You are listening to Take Out Therapy, speedy sessions for everyday problems. This is your host, Rebecca Hunter. In my role as a private practice therapist, I don't really just tell people what to do, but in this podcast, I'm doing things differently.
In the next few minutes, I'm just going to be straight up with you about what to do in certain situations. Keep listening for awesome tips on how to live a more intentional and less reactive life. Clearly, this is not a substitute for therapy, but I guarantee it might help you.
Listen up. Hello, people. Thank you so much for joining me today.
This episode is a little different than normal because I'm not actually going to ... Well, I might teach you a couple of things, but more importantly, I'm going to use a different kind of resource today. Therapists, we learn a lot about evidence-based practice, which is basically methods of doing therapy work with people that have been proven to help. A lot of the stuff that I talk with you guys about on this podcast is evidence-based practice.
It's stuff we know helps people. It's stuff we know works. Then today's category is a little bit different than that.
Today's category or today's category, today's podcast is really about using other humans and their experiences as resources. Maybe not so evidence-based, but real. We can learn and grow using other people's experience as a resource, but hey there, we need other people to talk about their experience in order to help us to kind of see ourselves.
This is where Glennon Doyle comes in. I love in my work, one of my favorite things is giving people resources. Like, hey guys, if you're in therapy and you're not getting resources on the regular from your therapist, ask.
Do you have a resource about that? Do you know of any podcasts about this subject? In my practice, I dispense resources like a self-help junkie. I came across Glennon Doyle many years ago. I want to illustrate for you how a human resource is such as the amazing and talented Glennon Doyle can be tools for our personal growth process.
Glennon Doyle is therapy. You guys, you can just skip your appointment this week. Feel free to tune in to Glennon Doyle.
Yeah, this is kind of a love fest. Glennon Doyle is a writer. Most recently, she released a book called Untamed that I just finished reading, which is why I'm sitting here talking to you about her.
She's been a writer for a long time. She actually started, well, I don't know when she started writing, probably when she was a small child. When I kind of heard about her, she was a Christian mommy blogger who was kind of in a kerfuffle with the church and with, frankly, other people's expectations of her.
She'd been writing this very, very popular blog all about raising kids. She's got some kids and she was married and living a Christian-based lifestyle and was just kind of writing about her experience in that. And then her life happened to her and things kind of went sideways for her.
So I want to talk to you about Glennon Doyle because this woman, A, she is on fire, you guys, and I'll kind of tell you why I think that she's good therapy. But also because I want you to understand the importance of just talking about the human experience and how fricking valuable that is. So let's talk about kind of some of the work of Glennon Doyle and why it's therapy, OK, why it's therapeutic to use other people's experience as your backdrop for your personal growth process.
So Glennon Doyle's all over social media and she always has been. And that's where I found her. She, well, she was in the middle of this divorce.
And subsequently, she actually fell in love with Abby Womback, who is a professional soccer player. And boy, did that cause a big ripple within the Christian community. And so Glennon Doyle just showed up on social media.
And when I say showed up, what I mean is that she has never been anything but a human being. And there's a really valuable lesson in that. Glennon Doyle is a woman who has had her fair share of trials.
She is a recovered alcoholic. She suffered from bulimia from a very early age. She had a fairly major, you know, religious crisis in her life and also fell in love with the woman much to her own surprise.
But what she does and what we can look at and learn from this is that she's just kind of talking about it, right? She's not like pretending anything out there. And so that's really validating, right, as a human being to just see another person living their life, just real about it. And frankly, she's got a great sense of humor.
This woman is hysterical. So she's out there on social media and she's very wide open. You know, she is talking about how life is, how her mental health is.
She's suffered from plenty of mental health stuff, as as many people do. Right. It's not like a unique experience to experience depression and anxiety.
What's unique and what she teaches us is let's talk about that shit. Let's be real about what that's like. Right.
So she's really open. And, you know, that includes the fact that on social media and I don't know where else, but like she shows up as real, too. This is not a woman who's got a lot of makeup on and it's all done up.
