away from us. I say that
(23:42):
with many grains of salt, because a lot of people
do become victims and they don't choose that at all,
And it's actually really hard for some people to acknowledge
that they've been a victim of something. But it's interesting
of like what kind of victimhood do we want? I
don't want to be a victim of X y Z,
but I will play this role of a victim all
day long in my life. So that's a whole another podcast.
(24:05):
But it goes with responsibility. So okay, if we're now
identifying that there's more to it than just this is
not good, so now it's abuse or this is manipulative,
so now it's abuse. Lying right, we just go we
pocket them all and makes a critical remark to me,
(24:25):
that's abuse, Like, we can't go that far in generalization.
That's not that's not really sifting things out well enough.
We'll think about like even the responsibility of a UM
supervisor or boss or I mean again, leader, there still
needs to be an ability to have critical conversations or
(24:49):
rather conversations with criticism in them. We need to be
able to give feedback. We need to be able to express, hey,
this was not right, this is not okay, and we
need to be able to see that as the people
that might have a leader above us. But a lot
of times I think, and maybe it is twofold, has
to do with us not being properly trained on how
to give feedback and also trained on how to receive feedback.
(25:12):
Because feedback a lot of times, if it is like
criticism of some sort, which is doesn't mean it's bad,
it feels icky, at least it does to me. And
if I can disregard somebody's critical feedback of me by
the way that they gave it to me and say
that was manipulative or abusive or whatever, again, it takes
(25:34):
the responsibility for me to actually look at my behavior
and and my work and I'm just like, oh, I
get to disregard that. That's not to say that the
person gave the criticism to you. Well, so there's other
ways to say, Hey, my boss might not be abusive,
but maybe he was this, or maybe she was this,
or maybe the way she gave me the feedback was this,
(25:54):
And so I want to kind of talk about the
other ways we can talk about that. And let's say
you have a relationship and it could be any kind
of relationship, romantic, any kind of family relationship, a boss,
and those relationships maybe are super unhealthy. Unhealth doesn't have
to equal abusive, it can be other things. So I
want to talk about those other things that we can
(26:15):
kind of use to describe things. Yeah, so a great
word is dysfunctional or harmful. Like someone maybe said something
to me that felt harmful. Maybe even the boss said
it in a really crappy way, you know, maybe they
were abrupt and didn't offer like a little compliment sandwich
on the other side of it, or maybe they said
(26:38):
it with some judgmental words. Like the specific words that
they use were like judgmental towards my character, like you've
been really lazy about X projects. And that's not super
constructive feedback, because if you were a boss, you would
need to name what that means. You would want to
talk about, like, hey, you have not turned X and
(27:00):
on time this many times and if you continue to
behave that way, then you're not gonna be able to
work here. Like that might not feel good to hear.
But also if someone calls me lazy, I might say
that's harmful. I'm not a lazy person, you know, that's
not who I am that's an assaulting of my character.
So again, like that would be the difference between like
a not healthy, harmful, or dysfunctional way of communicating something
(27:23):
to someone that wasn't versus abusive. Would be like I
did turn everything out on time, and my boss came
to me and says, if you don't do X, Y
and Z by the end of the week, then you're fired.
And that's not a part of my job description. And
that's not like those are abusive natures where I'm threatening
your livelihood and it's not in the nature of our
(27:44):
agreed upon like about like using any kind of black mail,
or like holding things above your head, or like the
words threatening and putting you in a place where like
you don't actually get to even if you did everything correctly,
you can't win. If you disagree with them, you can't win.
If you agree with them, you can't win. That feels
(28:05):
very different asking you to basically to meet standards that
are not in the contract of the like the natural
original contract of the relationship. You also used the word
when we're talking earlier, like you can be injured in
a relationship, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you were
a victim of abuse. And I don't mean that in
(28:25):
the physical way, of course. So can you talk about
like an emotional spiritual injury? Yeah, I think you know,
people can like here's a really common went like ghosting someone.
Oh my gosh. Yes, you like if you're friends or
romantic interest. If you were someone was talking to you
(28:47):
and then all of a sudden they didn't they stopped,
they didn't show up, they didn't answer your text. This
is not respectful way to treat you beings. I agree
with that. I think if we're really respecting ble as people,
than we could just say what we need to say
and be upfront and say, hey, I'm not interested in
continuing to talk to you for that may be the
(29:09):
end of the sentence. You might give some reasons. Who
knows is disrespectful. It's certainly hurts. It injures my feelings,
my sense of dignity as a human being, that I
wasn't honored or thought of to be treated in a
more respectful way. And you know, just piecing out is
not necessarily an abuse that I'm oppressed by that I
(29:34):
now have like significant loss to to my needs being
able to be met, to the resources that I need
to have access to in my life. So it's a
crappy way to behave and it's also not like think
about too like in a an emotional, psychologically, or spiritually
(29:55):
abusive experience, and I and more, my head is going
right now I'm thinking about like occult. My belief system
is slowly being changed about myself, my abilities, my capabilities,
and the same with that example with the boss of like,
then I'm going to constantly being doing like I can
never do anything right, Like I'm gonna eventually think, well,
this is my fault. He said, he told me exactly
(30:16):
what I need to do and I didn't do it correctly,
and like because they're so convincing and what they're saying,
I told you to do this, even though like you're like,
I didn't think that you said to do that, but
I guess you did because you're so convincing of it.
And there's not in writing anywhere, but in an abusive
relationship like that, when you're in it, when you actually
(30:38):
really are in and you're feeling the effects of it,
you do change the way you think about yourself, your value,
your worth, you mentioning like my resources and my ability
to get my needs met well, like in an abusive
relationship like that. I think it's very confusing for people
who have never been in one of those. But a
lot of times you stay in them because there's that
part that's like, well, if I leave this, and I
won't be able to get my needs met elsewhere. Think
(30:59):
about spiritual if you leave a spiritual group, like there
might be um, these beliefs that you're now holding onto
that if you do X, y Z, your higher power
will you'll be punished in some way because of that,
whether you're gonna be paid pain for that now or
in your afterlife. And so that's very different than somebody
being a jerk or somebody displaying poor behavior towards you,
(31:23):
or somebody again being a mean feels like not a
good enough word, but like yeah, like somebody being like
super mean and hurting your feelings and maybe having you
question I'm never I'm never enough or I'm not good
enough for this person. But a lot of times that
in dating circles has more to do with our just
(31:47):
own belief system outside these people. Yeah, what the baggage,
for lack of better word, that I brought into this
versus what I picked up all was in it, and
we have a responsibility. And I did do a whole
episode on cults, and I found it fascinating because I
did a deep dive on brainwashing and whether it's a
(32:07):
real thing, and there's no way to actually measure it,
so it's always going to be a question. And over
and over, I read like, it's so hard to really
actually hold onto the idea that we can be brainwashed,
because to be brainwashed, you have to have some desire
to believe what it is that you're in quotes choosing
to believe. And so if I come into a relationship
(32:30):
with a really damaged sense of self that believes that
to be good and to be worthy, I have to
have the approval of um, these kind of men, are
these kind of women or whatever I'm holding onto that
I have a desire to hold onto that belief for
whatever reason. Even I would call it an attachment more
(32:52):
than it's that's probably a better Yeah, totally, even are
like ikey weird beliefs. We talked about this too, this
secondary gain, there's something you get, even if it feels
weird to admit a lot of times when we're repeating
behaviors like that, or we're holding onto these or become
attached to these beliefs about ourselves. We get something out
of it, even if it's like doesn't really make logical sense. Yeah.
(33:16):
A good one to always I think that people can
understand really easily and that it's quick and easy is
if I'm getting critical criticism and that kind of treatment
from someone as a like natural part of the relationship,
I kind of I'm drawn to someone who like you know,
doesn't answer me, neglect that kind of thing, there's kind
of behaviors. Then if I was had a predisposition in
(33:39):
my attachment development to that's how I that's the only
attention I got was negative attention, then that's why might
I have an attachment to that sort of role that
sort of if I had an experience of not getting
you know, of a lot of neglect there, I am like,
that's how I know how to relate to people. That's
the role that I know how to play in relationships.
(34:01):
So I'm going to be with someone likely who isn't
very attentive and maybe ignores and forgets and doesn't show
up and doesn't answer, which, again, there's like a lot
of nuance in this because there could be both going
on to like, I have this part of me that's
attached to this belief system. And also maybe there are
people that are abusive that also find themselves abusing people
(34:23):
with those types of attachments. So I say that just
so you guys know, we're not even saying this is
a this or this like you have to do a
lot of your own introspection, hopefully talking if you're experiencing
any of this stuff with somebody who can help you,
like a professional therapist, what have you. But really what
I want you guys to hear in all of this
(34:45):
is that there's more language that might help you more
accurately describe your experience. And there's a point to that,
and so why does that matter? We could go into
the abandoned mint word and then kind of answer that
on the back end of both, because I think it
(35:07):
would make sense of all of it. Okay, so you're
talking about, you know, calling it, calling it different things,
finding different language, and why something why we don't always
want to call certain harmful behaviors abuse, And it was
something we were talking about before, even in the victimization
and the roles and the ways we get into things
and what's the impact that it has on us. It
(35:29):
made me think about the abandonment word, and this comes up.
