November 16, 2021 • 12 mins
Welcome to the '5th Thing' with Amy & Kat!!! Ever wondered: “Don’t we all have feelings of anxiety & depression?” Well, you are not alone, but the answer to that question is: “No.” Until recently, Amy thought the answer was yes. Thank you licensed therapist, Kat Defatta, for joining us with her wisdom. You can find her on Instagram: @Kat.Defatta + @YouNeedTherapyPodcast.
Best places to find more about Amy: RadioAmy.com + @RadioAmy
Please send emails for the 5th thing to 4ThingsWithAmyBrown@gmail.com
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the fifth Thing, the Amy and
cat Chat. And we always start the Tuesday episodes of
what ay Quote, and today's comes from the ell Royo
sign in Austin, Texas. I'm born and raised from Austin,
so I love ell Royo and I love the sign
and they're so clever. But I follow the Instagram account
that posts the sign every single day. Because I'm not
(00:24):
in Austin, I don't get to drive by it all
the time. Which people they get to drive by it
on their way to work every day. It's going to
be so lucky, lucky you. But I solve. One of
the signs they put up recently was I don't know
the secret to happiness, but I've never been sad at
a text X restaurant. And I was like, yeah, I
agree with that. Give me some chips K so GUALK,
(00:47):
maybe a margarita if you happen to. It's also just
good marketing for them consume alcohol, but if not, the
chips in Caeso and glog will do the same thing.
Which I love ell Royo, but we're here in Nashville
and we don't have that, but we have Chewy, which
is another Austin restaurant, and that is my jam. Now
I'm craving it now. I just want chewies so bad.
But the happiness and sad thing, which obviously this is
(01:08):
a joke, you still might be really sad even if
you get some really good text mex. But we were
texting Cat and I don't know who originally posted this.
This is something that you posted or someone else posted,
and then you reposted. Okay, I want you to read
what this is kind of like the thing that was
the inspiration for this chit chat that Cat and I
(01:29):
are going to have. So it was the I M
thirty a f account posted it, and it is a
like a repost of like a tweet or something that
somebody wrote and said doctor at might check up asked
me if I had any feelings of depression or anxiety,
and I said, don't we all? And she said no, yeah.
And I feel like I've had similar conversations like that
(01:51):
with people in my life or even my therapist, where
I have been in a place where I thought, well,
everybody must feel this way because this feels so normal
to me. So I don't know what about why it is, like,
is it a defense mechanism to be like, I'm feeling
this way, maybe I'm wrong. You can unpack this because
you're the license therapist, But like, why am I trying
(02:11):
to convince myself that everybody must feel this way? Or
is that what I'm doing? I don't know, but let's
just say it's slight feelings of depression or different thoughts
that you might have. And then when I've said out
loud to my therapist, like I didn't think that this
is weird because I just assumed everybody felt this way.
Is that me trying to protect myself from actually having
to deal with it by being like, oh, this is normal,
everybody feels this way. Well too deep, Well, I don't know.
(02:35):
We could figure that out for you. But what's coming
to my mind are two things. One this might fit
for you, I don't know. But when I was younger, like,
I've always had a ton of anxiety, like a ton,
but I didn't know that I had anxiety. I literally
just thought everybody felt that way because I didn't know
anything different, So I just thought that was what being
(02:55):
a human is, is that level of anxiety. Until I
literally like went to school for this stuff and I
was like, oh, my gosh, that's not normal. Actually, so
that was a huge wake up call for me. I
don't know if some people that think that that's where
they're coming from. The Other part that actually I thought
of when I read this was because we have created
(03:15):
so much content around that stuff. Depression anxiety can be
like just joked about a lot. Well I'm thrown around, yeah, flippantly, yes,
when it may not be. Yeah. I think that that
is creating this idea that yeah, we all have this,
it's just the thing that we all have, and like
it's normal, when like it's not normal to feel depressed, Ye,
(03:36):
not normal to feel anxiety. And so I wrote this
whole thing on Instagram about the difference between removing the
stigma from stuff and normalizing it and how we kind
of interchangeably are using that. Normalizing and destigmatizing are very
different difference. They sound the same to you. Well, to
be honest, yeah, okay, they do, because I'm I'm even
I'm racking my brain right now for examples of like
(03:58):
normalize this, normalize that, at which to me equals like,
let's take the stigma away from it. Yeah, well, I
think there's the normalized going to to therapy, right, like
going to therapy. So therefore, if for people to perceive
it as normal and needs to be destigmatized because there's
some sort of stigma around going to therapy. So I
(04:18):
think that there are these things that like sometimes can
exist together, but they are not the same thing. They
can exist together, but they're not the same thing. Because
when you are destigmatizing mental health conditions, like, there's been
so much work that I'm so grateful for. It is
so different the way that people talk about therapy and
mental health in like our generation then like our grandparents.
