Do you ever feel like you’re going through the motions but not truly connecting with others? Eddie Reece and Bill Courtright are here to bust the myths about therapy and show you how it can benefit ANYONE. In this episode, they discuss the surprising reasons why therapy is actually awesome, how to build deeper connections, how to manage stress and anxiety, and so much more! This episode is for YOU if you’re ready to feel more seen and heard, unleash your full potential, and live a life filled with meaningful connections. Tune in and get ready to be surprised by the power of therapy.
—
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Who Needs Therapy? Maybe You (And Why It’s Awesome)
We have a great episode in store for you. If you remember, or if you didn’t, last time, we talked about what therapy is and we spent about an hour defining what therapy is and we thought it’d be a next logical step to discuss for whom therapy might be a benefit. I can promise you that he’s going to go into detail in this episode. He is going to be dropping wisdom nuggets and giving you the tools and resources you need to move forward in your therapy journey. We hope that you take it. Stay tuned because this one’s a keeper.
—
Eddie, it’s great to see you again. If we bring your recollection back to our last episode, regardless of whether or not you had the privilege or benefit of reading it, it’s not important. We started this conversation about what therapy was. As a matter of fact, I asked Eddie, “Eddie, what is therapy?” We had an awesome conversation that if you haven’t read that episode, I suggest you find it. It’s the episode that immediately proceeds this one.
If you’re on YouTube, Apple Podcast or Spotify, you’ll find it there. It was a beautiful episode, Eddie, sharing all the information, inspiration, influence he has from years of experience helping folks in psychotherapy. I found it to be one of the more rewarding episodes that I’ve been privileged enough to be party to. You definitely want to check that one out.
If you have read it, you remember that Eddie so eloquently went through what therapy was, and in a way that only Eddie could, and I’m grateful for that. We thought, as a logical next step or first step, depending on how you listen to it, if we know what therapy is, perhaps you’re asking yourself, or you might even ponder one day for whom therapy might be helpful. After we’ve discussed that for a bit, perhaps we should understand why therapy for those people might be helpful?
Introduction To Therapy Discussion
I think, given an opportunity, Eddie would have an opinion on where you might be able to procure such therapy. As a way to round out in a journalistic style, the who, what, when, where, why type approach, we thoroughly covered the what is therapy. I think, Eddie, I think we’ll begin by asking that open-ended question. I can’t wait to hear your tutelage for whom therapy might be helpful.
Thinking back to our episode about what therapy is, when you and I talked before we started, you mentioned that the episode winds up with me talking about the movie Private Ryan. I’m thinking, “I got to go watch that. How do you start with what therapy is and wind up talking about Private Ryan? I got to go. I got to watch that episode.” I do a teaser in there without even thinking about it.
Who is therapy going to be helpful for? I’ll start by explaining this to folks that, for the most part, any random person out there, if you asked them even what a psychotherapist is, they’re not going to know. Early in my career, they’d say, “What do you do?” I said, “I’m a psychotherapist.” They would be like, “You help people who are injured like a physical therapist.” I finally learned pretty quickly, “Don’t even say that word. They don’t know what it means.”
Misconceptions About Psychotherapy
I learned very early on and this is part of one of the which reasons I wanted to do this show is I want to get the word out about therapy because, as a whole, my profession is horrible about getting the word out there. Very few people have any idea what therapy is. The last statistic I saw was 3% of the population of the United States had ever seen a therapist and some 80% or 90% of those people saw a therapist for one session. That was it. Very few people have actually been in therapy.
The more emotional intimacy you have with someone, the more your mess is going to show up.
If you live in the South where we do, it’s hard to find people who have been in therapy. If you get outside of Metro Atlanta, you not going to find people who have been in therapy often tell people if I live in California or New York, I’d be covered up with clients because it’s almost the opposite there. If you’re not in therapy, there’s some stigma around that. We’ve got to do a better job as a profession. Part of the problem is we can’t advertise the way that Joe’s Plumbing advertises. It doesn’t work. How to advertise is tricky, so it’s tough to do. Let me do some of that for everybody.
In addition to the advertising we might attempt to do, which isn’t really popular in this space, I’m sitting here thinking about California, New York and asked myself, “What is it about California and New York?” Outside of what you might immediately go to geopolitically, which isn’t important, I think what you have is what Malcolm Gladwell would call a tipping point.