You and I think both work with adults only I
don't think either of us work with children. So this
is something we have probably more like of an encounter
specifically to this side of the issue than if people
were working with children. So you know, we'll hear clients
say something like so and so abandoned me, or I'm
(35:51):
afraid of being abandoned by my spouse or whoever I'm
in a relationship with my friend, and it's such a
important thing to start to break down for that person.
And similarly to I think using words like abuse abandonment,
it really puts the person who's on the other side
(36:12):
of the experience in a lower level position. It puts
you in the victim position. It puts you in the
stuck place, It puts you in the powerless, helpless place.
If those words are accurate, there is a level of
reality and impact on the person experiencing them that's really
(36:33):
really severe. If you have been abused by a partner
who was stronger than you physically and physically abused you
or sexually assaulted you, you were helpless. They had a
power over that they used against you to harm you.
(36:54):
If you were a child and your dad and mom
got a divorce and you saw your dad once a year,
you were abandoned by your father. He wasn't there to
give you the care that a father role. You're supposed
to have two parents, that's part of the deal, So
(37:14):
you don't have one. You've a loss, you've been abandoned
in those needs that can only be met by one
of the two caregivers you were given is not going
to be met. So that's like a really big deal.
That's like a huge position to be put in, of helplessness,
of loss of I can't get myself what I need.
I can't, yeah, keep myself, I say, that's key, the helplessness, powerlessness.
(37:39):
I can't I don't have the ability to give myself
what I needed. That's right. And if we put our
like use words like I was abused or I was abandoned,
and we weren't actually completely at a loss for the
ability to get what we needed even amidst the injury.
You can have an injury amidst the ending of the relationship.
(38:05):
Then and if I could have gotten myself some of
the things I needed, if I still could you know,
provide finances, food, shelter for myself. If I could still
have friends or people that I could pick up the
phone and call and utilize those things, that's really important
for me to be connected with those things. Those are
the things that will keep me afloat. And when we
(38:29):
put ourselves under a category of abandonment, then we start
to feel that, you know, it becomes a self fulfilling
prophecy of like, I don't I'm helpless. I can't care
for myself because I was dependent upon this person to
do that, and it creates a story of powerlessness and
helplessness when really you actually do have the ability to
(38:49):
offer yourself or find it in some way what you need.
That whole thing that you just said is so important.
I think that's what I wanted to be expressed in
this because sometimes I do feel like, oh, I don't
want to invalidate somebody's experience, But it's not so much
about invalidating. Invalidating your experience is actually really invalidating to
(39:11):
you and your resources, your abilities, your relationships. When you
find yourself because of these words in a position where
you aren't actually in Yeah, okay, that's so important because
our goal as therapists empowerment, right, so people believe in themselves,
for people to find that their internal and external resources
to give themselves everything they need in their lives. Like,
(39:33):
that's what we want. So when when there's any kind
of block, whether it's real or perceived, to your finding
that in your life, then we want to try to
move those things out of the way. And if it's
a perception, then we're going to try to bust that
apart with you. So you can be left in a
relationship and that can hurt so bad, that can be
(39:54):
such a big injury and lost to you, and it
does not leave you helpless. Might feel that way, right, absolutely,
you get feelings are feelings about facts, they're they're an experience.
Like in the I think it's a Webster dictionary, there's
I looked up the definition of abandoned and it says
left without needed protection, care or support, for example in
(40:21):
abandoned Babies really says that literally says that, so you
need if you're in a state of needing care. So
there are some adults who would fit into this category.
If you were dependent, you were part of a vulnerable population,
you have a disability of some kind where you're dependent
on people to care for you in some way. That
(40:41):
can be mental, emotional, or physical. You are a child,
You're a dependent so you absolutely need people to give
you protection, care and support. Yeah, if I was, Because
I think this happens a lot. And when you said
I have a fear of being an abandoned, A lot
of that comes up in romantic relationships. It can come
(41:04):
up in other relationships as well, but that's the big
one that I hear a lot, and I think it's
one thing if like, let's say I am diagnosed with
something life threatening disease. Let's call it cancer for now,
just because that's easy one um to pull up in
my memory, not that I have a memory of being
diagnessed with cancer for you guys, get what I'm saying. Anyway,
(41:26):
So I get diagnosed with cancer, and I am dependent
on my spouse for um, maybe finances or health insurance
and maybe just like I need home care, and he's
very much the person that does that. And let's say
he goes to work one day and he never comes
back and I never hear from again. That feels like abandonment,
right absolutely. That feels different than I'm in a relationship
(41:50):
with somebody and we're both fully functional human adults. To
make this easy, let's say we even both have jobs
that allow us to be financially independent from each other.
But let's say we're together for ten years and I
love this person dearly, and one day he comes home
and he's like, I am not in love with you anymore.
(42:10):
I'm I'm actually going to move out this week. That
is going to hurt. I mean, I can't even I
don't even want to think about that happening, because that's
gonna hurt so bad. And I might feel like my
world is falling apart, and I very much might feel
abandoned by this person because we created this life together
and he's leaving me. I have not abandoned by him.
(42:31):
He's leaving me. What I want to go back to
is what Tara said is the importance of the difference
is I might feel in that moment powerless and helpless,
and I do have the ability to get my needs met.
But the more I believe that I'm powerless and helpless,
the less likely I am to actually get my needs met.
And so it creates that self fulfilling prophecy. So I
(42:53):
hope those examples. What I'm not doing is comparing the
impact that those might have in thetly on somebody, because
let's say, if I had cancer in my husband, who
knows how I might feel emotionally, I might be like
that ass whole, like I know whatever, And they're different.
So I don't want to compare the emotional impact and
experience of those, but I do want to just separate
(43:14):
the two so we can Those are two dramatic examples,
so you guys can see kind of the difference and
why the difference is important. Yeah, I was thinking about
the phrase feeling abandoned. I mean, it's interesting we usually
say that we say I felt abandoned rather than I
was abandoned. Yeah, I mean I think sometimes we might
when we're just talking kind of without thought, but it
(43:37):
does Actually that might even be more accurate to say
I feel if you're in the situation where you are
not completely unable to meet your own needs as an
independent adult, then you know, I mean, ultimately, I think
what you would what it sounds like to me, is
you feel incredible loss. Yeah, And like I think that
(44:00):
we all well I can't say we all, but I
know for me, I've had an experience where I felt
abandoned by a person I was in a relationship with
to the point where like I had to stay at
my parents for a period of time, it was very
hard for me to do a lot of daily life tasks,
and the fact that I was able to actually with
(44:20):
the help of community, because I'm I do have people
and even if I have to, even if I need
to call upon other resources because I've lost I had
a loss this person that fulfilled these needs of mine.
I might have to fill those in different ways, but
I have the ability to go get those filled rather
than like you said, a child whose dad abandoned them, like, okay,
(44:44):
well that's their dad, and yeah, let's not there are
people that might come in eventually. You can't get another
biological father. You can get father figure, you can get
somebody that is very important to you and helps you
in those ways, but you can't get another biological father.
So yeah, that's a loss. So I think that, like
we've had those experiences where it's felt like I will
(45:05):
I mean, I remember googling it is so filed. I'm
sure you have experiences like this where like so wild
when you look back when you were in such a
like highly volatile emotional state. The things that as a therapist,
I was googling, like I'm not going to say them
because they don't feel like it's necessary. They thinks I
was googling about this relationship and ending. I mean, I
(45:28):
thought my world was never going to be the same,
and I'm okay, yeah, yeah, And I think what what
that word is pointing you towards is you're feeling lost.
You're probably feeling afraid. So like, what am I afraid
of right now? I might be afraid that I won't
have this kind of connection or love or support or
(45:51):
whatever in my life. Again, that might be the fear.
