The Meltdown
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. Hello.
Hello. I'm so glad you stopped in again today. Always working on yourself, aren't you? Good for you. Life will get easier, your mental health will be better, and you'll just be overall a more pleasant and developed person to hang out with.
So thank you for making the world a better place by showing up. Now, I wanna talk to you about something really important that comes up constantly in the therapy office. And it's called the meltdown. You know, the meltdown Have you ever spent a few days feeding in your bed? Like, what the hell is wrong with me right now?
Yeah. That's the meltdown. That's what I'm talking about. You know, one of the reasons that I do this podcast is because mental health stigma just pisses me off. Like, the fact that in our culture, were led to believe that if we have an emotional meltdown, we're literally not doing life.
Right? Oh, it just irritates me so much because it couldn't be further from the truth. We always think like an emotional breakdown of some kind, just a full on meltdown is somehow an inadequacy of our own. Like, we can't handle everything or there's something wrong with us. And yeah, I'll give you that.
Like, occasionally, a a good long nasty meltdown, you might wanna go and see a doctor. Right? You might wanna go and see if they're at best. Like, definitely, a big long meltdown is caused for concern. But I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about what happened to me a few weeks ago when I just ended up in the fetal position in my bed. For a couple days crying and needing to be taken care of and I was taken care of because in my house, there's no such thing as mental health stigma. And meltdowns are a good thing. So let's talk about this today because life gets really complicated sometimes, and I think we over complicate it by thinking that we're not doing it right. So here's the deal.
It's not hard to find places in life that feel sad. It is not hard to get overwhelmed with emotion, just going through the daily dailies, whether it's fear, or uncertainty or worry or anger or sadness or god like loneliness. To ever just get swept out by loneliness. Even if you're surrounded by people, all of this is completely normal. And as a matter of fact, your friend Rebecca, the therapist, is gonna tell you it's a good thing because everything that happens in life lands in the body.
And I'm really simplifying this for you so that you can create a visual So if you just think about, you know, those big marshmallows that we used to roast in a campfire when we were kids, So if you just think about, like, every difficult thing that happens all day long every day, Just think that you just put a big marshmallow inside your body. And then you think, well, geez. Where do they all go? Well, they don't go anywhere. Okay?
And so the example is basically like, we just intake a lot of stuff. And every little stuff can count as a marshmallow that never goes away. And so before long, we become the marshmallow man. Oh, yeah. Sometimes, actually, I do kind of look like the marshmallow man.
Because I am eating my feelings. But that's a whole other episode. Like, let's not go down that road, shall we? What I'm saying is that everything that happens stays with you. Unless you process it.
But we can't process every single thing. Right? When we get up in the morning, and we have to go, like, say, get some blood work and the person puts three needles in instead of one. Hello, my veins are hard to find, I get it, but still. Right?
That's how the day starts. Then somebody cuts us off in traffic and then we go to work and we don't have any pencils in our pencil cup. And then people come in and they're complaining about us. All of this stuff is just adding, adding, adding, adding all this emotion. And as you're going through this day or these days or these months with all of these emotions that you just take on.
Again, like little marshmallows, big Fooluffy marshmallows, you're all full up. Where do they go? Where do all these emotions go? If you don't talk about them or show them or give them any space or time. Well, sooner or later, the meltdown happens.
The big marshmallow roast. My analogy is turning out pretty well. What happens is that when we don't process things, they stay with us, and we can only hold so much. I can only hold so much before I totally melt down. And probably the same as true for you, unless you're really good at avoiding emotion, which isn't good either because you can avoid it or you cannot avoid it, the marshmallow is still there.
And the only way To get rid of those marshmallows, my friend, is to feel your feelings. And so sometimes, in life. When we get really overwhelmed with a lot of emotion, the body kinda shuts us down and says, listen here bud. You can feel your feelings now, right now, right in the middle of your work day, right in the middle of this meeting. Right when you're supposed to go to this fabulous thing and do this fun thing.
So we call this the meltdown. And let's not stigmatize it. Let's just say, okay. Today, it's gonna be time for the meltdown. And just start to understand that all the meltdown is.
Is your body's asking you to just please stop? Please. Stop. Please rest. Please go willingly.
Into your emotion. So let me let me talk to you just for a few minutes about how to handle the next meltdown. And I will start with what I just said, which is go willingly. Just go willingly. Because you're not getting out of it.
Because your body is going to process, what it means to process, with or without your compliance, my dear. Your body's gonna do what it's gonna do. So when your body gives you this giant signal, that is this emotional hurricane or wave or overwhelm some sort of turbulence or maybe you just are crying that's kinda how it happens for me. And I just start crying. And then I'm like, okay.
Well, I need to take the day off. Right? So when this starts to happen, when you're headed into meltdown, I want you to understand that your body's just doing something that it needs to do, and you gotta participate. Here's what's not helpful. Being unkind, labeling yourself, criticizing yourself, going with the classic stigma of like, oh, well, I guess you can't handle it.
Or there's something wrong with you. That's usually not true. If we just sort of listen to our body, and understand that it needs to rest and reset and be kind to ourselves in the process it makes the whole process so much faster and so much easier. It takes, like, maybe a three day meltdown to a one day meltdown. Right?
