Therapy or Self-Help
Speaker 0: Welcome to Takeout Therapy. I'm Rebecca Hunter, a therapist who knows therapy is actually very expensive and believes that mental health education should be free. Stick with me for the next few minutes, and you'll learn something that will help you think about life differently, or maybe manage things better for yourself. This podcast is authentic. It's unedited and without a bunch of ads.
All I ask is that you pass it along. Please forward an episode to a friend in need. And if you like my style and you wanna do some work with me, come join the club at takeouttherapy dot com. Let's get to work. Hey, hey, before we start the episode, I quickly want to tell you a bit about Takeout Therapy Club.
It's my new project, and I'm really excited about it, and I think you will be too. For a ridiculously low price every month, I'm leading you through an in-depth workshop, meant to help you really dig into some deeper stuff as part of your personal growth work. It's the same length as a therapy session with about ten times the information you'd actually get in the office. With, of course, You know me, an action plan to follow. This takeout therapy club for me is about helping people change their lives through mental health education because there's just too much we don't know.
This month, we begin at the beginning. With the fundamental things that every person needs to know to have a baseline of decent mental health. Every month, you'll get tools to put into your life. These are the things we teach in the therapy office year after year. The human survival skills tools.
And as we go, we're gonna build a little community. Literally, the opposite of social media, this thing is not on Facebook. It's a insightful, accountable, and personally focused group of self helpers. Just like you, So come takeout checkout, takeout therapy club at takeout therapy dot com. Hello, my friend.
I'm so glad you're here with me to do some personal both work today. You know, I got an interesting question about a week ago, and I wanted to address it here on the podcast because I think it's a really common question. And the question is basically, like, I know I need to do some things to change my life. But I don't know whether I can do them on my own or I need to go to therapy. And isn't this such a common question, maybe you've thought the same thing yourself.
I know I have. I know sometimes I still do. Because personal growth is a lifelong project that I'm really hoping to get more people involved with. So that we can bring down the a whole quotient in our society. How about that action?
So it's confusing. Isn't it? When you wanna, like, dig in and work on yourself to know, like, well, what's an appropriate amount of a work, be action at a time and like how do I figure out what to do? It's really confusing. And I also think not to dig on the mental health field, but it's really stigmatized.
Still to talk about your mental health with anybody other than a professional. So it's like, it's becoming less stigmatized to go to therapy, which is cool, but it's like still really not always really acceptable to air your mental health crap with other people. Like, people don't know how to hold it. They don't know what to do with it. So there's a lot of stigma there.
You know, we're not just going around saying, hey, does anybody else just kinda go feel for days on and sometimes? I'll give you the short answer to that. Yeah, lots of people. And do they always diagnose themselves? No, they don't.
So that's kinda why I wanna do this episode because I wanna kinda create this distinction between what therapy is and what personal growth work is and what the difference is. You know, there's one thing is there's a lot of barriers to access in the mental health field. And I, as a therapist, am frustrated with the mental health field because it's become, like, totally glombed onto the medical model. And it's created barriers for people to be able to access just regular old therapy. You know, the demand is pretty high right now.
Sadly, we're seeing more and more mental health stuff. That's a pickle. Are we seeing more mental health stuff? Or are we just talking about the experience of being a human and how difficult it is. I think we're definitely seeing more mental health stuff.
And there are direct causes of that that I'll get into on a different episode that will be super uplifting. Just kidding. You know, another barrier to access is that there's not enough therapists for people with trauma. That need to work through their trauma. And so if you're anything like our area, it's kind of hard to find a therapist who's actually available.
And goodness knows if you're having to look for a therapist with your insurance plan, now that can just become a not very funny joke. Because those therapists are really slammed. And frankly, they're kind of burnt out sometimes too because they have to take a lot of people on their caseloads to make a decent living wage to pay back their astronomical student loan debts. Okay, that's the end of that rant. The mental health field is tough to be in, and I know some of you are therapists that listen to this podcast.
So may I just acknowledge us all with a little bow of my head and say thank you for the work that you do. But here's the thing. Not everybody needs therapy because therapy is a very unique healing environment that is really helpful in I I would say, like, everybody could use therapy not everybody needs therapy. Therapy is really specific for a few different things. You know, one of the things that's Super interesting.