(04:39):
It's very different. Now it's not perfect, but it's very different.
So I'm so grateful because we have begun to destigmatize
things like depression and anxiety and other mental health disorders
like bipolar, and we're removing the stigma that this means
that somebody's bad or wrong or crazy. Yet Jinks double
(05:00):
takes pinch cop okay, but like we're so that's destigmatizing.
But it's not normal to be bipolar. It is not normal.
Two And I hate that the word normal. I even
feel like these like because what is normal? Yeah, the
whole thing normal to be depressed. It's not normal to
have this cinical amount of anxiety. It's not normal to
(05:22):
have panic attacks. Okay, so now I'm understanding the difference.
Thank you, Thank you licensed therapist Catapata for enlightning me,
because now I see a clear distinction. My brain wasn't
able to see that a minute ago, but now I
get exactly what you're saying. Because the other the fear
that I have in that is, if it's normal to
be depressed, then I'm probably not going to go to
(05:44):
therapy for it, right, which I love that. Yeah, it's
like what is normal? Right? But yes, in this case,
it is important to know that it's not normal. Like
not that you're bad, It doesn't make you bad, but
it is not normal to feel that way. You know.
(06:10):
The other thing that comes up in this conversation. For me,
it's a little bit different, but I also have this
deep seated ikey feeling towards the way we even talk
about these mental health disorders sometimes when we are talking
about them, because we are like, when we're normalizing them,
then they aren't this big deal. But when somebody's struggling
with bipolar disorder, it's a huge deal, like a huge deal.
(06:34):
And the way that people even use that in conversation
is not even correct when people like, oh my gosh,
they're so bipolar. Well yeah, because I mean we use
that even about ourselves for feeling jackal and hid dish.
Sometimes we might just casually say bipolar, which is not
but that's not even We shouldn't do that. Well, we
shouldn't do that one because people really struggle with bipolar
(06:56):
disordering is a serious thing that isn't funny. And at
the same time, that's actually not how bipolar sort of works.
You don't just like switch from one thing to the
other in like an hour or a day periods of time,
these periods of time, and so I think that really
gets me too, because when when we are throwing these
things around, we're confusing what they really are. So we
(07:17):
could be doing that with things that more of our
population struggles with, like just straight up clinical depression and
anxiety of like we're almost like removing the seriousness of them.
And Yeah, I don't want there to be a stigma,
but I want people to know that these are real
things that we deserve real help. Yeah, I'm gonna go
back to kind of what I was trying to ask
(07:39):
you a minute ago about like what was I doing? Like,
why was I thinking that this was normal? What was
I trying to protect myself from? That's what I think. Like,
if I were to dig deep, and I'm just saying
this so that anybody else in case you're of a
similar mindset, it was like, as long as I convince
myself that what I'm feeling is quote unquote normal, then
I don't have to do the work. Oh are we
(08:00):
there yet? So like if I were to really get
to the root of me thinking like, oh, well, doesn't
everybody think this way to my therapist and her being
like no, similar to the meme that you read of
like do we all have feelings of anxiety and depression?
And she looks at her doctor and she's like yeah,
And the doctor's like no, and my therapist same thing
was like no, that is not normal. But for me,
(08:23):
I would keep telling myself, oh wow, I didn't really
think this was a concern because I thought everybody had
these thoughts. But as long as I convince myself that
everybody has these thoughts, then I don't have to address
the thoughts. Well, isn't that a nice little defense mechanism
that yeah, So that's what I meant earlier by like
trying to protect myself, And I was curious to your
thoughts on it because and I don't know, this is
just my hypothesis, my theory as to why I might
(08:45):
be doing that, and you listening right now, you might
have a similar defense mechanism or a completely different defense mechanism.
But oftentimes we can try to do something to convince
ourselves otherwise because we don't want there to be so
it's not that big of a deal. You know. This
makes me think of there's an esthetician that I love.
You can find her at the Nashville Esthetician. She's awesome.
(09:06):
She's been on you Need Therapy before, and she has
this thing that she will say, like hashtag normalized pores
because you know how like it's kind of well, I
think it's shifting a little bit. But there's this like
idea that like we want this like glass looking skin
that's like perfect, but no, poor y coorse. She's normalizing pores.
