You're listening to Take Out Therapy with your host, Rebecca Hunter. If you're into personal growth and fascinated by the human condition like I am, stick with me. In the next few minutes, I'll break down a common personal growth topic and give you some straightforward ideas for change.
I'm a private practice therapist and online mental health educator, so I see a lot of popular topics both in and out of the therapy office that we all struggle with. I'm here to help with that. This podcast is not a substitute for therapy, but rather the musings of a therapist and an opportunity for information and a little bit of help.
Okay, let's get to work. Hello, party people. Thank you so much for joining me today for your weekly mental health lesson.
I'm excited for today's episode. I think it's really interesting. It's also funny how sometimes I come up with these episodes.
I've been recording them completely on the fly now. I used to batch record them, so I'd do a whole bunch at one time and then have Camille help me with all the little side things I had to get done to publish a podcast. Then I just decided, you know what, girl, you're making this way too complicated.
I just do everything myself now. I just record the podcast on Mondays, afternoons, and I just write up a very short, simple blurb. Sometimes I send out an email, sometimes I don't.
If you'd like to get my sometimes email, feel free to subscribe to my list. This week, I have been noticing a theme that's come up in therapy around detachment. It's really interesting because I'm going to talk to you today about this idea about how to detach in general from people or maybe from their some specific behaviors.
Sometimes we need to physically detach ourselves from others, and sometimes we can kind of emotionally detach from others. It just really depends on what your situation is or what the deal is, my friend. You kind of have to think about who the person is and what the situation is.
If it's something that our close family does and we are driven absolutely bananas by it, we can emotionally detach from it, absolutely. Obviously, if it's somebody who lives in our house, we can't physically detach, but we can definitely emotionally detach. And then there's that whole pickle about when we actually need to get out of a relationship.
Sometimes we need to detach from people. Maybe it's a toxic person or terrible feeling relationships with unhealthy patterns and all that fun stuff. Maybe it's just flat out somebody that triggers you, but a lot of times we need to get out of relationships or detach from some aspect of a relationship.
Maybe it's somebody else's behavior and it feels terrible. And so instead of doing what we need to do and detaching, we don't. And then we become kind of victimized, right? So I used to have this neighbor that I'm going to use a silly example.
I used to have this neighbor that drove me crazy and I would get all roped in to whatever the behavior was and then basically realize like, oh my gosh, I'm all roped in about some silly neighborhood garbage, right? And then I would have to like work on emotionally detaching, which would mean the logistical steps would have to be taken, right? In order to free myself emotionally. But it feels bad when it's somebody that's close to us or somebody we're in a relationship with, right? If it's family or maybe we need to detach a little bit from a friend. Sometimes friends can be really triggering and the things that they go through can be really, really hard to watch.
And sometimes it's best for us if we can just kind of step back a little bit from it. And there's a way to do that without like abandoning people, my friend. And there's a way to do that without feeling abandonment.
Maybe it's a more serious situation in which we need to detach from somebody we deeply love, somebody who isn't taking care of their own mental health or somebody who isn't being accountable for their behavior. More importantly, that's kind of what I mean. Just somebody whose behavior is not okay in our life.
It's triggering, it's uncomfortable. Like by the way, may I just add, you get to choose who's in your life, okay? And so don't feel like you can't detach from people. But it's important that we talk about how to detach kindly.
Because the reason that we don't detach when we need to, people always say, oh, I stayed in relationships too long or oh my God, I should have left that job a long time ago. Right? The reason that we do that is because detachment feels so bad, both from the person who needs to leave and the person who has to stay. And we want to, and it feels like abandonment.
And so instead of that, we just stay. So let's talk about what the difference is, because here's the deal. Here's what I've been teaching people lately.
We can detach from other people really kindly. We can totally do that. That's possible.
And I want to teach you how in a really quick little lesson. Let's talk about detaching without intention, which is detaching not kindly. Okay? What we do is we get super pissed off about, and we do a lot of othering.
This is one of the reasons I love Tara Brock is that she talks about how we other. We're like, she did this and she didn't understand it. You know, I tried to do this, but then she did.
