Hi there, you're listening to Take Out Therapy, short weekly lessons about all things mental health that you can take into your life and use. No topic will go unturned. This is your host, Rebecca Hunter.
My day job is a therapist, and we don't really just tell people what to do. We listen a lot and validate and help people reach their goals. But in the next few minutes, I'm just going to be straight up with you about what to do in certain situations.
Yeah, I am going to teach you about how to have a higher level and more functional, happy life. While I'm a therapist, I'm not your therapist. If you need a therapist, go get one, friend.
But listen in as I open the door to my office in an exploration of things we all struggle with. And if you have little people in the room, you might want to throw on some headphones unless they already know all the swear words. I'm grateful you're here.
Thanks for showing up. Hi there, everybody. Thanks so much for showing up today.
I'm super excited about this episode. I hope that it proves to be really helpful to you. I think that I am going to talk today about a subject we don't talk about very much, and that is our relationship with ourself.
And I think I'm excited about it. I have a little outline even, like this is a big deal for me. I'm going to talk about this idea about having a good relationship with ourself in the context of my own relationship with myself.
As a therapist, I think one of my major ethical guidelines is that I need to be doing my own work. Right? So if I'm sitting in a room and I'm holding space for somebody else to do their work, I damn well better be doing my work. Right? Because if I'm sort of not really aware of my trauma or not really aware of where I'm at in my life, or I'm all caught up in my own stuff, then how can I possibly have enough perspective to help somebody else figure out what's going on in their life? Right? How could I ask curious questions? How can I stay open to all the different possibilities that can be coming up for people if I'm all mired in my own crap, basically? So I've always, ever since I was young, actually, I've always been kind of working on myself and not in this way of like, you know, you're shitty, you need to get help kind of thing.
That's really not my idea about having a good relationship with myself. My self work is more like, I'm gonna be the best person I can possibly be while I'm here. Right? This is like kind of a short deal.
The life of this woman, Rebecca Hunter, in the grand scheme of things, right? I'm just here for a short time. So my idea or my kind of frame of reference is that I just want to, I just want to give something to the world. And I want to heal myself and my, um, my own, you know, I just want to be aware.
I just want to show up. I just want to live my life in a way that's really authentic and open. And if it's like hurting people, or if I get hurt, I want to know that, like, I want to know it and I want to learn about it and I want to do it better.
Does that make sense? It's, it's just this very kind of circular, um, let's just say it's a nonlinear path, right? Um, it's, it's a feedback is welcome type of path, um, that I'm trying to lead here. And, and I think I've gotten really serious about my own work in the last few years as my kids have gotten older. You know, when you have little kids, I'm sorry, but like, it's really hard to do your own work because you're so busy keeping the tiny people alive.
Right. And so I think once my kids got to a certain point where they started to have a lot more independence, then I kind of went back into doing my own work. So this podcast is really about what, what, what is a good relationship with ourself? What does that even look like? How do we even get there? Right.
And, and what are some steps that we can all kind of take to be more open to the idea of just having a good relationship with ourself? Um, I believe that a good relationship with oneself is a foundation for healthy relationships in our life and a pathway to like just being fulfilled. You guys just, just feeling like, okay, yeah, this is good. Like I'm living here on this earth and I feel like I have a purpose and it feels really good.
And like all that stuff, you know, nothing's ever going to be perfect, but just to move in the direction of progress feels really empowered. Right. Um, and so I think, you know, what would be helpful is just to kind of break down how I sort of learned about my relationship with myself and the steps that I took along the way to kind of get where I am today, which by the way, like still plugging guys, like it's not perfect.
Um, I am never going to be perfect. I will always be human, right? Darn it all. Um, but I'm always kind of pushing, I'm always pushing.
So the first thing that I, um, have always thought was important is just to learn, right? And even as a young, well, a young adult, but even as a teenager, right, I did a lot of learning about my specific trauma, which is, you know, when I use the word trauma and I'll probably say this on most of the episodes of my podcast, trauma just means adverse stress, right? Any adverse stress that we have in our lives, it shapes our brains and our bodies and our life experience, our perspective, right? Our, our thoughts. Um, so we call that trauma in my business. So you can call it whatever you want.
Um, but I'm going to refer to adverse stress in my own life as my trauma, uh, my hardship, you know? Um, so just so you understand that. And so as a young person, just learning about, basically learning about the impact on me of the things that I went through was really important. So like, for example, I had a parent that was a heavy drinker, right? An alcoholic who was an addict really.
And um, and just as a young person, learning about addiction was really helpful, right? In my journey to have a better relationship with myself, because when we're kids and there's somebody in our life who's behaving in a way that's not reliable, the brain will think that it's about us, right? The brain will say, well, this is because you're not a good kid, or this is because you're not lovable. Right. And all these kinds of bullshit things start to get formed.