Like when I think about that's what it is, there's
a core fear going on there that I'm like, ah,
oh no, did ah right. So it gives you insight
into you might say, I lost this person and now
here's what I'm afraid of. Now here are the things
I'm grieving. That is also I think other words to you,
(46:14):
Like we were talking about finding other words for abandonment,
feeling loss, it's feeling fear, it's feeling lonely. Yeah, and
they heart going back when we look at things as
feelings because that's in that moment. What that is, Well,
our feelings can lead us to like needs. Right, So
if I'm afraid that I'm never going to connect with
(46:34):
somebody in this way again, or I'm afraid that I
whatever nobody else will love me, so that will lead
you to a need in that need might be different
for you from me. It was that like, there are
people in my life still that value me and see
me as worthy and would want me in their life
even when I mess up. And so if we can
actually look at things as they are and get down
(46:57):
to the feeling part of them, that actually leads us
where we need to go, So then we actually don't
become those people who literally feel like we're help us
and fulfilled that idea of I'm going to be in
this space forever. So okay, this is I feel like
there might be more things for you to say too,
but I feel like what I want to say over
(47:20):
and over again, and I'm just going to say it
one more time, is that I want you guys to
hear that this conversation that we're having is one that's
meant to more empower then um invalidate your experience, and
so you might be listening to this, and you very
much might have been abandoned. You very much might have
been abused what in whatever way you have been And
(47:43):
so I don't want you to say because we're saying,
I don't want you to hear that, because we're saying
not everything we initially think is abuse and abandonment is
that might still be your experience. We're just trying to
help give more language that you guys can accurately look
at and and your experience and get what you need.
Anything else you want to say here. This was very
(48:04):
helpful for me personally. I think it's great. I was
thinking about like some of the ambiguous abandonment sort of
places like because when we say like dependent and have
the capability to get your own needs, mat that can
get a little you can get, you can get hairy.
I was thinking about like an adult, you know, who's
maybe still financially dependent upon their parents, and their parents
(48:29):
all of a sudden cut them off and it gets
real sticky, right, because it's like, obviously there's a way
of going about that that I think is a healthy
way of going about that. If your parents are and
you're like, I gotta set boundaries I'm not helping my
child grow. They need to go be responsible and independent,
and I've got to make changes. There's a way to
(48:50):
go about that. I think that would be most appropriate,
And in them doing that, I think ultimately hopefully there's
enough of of a bridge of them saying I want
to move you out of dependence upon me into dependence
upon yourself. Hopefully you would do it that way, and
you probably at whatever level had happened where they were like,
(49:12):
we're not doing this anymore. Let's say they were had
some grace and they were like, by the end of
the month, you can't live here rent free anymore. Okay.
Then by the end of the month or whatever amount
of days I have, if as long as like my
capabilities work inside my body and my brain, like I'm
gonna go get a job, it might not be the
(49:34):
job you really want to get, absolutely okay. So I'm
glad you said that's actually really helpful for everybody, because
when you said that, my initial thought was a lot
of times when there is somebody who's struggling with addiction
of any kind, there is a cut off, and very
often I've experienced with families and clients and friends where
(49:55):
that cut off was the thing that actually really helped
them to and it may have been the hardest thing
in the world to do, and there might have been
a period of time where the person cut off was
piste off, felt abandoned all of the things. And it
is an attempt to not enable somebody anymore. And so
that's a very extreme example. But what you're talking about
(50:17):
two is like, yeah, there might be times where we've
noticed that we've enabled friends or family members or whoever
it is, and we have a responsibility to not just
allow the same behavior to happen and then just be
annoyed by it even though we're part of the process.
So there's a way to go about that. Hey, let's
actually look at a plan to help you get on
(50:39):
your feet. I think what can be really when you're
in it, When you're the person who's then having to
make changes, whether it's I have to get that job
that I don't want, it's really easy to go to
that place of like I'm a victim of the their
poor behavior and their poor choices, and my mom kicked
me out or my dad kicked me out or right whatever,
when really it's about I don't want to be responsible
(51:00):
for my life because being an adult is hard and
sometimes we have to get jobs we don't want to
work and they're not fun and they feel like work.
And I think that has a lot to do with
the fact that we put out there that your job
shouldn't feel like work. When work is work, and sometimes
you like it, sometimes you don't. But I think that's
a huge part of that process. It's like, I don't
want to take responsibility. And also with that because everything
(51:24):
is nuanced when you're you've lived this life of parents
doing everything for you, and all of a sudden they're like,
we're gonna make a plan. That's jolting. That's right, Like
you kind of set me up for this, right, And
there's responsibility on both ends. There are that there is.
I think that that's real. That doesn't mean yeah, just
because it isn't abandonment and you don't have resources that
(51:45):
you need to now tap into that you haven't been,
it doesn't mean that they don't have some could ability
in getting all the build up to that point. So
you know, people are doing their best. Hopefully when they
want to correct it, they can do it with some
of that awareness, and if it can't, then your life
(52:06):
is up like getting like if someone else is this
is a problem with being in a dependent situation. If
you have the resources not to do that in life,
it leaves you vulnerable. It leaves you vulnerable to not
having the things that you need when you need them,
if you aren't practiced at really getting your needs met
(52:30):
through your own resources, through your own ways. And you know,
there's all kinds of nuances about finances and marriages and
all that stuff. We have courts, thankfully to like protect
people with those real life issues. That's why I think
we have a legal system around marriage and stuff like
that is is because that's a real thing. And we
don't want women who are vulnerable to be abandoned and
(52:51):
not you know, because they were raising their children and
not making the money all that stuff. So there are
things that are that do acknowledge the dynamics of that
and in as many ways as possible. If if we
are really engaging in our own autonomy and our own agency,
then we're not so vulnerable to feeling like, oh no,
(53:12):
oh no, I'm abandoned. Um, Like, if if we're thinking
about even my own self esteem, if I'm doing a
lot of stuff to build my sense of value in
my own little world with other friends, with other activities,
with meditation, with therapy. Then when I lose a relationship
like a partner, I'm probably not going to feel so
(53:33):
abandoned because that part of my esteem and value has
already been propped up with lots of other resources that
I'm using to fill that part of myself, so I
won't feel like that drastic it's all that sucked out
of my life. Now good add into that and again
here that this is so nuanced, and take this information
and then tease through it like it doesn't have to.
(53:55):
I'm assuming we didn't lay out your exact experience, because
how could we do that, because every person is so different.
So you can look at it with people that feel
safe to you, whether that is a therapist or somebody
in your life. If you're trying to figure out how
to identify your own experiences. Thank you for having this conversation.
Stay tuned, because you're going to have a similar conversation
(54:16):
about some other mental health things that have been a
little bit skewed in our current pop culture, and that
will be I think in two weeks of Stay tuned.
It might be a fun game if you guys could
guess what they are actually, let's play that game. So
if you have an idea of some other things, or
you have an experience of some other things that have
(54:38):
been skewed um, whether the things that you actually experience
and you you see a lot in pop culture and
now and it's become a little bit harmful or painful
for you to see. Or if there are things that
you just see put over and over and you're like,
this can't be what that means. It seems way too
common or or too easily thrown out in the world.
Let us know what you think our next couple of things.
(55:00):
We're going to dive into our You can email it
to me or you can DM me. But the problem
with DM is I don't always see it. But you
could play that game. You could roll those dice. But
if you want to email, it's Catherine at you Need
Therapy podcast dot com, and on Instagram it's at cat
dot de fata and at you Need Therapy Podcast. Also,
if you just have questions or you want to lay
(55:21):
out an experience and you kind of want to ask
some questions about that experience, you can send that to
my email. I will say it's not really possible for
us to read an email about your experience and then
be like this was this and this was that, because
there are so many details that you can't put an
email and would not be inappropriate to put an email.
(55:41):
And we're also not in a relationship which I can
give you mental health care over a podcast, So you
can give us an example or an experience, and you
might want to hear our thoughts and what questions we
might ask those that might be something we could do.
I'm open to that, but I definitely want to know
what you guys think. The next a little bit topics
we're gonna talk about are so that will be in
two weeks. We have time to send those in. Thank you, Tara,
(56:06):
thanks Cat, anything else you would like to say. Just
be easy on yourself with understanding these things. And also,
everybody has permission to call things whatever they want to
call them at the end of the day, whatever word
feels like the one you need for where you are
in your own process. Because I think, like we talked
about before, some people need to get to the place
(56:27):
where they call something abuse because they need to get
honest about how harmful and truly oppressive something was in
their life and the fact that it really did mess
their insides up and they need to give themselves permission
to work on that. So uh well that's the other side. Yeah,
and thanks for saying that, because everybody is at a
(56:48):
different place in their journey, because we all have such
different experiences of literally everything. So what I might not
call something, somebody might call and they might change that,
and I might change that later in my life as
I've rediscovered certain things. But I think just having the
ability what we're doing again and power. We're trying to
(57:09):
give you more information and we're trying to give you
more options so that you can actually describe your experience
with what it feels like to you rather than with
the little options that you know, going back to that
when you're a little somebody's mean, but really what you
mean later in life might be like they were selfish.