Like, you go to school and you pay all the money and you get your master's degree and you start, you know, work and work and work and And what you start learning is that the therapy that you're doing isn't about what you're doing. It's really about being in a healthy relationship with another person so they can see what that's like. It's really interesting. So it's like you learn all this stuff and then it all kinda goes out the window when you realize this isn't always about the methods and the, you know, your theoretical viewpoint. It's about relationship.
And so for those of us who grew up in traumatic situations where there weren't healthy relationships with other adults, healthy relationships with females, healthy relationships with males, healthy relationships being one in which you're validated, and told that you're understood and you're seen as a human being and that you have a right to your opinion and you have a right to your emotions Yeah. That kind of healthy relationship. So like I said, we could all use that, but not everybody needs that. It's kind of a weird relationship too because it's the relationship is only about you. You know, you don't go into therapy and be like, how's your weekend?
No. You just don't do that. The whole relationship gets to be about the client, the person in therapy, which is pretty fun. And it's a really it's a really nice way to be able connect to somebody authentically, which is also also a really important element to healthy relationships. Therapy is a place to heal trauma.
And I don't know that many people who don't have trauma. Trauma just being a word that we use to describe adverse stress. Did you ever have adverse stress in your childhood? Right? Like, you don't have to come from, like, a quote unquote, bad family to have trauma.
Like, teachers can traumatize their students with their words and their looks. Right? And coaches can bring adverse stress on to their athletes with their philosophies and their methods. Yeah. Adverse stress is just part of growing up.
And so, of course, we all have things to heal. And in the therapy office, the way you do that is to learn to talk about them. In a way that the sentences start with I and me. The therapist teaches people to talk about their life, to talk about their emotions and their experience at the things that they've been through. And so If you don't know how to do that, it might be fun to go to a therapist and learn that.
A therapist is there to help somebody gain perspective. On what they've gone through because I have a lot of education, yeah, but also supplemental trainings, which is where therapies really get educated through our continuing ed and our areas of specialization. So we have a lot of information. A lot of information. We have a lot of information about the body and the mind and the development of a sense of self And that's one of the, like, kind of, what what the money's worth, right, is, like, a different perspective because when you're going through stuff in your life and you only have your own perspective, that's a very limited place to heal from.
And so in that case, yeah, of course, therapy would be super helpful. Right? But here's where I'm gonna ding on the medical model of therapy because not everybody actually has like quote unquote mental illness Most of us just feel it crap sometimes. Some people just have lifelong anxiety. That we really need to learn about and figure out how to nurture and soothe and heal.
Does that have to happen in the therapist's office? Not necessarily. And does a diagnosis help us do that? Not really. A diagnosis is part of the whole picture of mental health and it's really, really important but not everybody feels like that's a helpful tool for them to begin to heal.
Some people actually feel like they really don't want that label. Like, don't tell me I'm this. You know? Those are the people that I work with. In in the medical model of therapy, we have to give diagnoses.
If you're working in the medical model of therapy, you have to do long assessments where you ask people all kinds of questions and you have to write all those answers down and you have to submit those things and fill out a code that's called a diagnosis, which means this is the problem that we're gonna try to solve. And some people, they really want that. And some people, that is literally the last thing they want. They don't want a treatment plan and they don't want medical records about their sessions or about their mental health. And so that's the medical model of mental health.
And I'll just say, like, I don't work in that model at all anymore. I work differently than that. I'm proud say that. I choose to say that because the people that I work with, they don't need diagnosis or they don't care about treatment plans. They just want me to meet up with them as a human being in what they're in and start from there.
And so that's how I work with people both in my practice and in my membership club and all the courses and things that I've done over the years. That's how I work. So sometimes in the therapy model, people get hung up on that medical model. They don't want their mental health to be part of their medical picture, which would like, then I would say, either find somebody out of the box or start doing self help. Right?
Because I think that therapy, I guess, if there's a line between where therapy is appropriate and where self help is okay, or enough is that therapy is like what we do when we need to learn how to talk about things. We need to have a good relationship modeled for us. We need an intense level of support. Around our personal growth and where we get to a point in life sometimes where we're just not functioning. And when we're just not functioning, going to a therapist is a great idea.