I think when you have the sociology of individuals in close proximity that have experienced something of benefit and have something positive to say, the lemmings of us would like, “I’d like to feel that way, learn that thing, be absolved of that condition. Work through that challenge.” I think what’s going on here in the Southeast is that we’re all people. As John Maxwell says, “How do you know someone needs encouragement? They’re breathing.”
You’ve got people in California and New York and probably Chicago and Austin, maybe more progressive areas of the country where, I don’t want to say it’s more of a priority, but it certainly dealing with one’s mental health has less of a stigma as you put it. There are more people to say, “This was helpful for me, therefore I go. You should meet my therapist.”
I think Malcolm Gladwell calls that a tipping point where things go from out of the shadows into the mainstream. All of a sudden, if you look at the adoption of any product or service, you’ve got the early adopters, then you’ve got the early majority, the majority and then the laggers. That’s how the bell curve adoption works in technology. I would imagine it works in therapy, but what are your thoughts?
Same thing. We’re in that early stages of the early adopters still in the South and a good chunk of the country. To your point, we need 100 monkeys to go to therapy and then we’ll get some more to show up.
We’re doing our part and spreading the word about how awesome therapy is, according to Eddie and me.
It’s so that you’ll go and you’ll go, “What me? I don’t need therapy.” Let’s find out. Who could have helped? What did you do? A good way to think about that is, what do I do as a therapist? The people that are coming into my office here, what are they coming in for? Number one in my practice is relationship issues. Relationship issues are like this. The more emotional intimacy you want to have with someone, the more your mess is going to show up. The most difficult relationships we have are with the people we are closest to and that we want to be closer to. Clients come in all the time and say, “We want to feel closer.” Right there, I need some education, and I like being a smart aleck.
To build emotional intimacy, you have to learn to be vulnerable.
Emotional Intimacy And Therapy
I have a loveseat. I don’t have a full-size couch so that people have to sit next to each other, portion it on them, but they go, “We want to be closer.” I go, “You’re pretty close right now.” They’re like, “No, I mean like closer.” I go, “What kind of closer?” I want to help them see what they’re after is emotional intimacy, which they say, “Yeah, that.” I go, “You don’t really want that.” They’re like, “Why not?” I’ll say, “It’s because here’s what emotional intimacy really is. You are going to find a part of you who thinks, feels, believes, and wants to say something that another part of you does not want you to say in any way, shape, or form.” First of all, it is tricky to do, and you’ve got to do some emotional gymnastics inside to get that out. I can bet you that the person you pick to share this with doesn’t want to hear it either.
Why would you want to do that? You don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to hear it. The reason you want to do that is because it’s the only way you’re going to achieve emotional intimacy at any depth. We can share some emotional intimacy pretty easily if it’s about something we both like. We’re all excited to be in this time and place and so are they and we have the emotions of excitement and we’re sharing that, so there’s some emotional intimacy.
Folks aren’t sure about what they’re asking for because when you explain it to them, they’re not so keen on it. If you want to be close to somebody emotionally, you’re going to have to share the things that are inside you that you absolutely don’t want to share. You’re going to have to do some work with yourself in order to do that. You have to learn and learn.
To be emotionally available, as people say, to build emotional intimacy, you have to learn to be vulnerable, which most people don’t want to be. Being vulnerable says, “I can take this part of me and I can present it to you in full.” It takes a lot of courage when you do that against your will, knowing that they probably don’t want to hear it. It takes a lot of emotional upheaval. I’ve done this millions and millions of times in a therapist’s office and with my friends. It feels like you’re almost pulling this out of you and putting it out there. It’s painful. I’ve been in some deep, awful emotional pain. I’ve done this a few times and I’d go, “No wonder my clients don’t want to come see me.”
The good news is that that is the way to get the things you want in your life. People come in and they go, “I just want to be happy.” I go, “I can make you happy. Let’s talk about things that are sad in your life.” “How’s that going to make me happy?” “Part of the reason you’re not happy is because you don’t know how to be sad. You won’t let yourself be sad. When’s the last time you cried about anything?”
They don’t know. If they do know, “I’ve cried last week like this.” “Were you by yourself?” “Yeah.” “That’s not the crying I’m talking about. I’m talking about crying that you are letting something out that’s sad, hurtful, awful and you’re sharing that with another person and that person knows how to take that in, not change it in any way, shape or form and reflect it back to you so that you can see yourself.” When it comes out of mirror neurons, as they’re called, we need to feel seen, heard and felt. In order to do that, we need the other to see, feel here us and reflect it back.