She's actually most of the time looks like the rest of us, my friends. And so the other thing that I love about people like Glennon Doyle is like, can we can we just look like ourselves? Can we just show up? The other day I saw a great picture of her and Abby and they had on these super cute sweatshirts and Glennon was like in super short shorts or maybe even panties, but you couldn't really tell. But like, can we just show up how we are in our life? Does everything have to be fucking posed? And what she teaches us is, hey, friend, no, it doesn't.
That stuff doesn't matter. Right. And so I think what I love about her social media presence particularly is that she's kind of helping us through her experience figure ourselves out.
She's asking some important questions and she's having important dialogue that we haven't had, guys. And so that's therapeutic. Just so you know, that's what we do in therapy.
We talk about shit we never talk about. And here is Glennon Doyle and she's doing it out loud on social media. I also want to and also one more thing I want about that.
I want to say that Glennon Doyle is a good example of a growth oriented social media feed. And you guys know I harp on and on about minding your feet, clean your shit up on social media. Guys, social media can be used for a purpose.
And I particularly I'll tell you my personal use of social media is for personal growth. I want to hear from people that are real, open, right, straight up, but helpful. I don't like I don't follow people that aren't fitting into kind of what I'm looking for.
So by the way, like, yes, that's totally biased and absolutely my right. On social media. And you have that right, too.
So, yeah, so people like Glennon Doyle. And if you follow Glennon Doyle, like you're you're going to start to see kind of what I'm talking about by the people that she interacts with online. She's a good example of somebody to put in your feed who's growth oriented.
If you're looking to do some work, let me talk about her writing and then I'll stop gushing about this woman. But I'm just kind of using Glennon Doyle as an example. I hope you don't mind, girlfriend.
I, well, I don't know if Glennon Doyle will ever hear this podcast, but I'm going to continue on with my gushing anyways. Glennon Doyle is a hell of a writer, so she's written some beautiful books, one of which is called Love Warrior, which I actually have not read. I'm not totally obsessed with Glennon Doyle.
I don't know why you would think that. I'm going to read it after this. But Love Warrior is about her journey out of a dysfunctional marriage, out of alcohol addiction and into what can only be described as one of life's great loves that I can see from social media.
Yeah. So it's her love story, basically, and her kind of come to Jesus, I guess you could call it, about her life and her path and where she was headed. And so that was the book that came right before Untamed, which is the book that I just finished reading, which was phenomenal.
And I recommend borrowing it from a friend or going and buying it because it's a fantastic book. And I'll tell you why. And I just want to say, like, I'm a self-help junkie.
I'm a proud, card-carrying member of the self-help society, you guys. And Untamed is self-help at its best. This book is...so Glennon Doyle is a beautiful writer.
She's not super flowery. She's super, like, down-to-earth, direct. And yeah, her writing's just beautiful.
So this book was empowering. Like, I was reading this book and thinking, oh, my God, I need a highlighter. Like, this book is very empowering.
For one thing, Glennon is shining a light on the importance and the reality of our emotional health. She's shining the light on our responsibility to deal with that, okay? And so that's why I really appreciate her, because she's out there talking about mental health, frankly. And as you know, that's kind of a hot button for me.
We need to be out there talking about what's real, right? And so one of her quotes is, being human is not hard because you're doing it wrong. It's hard because you're doing it right, right? And so she has this very empowering way of helping us to think a little bit deeper about our beliefs, right, about what we think about ourselves in the great, great world. Glennon Doyle is unequivocally female-centered, which I freaking love.
And frankly, if I were a man, I would also buy this book, because you're going to learn something about the experience of being a woman that's just real, that's just like honest truth about what it is to be a woman, right? And one of the things that she talks about, which I think we need to be talking more about, and I just want to highlight this, in her book, she talks about sensitivity, right? In our culture, if you're, quote, unquote, sensitive, right, there's something wrong with you. This book stands behind the idea that I talk about a lot. Hey, guys, we should be feeling stuff.
So sensitivity means you're paying attention. So being insensitive means you're not really paying attention, right? Have you ever been insensitive and you were like, oh, my God, I didn't even think about that? Yeah. So one of the quotes that she I'll tell you from her book is she's talking about her daughter, Tish, and she says, Tish is sensitive and that is her superpower.
The opposite of sensitive is not brave. It's not brave to refuse to pay attention, to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine. The opposite of sensitive is insensitive.