Okay? And so there's where the line lives. And let me talk about the difference between therapy and self help because I and it's self help junky. No. I love self help.
I've always liked self help. I guess, you know, as a kid, My parents were kinda messed up, but my dad was in AA. And so I was I went to AA meetings when I was, like, six and seven years old. And so he always had self help books around, and I was a kid who coped with the chaos of our lives by reading. And so you guys, when I was a little kid, like in middle school or even maybe elementary school, I would just pick up these random self help books and start reading them.
So that's kind of a funny fact about me and why I'm such a self help nerd. But one of the reasons I love self help is that it's just a place that you can start to do some work. Right? Like, rather than be like, oh, maybe I need therapy or maybe I can do it myself just like start with self help. Start by listening to a podcast once a week.
Not three, not seven, just one and start by creating an action plan. Right? Like, self help is cool because It's like we can just dip our toe in the pool here and there and do a little bit of work that feels good to us. And it's enough for now. As long as people are engaged and you're learning what you want, when you want to, Right?
You become empowered to take different actions. One of the things I hear from people a lot about the difference between self help and therapy is that therapy didn't work. And I'm like, well, why didn't therapy work? Well, all we did is talk. And then all she did is ask me And then at the end, I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
And that is one of the things about therapy, like the traditional therapy model is not always set up to give people action items. Now there's an up and coming thing happening in the therapy world where more and more therapists are working with people in an action oriented way like I do. It's kind of coachy. It's kind of therapy coaching. And I love the coaching field as well when people are healthy and they're able to provide, you know, trauma informed care I'm down with that as well.
I actually consider coaching more self help because coaching is like you talk with somebody and they kind of give you some education and some ideas about what to do and they provide you accountability. So it's actually kind of a mix of the two models, but it's more self help. It's empowering Right? And so many people feel like going to therapy and getting a diagnosis and working, you know, kind of your life around this label is really disempowering. They don't feel empowered by that.
And so if you're one of those people, start with self help. If you think you have an anxiety problem, start becoming nerdy about anxiety, and then you'll know pretty fast whether you need therapy or not. So find a good guide and take some right actions. Right? And figure out, like, does is that helpful?
Can you do it on your own? Perhaps you need a little bit more support. Right? It's obvious the reasons that I created takeout therapy club because people wanna do their self help work. They don't know what to do.
So it's nice to have a guide to just go, like, here's the information. Here's what you need to do with it. And here is your support system that you can use for this process, which is what I do in the club. That's good self help because self help isn't a vacuum in which you operate and you just read a book and you hope that things will change. No.
Self help is read a book and then figure out what you're gonna do differently. Figure out areas of your life that you need to arrive in and behave differently in in order to affect change. So it's a much more action oriented way of doing things. So what we do in both, hopefully, therapy and self help is we get to know ourselves and we start being in a good relationship with ourselves. And we learn some stuff, and we grow up a little.
Right? And hopefully, in that process, whether you choose therapy or you choose self help, you take some actions, take some different actions that get you out of the patterns that are not working for you in your life to begin with. So whatever you choose, choose what feels like the most empowering things for you and just get going. Okay? You know, I have a lot of clients that are like, I really want this to move faster.
Like, you know, I'm doing all this stuff you're telling me and I'm, you know, things are really changing, but I just thought I'd be, like, totally different by now. And what I have to say to you friend is there wasn't anything along with you to begin with. It was only that the ways that you were functioning before you started your personal growth journey just didn't fit with the person that you were becoming. And becoming, that takes time. And healing, that takes time too.
And we can do it slowly slowly, or we can do it in a more intense way. But do it with yourself in mind, in your relationship with yourself. Because as I've said many times on the podcast, That is the foundation for everything, your relationship with yourself. Because after all, we're kinda stuck with ourselves at the end of the day. So if you want to get some good self help, check out takeout therapy dot com.
I'm here for you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. The goal of this project is really to provide mental health education to everyone who needs it. So if you want to help me with that, forward an episode to a friend or write a kind review.
Please And if you like my style and you're ready to dig in, do some work with me, come join the club at takeout therapy dot com. Where I'm now hosting a monthly mental health maintenance club. I also do classes, groups, and one on one coaching and therapy. It's time for a change. Are you ready?