How much of receiving therapy is not only helpful for the client or patient in this case, in the way that they’re processing their emotions or their feelings, but at the same time actually helps them in the relationship aspect that you’re referring to be a better communicator person or listener? What I’m hearing you say, therapy is not only to make you feel better so that you can be better.
We’ll call it better. I’m making a judgment here that I think it’s better to be emotionally vulnerable. I think it’s better to be able to share emotions with people. I’ll explain this to everybody the first time they get into it. That doesn’t mean you go and share all of your emotions with everybody on the street. That’s not what we’re after. That’s throwing up on people.
It makes you feel better and no one else.
Maybe it does, but it actually doesn’t in the long run because nothing was reflected back to you, but get out of my face. That helps you squish this down. Along with being emotionally available, vulnerable, able to say, “Here’s what I’m feeling. Here it is.” Present it. You have to learn to discriminate. You have to go, “With this person, I can share these types of things to this degree. With this person, I can share these types of things to this degree,” and on and on.
If you start looking at the relationships in your life, most of us will realize that there is no one in our life with whom we share everything to the fullest extent. If you got somebody like that, you probably have a therapist. Most people don’t do that with their therapist, which is what you have to do. It doesn’t mean you walk in on session one and go, “Here’s everything,” because we haven’t got time for everything. You don’t know exactly what to do with it anyway. I don’t know what you want me to do with it anyway. We’ve got to learn all that so that you learn who you can share with and what you can share with them and what you can’t share with them.
You also learn that if you share something with somebody and it doesn’t go, that doesn’t mean that this part of you that doesn’t want you to ever share anything is right. You’re also going to learn things like how to take care of yourself when something like that happens, when it’s something hurtful happens “It hurt me that that person didn’t care or ignored me. I was sharing something important.” That’s your responsibility, not theirs.
You’re learning do that with them, not with them. Do this for them, not with them. You go around. It’s very helpful to live a full life and to have a number of people in your life with whom you can do bits and pieces. Don’t be out there looking for friends, family, coworkers, lovers, or roommates that you share everything with. You’re not going to find too many of those people. Probably hardly any. It takes a village to listen to all my crap. Nobody wants to hear all of it.
What I’m hearing you say is that people come in craving closeness, but maybe what they desire is a sense of connection. You pretty clearly articulated what connection is. It’s that emotional connection that is discovered from a place of vulnerability, which creates relatability and relationships. That closeness that we feel is a connection on an emotional level,.
I’m actually reading right now, Charles Duhigg’s latest book, which is called Super Communicators. Shameless plug, if you’re an Audible or reader, go grab that. It’s pretty profound. It talks about learning conversations. We’ve known this, whether you read 7 Habits by Covey, seek first to understand in order to be understood, there has to be a sense. Another cliché people say is no one cares what you know until they know that you care. How do you show someone you care?
When we examine the relationships in our lives, most of us come to the realization that there is no one person with whom we share absolutely everything.
Vulnerability And Emotional Availability
That is the talent of being vulnerable enough with people, acknowledging their vulnerability, and mirroring that back to them. As you’re saying, everybody’s running around going, I want to feel more connected apart. When you say that, you are also saying and I think you need to be conscious of it. I’m also looking for a deeper connection to the parts of myself, which is why we want to be seen, heard, felt, and acknowledged because then we’re like, “That’s who I am.” We find out who we are through relationships. You’re doing everybody a great service if you can do that in a genuine, authentic, real way, which means emotionally vulnerable.
Yeah, because that’s the mirroring that has to happen.
Anybody who should show up or who could show up, or, “Why would I show up to therapy,” if you want to feel closer to people, if you want to feel closer to yourself, you want to learn to be more emotionally vulnerable, you then find a good therapist. Why would you want to be that? It’s because most of us have some way of saying we want to live our life to the fullest. When we say that, we generally conceptualize doing things. “I want to travel the world. I want to experience these places and these kinds of people.” In order to fully enjoy, you’ve got to be emotionally vulnerable enough to enjoy because joy’s an emotion, and all emotions, the way I picture it, are all stored away in one little cramped room.