So that's what we're trying to do. We're not trying
to tell you what to do. We're trying to give
(57:29):
you more information so you can make it more informed
decisions on your in life. So thank you and we'll
be back in two weeks. Okay, Thanks
Hi guys, and welcome to a brand new episode of
You Need Therapy Podcast. My name is Kat and I
am the host. Welcome everybody, and welcome to people who
are new. Glad you're here. Like the usual, I like
to give a little disclaimer at the top of every
episode that although I am a therapist and we're talking
about some mental health things, um and things that you
(00:31):
might talk about in therapy, this podcast does not serve
as a replacement for mental health services or a substitute
for actual therapy. But it might help you get to
where you need to go. It might help, um you
find a therapist or find something you want to actually
go to therapy forre so um, or it might not
do any of those things, and you might just like
this podcast. That's also fine. Anyway, now that we have
(00:53):
that out of the way, I am pretty excited about
I feel like I say that all the time, which
I do because I am excited a lot about the
episodes that I put out. But I'm specifically excited about
this episode slash episodes because I had my friend Tara
Booker here and I met her and we talked about
(01:15):
this in the episode. So I won't go too long
winded into it. But I met her working at a
treatment center years ago when I was an intern, and
then I got a job there, and so I've known
her for a really long time. I've known her for
almost the entirety of my career as a therapist, and
she's pretty good at what she does. She has been
on the podcast before. UM, we've talked about spirituality together,
(01:37):
We've talked about trauma in general together. We've talked about
a couple of things, and we started talking about stuff
that we could do together more in ways that she
could actually help on the podcast more often, because she
does have one away with words when it comes to
mental health and therapy in general. And also she's an
(01:57):
expert expert therapist, like she's very good and anyway, so
she came over to record a couple episodes about a
couple of different things and what happened, which eventually you'll
hear it happen live on the on the podcast. UM,
I think in not this episode, but another one is
(02:18):
we decided that there is so much in what we're
talking about that it actually deserves to be kind of
a mini series. And what we do in this episode
and what we're going to continue to do is we
talk about some terms, some that just have to do
with mental health and some that are actual clinical terms.
We talk about them, we talk about kind of how
(02:40):
they've been misconstrued in popular culture and what they really
might mean. And it's a way for us to help
kind of give you guys more language to describe the
experiences that you're going through or having or seen. So
we don't use words that mean one thing for blink,
get statements or or experiences that actually means something else.
(03:04):
And so I'm really excited because there's a ton of
stuff that we can talk about. And the reason that
we're actually going to make this into a series is
in the second episode we were actually recording together, I
felt like I was like rushing it because I wanted
to get through a couple of things, and I was like,
wait a second, I don't really want to rush this,
because rushing this is what has got us kind of
(03:25):
in this place in the first place, this place where
we're not really clear on what things mean, but we
kind of might know enough. So we're just going to
use this word, or we're gonna um categorize this as this,
or we're not going to care that much about the
real meaning of this word, because it kind of fits
for this, and there's some harm being done to other people,
(03:46):
and there's some harm being done, I think, to ourselves
because we don't actually know what we're experiencing. So I'm
excited because this is really a series about empowering us
and giving us more language and more understanding about things
that we might be going through or our friends and
neighbors might be going through. So all that to let
you know that this is not just the beginning or
(04:08):
the only episode I have with Tara. This is actually
the beginning of um many episodes that I am going
to be having with her in the next couple of
weeks slash months. So I hope you like her, because
she will be back and she'll be back again. And
I just want to say thank you Tara for doing this,
because she does this because she loves actually being helpful,
(04:31):
which is really nice coming from a therapist, because that's
kind of our job is to be helpful in some way.
So thank you for taking the time to do this,
and thank you for being just like so brilliant at
what you you do and having such good language and
just away with explaining and expressing things that I know
I can get tripped up with because I get a
(04:51):
little bit anxious. Even on this podcast, even though it's
my own I get anxious kind of talking about certain
things because I want to make sure that I'm I'm
saying what I mean um and meaning what I say,
And sometimes this stuff is just a little bit tricky
and convoluted and very nuanced. So I hope you like this, Tara,
Thank you for being here and being a part of this,
(05:14):
and get excited for more conversations like this one with Tara.
If you have any questions, concerns, thoughts, feedback, you can
send up to me Catherine You Need Therapy podcast dot com.
But for now, I hope you just dive into this
episode and learn something because I know that I learned
something talking to Tara this day. So here to my
(05:34):
conversation with Tara Booker. All right, guys, welcome back to
a new episode of You Need Therapy Podcast. I have
a what do we call this your third time there?
Maybe fourth time, because you've been on some couch talks.
I have a repeating guest. You might be my most
frequent guest. I can't wait to see what I get
(05:57):
for I haven't thought about that yet. But terror Booker
is here, and she is somebody that I met. If
you haven't heard the episodes with her before we met,
but this beyond two thou so, yeah, that's six seven,
eight years ago. Okay, So she's also a licensed therapist.
(06:17):
Year background is clinical social work, which really isn't that different.
We want to literally do the same thing. Yeah, So
she's here because I want to talk about and you
guys have heard me talk about this kind of stuff before,
but now it's nice to be here with another therapist
talking about this and getting her perspective. But we're going
to have a couple of conversations about some common misconceptions
(06:42):
in the mental health world. And like I've discussed before,
I think because we have more access to information, which
is a great thing, but we have more ways of
getting information out, whether that's through social media or podcasts
like this one, or there's more people writing books. It's
just we're trying to kind of reduce the stigma that
(07:02):
has been connected to mental health. But at the same time,
because we're getting more information and it's more I think,
from my perspective, generalized and oversimplified, we get a little confused,
and that is for the most part, nobody's malicious fault.
It's just something that happens. And so we're going to
(07:23):
talk about a couple of different things. Um, and then
we're going to actually break this into two parts. So
we're gonna do two of the things, which might end
up being like a lot of things under the things.
And then, UM, we're just gonna give you more information
and more language that might help you more accurately understand
or describe the things that you've been through, whether you
(07:45):
see or that your family and friends go through. Let's
do it. I want the audience to be like, Okay, cool,
we're going to fill in. Okay. So the first thing
we're gonna talk about, which is very overarching, is the
reality of it abuses, whether that's emotional abuse or psychological
(08:06):
abuse or spiritual abuse. I think I hear that word,
and I think I use that word a lot, and
you know, sometimes I might use it in the wrong way,
but I hear that word more than I've ever heard
that word. I feel like it used to be something
that and not to say this doesn't still happen, but
it used to be something that people didn't want to
(08:27):
use that word, and it was like, no, that's my
experience as a therapist. I think actually in the beginning,
we would work with clients and in my head a bit,
oh wow, this person has gone through a lot of abuse,
and that word was not wanted in that person's vocabulary.
But now I feel like I see, not even just
with my clients, it's more just in the world, every
(08:49):
other description of not great behavior is abusive. And so
I want to hear you and hear your thoughts on
how you've seen that kind of like abuse, the word
kind of transform in the past couple of years, and
then we can dive into like, okay, so what's abuse,
and then if it's not abuse, what is it? Yeah,
(09:10):
it's I mean this obviously we talked about this, but
it's such a delicate topic, right because I think what
happens with all things that we are like under educated,
or are neglecting as a culture, or are ignoring and
non addressing, like mental health has been for a long
time in Western society, then we do an overcorrection, We
(09:33):
like swing to the other end of the pendulum with
most things. Right, So it's like whatever rights issues that
were you know, denied it's like I'm swinging way over
here to where, well, specifically mental health, Like we didn't
talk about it. It was something that was taboo, stigmatized,
a bad thing or not a real thing, or all
(09:54):
the things that people would use. And then we swing
to the other side. People are like, no, it's real.
I'm making a stand. And I feel that's similar, like
abuse goes in that category where we didn't talk about
abuse of things people in power and people who were
oppressed and victimized, very neglected, and most population to experience
(10:15):
that because they're vulnerable populations, their marginalized populations for the
most part, you know, people of color, women, poor, impoverished people.
So people aren't voicing those people's issues. And so it's
like we swing to the other side and say everything,
you know, this is abuse. We're calling it abuse. This
is an issue, this is a problem, this is a problem.
(10:35):
That's a good way of describing it and painting the picture.
Because I was listening to talk about this podcast all
the time, the Man Enough podcast. I was listening to
the it's actually I think maybe this isn't like the
intro to their new season or their like episode intro,
but they talk about how somebody. The whole podcast is
about like how to like equality and undefining this like
(10:59):
very strange masculine, like this is the whatever. So one
of the hosts says, like, I think women are better,
and one of the other hosts says, well, no, that's
still not equality. That's not really what we're fighting for.
That's not really what we're working for. Going that, okay,
men are now under women does not fix the problem
(11:19):
that women feel like they're less than compared to men.
And that's kind of like the same thing. It's like
you're swinging this pendulum and it's like, wait a second,
we needed to put that kind of in the center.
We don't need to be on um one side or
the other. So where mental health was like taboo, now
it's like if you go to therapy, you just better
wear a sign on your forehead that says I go
(11:40):
to therapy, when like you could. But that doesn't mean
that that you have to or you need to. Yeah,
And I think that is actually a natural part of change.