All you really have to do is go willingly, be kind, nurture yourself. What do I mean by this? Nurture. Well, for me, it means when I am I when I'm heading in the meltdown territory, I spend a lot of time in water I'm I'm a cancer. I don't know if my horoscope has anything to do with it, but you guys I just need like a big vat of water to sit in.
And I feel like I can sort of allow the emotion to come and it feels safe for me in water. Feels like not super overwhelming. Maybe some people prefer their bed. Maybe some people need to go out to nature. Whatever will help you to sort of join with yourself.
Would you please do that? We'll call that nurturing. Is it a cup of hot cocoa with whipped cream on top? Whatever. I'll tell you what it's not.
It's not Netflix. It's not reading a novel. It's not distracting yourself with something else because that's what you did to lead up to the meltdown. Right? Because when, again, when things happen and we don't face them, we don't look at them, we don't feel them.
Maybe we don't have time, maybe we don't have energy or the mental capacity find whatever, but eventually we have to. And you can't keep putting it off, putting it off, putting it off, right? With the Mindy project or whatever you're watching on Netflix. It doesn't work like that. So when your body says, let's do this, what I'm telling you is you say, okay, and you take the day off and you go willingly.
And so then what? Then you're just laying around with a bunch of emotions Well, yeah. That's what you're doing. You're basically just identifying your feelings. And here's where it gets tricky because if you're anything like me or any other humans, you identify your feelings and then you talk a lot about why you feel that way.
And maybe that's more in your head or maybe it's really out loud. But the plot of the story doesn't matter, all it matters, the emotion. All it matters is if it's sadness, then it's like, I'm feeling really sad right now. And you know what? My friend, you don't have to have a reason to be sad.
Look around you. There's plenty of reasons to be sad. Why the hell wouldn't you be sad sometimes? I often get overtaken by a sadness, and I go willingly, and I allow my body to feel the sadness. And it's super interesting because even as I'm just sitting here on this podcast and I don't feel super sad today, but I can generate sadness by just talking about it, by just allowing my body to go yeah, that is really sad.
And there's a wave, right, that kinda comes up, and it's a feeling in the body. And when you get that feeling in your body, because you've stated an emotion dude. You are awesome. You're doing it right. Isn't it terrible?
Why is it that we're so adverse to feeling feelings? Do you know that most feelings last about second? Like literally seconds, maybe twenty, I don't know the number. I'm not a mathematician, I'm a therapist. Feelings last for seconds.
If we do not, you know, actualize them. If we don't go well, I'm sad because Betsy never texted me back. Yes, after I texted her, inviting her to go I said, no. It doesn't matter. All that's important is the feeling.
The mind will try to distract you from feeling the feelings every every freaking time. Did you listen to last week's episode? Watch out for the martyr and the critic and the victim. When you feel a lot of emotion, those three characters will come in and you'll become distracted from your emotion. And then you'll be all up in your head with the murder and the critic and the victim.
And if you didn't listen to that episode, go and listen because it's so interesting how our brain responds to a simple emotion. What I'm telling you today is when you know you're heading into meltdown territory, go willingly. Open the door. Roll out the red carpet. Get comfy.
Talk about how you're feeling. Journal draw, listen to music, stretch, breathe, connect with your emotion. For me, all I have to do is say, I'm really angry or I'm really sad or I'm super overwhelmed, and I will feel that emotion immediately. And so seeing it out loud is very helpful. So that's all you really wanna do.
And then you wanna nurture yourself back again. And for me, what that looks like is taking that time, taking a lot of time actually until I'm bored of it. I really get bored of it is what happened with my last meltdown. I'm like, okay. Well, that's when that's I'm gonna go do something else now.
It only takes a while for the body to be able to process some of this daily, daily crap that builds up in it. And we could get rid of all those marshmallows. And doesn't that feel so much better? Right? When we can just say, I'm sad.
And we could spend some time in sadness and then we can go, okay, I've processed that. I'm gonna move on now. That, my friend, is extremely functional mental health. And I think what's really dangerous about stigma. I just wanna poke this in at the end.
It's like, stigma is so dangerous because it's like, if this is normal, then why aren't we told that this is completely normal? If the meltdown is just a backlog of emotion that we didn't get a chance to give to give space to. If it doesn't mean that we're incapable of handling life and it doesn't mean we're shitty at this thing, If it doesn't mean that our mental health is messed up, but rather what it means is that we're gonna be okay. Were creatures, were a species. The way we experience life is through emotion.
Let's get on board with that. Let's get rid of stigma. Hey, if you have any desire to continue this conversation, Come, join, takeout therapy club. I'm getting this thing going, and I'm real excited about it. My first work shop is amazing.
You're gonna learn all about your mind and your body and your as you relate to yourself in your mental health journey. It's a really nice setup for the year ahead. I've got some really fun things planned in this club. And I gotta say, as far as a personal growth monthly membership goes, this thing is cheap as dirt right now because I'm just getting it started. So come check it out at takeout therapy dot com.
Okay. Thanks for doing your work with me today. Let's keep working together to make the world a more, I don't know, emotionally mature and functional place to be. Me and Ye will keep doing it. Thanks for listening.
The goal of this project is really to provide mental health education to everyone who needs it. So if you wanna help me with that, forward an episode to a friend or write a kind review, pleats. 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?