And her point in that is like pores aren't that
big of a deal, Like this isn't a big deal,
(09:28):
Like this isn't something we should be like afraid or
a run from. But at the same time, when you're
normalizing depression and anxiety, it's normal, it's not that big.
You're saying, it's not that big of a deal, and
then you're not paying attention to it, so it backfires
on us. So I want us to normalize things. Yeah,
but I also want us to remember that there are
things that deserve a lot of attention. Might maybe not
(09:49):
want to pay attention to it all the time. No,
but to get the life you want, it seems like
you might have to. Well, sometimes I use a magnifying glass,
and my poor seem even bigger. That could be a
metaphor for something. We're going to start a book and
it's gonna be Amy Brown's metaphors. Well, because it's getting good.
(10:12):
I know one time we had the food on the plate,
things that we did. But I think that if I
were to just be looking in my normal mirror, hold on,
I'm trying to unpack the metaphor here with you. Actually
I'm creating it as we talk. I can't decide which
parts the negative part because the magnifying glass for my
pores is bad. But in my life, in my therapy,
(10:35):
in my thoughts, sometimes I do have to use the
magnifying Glass Metaphor didn't quite work out like I thought
I was going to. And I think the point that
I'm really trying to make is like there are some
things that need to be normalized, and there are some
things that don't write. So there's some things you need
to use the magnifying glass four and there's some things
that you don't. If you don't need to use it
for your pores, but you do need to use it
(10:56):
to take a look at some of the stuff you
might have going on. There A boom nailed it. Put
it in the book. Agnifying Glass Metaphor done. Peace out.
Thank you all so much for loving the Fifth Thing.
The new Cat and Amy chat like we're getting feedback
from you and hearing the emails or seeing the emails.
(11:17):
Not all episodes are gonna be email related. I know
they're more kind of just conversations that Cat and I
are having, but we are building episodes where they will
be centered around emails. To make sure you send us
in any questions you have four things with Amy Brown
at gmail dot com, put fifth thing in the subject line.
You can find Cat on Instagram at Cat dot de
fata d E f A T T A. And then
(11:39):
I am at Radio Amy and you can also hit
up radiom dot com if you want to. You can
write and review the podcast here if you want to.
That be amazing, and you can also check out cats
podcast You Need Therapy wherever you listen to podcasts. All right,
thanks and I will see you on Thursday for four
Thanks by bye, be
Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the fifth Thing, the Amy and
cat Chat. And we always start the Tuesday episodes of
what ay Quote, and today's comes from the ell Royo
sign in Austin, Texas. I'm born and raised from Austin,
so I love ell Royo and I love the sign
and they're so clever. But I follow the Instagram account
that posts the sign every single day. Because I'm not
(00:24):
in Austin, I don't get to drive by it all
the time. Which people they get to drive by it
on their way to work every day. It's going to
be so lucky, lucky you. But I solve. One of
the signs they put up recently was I don't know
the secret to happiness, but I've never been sad at
a text X restaurant. And I was like, yeah, I
agree with that. Give me some chips K so GUALK,
(00:47):
maybe a margarita if you happen to. It's also just
good marketing for them consume alcohol, but if not, the
chips in Caeso and glog will do the same thing.
Which I love ell Royo, but we're here in Nashville
and we don't have that, but we have Chewy, which
is another Austin restaurant, and that is my jam. Now
I'm craving it now. I just want chewies so bad.
But the happiness and sad thing, which obviously this is
(01:08):
a joke, you still might be really sad even if
you get some really good text mex. But we were
texting Cat and I don't know who originally posted this.
This is something that you posted or someone else posted,
and then you reposted. Okay, I want you to read
what this is kind of like the thing that was
the inspiration for this chit chat that Cat and I
(01:29):
are going to have. So it was the I M
thirty a f account posted it, and it is a
like a repost of like a tweet or something that
somebody wrote and said doctor at might check up asked
me if I had any feelings of depression or anxiety,
and I said, don't we all? And she said no, yeah.
And I feel like I've had similar conversations like that
(01:51):
with people in my life or even my therapist, where
I have been in a place where I thought, well,
everybody must feel this way because this feels so normal
to me. So I don't know what about why it is, like,
is it a defense mechanism to be like, I'm feeling
this way, maybe I'm wrong. You can unpack this because
you're the license therapist, But like, why am I trying
(02:11):
to convince myself that everybody must feel this way? Or
is that what I'm doing? I don't know, but let's
just say it's slight feelings of depression or different thoughts
that you might have. And then when I've said out
loud to my therapist, like I didn't think that this
is weird because I just assumed everybody felt this way.