People who get sober, for instance, right, it's like they'se
change their whole world around. I. I can't do any
of these things. I live in this type box and
then they find their way to a middle as you
(12:01):
get better, and like, I think all change has to
kind of happen that way, where we have to swing
really hard out of something dysfunctional to kind of get
it out of our system and to normalize it. And
then hopefully this is a conversation because we've been a
few years in I like mental health is way more
open that we are, even us therapists starting to see
(12:21):
we need to come back to the middle and so
we can hopefully be a part of like Okay, yes,
now we're open about it, and let's put it in
its right place and its right size culturally, so okay,
the wrong way. Yeah, Okay, listen up if you've been
having these conversations with me too about when it comes
to like recovery, specifically in disorder recovery, because there's a
(12:43):
lot of confusion with that right now too, because the
anti diet culture all that movement has become very very
loud where it's also swinging the other way and it's
confusing people who are in their own recovery process that
then once they get in that for a while and
they're like, okay, wait a second, now I don't know,
if I'm making decisions because I have to be anti
(13:04):
diet culture, if I'm making decisions because I'm listening to
my body. And that's the same thing. When you're going
through eating disorder recovery. You have to like take out
a lot of parts of your life that somebody who
is just like moving along with their life who doesn't
have disordered eating or eating disorder doesn't have to do.
But once you kind of recalibrate that, then you get
(13:25):
to come back into this niddle ground. And I think
that's the part that we don't talk about is that, Okay,
we do this extreme thing, like think about like somebody
going to treatment, to whether it's for anything, you got
to treatment. You are cutting out so many things, like
socially just like you're not going to work, like you're
you're not many things out of your life. You aren't
supposed to live that way forever, but you need a
(13:47):
period of time where you can like clear up some
thing so then you can actually reintroduce the parts that
you want to reintroduce. So I think this is the
same thing of like we're opening up this box that
like abuse is something we should talk about. Abuse is
something we need to start to recognize because I think
for a long time, if it wasn't somebody when it
comes to physical abuse, if it wasn't or any abuse,
(14:10):
actually physical abuse was the only real abuse. And if
somebody wasn't pushing you down a flight of stairs and
giving you like broken bones, then like it's not that
bit of a deal, which is like feels ichy and
my body to even say that. But now we've kind
of opened up this box and now we need to
kind of bring it back into that middle ground, not
saying that some of the things people are experiencing aren't
(14:33):
bad or harmful, but it might not go into that
category of this is abusive behavior. Yeah, because the language
does matter. I mean, it's really all we have. It's
like one of our primary methods of like living in
the world. So I'm gonna be careful in the way
I say this, so I want you guys to hear
(14:54):
what I am trying to say. But language does matter,
and when we categorize human beings as abusive, we can't
really take that back because somebody's heard it, and so
not that I am trying to like victim blame or
like protect an abuser by any means, but it always
brings me back to that West Elm guy. What was
(15:16):
his name? I didn't get too deep into it, but
there's this jerk guy. I don't know too much, but like,
I think he was just being kind of like a uh,
for lack of a better word, douche bag to a
lot of people on like dating apps and stuff like that.
And I'm saying this not knowing the whole story. So
if I'm wrong, somebody please correct me. But he got
categorized as and he became a huge thing. He was
(15:37):
all over like different platforms as this like narcissist, abuser
kind of person. And I read one article about it
and she was like, I think this guy was just
like a jerk, Like he was not like he didn't
have good intentions he x y Z. But now he
is literally labeled as this person with a personality disorder
and that's out there and people. Caleb did I say
(15:59):
that without the name? I said, I think what's west Elm?
Caleb was the story, but I used as an example
because I think that because we have a lack of language,
we want to be able to say and talk about
our experience and speak up for ourselves. And at same
time we have to be careful because it's affecting a
lot of people's lives. Yeah, I think, yeah, we could
(16:19):
talk about this forever. But another frame is like, if
we're just beginning to really understand educate and have it
as like a broader part of cultural awareness mental health,
then we're like babies, you know, like we're in elementary school,
and so our language has been representative of that. You know,
you think about the language that you learn to describe
(16:39):
certain things when you're like a smaller child versus it
grows and it expands, it gets more detailed and more specific,
But a child brain can't really differentiate all those things
at the beginning. You know. It's like that was main
is what you say when you're like very small, And
then you might say, well, you know that was selfish
(17:00):
or that you start to get more specific, and kids
can do that when they get older. So I just
think like we are at the beginning stage of like
it really being a known educational awareness sort of thing.
So we're gonna we're gonna grow. Okay, so let's talk
about this just in a more basic tense. Can you
(17:26):
tell us this doesn't have to be a exact like definition,
but I do want to hear from your perspective, how
do you differentiate between abusive behavior? And then I don't
want to like give away the other words yet or
something else. Sure, sure, well, I did some reading or
looked at some little notes about it, because it's kind
(17:49):
of can be an ambiguous thing to try to nail down.
And I think that is part of the struggle of
talking about it and why it can get kind of
co opted or misused or thrown around is because it
isn't always super specific. You named things like physical abuse
sexual abuse, which can get hairy, but also those are
(18:10):
categories that can feel a little bit easier to define,
so tangible they're like behavioral, whereas spiritual, emotional psychological are
not so specific to every time someone punches you in
the face, like that's physically abuses. We know that, we
know it, we get it. We can like put a
(18:30):
picture on that definition of a behavior that works pretty
much every time. I mean, I guess unless you're are boxing,
it's not abuse, but there's a context. We get it.
But things like emotional, psychological, spiritual, like they get kind
of confusing. But I think some of the things that
might come up for me, are like an explit explicit
(18:55):
manipulation of power of resource, Like if someone has a
different kind of resource than you, maybe that's literally a
physical They're bigger than you, they're stronger than you, um,
they make more money than you. They're in a cultural
position that's higher than you, like a male versus a woman,
or a boss versus an employee, a parent versus a child,
(19:17):
those different kind of advantages or privileges or resources, and
they are specifically using those kind of resources to cause
harm to I think that's a person to cause harm
because I think about like the word manipulation and the
word manipulate, like I can manipulate somebody, But am I
(19:39):
being abusive? Maybe not? And I even as like a therapist,
there could be an argument for sometimes I have an
idea of where I want to go with somebody, but
I'm going to kind of like scaffold them there and
and kind of like create a process that lets them
get there on their own. And yeah, would I be
manipulating the experience work because I have a knowledge or
(20:02):
or expertise or something like that, But in no way
am I doing that in order to control the person
long term? Right? So like, I'm actually trying to give
them more freedom, and I'm not trying to harm them.
I'm trying to help them. So I think that where
somebody's coming from is really important. Now, if you're good
at manipulating, you can manipulate somebody's experience of being manipulated.
(20:22):
So you're right, it gets really hairy. But I think
it's important to look at, like what is the gain
of the person who is doing the manipulation. I get
no in my own life gain from a client, getting
to ex point, like that's that gain is for them
versus if I am in a position of power in
(20:43):
a church leadership role, and I might gain I've never
been in this role, but like I might gain a
larger following that might lead to money or notoriety, which
might lead to more avenues for me to have a
certain agenda that I want, Like think about politically, like, um,
I've might be pushing a certain agenda to get certain things,
and those feel very different to me. I think about
(21:05):
words like abuse are health like if we're putting it
next to addiction, so people um misuse and unhealthy relationships
with substances or with food or right, but people are
very very cautious to call those things an addiction unless
they are really high level disruptive to their lives. So
(21:29):
I think even abuse, you would want to look at
the consequences of the abuse that's happening to you. What's happened?
You know, what are the impacts on my life? Am
I literally not pursuing things that are good for me
or healthy for me? Am I isolated from my community,
from my friends, from my family? Have I abandoned jobs
(21:50):
and don't have my own financial kind of independence or security?
Am I becoming depressed? You know? Have I needed to
seek mental health, treat meant or medication or so? I
think you can look at like the severity of the
impact on the person who's being abused, and that would
really start to qualify this is abuse, you know what.
(22:14):
I like that descriptor because I think a lot of
people don't want to classify their behaviors when it comes
to substances like that as abuse at all, and so
they might say like, oh, no, that's not abuse, But
then like, wait is saying it is affecting X y Z. Yeah.
I just like the way that that is actually giving
you more what's the word responsibility? Yeah, that's the difference, right,
(22:39):
And this is where again with all sensitivity, but we're humans,
and it might feel a little bit easier to name
a person as abusive instead of my relationship with a
substance abusive, because then who's the culprit? Oh my god,
the other person feels like the culprit instead of me,
(22:59):
And I'm only one who can change my relationship with
the substance, you know, like that's not a living, breathing thing,
so it feels a lot harder to reckon with that. Yeah,
that's yeah, that's a whole responsibility. And we've even talked
about having a conversation on here about just like being
a victim, and like, I think that I'm not gonna
We're not gonna go down this rabbit hole. But I
(23:19):
have to say this because it's just on my head
and I cannot. We think that we don't want to
be victims, and I think depending everybody has their own experience,
but there is also this large experience of we don't
want to be called victims. But it's actually feels nice
in certain situations to play a victim role because the
responsibility is then taken away from us. I say that
(23:42):
with many grains of salt, because a lot of people
do become victims and they don't choose that at all,
And it's actually really hard for some people to acknowledge
that they've been a victim of something. But it's interesting
of like what kind of victimhood do we want? I
don't want to be a victim of X y Z,
but I will play this role of a victim all
day long in my life. So that's a whole another podcast.