You know, we work ourselves into this angry frenzy where we can feel justified to leave the person. And that's super, super important to understand. We're just angry.
And that's okay. You can be angry. But acting out of anger is not grown up behavior in a lot of cases.
And so, and you know what I mean, because you and I, we have both done some shady stuff when we were mad, right? And being mad is, I could do a whole episode on that, right? Of course. But being mad is justified and it's safe and it keeps us safe and it keeps us from accessing all the other reasons why we need to detach, right? And it comes in big and it comes in strong and it's never particularly loving. So acting out of anger is a good indication that we're detaching without intention or that somebody is detaching from us without intention, right? The other thing to look for is like causing of shame.
Shame, shame, shame, shame. Go find Brene Brown if you don't know about her. She's a shame researcher and she has put out some beautiful information to teach us about what shame is.
But it's basically just that underlying feeling like that we're not a good person, that there's something wrong with us inherently. And shame is something that when we feel that, and by the way, everybody has shame. I don't care who you are.
We all have shame and shame is, we have to do something with it. It's just one of those emotions like human beings really like to pass around like a hot potato. And so what we do is we typically either overly caretake for somebody or we shame the shit out of them.
We just pass it along like a hot potato. And so detachment without intention can sometimes look like being shamed or trying to cause somebody else to feel bad about the kind of person they are. And so that is super understandable and very common and also feels really bad to both parties.
You're not going to be able to get out of that one without getting hurt is what I'm saying. And so that's how you know that someone is detaching without really having a lot of intention around what's happening. And then the other things you'll see in just like this detachment that just scares the hell out of all of us and that none of us want to have happen or to do to anyone.
But sometimes we do because we don't have intention. And sometimes people did that to us because they didn't understand either. It's like when we invalidate each other like ignoring, ignoring someone, giving them the silent treatment is very hurtful.
It's detaching from somebody else. Of course it is like just leave me alone. Silence.
Nothing. You get nothing out of me. It's so understandable, but it's completely like this very damaging detachment that's hard to bounce back from, to be honest, right? It's like that ultimate abandonment.
So whether somebody does this to you or you do this to somebody else, it might be time to just try something different that might work better. Right? Passive aggressive behavior never won any prizes and silence and ignoring somebody in that ultimate abandonment or, or invalidation is part of that. So that's all the things not to do is what I'm saying, because they'll hurt you as well as the person that you're trying to detach from.
But what you can do if you really care about somebody, but you need to leave a relationship. If you really care about yourself and you need to detach emotionally from something, you can detach with love, which looks a lot different. It's um, you know, if you're trying to leave a relationship, for example, with somebody that you deeply love, but you know, like this thing's done, I gotta go.
I need to detach from you. Right? You can do it in a way that is kind and compassionate and empathic and understanding and in a way where you have rock solid line boundaries, you get to leave, don't forget, you just get to leave relationships. You get to choose who's in your life, right? But do it with love.
Do it in a kind way if you possibly can. And what I would say is the first thing to do is to get emotionally regulated, my friend. If you are so angry that you're trying to actively hurt somebody else, meaning emotionally, like are you saying mean things? Are you feeling like all this rage and hatred and resentment, right? That is not a place to come from when we talk about detachment.
It's just going to be really, really hard for you to detach from there. But if you come into a place where you can be more emotionally regulated and like really think things through in a rational way, using all the different parts of your mind, both the rational and the emotional parts of your mind, oh, it's so much easier to figure out how to detach in a way that's permanent and healthy. But when we detach in like anger and shame and by ignoring people, it doesn't last.
And so it's really hard emotionally to be able to get detached. Does that make sense? I hope so, my friend. You know, the other thing is like these are my two favorite words in therapy are the words curious and open.
Okay. So if you've ever had to leave a relationship that's been unhealthy for whatever reason, maybe it was with a college roommate, maybe it was with right, your friend from way back in the day, maybe it was from leaving a job or leaving a relationship. It's good idea to just kind of stay curious.
