TikTok Therapy
Over the past 24 hours I have watched hundreds of videos from many beautiful humans across the globe, sharing "The BEST thing a therapist ever told you" stories from a #stitch with @carveyourownpath
I am so grateful that I was able to learn some of these things today and wish to share them with you too.
Behaviours
When someone says “I’m sorry” and we say “that’s ok” we are implicitly accepting their behaviour and the behaviour wasn’t ok in the first place. So when someone does something wrong to you, instead of saying “That’s ok” and brushing it off and accepting their poor behaviour, instead say “Thank you for your apology” where you’re acknowledging that they’re apologising, you’re acknowledging that a wrong was made, but you’re not implicitly telling them that their behaviour was ok.
Just because you understand motivations behind people’s behaviours, doesn't mean that that's an acceptable way for you to be treated.
“You cannot teach a drowning person how to swim” think about that, that applies with kids too when they're having that tantrum and you're coming at them trying to rationalise with them, they're not listening, they can't hear you. That person having a heated argument with you, they don't hear you, they're drowning, you can't teach them to swim while they're drowning. You have to walk away and come back when they’re calm, when you're calm, then you can rationalise. Then you can discuss, then you can get through it all.
Boundaries
Boundaries don't feel good in the short term, they're like a muscle you're not used to using yet, but they do feel good once they're strong and you can use them all the time.
You cannot simultaneously set a boundary and manage somebody's emotional reaction to the boundary. Their emotional reaction is not your responsibility. Set the boundary anyways.
If you say this is always happening to me and something has become a pattern, then you have to stop looking outside yourself to find out what the problem is. I had a string of terrible bosses and they kept doing things and I was like “why does this always happen to me” and he said something is happening in act one or act two and you don't see it .If it happens in a pattern, then it's not outside you. Transgressors transgress against everybody but they keep the ones that don't notice the boundary crossing as their special targets and I could never see it until then.
Nobody should ever be aggressive with you. Mistakes happen people are human but it's important to practise communication skills where you are not aggressive and screaming at people. People can cry with you, they can be passionate about the way you made them feel, but you always deserve baseline respect. You don't have to be nice you don't have to be kind all you have to do is be respectful of other people; that is your job as a person.
Grief
Grief is not so much about the past, it's more about mourning the future that you thought you had.
Growth
“The first thought you ever had was not your own” meaning that a lot of your belief system is based off of other people’s opinions, which means there's so much unlearning to do and a lot of learning on how you view things and make your own opinion, rather than just being somebody that believes what everybody else believes.
You don't get any extra points for doing life on hard mode. If something makes your life easier, use that tool, use your prescriptions, whatever it is that works for you use it.
Healing is a journey; it's relapse and remission. It's one day at a time, don't ever let anyone try to tell you how long it should take you to heal because this is your journey.
When everything is uncertain, anything is possible.
I used to think that 'secure' was in the middle of 'avoidant' and 'anxious' but this is not true, it actually goes 'avoidant', 'anxious', 'secure' - so you are avoidant, then you have to do the work through the anxiety, and then you're secure.
If you're trying something new, stepping outside of your comfort zone and being brave and courageous - it doesn't feel good, it feels like shit, it always feels like shit, because that's the sign that you're doing it right, because you're working through the things that you need to.
Courage cannot exist without the presence of fear.
Happiness
Happiness is kind of like sadness; it's extreme and is one side of the spectrum. Really what we're trying to achieve as a state of contentment, rather than striving to be happy all the time. It's this idea that you're just at peace. It's the feeling where you lay down in bed at night and you don't have that little voice in your head telling you that you could have done more, instead you just lay down and you think, I was enough.
I said that I wanted to be happy but happiness is short term, what I want is to experience joy, because joy is longer and it's something you take with you everywhere, regardless of what's going on in your life, underneath all the bullshit, you still experience joy.
Relationships
Even if you tell your partner your wants and needs, they get to choose to give it to you how they want to give it to you, but you still get to choose if how they give it to you is good enough for you.
Think about it like wavelengths - we're on our own, but some of us might be similar to other peoples. Factors determining your wavelength are socioeconomic status, interest, dislikes, education levels etc. These factors can be both healthy and unhealthy. You are attracted to people on similar wavelengths as you, so when you're growing and doing great things you're attracting people who are more on your wavelength, when you're regressing and not doing so great, you're attracting those people and you're attracted to them.
No matter how much they hurt you, and you want them to understand how much they hurt you, if they haven't understood that at this point in time, you have to accept that they're never going to change and it's ok to let them go.
Don't mistake stability for happiness and it's OK to give up stability in search of both.
People know how to care, love and treat in the ways that they were taught to care, love and treat. So your parents only knew how to parent you in the way that they were parented, your friends only know how to friend you in the way that they were friended, your lover only loves you in the way that they learn how to love; it's not to say that what they're doing is best or good, it is just a way to look at it things from their perspective so you understand things a little bit more and that it's not you, but it was actually them and it wasn't them, but what they have learned, and it's a way that you can end cycles and learn from those things and see things from other people's perspective.