(24:05):
But it goes with responsibility. So okay, if we're now
identifying that there's more to it than just this is
not good, so now it's abuse or this is manipulative,
so now it's abuse. Lying right, we just go we
pocket them all and makes a critical remark to me,
(24:25):
that's abuse, Like, we can't go that far in generalization.
That's not that's not really sifting things out well enough.
We'll think about like even the responsibility of a UM
supervisor or boss or I mean again, leader, there still
needs to be an ability to have critical conversations or
(24:49):
rather conversations with criticism in them. We need to be
able to give feedback. We need to be able to express, hey,
this was not right, this is not okay, and we
need to be able to see that as the people
that might have a leader above us. But a lot
of times I think, and maybe it is twofold, has
to do with us not being properly trained on how
to give feedback and also trained on how to receive feedback.
(25:12):
Because feedback a lot of times, if it is like
criticism of some sort, which is doesn't mean it's bad,
it feels icky, at least it does to me. And
if I can disregard somebody's critical feedback of me by
the way that they gave it to me and say
that was manipulative or abusive or whatever, again, it takes
(25:34):
the responsibility for me to actually look at my behavior
and and my work and I'm just like, oh, I
get to disregard that. That's not to say that the
person gave the criticism to you. Well, so there's other
ways to say, Hey, my boss might not be abusive,
but maybe he was this, or maybe she was this,
or maybe the way she gave me the feedback was this,
(25:54):
And so I want to kind of talk about the
other ways we can talk about that. And let's say
you have a relationship and it could be any kind
of relationship, romantic, any kind of family relationship, a boss,
and those relationships maybe are super unhealthy. Unhealth doesn't have
to equal abusive, it can be other things. So I
want to talk about those other things that we can
(26:15):
kind of use to describe things. Yeah, so a great
word is dysfunctional or harmful. Like someone maybe said something
to me that felt harmful. Maybe even the boss said
it in a really crappy way, you know, maybe they
were abrupt and didn't offer like a little compliment sandwich
on the other side of it, or maybe they said
(26:38):
it with some judgmental words. Like the specific words that
they use were like judgmental towards my character, like you've
been really lazy about X projects. And that's not super
constructive feedback, because if you were a boss, you would
need to name what that means. You would want to
talk about, like, hey, you have not turned X and
(27:00):
on time this many times and if you continue to
behave that way, then you're not gonna be able to
work here. Like that might not feel good to hear.
But also if someone calls me lazy, I might say
that's harmful. I'm not a lazy person, you know, that's
not who I am that's an assaulting of my character.
So again, like that would be the difference between like
a not healthy, harmful, or dysfunctional way of communicating something
(27:23):
to someone that wasn't versus abusive. Would be like I
did turn everything out on time, and my boss came
to me and says, if you don't do X, Y
and Z by the end of the week, then you're fired.
And that's not a part of my job description. And
that's not like those are abusive natures where I'm threatening
your livelihood and it's not in the nature of our
(27:44):
agreed upon like about like using any kind of black mail,
or like holding things above your head, or like the
words threatening and putting you in a place where like
you don't actually get to even if you did everything correctly,
you can't win. If you disagree with them, you can't win.
If you agree with them, you can't win. That feels
(28:05):
very different asking you to basically to meet standards that
are not in the contract of the like the natural
original contract of the relationship. You also used the word
when we're talking earlier, like you can be injured in
a relationship, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you were
a victim of abuse. And I don't mean that in
(28:25):
the physical way, of course. So can you talk about
like an emotional spiritual injury? Yeah, I think you know,
people can like here's a really common went like ghosting someone.
Oh my gosh. Yes, you like if you're friends or
romantic interest. If you were someone was talking to you
(28:47):
and then all of a sudden they didn't they stopped,
they didn't show up, they didn't answer your text. This
is not respectful way to treat you beings. I agree
with that. I think if we're really respecting ble as people,
than we could just say what we need to say
and be upfront and say, hey, I'm not interested in
continuing to talk to you for that may be the
(29:09):
end of the sentence. You might give some reasons. Who
knows is disrespectful. It's certainly hurts. It injures my feelings,
my sense of dignity as a human being, that I
wasn't honored or thought of to be treated in a
more respectful way. And you know, just piecing out is
not necessarily an abuse that I'm oppressed by that I
(29:34):
now have like significant loss to to my needs being
able to be met, to the resources that I need
to have access to in my life. So it's a
crappy way to behave and it's also not like think
about too like in a an emotional, psychologically, or spiritually
(29:55):
abusive experience, and I and more, my head is going
right now I'm thinking about like occult. My belief system
is slowly being changed about myself, my abilities, my capabilities,
and the same with that example with the boss of like,
then I'm going to constantly being doing like I can
never do anything right, Like I'm gonna eventually think, well,
this is my fault. He said, he told me exactly
(30:16):
what I need to do and I didn't do it correctly,
and like because they're so convincing and what they're saying,
I told you to do this, even though like you're like,
I didn't think that you said to do that, but
I guess you did because you're so convincing of it.
And there's not in writing anywhere, but in an abusive
relationship like that, when you're in it, when you actually
(30:38):
really are in and you're feeling the effects of it,
you do change the way you think about yourself, your value,
your worth, you mentioning like my resources and my ability
to get my needs met well, like in an abusive
relationship like that. I think it's very confusing for people
who have never been in one of those. But a
lot of times you stay in them because there's that
part that's like, well, if I leave this, and I
won't be able to get my needs met elsewhere. Think
(30:59):
about spiritual if you leave a spiritual group, like there
might be um, these beliefs that you're now holding onto
that if you do X, y Z, your higher power
will you'll be punished in some way because of that,
whether you're gonna be paid pain for that now or
in your afterlife. And so that's very different than somebody
being a jerk or somebody displaying poor behavior towards you,
(31:23):
or somebody again being a mean feels like not a
good enough word, but like yeah, like somebody being like
super mean and hurting your feelings and maybe having you
question I'm never I'm never enough or I'm not good
enough for this person. But a lot of times that
in dating circles has more to do with our just
(31:47):
own belief system outside these people. Yeah, what the baggage,
for lack of better word, that I brought into this
versus what I picked up all was in it, and
we have a responsibility. And I did do a whole
episode on cults, and I found it fascinating because I
did a deep dive on brainwashing and whether it's a
(32:07):
real thing, and there's no way to actually measure it,
so it's always going to be a question. And over
and over, I read like, it's so hard to really
actually hold onto the idea that we can be brainwashed,
because to be brainwashed, you have to have some desire
to believe what it is that you're in quotes choosing
to believe. And so if I come into a relationship
(32:30):
with a really damaged sense of self that believes that
to be good and to be worthy, I have to
have the approval of um, these kind of men, are
these kind of women or whatever I'm holding onto that
I have a desire to hold onto that belief for
whatever reason. Even I would call it an attachment more
(32:52):
than it's that's probably a better Yeah, totally, even are
like ikey weird beliefs. We talked about this too, this
secondary gain, there's something you get, even if it feels
weird to admit a lot of times when we're repeating
behaviors like that, or we're holding onto these or become
attached to these beliefs about ourselves. We get something out
of it, even if it's like doesn't really make logical sense. Yeah.
(33:16):
A good one to always I think that people can
understand really easily and that it's quick and easy is
if I'm getting critical criticism and that kind of treatment
from someone as a like natural part of the relationship,
I kind of I'm drawn to someone who like you know,
doesn't answer me, neglect that kind of thing, there's kind
of behaviors. Then if I was had a predisposition in
(33:39):
my attachment development to that's how I that's the only
attention I got was negative attention, then that's why might
I have an attachment to that sort of role that
sort of if I had an experience of not getting
you know, of a lot of neglect there, I am like,
that's how I know how to relate to people. That's
the role that I know how to play in relationships.