And so as an early adult, just going and reading some books, right? About, well, what's it like to grow up with a parent who's an alcoholic? What is that, right? What is the life of an adult child of an alcoholic look like? That's a really important step along the way, learning, reading, right? Even like taking a course or class in the impact of your own trauma will help you to kind of learn and also like depersonalize, right? I didn't, I'm not responsible for the behavior of my parent, right? And just sort of learning about that is super important for our relationship with ourself, because sometimes there's those background beliefs of like, well, you know, if I hadn't been such a pain in the butt, maybe my parent would have blah, blah, blah. And just kind of taking away that top layer of BS is really helpful when you're starting to correct your relationship with yourself, because life digs at it, right? So it's, it's almost like we're having to rebuild. And then the second kind of phase, you know, of, of learning to have a better relationship with myself after I kind of learned a lot about how the things I've been through affects human beings was just to notice, just to slow my own life down and just like notice where those things came into play for me, right? And I did this by using mindfulness and mindfulness is just this like, super trendy word that means paying attention.
So and I, and I do talk about mindfulness along the way, but mindfulness is like paying attention has kind of been around for a while, right? And there's a lot of different ways that we can pay attention in our lives. But you know, one thing that really helps is just slowing down and just like being an observer, right? Not being so emotionally involved in everything, not being so reactive all the time, but rather just taking a step back and going, Oh, like, this is what I do, right? When I feel left behind, or this is what I do in conflict, right? Or I don't do conflict, which is what a lot of people, you know, really struggle with is when we don't do conflict, that really impacts our relationship with ourself. But there's a reason we don't do conflict, and we have to learn about it.
And we have to notice it first. And then the third step is like, start implementing change. And so a few years ago, right, and I'm 46.
So I've been, I was in therapy as a teenager, right? So I've been on this really long journey of trying to a recover from trauma, but also like leveling up and figuring out like, well, what do I want to do? Right? How do I want to be in my life? What are my values? How do I live to my values? How do I keep those promises to myself all the time? How do I create boundaries, right? And those things all have to do with kind of the third stage, which is like change, you know, changes, very action oriented. It's, it's, it's actual, making things different, right? First you learn, and then you start to notice what's happening. And then you're like, oh, I don't want to do that anymore.
Right? Because I don't want to be like that. Or I don't want to lead with my trauma in my interactions with people. And so in order to create change in your life, first of all, you have to be willing to do things differently.
You have to be willing to have difficult conversations and conflict. But also it requires an openness and an openness means like anything goes. There are no wrong answers, right? And in order to get to what the answers are, we have to be curious.
So in order to create change, we have to first notice, and then we have to be open and we have to be curious, right? And the best way I can describe curious is something that I talk about a lot, and it's just asking open ended questions like what's happening for me right now, right? There's no right answer to that question, guys. There's no wrong answer to that question. What's happening for me right now is what's happening for me right now.
And sometimes I'm going to like the answer. And sometimes I'm not right. Well, what's happening for me right now is I'm acting really childish because I'm, I'm feeling really triggered, right by this person's behavior, or something that my husband said, or something like a slamming door from a kid, right? So it's, it's really important just to kind of blend all those things together.
When we're talking about having a relationship with ourself, we have to learn about how we've been affected, we have to notice what's happening in our lives, and then start to change to a place where it feels better. So I have kind of three rules, three major rules in creating and having maintaining a good relationship with myself. So rule one is don't talk shit.
And so what I mean by this is like, I don't look in the mirror anymore and say mean things. I don't say in my head or out loud, that was so stupid, right? I don't criticize myself. I'm really gentle, right? I say, Oh, I could have done that better.
Or I'll go, I'll circle back with somebody and say, I could have handled that better. Right? Can we do that again? Right? I'm fault. I'm, I'm faulty.
I'm a faulty human, right? And being, being able to accept that, and also like have a sense of humor helps me not to talk shit about myself. Right? And then my second rule is like, I never let anyone treat me worse than I treat myself. We are so hard on ourselves.
Don't keep people in your life that are harder on you than you are. That's not helpful. It's never going to get you where you want to go.
So it's okay to kind of recognize, um, when people are not treating you as well as you would like to be treated, that the reason that that is, is because you don't treat yourself very well either. Right? And that's a good place to start from. So just that's like my second rule is basically like when I noticed that someone is not treating me as well as I treat myself, then I just like bring it up and I don't necessarily always have to bring it up with them.
I can bring it up with me and be like, dude, what's up with this, right? Why are you allowing this person to do this thing? Right? And so, and a lot of times it's about, I haven't gotten straight with myself on that or I haven't really figured out like what's going on there. Right? And then my third rule that's non-negotiable in having a good relationship with myself is to listen to myself. So you can't, and I can't be in a good relationship with anyone you don't listen to period.
Game over. We must listen to ourselves. So here's the problem with this and where I get a lot of kickback in therapy, um, is that when I bring up the fact that we need to be listening to ourself, people are like, yeah, but I don't really like what I hear.
Okay. All right. So a good example is like when someone's in a relationship that they don't want to be in anymore, right? And they kind of know they're ready to move forward in their life into a different kind of a relationship, maybe a different pattern or, um, you know, it's just done, right? People move in, they move out.
Um, but, but people don't like, I always say breakups and quitting jobs are the hardest decisions. Right. And there's a reason for that.