It really helps us stay in a place of emotional regulation for one thing, right? Because if we go down the rabbit hole of anger, it's just really hard to get out of it, feeling really victimized and of all this like negative, negative, I'm not saying don't feel the negative stuff. I'm saying like, be curious about what else is there, right? Try to kind of tilt your head to the side and go like, what's up with you? Right? What might be happening for this person that maybe isn't about you, right? And the reason we want to do that is because sometimes we get stuck in a space where we think everything's about us. It's a funny place to be my friend and yet a place I find myself often, right? But it's like if we're open to the idea that not everything's about us and we can be a little bit curious, then we can understand what's needed, right? We can validate the other person's experience maybe, right? To say like, listen, I know that you're really struggling right now and I don't exactly know what is happening for you, but like it impacts me and here's how and that's why I have to go, right? And here's the thing is like to be able to understand another person is also an exercise in being able to understand yourself, my friend.
So if you need to detach, you need to understand why that's happening for you. You need to understand your part in it, what might be there for you to learn or a place where maybe you can grow. And here's the deal.
Like if you're in a relationship with somebody who just triggers you and you know like, oh, I've got this trigger and it's a really tough, it's really hard for me to be in relationships. Like for example, with people that are flaky, right? Because I need people to be able to show up for me. And so this person is too triggering and I need to detach.
You can totally do that in a really kind way by just having good boundaries, right? By just sort of saying like you get to take up this emotional space, but not this, like in your own head, not to them because that's just an odd thing to say. What I'm saying is you just, if you can come from a place of being emotionally regulated, you can detach with somebody by understanding them and being more curious than judging, right? Being kind of open to like, okay, well this experience is different for both of us and that's okay, right? That that's okay to have a different experience, but you're going to set a boundary and choose how you want to conduct the relationship anyways. Does that make sense? Like I think at some point in raising up my kids, I needed to, another silly example, but emotionally detach from the fact that they didn't clean their rooms.
Like they don't, they don't care about having clean rooms, right? And it's interesting because hindsight's 20, 20 baby. As soon as I detached from the process and got out of it, they cleaned their rooms. It's like, it's so, the whole thing's just so annoying.
This whole parenting situation. It's like as soon as you do whatever you need to do to heal, the kid just falls in line. What's up with that? Anyways, I knew that I needed to emotionally detach from it.
And so that was about me, right? Like getting emotionally regulated, getting out of this angry place where I'm like, I'm like Charlie Brown's mom about the rooms, right? Like that's super helpful. Thank you. But rather just to get curious and be open.
And in the end, like just kind of validating like, okay, well they're kids, right? And I'm going to let them express themselves in this way while they're young. And just sort of like, this isn't really a good and validating my own trigger of like, oh man, this isn't a really very good idea to get all wrapped up in. Like this is a very poor use of my energy and my time, right? And if I can't figure out how to sort of win, then this is going to be a long, arduous losing battle.
And so just validating my own need to move forward and then just having boundaries with myself around it and saying like, I'm not going to do more than two reminders. And this is going to be the consequence. And beyond that, like there will be not a lot of, you know, anything like that's coming from an emotional place and being able to detach emotionally from a situation in whatever logistical way had to happen in order for you to just be in good health, but also like be in good standing, like be a good person, be a nice, compassionate, empathic, and loving person.
Ah, wouldn't that be lovely to be able to detach with love? Glennon Doyle says, bless and unfollow. And I like that expression. It's kind of funny.
It's like, thank you very much. Bye bye. Right.
And we can do that, my friend. And you can do it in a way that doesn't trigger you and doesn't destroy another person, but just exercises your right to get to choose like who gets to be in a relationship with you because you, you are fantastic. And I am so lucky that you're my friend.
Thanks for being here. I'll see you next week. I hope you found today's episode helpful.
Here's the deal. I'd like to get rid of some of the stigma around mental health. And this is how I'm doing it.
You can join me by leaving a review, sending an episode along to a struggling friend or even subscribing, my friend. Any of those choices would be exciting because then we would be helping more people. If you want to dig in further with me, I have spots open in my monthly online anxiety group.
It's going to fill up fast. So get in touch or you can join my free private group for daily tools, journal prompts and information to help move you from struggling with anxiety to healing it. It's the Anxiety Recovery Club.
And I'm not messing around over here. Head to the link in the show notes at RebeccaHunterMSW.com. Way to show up today.