(34:01):
So I'm going to be with someone likely who isn't
very attentive and maybe ignores and forgets and doesn't show
up and doesn't answer, which, again, there's like a lot
of nuance in this because there could be both going
on to like, I have this part of me that's
attached to this belief system. And also maybe there are
people that are abusive that also find themselves abusing people
(34:23):
with those types of attachments. So I say that just
so you guys know, we're not even saying this is
a this or this like you have to do a
lot of your own introspection, hopefully talking if you're experiencing
any of this stuff with somebody who can help you,
like a professional therapist, what have you. But really what
I want you guys to hear in all of this
(34:45):
is that there's more language that might help you more
accurately describe your experience. And there's a point to that,
and so why does that matter? We could go into
the abandoned mint word and then kind of answer that
on the back end of both, because I think it
(35:07):
would make sense of all of it. Okay, so you're
talking about, you know, calling it, calling it different things,
finding different language, and why something why we don't always
want to call certain harmful behaviors abuse, And it was
something we were talking about before, even in the victimization
and the roles and the ways we get into things
and what's the impact that it has on us. It
(35:29):
made me think about the abandonment word, and this comes up.
You and I think both work with adults only I
don't think either of us work with children. So this
is something we have probably more like of an encounter
specifically to this side of the issue than if people
were working with children. So you know, we'll hear clients
say something like so and so abandoned me, or I'm
(35:51):
afraid of being abandoned by my spouse or whoever I'm
in a relationship with my friend, and it's such a
important thing to start to break down for that person.
And similarly to I think using words like abuse abandonment,
it really puts the person who's on the other side
(36:12):
of the experience in a lower level position. It puts
you in the victim position. It puts you in the
stuck place, It puts you in the powerless, helpless place.
If those words are accurate, there is a level of
reality and impact on the person experiencing them that's really
(36:33):
really severe. If you have been abused by a partner
who was stronger than you physically and physically abused you
or sexually assaulted you, you were helpless. They had a
power over that they used against you to harm you.
(36:54):
If you were a child and your dad and mom
got a divorce and you saw your dad once a year,
you were abandoned by your father. He wasn't there to
give you the care that a father role. You're supposed
to have two parents, that's part of the deal, So
(37:14):
you don't have one. You've a loss, you've been abandoned
in those needs that can only be met by one
of the two caregivers you were given is not going
to be met. So that's like a really big deal.
That's like a huge position to be put in, of helplessness,
of loss of I can't get myself what I need.
I can't, yeah, keep myself, I say, that's key, the helplessness, powerlessness.
(37:39):
I can't I don't have the ability to give myself
what I needed. That's right. And if we put our
like use words like I was abused or I was abandoned,
and we weren't actually completely at a loss for the
ability to get what we needed even amidst the injury.
You can have an injury amidst the ending of the relationship.
(38:05):
Then and if I could have gotten myself some of
the things I needed, if I still could you know,
provide finances, food, shelter for myself. If I could still
have friends or people that I could pick up the
phone and call and utilize those things, that's really important
for me to be connected with those things. Those are
the things that will keep me afloat. And when we
(38:29):
put ourselves under a category of abandonment, then we start
to feel that, you know, it becomes a self fulfilling
prophecy of like, I don't I'm helpless. I can't care
for myself because I was dependent upon this person to
do that, and it creates a story of powerlessness and
helplessness when really you actually do have the ability to
(38:49):
offer yourself or find it in some way what you need.
That whole thing that you just said is so important.
I think that's what I wanted to be expressed in
this because sometimes I do feel like, oh, I don't
want to invalidate somebody's experience, But it's not so much
about invalidating. Invalidating your experience is actually really invalidating to
(39:11):
you and your resources, your abilities, your relationships. When you
find yourself because of these words in a position where
you aren't actually in Yeah, okay, that's so important because
our goal as therapists empowerment, right, so people believe in themselves,
for people to find that their internal and external resources
to give themselves everything they need in their lives. Like,
(39:33):
that's what we want. So when when there's any kind
of block, whether it's real or perceived, to your finding
that in your life, then we want to try to
move those things out of the way. And if it's
a perception, then we're going to try to bust that
apart with you. So you can be left in a
relationship and that can hurt so bad, that can be
(39:54):
such a big injury and lost to you, and it
does not leave you helpless. Might feel that way, right, absolutely,
you get feelings are feelings about facts, they're they're an experience.
Like in the I think it's a Webster dictionary, there's
I looked up the definition of abandoned and it says
left without needed protection, care or support, for example in
(40:21):
abandoned Babies really says that literally says that, so you
need if you're in a state of needing care. So
there are some adults who would fit into this category.
If you were dependent, you were part of a vulnerable population,
you have a disability of some kind where you're dependent
on people to care for you in some way. That
(40:41):
can be mental, emotional, or physical. You are a child,
You're a dependent so you absolutely need people to give
you protection, care and support. Yeah, if I was, Because
I think this happens a lot. And when you said
I have a fear of being an abandoned, A lot
of that comes up in romantic relationships. It can come
(41:04):
up in other relationships as well, but that's the big
one that I hear a lot, and I think it's
one thing if like, let's say I am diagnosed with
something life threatening disease. Let's call it cancer for now,
just because that's easy one um to pull up in
my memory, not that I have a memory of being
diagnessed with cancer for you guys, get what I'm saying. Anyway,
(41:26):
So I get diagnosed with cancer, and I am dependent
on my spouse for um, maybe finances or health insurance
and maybe just like I need home care, and he's
very much the person that does that. And let's say
he goes to work one day and he never comes
back and I never hear from again. That feels like abandonment,
right absolutely. That feels different than I'm in a relationship
(41:50):
with somebody and we're both fully functional human adults. To
make this easy, let's say we even both have jobs
that allow us to be financially independent from each other.
But let's say we're together for ten years and I
love this person dearly, and one day he comes home
and he's like, I am not in love with you anymore.
(42:10):
I'm I'm actually going to move out this week. That
is going to hurt. I mean, I can't even I
don't even want to think about that happening, because that's
gonna hurt so bad. And I might feel like my
world is falling apart, and I very much might feel
abandoned by this person because we created this life together
and he's leaving me. I have not abandoned by him.
(42:31):
He's leaving me. What I want to go back to
is what Tara said is the importance of the difference
is I might feel in that moment powerless and helpless,
and I do have the ability to get my needs met.
But the more I believe that I'm powerless and helpless,
the less likely I am to actually get my needs met.
And so it creates that self fulfilling prophecy. So I
(42:53):
hope those examples. What I'm not doing is comparing the
impact that those might have in thetly on somebody, because
let's say, if I had cancer in my husband, who
knows how I might feel emotionally, I might be like
that ass whole, like I know whatever, And they're different.
So I don't want to compare the emotional impact and
experience of those, but I do want to just separate
(43:14):
the two so we can Those are two dramatic examples,
so you guys can see kind of the difference and
why the difference is important. Yeah, I was thinking about
the phrase feeling abandoned. I mean, it's interesting we usually
say that we say I felt abandoned rather than I
was abandoned. Yeah, I mean I think sometimes we might
when we're just talking kind of without thought, but it
(43:37):
does Actually that might even be more accurate to say
I feel if you're in the situation where you are
not completely unable to meet your own needs as an
independent adult, then you know, I mean, ultimately, I think
what you would what it sounds like to me, is
you feel incredible loss. Yeah, And like I think that
(44:00):
we all well I can't say we all, but I
know for me, I've had an experience where I felt
abandoned by a person I was in a relationship with
to the point where like I had to stay at
my parents for a period of time, it was very
hard for me to do a lot of daily life tasks,
and the fact that I was able to actually with
(44:20):
the help of community, because I'm I do have people
and even if I have to, even if I need
to call upon other resources because I've lost I had
a loss this person that fulfilled these needs of mine.
I might have to fill those in different ways, but
I have the ability to go get those filled rather
than like you said, a child whose dad abandoned them, like, okay,
(44:44):
well that's their dad, and yeah, let's not there are
people that might come in eventually. You can't get another
biological father. You can get father figure, you can get
somebody that is very important to you and helps you
in those ways, but you can't get another biological father.
So yeah, that's a loss. So I think that, like
we've had those experiences where it's felt like I will
(45:05):
I mean, I remember googling it is so filed. I'm
sure you have experiences like this where like so wild
when you look back when you were in such a
like highly volatile emotional state. The things that as a therapist,
I was googling, like I'm not going to say them
because they don't feel like it's necessary. They thinks I
was googling about this relationship and ending. I mean, I
(45:28):
thought my world was never going to be the same,
and I'm okay, yeah, yeah, And I think what what
that word is pointing you towards is you're feeling lost.
You're probably feeling afraid. So like, what am I afraid
of right now? I might be afraid that I won't
have this kind of connection or love or support or
(45:51):
whatever in my life. Again, that might be the fear.