If you want your partner to send you a good morning text and they finally start to do it, they are only sending the good morning text because it's a manufactured. Then my therapist asked me “If someone is sending you a good morning text because you begged them to do it it's going to be a chore to them – why would you want someone that feels like it's a chore to love you?”
You don't need to be upset every time somebody is no longer in your life because people are in your life for a reason a season or a lifetime but they're not always going to be the lifetime.
You can't date a version of someone you think they can become. You have to date the version standing in front of you. Can't change people especially when they're not even trying to change themselves.
Giving your partner the silent treatment is only hurting you, it is not hurting them because you're not communicating to that person what has either upset you, or made you mad or whatever and that you need to communicate, because all you're doing is sitting there and stewing in your own anger and that you have to be upfront and forward with what you want to say.
They heard you the first time and they either didn't care about how you feel, or they didn't care about what you said.
Self-Talk
“Transformational Vocabulary” We believe what we tell ourselves, so if all of your self talk is negative, you’re going to believe all of those thoughts, it works the opposite way as well, so if all of your self-talk is encouraging and feeding yourself positive thoughts, you’re going to manifest an incredible life.
There will always be someone that has it worse than you, but that doesn't mean that what you're feeling isn't valid; Just like there will probably always be someone that is better than you at whatever it is that you like to do, that doesn’t mean that you're not good at it.
There is no point in worrying about what other people think about you, because every single person has a different perspective that reflects their own mind, so it really isn't about you it's about them.
Your thoughts are not facts if you feel like you're going down the rabbit hole of overthinking stop and only believe the things you're telling yourself that you can prove.
The more you try to control things that are out of your control, the more out of control you will feel.
Keep a photo of yourself when you were a kid and every time you catch yourself beating yourself up, or talking down to yourself or feeling really bad, look at that picture and ask if that child deserves it.
The way you speak to yourself, is the same way your abuser speaks to you. The way you speak to yourself, the things you say, is abuse. You’re abusing yourself.
You are not your feelings. Let me use the analogy that she used - “I am the Sky and my feelings are like the weather. The sky knows itself very well and it also knows the weather, but the sky also knows that it is not the weather, it's the sky.”
Whenever I start talking badly about myself, my therapist is always like “OK what if your friend told you those things and that they were struggling with that, but you respond to them in the same way that you just responded to yourself? What if instead you responded to yourself in the way that you would respond to your friends if they came to you with that same situation?"
My therapist told me to write down all the things that I think about myself on a piece of paper. I filled the whole page with all kinds of awful adjectives and things I would never ever want to see again and at the end of it he told me to read it and asked me if I would ever say those things to another person, and I was like "Of course not!" and he's like "So why would you say it to yourself?"
I was once told that your brain can't be emotional and logical at the same time. So if you're having an anxiety attack, a way to help calm yourself down is to count by odd numbers up to a certain amount like 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 etc. It’s not incredibly easy, but it helps bring your brain out of an emotional overload and kinda helps you to calm down.
I've been trying to unlearn using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and understand that there's no connection between my worth and productivity; We've just been taught over and over, that we have to be humans that produce things, that bring in money, that come up with ideas and concepts that will change the world and if we aren't able to do that then we are less than. That's not how things should be, even though you know we get raised in a society that views us that way, it's super easy to get stuck in a loop where you feel like if you're not being productive, if you're not producing, if you're not making money, if you're not hustling, then you're not worth anything and that's the farthest from the truth.
Trauma
Everyone has experienced Trauma, we need to start seeing people as survivors of trauma. Then we can understand that the things that they do are not personal towards us, they are trauma responses.
“If it’s hysterical, it’s historical” meaning if you’re having a really big emotional reaction to something, that could be about something fairly minor. It means it’s a reaction to something unhealed from your past, or your childhood, a trauma that you have yet to heal from.
You don't have to make amends with the adults in your life that let you down or actively harmed you that caused your childhood trauma, you don't have to fix that, that was on them you were just a kid.
When you overthink exactly what you're going to say in order for it to be received the way that you wanted it to be, all that you're actually doing is trying to control the other person's reaction, which is a trauma response.
The danger in being too empathetic is, that with empathy you feel their stress, anxiety and anger in your body emotionally and physically, and if you let those emotions sit in your body, your mind and body can be emotionally hijacked.
You're not responsible for the trauma other people gave you and it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility to try and heal from it and to try and grow, because nobody else is going come back and fix it, you gotta try and better yourself.
You don't understand and may never understand because you are not them you cannot think why someone would do something so awful because you never would.
My therapist looked at me and said "You know neglect is a form of abuse right?"
"We repeat what we don't repair" probably some of the best advice I've ever received from a therapist.
People pleasing behaviour can be a learned trauma response.
She looks me dead in the eye, she grabs my hand, I have two of them, and just with the most empathy and compassion in her voice said “Look, what happened to you is not your fault and it speaks nothing of your character” and she went on to talk about what matters is how I handle what happened but that first part really stuck with me that I wasn't to blame.
Disclaimer: I am not a therapist and cannot confirm if licensed therapist provided all of the above information. Therefore am not responsible how this information is interpreted.
IMAGE: PEXELS