Is that me trying to protect myself from actually having
to deal with it by being like, oh, this is normal,
everybody feels this way. Well too deep, Well, I don't know.
(02:35):
We could figure that out for you. But what's coming
to my mind are two things. One this might fit
for you, I don't know. But when I was younger, like,
I've always had a ton of anxiety, like a ton,
but I didn't know that I had anxiety. I literally
just thought everybody felt that way because I didn't know
anything different, So I just thought that was what being
(02:55):
a human is, is that level of anxiety. Until I
literally like went to school for this stuff and I
was like, oh, my gosh, that's not normal. Actually, so
that was a huge wake up call for me. I
don't know if some people that think that that's where
they're coming from. The Other part that actually I thought
of when I read this was because we have created
(03:15):
so much content around that stuff. Depression anxiety can be
like just joked about a lot. Well I'm thrown around, yeah, flippantly, yes,
when it may not be. Yeah. I think that that
is creating this idea that yeah, we all have this,
it's just the thing that we all have, and like
it's normal, when like it's not normal to feel depressed, Ye,
(03:36):
not normal to feel anxiety. And so I wrote this
whole thing on Instagram about the difference between removing the
stigma from stuff and normalizing it and how we kind
of interchangeably are using that. Normalizing and destigmatizing are very
different difference. They sound the same to you. Well, to
be honest, yeah, okay, they do, because I'm I'm even
I'm racking my brain right now for examples of like
(03:58):
normalize this, normalize that, at which to me equals like,
let's take the stigma away from it. Yeah, well, I
think there's the normalized going to to therapy, right, like
going to therapy. So therefore, if for people to perceive
it as normal and needs to be destigmatized because there's
some sort of stigma around going to therapy. So I
(04:18):
think that there are these things that like sometimes can
exist together, but they are not the same thing. They
can exist together, but they're not the same thing. Because
when you are destigmatizing mental health conditions, like, there's been
so much work that I'm so grateful for. It is
so different the way that people talk about therapy and
mental health in like our generation then like our grandparents.
(04:39):
It's very different. Now it's not perfect, but it's very different.
So I'm so grateful because we have begun to destigmatize
things like depression and anxiety and other mental health disorders
like bipolar, and we're removing the stigma that this means
that somebody's bad or wrong or crazy. Yet Jinks double
(05:00):
takes pinch cop okay, but like we're so that's destigmatizing.
But it's not normal to be bipolar. It is not normal.
Two And I hate that the word normal. I even
feel like these like because what is normal? Yeah, the
whole thing normal to be depressed. It's not normal to
have this cinical amount of anxiety. It's not normal to
(05:22):
have panic attacks. Okay, so now I'm understanding the difference.
Thank you, Thank you licensed therapist Catapata for enlightning me,
because now I see a clear distinction. My brain wasn't
able to see that a minute ago, but now I
get exactly what you're saying. Because the other the fear
that I have in that is, if it's normal to
be depressed, then I'm probably not going to go to
(05:44):
therapy for it, right, which I love that. Yeah, it's
like what is normal? Right? But yes, in this case,
it is important to know that it's not normal. Like
not that you're bad, It doesn't make you bad, but
it is not normal to feel that way. You know.
(06:10):
The other thing that comes up in this conversation. For me,
it's a little bit different, but I also have this
deep seated ikey feeling towards the way we even talk
about these mental health disorders sometimes when we are talking
about them, because we are like, when we're normalizing them,
then they aren't this big deal. But when somebody's struggling
with bipolar disorder, it's a huge deal, like a huge deal.
(06:34):
And the way that people even use that in conversation
is not even correct when people like, oh my gosh,
they're so bipolar. Well yeah, because I mean we use
that even about ourselves for feeling jackal and hid dish.
Sometimes we might just casually say bipolar, which is not
but that's not even We shouldn't do that. Well, we
shouldn't do that one because people really struggle with bipolar
(06:56):
disordering is a serious thing that isn't funny. And at
the same time, that's actually not how bipolar sort of works.
You don't just like switch from one thing to the
other in like an hour or a day periods of time,
these periods of time, and so I think that really
gets me too, because when when we are throwing these
things around, we're confusing what they really are. So we
(07:17):
could be doing that with things that more of our
population struggles with, like just straight up clinical depression and
anxiety of like we're almost like removing the seriousness of them.