But we know when a relationship has run its course, it's just a really hard answer to deal with. Because if I decide that, like say a friendship has run its course, that's really hard. You guys like, how am I going to implement change there? Like how am I going to explain that to my friend? How am I going to deal with that? Um, that loss on my own.
Right. So sometimes my intuition is very strong, but I don't like the answer. And so it takes me some time, right.
To implement change. But I always listen to myself. And if I can't hear myself, then I know that I have to go on vacation or I have to slow down or have to take a walk or I need to, you know, I just, I need to just tune in to that.
So I never ever push myself to the side that goes back to rule number two, where I, I don't want anybody else pushing me to the side, like I don't want to be pushed to the side. Um, and so it's important to sort of listen to yourself and, um, and treat you really well. Right.
Well, I said it, I mean it. Yeah. And, and yeah, sometimes the answer is hard when I listen to myself.
So that's where self-compassion comes in. And I think it's, um, we can't really talk about our relationship with ourself unless we deal with self-compassion and self-compassion is this idea that we don't really treat ourselves very well. Right.
Right. And, um, that we can allow ourselves to feel emotions and have compassion for those emotions without sort of being hard on ourself or trying to talk ourselves out of feeling badly or any of those things. Right.
So I really recommend, um, Kristen Neff is a great resource. Her last name is N E F F and she's got a website, it's self-compassion.org. I really recommend looking into self-compassion. Um, there are some components to it and self-compassion involves sort of being a listener, right? Being a good listener of oneself and holding space for difficult emotion, um, for understanding that like you guys, life is hard and we all really struggle.
And so there's like that piece about shared humanity that sometimes when we're struggling, we feel like we're the only one that really struggles with things. And when we start kind of having compassion for ourself, we kind of are able to talk about our struggle and then we're like, Oh shit, everybody feels like I feel like I'm so not alone. Right.
Um, and then mindfulness is also a big part of self-compassion. Um, which is basically like, I don't know how I feel unless I'm willing to go there. And mindfulness is the path.
Basically. Once I start paying attention to what's happening, then I know how I feel. Then I can listen to my intuition.
Then I can stop talking shit to myself. Then I can treat myself better than everybody else treats me. Um, hopefully that makes sense, right? I've done, um, a lot of things to improve my relationship with myself.
Um, and it's really fun to be a therapist because I get to go to like all these fun trainings, you know, where I can kind of, I use trainings not only as a way to bring new things into my private practice and the coaching and therapy work that I do with people, but also to just like deal with my own shit, right? Like first I do it with me and then I teach other people to do it with themselves. So again, like I'm out here, I'm doing the work and I should be right. I've done, um, I've had a lot of therapists, I've done a ton of therapy.
I really like therapy if it's done well. Um, obviously I do the kind of therapy that I like to be in, which is like that action oriented work. Yeah.
Um, I've done a lot of things over the years. I've done, I get regular massage, I go to an acupuncturist, right? I have deep, deep conversations with good friends. I read a ton of books.
Um, I do, I've done gone through periods where I've done some mirror work, right? Looking in the mirror and just practicing saying nice things, right? I have mantras that I use, which are just short phrases that when I, when I start to like do that old pattern of talking shit to myself, I'm like, Oh no, I don't do that anymore. Right? And so I say like a nice thing, right? You deserve to be treated well. You look really beautiful today, right? Or like my basic one, which, you know, I sort of spread the word in my office about this one.
It's okay. It's one of my major mantras. I use it all the time, right? When I get into a thinking pattern that I don't want to be in, it doesn't align with who I am and my values.
I will literally just say it's okay and reset, right? And that helps me a lot in my relationship with myself because I'm upholding it. And um, so hopefully like I've been able to sort of help you figure out what in the world is, am I talking about what I'm talking about? Having a good relationship with myself and like how do we get there, right? And so just to recap the way I've kind of done it is learning, right? Lots of learning, lots of reading and going to clinics and classes and talking to therapists and um, you know, just doing the work and then like noticing, just slowing things down, using mindfulness, doing a little bit of meditation here and there. Um, and then just like being willing to implement change and creating some value, a value system for my relationship with myself, which is those three rules of like, don't talk shit.
Never let anyone treat you worse than I treat myself, right? Never let anyone treat me worse than I treat myself. And number three is just like, listen, just listen to me, right? Because I'm important and I have something to say. So hopefully this helps you think and noodle on your relationship with yourself, right? Maybe you could create some rules and some guidelines that you want to just poke along at.
This is a lifelong process. There's no rush, my friend. Just, just get to it when the time feels right.
I hope this was really helpful. Um, let me know, get in touch, take care of yourself. Have a great week.
Thanks. Bye. This podcast is meant to be helpful to help you learn some stuff and grow as a person and to help me fulfill my mission of opening the doors to the therapy office a little bit wider so we can get rid of some of this stigma.
Life is challenging and we all need all the help we can get. This podcast is in no way meant to be a substitute for therapy, but I recommend therapy or coaching, regardless of whether you're struggling or not. It can be a great way to learn about yourself so you can navigate a bit easier.
I'll see you next time.