Like when I think about that's what it is, there's
a core fear going on there that I'm like, ah,
oh no, did ah right. So it gives you insight
into you might say, I lost this person and now
here's what I'm afraid of. Now here are the things
I'm grieving. That is also I think other words to you,
(46:14):
Like we were talking about finding other words for abandonment,
feeling loss, it's feeling fear, it's feeling lonely. Yeah, and
they heart going back when we look at things as
feelings because that's in that moment. What that is, Well,
our feelings can lead us to like needs. Right, So
if I'm afraid that I'm never going to connect with
(46:34):
somebody in this way again, or I'm afraid that I
whatever nobody else will love me, so that will lead
you to a need in that need might be different
for you from me. It was that like, there are
people in my life still that value me and see
me as worthy and would want me in their life
even when I mess up. And so if we can
actually look at things as they are and get down
(46:57):
to the feeling part of them, that actually leads us
where we need to go, So then we actually don't
become those people who literally feel like we're help us
and fulfilled that idea of I'm going to be in
this space forever. So okay, this is I feel like
there might be more things for you to say too,
but I feel like what I want to say over
(47:20):
and over again, and I'm just going to say it
one more time, is that I want you guys to
hear that this conversation that we're having is one that's
meant to more empower then um invalidate your experience, and
so you might be listening to this, and you very
much might have been abandoned. You very much might have
been abused what in whatever way you have been And
(47:43):
so I don't want you to say because we're saying,
I don't want you to hear that, because we're saying
not everything we initially think is abuse and abandonment is
that might still be your experience. We're just trying to
help give more language that you guys can accurately look
at and and your experience and get what you need.
Anything else you want to say here. This was very
(48:04):
helpful for me personally. I think it's great. I was
thinking about like some of the ambiguous abandonment sort of
places like because when we say like dependent and have
the capability to get your own needs, mat that can
get a little you can get, you can get hairy.
I was thinking about like an adult, you know, who's
maybe still financially dependent upon their parents, and their parents
(48:29):
all of a sudden cut them off and it gets
real sticky, right, because it's like, obviously there's a way
of going about that that I think is a healthy
way of going about that. If your parents are and
you're like, I gotta set boundaries I'm not helping my
child grow. They need to go be responsible and independent,
and I've got to make changes. There's a way to
(48:50):
go about that. I think that would be most appropriate,
And in them doing that, I think ultimately hopefully there's
enough of of a bridge of them saying I want
to move you out of dependence upon me into dependence
upon yourself. Hopefully you would do it that way, and
you probably at whatever level had happened where they were like,
(49:12):
we're not doing this anymore. Let's say they were had
some grace and they were like, by the end of
the month, you can't live here rent free anymore. Okay.
Then by the end of the month or whatever amount
of days I have, if as long as like my
capabilities work inside my body and my brain, like I'm
gonna go get a job, it might not be the
(49:34):
job you really want to get, absolutely okay. So I'm
glad you said that's actually really helpful for everybody, because
when you said that, my initial thought was a lot
of times when there is somebody who's struggling with addiction
of any kind, there is a cut off, and very
often I've experienced with families and clients and friends where
(49:55):
that cut off was the thing that actually really helped
them to and it may have been the hardest thing
in the world to do, and there might have been
a period of time where the person cut off was
piste off, felt abandoned all of the things. And it
is an attempt to not enable somebody anymore. And so
that's a very extreme example. But what you're talking about
(50:17):
two is like, yeah, there might be times where we've
noticed that we've enabled friends or family members or whoever
it is, and we have a responsibility to not just
allow the same behavior to happen and then just be
annoyed by it even though we're part of the process.
So there's a way to go about that. Hey, let's
actually look at a plan to help you get on
(50:39):
your feet. I think what can be really when you're
in it, When you're the person who's then having to
make changes, whether it's I have to get that job
that I don't want, it's really easy to go to
that place of like I'm a victim of the their
poor behavior and their poor choices, and my mom kicked
me out or my dad kicked me out or right whatever,
when really it's about I don't want to be responsible
(51:00):
for my life because being an adult is hard and
sometimes we have to get jobs we don't want to
work and they're not fun and they feel like work.
And I think that has a lot to do with
the fact that we put out there that your job
shouldn't feel like work. When work is work, and sometimes
you like it, sometimes you don't. But I think that's
a huge part of that process. It's like, I don't
want to take responsibility. And also with that because everything
(51:24):
is nuanced when you're you've lived this life of parents
doing everything for you, and all of a sudden they're like,
we're gonna make a plan. That's jolting. That's right, Like
you kind of set me up for this, right, And
there's responsibility on both ends. There are that there is.
I think that that's real. That doesn't mean yeah, just
because it isn't abandonment and you don't have resources that
(51:45):
you need to now tap into that you haven't been,
it doesn't mean that they don't have some could ability
in getting all the build up to that point. So
you know, people are doing their best. Hopefully when they
want to correct it, they can do it with some
of that awareness, and if it can't, then your life
(52:06):
is up like getting like if someone else is this
is a problem with being in a dependent situation. If
you have the resources not to do that in life,
it leaves you vulnerable. It leaves you vulnerable to not
having the things that you need when you need them,
if you aren't practiced at really getting your needs met
(52:30):
through your own resources, through your own ways. And you know,
there's all kinds of nuances about finances and marriages and
all that stuff. We have courts, thankfully to like protect
people with those real life issues. That's why I think
we have a legal system around marriage and stuff like
that is is because that's a real thing. And we
don't want women who are vulnerable to be abandoned and
(52:51):
not you know, because they were raising their children and
not making the money all that stuff. So there are
things that are that do acknowledge the dynamics of that
and in as many ways as possible. If if we
are really engaging in our own autonomy and our own agency,
then we're not so vulnerable to feeling like, oh no,
(53:12):
oh no, I'm abandoned. Um, Like, if if we're thinking
about even my own self esteem, if I'm doing a
lot of stuff to build my sense of value in
my own little world with other friends, with other activities,
with meditation, with therapy. Then when I lose a relationship
like a partner, I'm probably not going to feel so
(53:33):
abandoned because that part of my esteem and value has
already been propped up with lots of other resources that
I'm using to fill that part of myself, so I
won't feel like that drastic it's all that sucked out
of my life. Now good add into that and again
here that this is so nuanced, and take this information
and then tease through it like it doesn't have to.
(53:55):
I'm assuming we didn't lay out your exact experience, because
how could we do that, because every person is so different.
So you can look at it with people that feel
safe to you, whether that is a therapist or somebody
in your life. If you're trying to figure out how
to identify your own experiences. Thank you for having this conversation.
Stay tuned, because you're going to have a similar conversation
(54:16):
about some other mental health things that have been a
little bit skewed in our current pop culture, and that
will be I think in two weeks of Stay tuned.
It might be a fun game if you guys could
guess what they are actually, let's play that game. So
if you have an idea of some other things, or
you have an experience of some other things that have
(54:38):
been skewed um, whether the things that you actually experience
and you you see a lot in pop culture and
now and it's become a little bit harmful or painful
for you to see. Or if there are things that
you just see put over and over and you're like,
this can't be what that means. It seems way too
common or or too easily thrown out in the world.
Let us know what you think our next couple of things.
(55:00):
We're going to dive into our You can email it
to me or you can DM me. But the problem
with DM is I don't always see it. But you
could play that game. You could roll those dice. But
if you want to email, it's Catherine at you Need
Therapy podcast dot com, and on Instagram it's at cat
dot de fata and at you Need Therapy Podcast. Also,
if you just have questions or you want to lay
(55:21):
out an experience and you kind of want to ask
some questions about that experience, you can send that to
my email. I will say it's not really possible for
us to read an email about your experience and then
be like this was this and this was that, because
there are so many details that you can't put an
email and would not be inappropriate to put an email.
(55:41):
And we're also not in a relationship which I can
give you mental health care over a podcast, So you
can give us an example or an experience, and you
might want to hear our thoughts and what questions we
might ask those that might be something we could do.
I'm open to that, but I definitely want to know
what you guys think. The next a little bit topics
we're gonna talk about are so that will be in
two weeks. We have time to send those in. Thank you, Tara,
(56:06):
thanks Cat, anything else you would like to say. Just
be easy on yourself with understanding these things. And also,
everybody has permission to call things whatever they want to
call them at the end of the day, whatever word
feels like the one you need for where you are
in your own process. Because I think, like we talked
about before, some people need to get to the place
(56:27):
where they call something abuse because they need to get
honest about how harmful and truly oppressive something was in
their life and the fact that it really did mess
their insides up and they need to give themselves permission
to work on that. So uh well that's the other side. Yeah,
and thanks for saying that, because everybody is at a
(56:48):
different place in their journey, because we all have such
different experiences of literally everything. So what I might not
call something, somebody might call and they might change that,
and I might change that later in my life as
I've rediscovered certain things. But I think just having the
ability what we're doing again and power. We're trying to
(57:09):
give you more information and we're trying to give you
more options so that you can actually describe your experience
with what it feels like to you rather than with
the little options that you know, going back to that
when you're a little somebody's mean, but really what you
mean later in life might be like they were selfish.
So that's what we're trying to do. We're not trying
to tell you what to do. We're trying to give
(57:29):
you more information so you can make it more informed
decisions on your in life. So thank you and we'll
be back in two weeks. Okay, Thanks
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