And that's no badge of honor. So she's sort of standing up for, frankly, females, right? Because we've typically been gender stereotyped as overly sensitive and saying, no, no, no, no, no. You know, sensitivity is what we need here.
She talks a lot about the knowing, right, which is kind of if you've seen any of my videos, I like put my hand on my chest a lot when I'm talking about intuition and like our knowing, like what we know to be OK and what we know to be not OK. Right. And so I just I love that she's out there doing this because we need to hear this.
And the other thing real quickly is that my girl, Glennon, she's unapologetic. You guys, she is not, frankly, interested or sticking to any social or religious or gender or sexuality norms. And I say, can we just clap for that? Because it gets old, you guys, all the boxes that we're constantly asked to be in and to get in and to stay in.
It's all just it's all just a lot of noise. OK, and so here's somebody that can reaffirm for us that when we feel like that's BS, it's because maybe it is right. And we deserve to ask that question.
So I will end by talking about community, because I think that Glennon Doyle is laying it out for us that what we need is to build community. And I believe in building community. It's what I'm doing through my work to say, you know, I'm a community builder.
I don't think that we're necessarily in a great place with some of the divisiveness that exists in our world. And Glennon Doyle is basically showing us that it's possible to let go of some of that. And for that, I thank her.
She is building a community of people that is very empowered, but also, oh, my gosh, incredibly generous. You guys, she is a very generous woman. So I'll end with this.
Glennon Doyle and a few of her friends started a project and the project is called Together Rising. It's togetherrising.org on their homepage. It says, you see suffering in your community and around the world.
You want to help, but don't know where to turn. Turn to Together Rising to transform your heartache into action. Basically, what this organization does through basically social media, the leaders of Together Rising occasionally will be like, hey, we see a need over here.
They were big activists about getting children and parents and still are, they're working their asses off, reacquainted at the border. Like, OK, come on. So those guys are like, hey, so we see this happening.
This is absolutely not OK. You know, one of Glennon Doyle's beliefs is that every kid is everyone's kid, right? Like these are our children, all of ours. So that's a big tenant of their action.
It's just like keeping people going that need help, reaching out. So they basically post on social media and they're like, hey, we see this. You know, we're going to raise some money.
Let's try to send some money. If you're interested, like get involved and you can just donate like very little money or a lot of money if you want to. And it's it's awesome.
They have raised so much money. Look into Together Rising. OK, I'm going to stop gushing about Glennon Doyle.
I think you get the picture that what I'm trying to say, you guys, is that in order to keep on a personal growth journey, it's really helpful to find people that really inspire you, right, that resonate with you, that when you hear them, you get all like the funny little chili bumps, which Glennon Doyle totally gives me chili bumps. So I hope you guys follow her and I hope that you find some people in your own, you know, on your own feed, right, in your own little corner of the land that is inspiring and keeps you pumped up because we can do that for each other. We can do it every single day, all the time.
Let's build community with that idea, shall we? Thanks for listening. Hey, before you go, I just want to tell you a few more ways that I can provide you with the content you might be looking for. If you're somebody who deals with overthinking, I actually have a free downloadable guide on my website about how to deal with overthinking.
I also have a guide you can download that helps people who are thinking about exploring the therapy process. And it helps go from tip to tail, like how do you hire a therapist? What kind of therapy do you need? And then just so you know, I'm all over my social media. I really enjoy providing good content on social media.
So I'm on Facebook and Instagram and it's Rebecca Hunter MSW. And then within Facebook, I offer a private group for people who are interested in kind of learning the nuts and bolts of how to recover from anxiety. So just a reminder, I have my podcast, but I'm also here for people in a lot of different ways and just trying to get a lot of information out there.
So thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening. This podcast is not meant to be a substitute for therapy, but I hope it was super helpful for you in any case.
I want to be part of some much needed change, but I'm going to need your help. Please subscribe and review the podcast, recommend it to your friends and family, and share it on social media. We're living in the digital age, people.
Let's do some good where we can. All right. Visit my website at RebeccaHunterMSW.com to have access to resources, videos, and the show notes if that interests you.
And again, I'm so grateful you're listening to Take Out Therapy. Thanks.