You can’t open the door, pull one of them out, or shut the door back. Nobody else gets out. If you want to be happy, you got to learn to be sad. If you want joy and ecstasy, you’ve got to know despair and the depths of pain. Everything works that way. You see the stars at night, because of the blackness of the sky. When you look at me or at Billy in video, you don’t see me or Billy. You see the chair, you see the plant, you see all those things that are in there. A full life, a life that you could be on your deathbed, if you’re lucky enough to have some time to experience your death, to, to go, “I did it all. I was as happy and thrilled and joyous as any person could be.”
I was in the pit deeper than anybody could go and not off themselves, I know all that. I have to preach this at every opportunity, which is why you want a therapist, why you absolutely have got to have a therapist who can do that, which means a therapist who has learned to do that, which means a therapist who has been on a couch in a therapist’s office or in a chair for a long time, decades. This journey of learning yourself and then being able to share that with others as deeply as you can with each person you’re with, you are going to play around with that the rest of your life. You are never going to be an expert at it. If you were the expert musician, they could drop a brand-new piece of sheet music in front of you and you could knock it out on the first try. There’s so much to us.
You want to be closer to, to yourself and other people. You want to be happier in your life. Go to therapy. Look at your day-to-day existence. I’ll bet you there are so many things that you experience in a day that you wish were different. Pull out any one of those things and I could explain to you how a therapist could help you with that and make it different. It’s those day-to-cay things.
Therapy For Daily Life Improvements
The average person on the street thinks of therapy or a therapist as working with people who have got some real problems. They probably wind up in a mental hospital or close to that, or they have named problems like schizophrenia or something like that. Most of us go, “I don’t have any of that.” You’re not schizophrenic more than likely. At the same time, we could count those 15, 20 moments in your day every day to where you’re either mad or sad, or hopeless or fed up or whatever. That’s therapeutic material
In many cases, it’s my opinion that whether it’s unrecognized, unresolved, or unacknowledged, however you want to put it, it’s an issue. It’s trauma, it’s weight. I feel personally, I don’t go to speak of anyone else, but I feel personally that in day-to-day, whether it’s relationship with my wife, my kids, my work, my clients, whomever, there’s a heaviness. There’s a sense of responsibility and accountability. I know you have an opinion on this, and I’ve learned a lot from talking to you about it.
We find out who we are through our relationships.
For those of us that accept responsibility and consider themselves accountable, there’s a pressure that we put on ourselves and it wears on you over time and it weighs on you in a way that you don’t feel so satisfied in the way you’re showing up. A conversation with a therapist, I believe, could help to understand and perhaps even resolve that weight, that heaviness, that pressure. Am I wrong?
Understanding Anxiety And Stress
No. If you were presenting that to me as a client, I would start with, “Tell me about this pressure thing. I don’t know what that is. The plan that I came from is that we don’t have pressure. What does that mean?” As we explore that and I’ll go ahead and give you the answer, if you feel pressure or as you called it, a weight or a heaviness, what are you feeling? Here’s the way it breaks down. The thing that causes us to feel pressure, feel anxiety, feel on edge, any of those things, we tend to call maybe anxiety of some sort. I’ve come to figure out, at least in my mind, that anxiety is a kind of fear. The fear that bugs us is the kind of fear that our nervous system registers as a threat to survival.
I’m guessing we’ve talked about this. If we haven’t, we need to in-depth in our show about how our nervous systems work and why everything you do think feels safe is neural firings. We’re electrical appliances. If you’re feeling pressure, if you’re feeling stressed, if you’re feeling anxious, if you’re worried, that is code for the survival part of your nervous system is registering enough of a threat that you’re conscious of it. That threat in the survival part of our nervous system is all about death. “This could get me killed.” Now it seems wacky to think that. I’m scared to death of public speaking. You know what you’re afraid of? You’re afraid that you’re going to die from it. That sounds crazy. Who’s ever died from public speaking? Nobody.
The nervous system is in survival mode because remember that part of your nervous system works 24/7. It scans every day. Part of the reason you go from one room to another to get something and you forget why you went in there is because you took so much time scanning the room for threats, you forgot what you were doing because you got focused on something. That’s going on all the time. This pressure you feel is being registered over here as a threat to your life because look at it this way. If you don’t meet those responsibilities, if you don’t live up to what you’re supposed to do, if you’re a complete failure at it, what’s going to happen? “I guess people aren’t going to want anything to do with me.” What happens? You carry this out with anybody, it will go to exactly the same place.