And Yeah, I don't want there to be a stigma,
but I want people to know that these are real
things that we deserve real help. Yeah, I'm gonna go
back to kind of what I was trying to ask
(07:39):
you a minute ago about like what was I doing? Like,
why was I thinking that this was normal? What was
I trying to protect myself from? That's what I think. Like,
if I were to dig deep, and I'm just saying
this so that anybody else in case you're of a
similar mindset, it was like, as long as I convince
myself that what I'm feeling is quote unquote normal, then
I don't have to do the work. Oh are we
(08:00):
there yet? So like if I were to really get
to the root of me thinking like, oh, well, doesn't
everybody think this way to my therapist and her being
like no, similar to the meme that you read of
like do we all have feelings of anxiety and depression?
And she looks at her doctor and she's like yeah,
And the doctor's like no, and my therapist same thing
was like no, that is not normal. But for me,
(08:23):
I would keep telling myself, oh wow, I didn't really
think this was a concern because I thought everybody had
these thoughts. But as long as I convince myself that
everybody has these thoughts, then I don't have to address
the thoughts. Well, isn't that a nice little defense mechanism
that yeah, So that's what I meant earlier by like
trying to protect myself, And I was curious to your
thoughts on it because and I don't know, this is
just my hypothesis, my theory as to why I might
(08:45):
be doing that, and you listening right now, you might
have a similar defense mechanism or a completely different defense mechanism.
But oftentimes we can try to do something to convince
ourselves otherwise because we don't want there to be so
it's not that big of a deal. You know. This
makes me think of there's an esthetician that I love.
You can find her at the Nashville Esthetician. She's awesome.
(09:06):
She's been on you Need Therapy before, and she has
this thing that she will say, like hashtag normalized pores
because you know how like it's kind of well, I
think it's shifting a little bit. But there's this like
idea that like we want this like glass looking skin
that's like perfect, but no, poor y coorse. She's normalizing pores.
And her point in that is like pores aren't that
big of a deal, Like this isn't a big deal,
(09:28):
Like this isn't something we should be like afraid or
a run from. But at the same time, when you're
normalizing depression and anxiety, it's normal, it's not that big.
You're saying, it's not that big of a deal, and
then you're not paying attention to it, so it backfires
on us. So I want us to normalize things. Yeah,
but I also want us to remember that there are
things that deserve a lot of attention. Might maybe not
(09:49):
want to pay attention to it all the time. No,
but to get the life you want, it seems like
you might have to. Well, sometimes I use a magnifying glass,
and my poor seem even bigger. That could be a
metaphor for something. We're going to start a book and
it's gonna be Amy Brown's metaphors. Well, because it's getting good.
(10:12):
I know one time we had the food on the plate,
things that we did. But I think that if I
were to just be looking in my normal mirror, hold on,
I'm trying to unpack the metaphor here with you. Actually
I'm creating it as we talk. I can't decide which
parts the negative part because the magnifying glass for my
pores is bad. But in my life, in my therapy,
(10:35):
in my thoughts, sometimes I do have to use the
magnifying Glass Metaphor didn't quite work out like I thought
I was going to. And I think the point that
I'm really trying to make is like there are some
things that need to be normalized, and there are some
things that don't write. So there's some things you need
to use the magnifying glass four and there's some things
that you don't. If you don't need to use it
for your pores, but you do need to use it
(10:56):
to take a look at some of the stuff you
might have going on. There A boom nailed it. Put
it in the book. Agnifying Glass Metaphor done. Peace out.
Thank you all so much for loving the Fifth Thing.
The new Cat and Amy chat like we're getting feedback
from you and hearing the emails or seeing the emails.
(11:17):
Not all episodes are gonna be email related. I know
they're more kind of just conversations that Cat and I
are having, but we are building episodes where they will
be centered around emails. To make sure you send us
in any questions you have four things with Amy Brown
at gmail dot com, put fifth thing in the subject line.
You can find Cat on Instagram at Cat dot de
fata d E f A T T A. And then
(11:39):
I am at Radio Amy and you can also hit
up radiom dot com if you want to. You can
write and review the podcast here if you want to.
That be amazing, and you can also check out cats
podcast You Need Therapy wherever you listen to podcasts. All right,
thanks and I will see you on Thursday for four
Thanks by bye, be
Feeling Things with Amy & Kat News
Host
Amy Brown
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.