My version of it, and I worked on this for a long time to own life, is, “Where’s that going to pain me?” If I’m as totally irresponsible, I don’t follow through on anything person. The people who love me most get sick and tired of me and they leave me, then who in the world’s going to want anything to do with me? The word’s going to get out. This is how your nervous system does think about this stuff. When you’re in survival mode, word’s going to get out. Everybody’s going to know it’s going to be the lead story on every news network everywhere. Eddie is worthless. Look what he did to his family, his friends. Look at how he let everybody down. Finally, the people at work learned about it.
Every time he tries to get a job, people go, “You’re that guy. I’m not hiring you.” What’s going to happen? I’m going to be a homeless person. How well am I going to do as a homeless person? Not well at all. I don’t know anything about trying to get some food if I don’t have any money. It becomes the story of Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. He’s shoving things down in his Santa suit, getting some food to carry with him. I’m going to become a homeless person. That’s not going to be good because I’m probably not going to live very long as a homeless person. Somebody’s probably going to beat me up and try to get my little piece of blanket that I found somewhere. I’m going to wind up dying on under a bridge somewhere.
I choose to believe the scene in which they’re on the yacht in the Caribbean. He’s saying, “Looking good, Billy Ray.”
That’s where you get wired up. Our nervous systems go to extremes because not only am I going to die under that bridge, I’m so worthless that the other homeless people are going to step over my dead, lifeless body. They’re not even going to care. I stopped right there for a long time. I thought, “That’s it.” I went, “No. That’s not it. What’s going to happen to my body?” The county coroner knows who I am, and when they come out and start to identify me, they say, “We’re not wasting our time on this.” They’re going to leave. The vultures are going to show up. They’re going to start picking at me. They’re going to go, “This is nasty.” They’re going to leave.
The more you get into survival mode, the less blood flow you have to your frontal lobe, which is where higher-order thinking functions, like logic and reasoning, take place.
The reality is you distilled something that I didn’t know where you were going to go, but I was genuinely trying to create another example for which someone might seek a therapist to say, “I’m a professional. I’ve got two kids under ten. I got a wife that I want to revere me and feel good about being married to me.” You’re right. Why do I put pressure on myself? It’s because I feel like, “What if I’m unaccountable? What if I don’t come through?” You’re right. I never would’ve thought about that had you not given it the example you did.
Nobody does because everybody stops at, “I’m not going to be happy,” or, “They’re not going to be happy,” or even, “I might get divorced,” or, “My kids aren’t going to want anything to do with me.” They’ll hit 1 or 2 of those and then they stop. I go like, “And then what?” After then, they’re dead on the street and nobody cares.
Is it true or is the intention of that line of questioning to create some context and almost a ridiculousness to the initial stress and aggravation anyway?
Depth Of Fear And Stress
To show you that, first of all, this is what you’re afraid of from the point of view of your nervous system in survival mode, which controls everything when it says we’re in survival mode. The more you get into survival mode, the less blood flow you have to your frontal lobe, which is where your thought, logic, rational being. You don’t do that. You don’t need that. If you’re in survival mode, you don’t need to go, “That’s a snake. It’s a poisonous a snake. That snake is about 3.8 feet from me. It can strike this quick.” You don’t need any of that.
I want people to understand that, again, we’re electrical appliances and a huge part of the struggle you’re having, whether it’s a relationship issue, whether it’s worried about your job at work, whether you’re not sure of your performance, you’re raging at people in their cars because they’re not behaving correctly. You want to strangle somebody because of something they said or did. You’re watching TV and screaming at the TV. Any and all of those things come back to this. Your nervous system is unregulated. You’re in survival mode and you’re not going to die but your nervous system doesn’t know that.
To recap and to make sure that I heard you correctly, Eddie, and I appreciate it, is we’ve talked about for whom therapy might be helpful in the first place. We went quite logically that it was relationships, connection, closeness, and intimacy. We talked about emotional availability, learning conversations, being vulnerable in a way to be relatable and show, in your words, mirroring to show a real sense of care and consideration. It’s been said, I think therefore I am. I would argue, I think I’m seen, therefore I am.
I’m seen. I can see myself.
We got into the conversation of pressure and anxiety and obligation and fight or flight and what’s going on from a neural perspective in that survival mode and how that changes our perception of ourselves and our performance and all that other stuff, which is important. That goes back to that survival reflex. There’s one thing where I’d like to go next, which I think is also likely to be a pretty popular reason someone might see a therapist and I don’t know that we may have uncovered the surface of it. We didn’t explain it. That would be like depression or maybe addiction. If I’m not anxious and I’m not suffering from relationship issues, I’m generally lost and depressed or perhaps addicted. Let’s go there.
Depression And How To Manage It
It’s either one. You can name 50 different afflictions and I’m going to take you to the same place where you’re not able to access all the parts of yourself that you need to access, hear from, and listen to. Most depression that winds up in the therapist’s office isn’t like a clinical depression to where you can’t get up out of bed. People come in and they tell me they’re depressed. I go, “How’d you get up and dressed this morning?” “I get up and dressed every morning. “You go to work and you fed your kids.” “I don’t know that that’s depression.” I think it’s a depression that the word literally means. Depressing. You’re depressing parts of yourself that are screaming to get out. The cure for depression is expression to that emotional vulnerability that sharing, learning how to do that.
It is a skill. There are all these therapies all about healing your trauma and you work hard to be. It’s learning skills. Here’s how you talk to somebody. Here’s how you talk to yourself. These are the rules you follow. You do it this way. All the time, I’m using dance lessons or piano lessons. You’re coming to me for that. If you’ve been banging on a piano your whole life and you finally find out that nobody thinks it’s music except you, you come in and go, “I want to learn to play the piano better.” I say, “Show me your piano playing. Put this finger here. Don’t put it there.” You’ll put it there. I go, “That sounds better.” You’ll immediately put it back over there.
I go, “No, put it over here.” That’s therapy. That’s all it is. Put your foot here, not there. You say, “Put it there and see what happens.” “That’s better. Go practice now. Go do that again.” It’s a skill. You don’t want to be depressed. It’s a skill. Even if it’s like, “I don’t feel like getting out bed in the morning.” “Don’t worry about getting out of bed in the morning.” You wake up and you’re like, “I don’t want to get out of bed in the morning.” I’m going to help you learn. First of all, which part said that? Who did it say it to? In my way of working with clients, you should constantly be in conversation with yourself. It’s not, “I don’t want to get up in the morning.”
“I don’t want you to get up.” “You don’t want me to get up?” No, I don’t want to go out there because if you get up, I better go out there. I don’t want to go. You’re going to learn to be emotionally vulnerable so that not only the other can see you, but you can see yourself. When you do that, you begin to see why staying in bed becomes the best option of all the options you can think of.
When you hear from other parts of you and you hear from yourself and they hear from you, they get it when you don’t want to get up. You get it while they do want to get up and then you can work together to pick another option that is not just your best option, this part of you, because that means you’re ignoring everybody else and they’re not happy about that. The worn-out example I use is if I’m going out to eat, I don’t go, “Where do I want to eat?” I go, “Where do you guys want to eat?” I’ll hear 2, 3, 4 different ideas from 2, 3, 4 different parts of me. They’ll start this conversation and then they’ll come together and form a consensus, not a compromise. Don’t compromise. We’ll go eat.
Therapy’s Role In Self-Kindness
It reminds me of the what is therapy conversation where we ended with the beautiful fifteen minutes on kindness. What I believe I heard you say was that therapy is being kind to yourself to give yourself the tools and resources you need to. Process and deal with the things that are perhaps taken away from what would normally be the full human existence.
Every single client I have and every time I’m in therapy, bottom line, what I’m learning, what I’m teaching them, what they’re learning is to be kinder, more curious and compassionate. That’s it. It doesn’t matter why they came in here. I’ve never had anybody come in, and I ask, “What brings you to therapy?” I want to be kinder and more compassionate to myself and other people. I want to have some more curiosity be about why these crazy people bug me.” Nobody wants curiosity. They know.
I’m going to teach you some skills to cultivate curiosity, kindness and compassion, because there’s not a time or a place to not be that. Even if somebody has a gun to your head, kindness and compassion towards yourself or, if you can, towards the other, even if you have to kill them to prevent them from killing you, can you do that from a place of kindness and compassion?
One way to manage depression is by expressing your emotional vulnerabilities.
That was the scene in Private Ryan, I think. Is that what I was talking about? How do you do that? You go, “Do I need therapy?” Are you one of the most kindest, curious and compassionate people in the world? Therapy could help you be more of all that. Anybody who wants to be that, if you want to be that, go find a good therapist who has learned the skills of doing that and, therefore, can teach you. No matter what your issue, affliction or problem is, you’re not going to fix it without regulating your nervous system as part of your nervous system that sees it. These things are a threat. They’re not snakes, they’re sticks. I got to help you learn to see that. You are not going to change anything worthwhile without curiosity, kindness and compassion.
I’m going to teach you those things. Do you want to be a jazz improvisationist? Okay, learn the scales. Come in here, see me, sit with me, I’ll teach you the scales. Once you learn the scales, we’ll learn to play some songs to how the greats play that. It’s like the great painters sat in front of the great paintings and the mathematical grids showing, this is where you put this, this is where you put that, you’ve got to have those skills if you want to do those things.
You can’t approach somebody who’s upset with you, not happy with you without regulating your nervous system to begin with. If you go in there like, “Here we go again.” It is over. Don’t even go. It’s not going to turn out well. You got to regulate that nervous system. It’s a stick, it’s not a snake. It’s actually someone who loves you and that you love. You got to be able to see that. You have to be curious enough about what they’re not happy about. You have to be kind enough about what they’re not happy about. You got to be compassionate enough to understand, “No wonder you’re not happy about that. Nobody would be.”
We started this conversation talking about the lack of prevalence for therapy where we live and whether that’s real or perceived, I guess, is not important. We also mentioned that there’s parts of the country and likely the world where it’s more popular and more of a prevailing treatment for an outcome that most people, I would think would find attractive in many ways. We touched on the areas that if you were asking yourself, “Would I be a good candidate to seek out a therapist?”
Therapy Awareness
I think we covered some good pieces of information that hopefully enlightened some people. I’m brought back to how we bridge the gap between where we are here outside of Atlanta to maybe where they are in Northern California or the Northeast United States. I think it comes down to awareness. I think awareness proceeds progress. That’s my opinion.
To know about therapists and therapy and they have to know what it is and they have to know about it in such a way that they can apply it to their own life and go, “What would help me?”
That’s what we’re doing here.
It’s a big part of why I do this show. I dream of a world that I’ll never see to where somebody could say, “What do you do for a living?” I go, “I’m a psychotherapist.” They go, “That is great. The therapist I had was awesome and absolutely changed my life for the better. I so appreciate what you guys do for a living.”
No matter what your issue, affliction, or problem is, you’re not going to fix it without regulating your nervous system.
If you don’t know what you want, you can’t ask for it. I think it was nice that we were able to quantify it. Think about it. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s great goal to have. That’s why we get together.
It’s one I want. I’m incredibly passionate about it. I’m so thankful for you, Billy and this show and the people who tune in and get out there and spread the world and spread the word because we can heal people.
We’re going to keep coming. We’re going to keep delivering as much awareness as we possibly can and, hopefully, one by one, remove some stigma behind psychotherapy and therapy in general. I hope that in the process of educating people and sharing with them what therapy is, for whom it might be helpful, where they can get it, and why they might want it. They realize, “That sounds a lot like me. I appreciate Eddie and Billy talking for an hour a week about how I can deal with some of these things and develop the skills and be provided with the tools and resources to process, exercise and learn these things and be a better kinder, more curious and more compassionate human to myself and to others.” That’s why we come together.
Eddie and Billy’s perception of what therapy is and for whom it can benefit. This has been another episode. We ask that you keep tuning in. If you found this beneficial, don’t keep us a secret. Share it with some friends and perhaps go back to some earlier episodes and see what we’ve been talking about and why we’re talking. We’ll keep showing up again each week to bring you as much as we can to spread the word and create awareness and remove stigma.
Who knows, Atlanta might be the hotbed for psychotherapy in 2025 because of the work that Eddie’s doing right here on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you receive your spoken or viewed word. This has been another episode. We would like to express sincere gratitude for the time that you spent with us. Hopefully, it was helpful and beneficial and maybe you even learned something. If you need any further assistance on where you might find a good therapist or what questions you might ask in interviewing a therapist or where to begin, hit us up in the comments or email us, Eddie@TheCouchTrip.co. We will make sure that we get you that information because, again, it makes it incredibly worthwhile and fulfilling for us. Eddie, any final words?
No, I’m worded out. It was awesome. Thanks.
We’ll see you all next time. Stay tuned.
Important Links
- YouTube – The Couch Trip
- Super Communicators
- 7 Habits
- Eddie@TheCouchTrip.co
Leave a Comment