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. I thought it would be really helpful to just do a quick episode about who I am and what I'm doing with this podcast.
So hello, I'm Rebecca Hunter. I am a therapist, a mental health therapist. I have a private practice.
I am a mom of two teenage boys. One is a year from out of the house and the other one is going to be a junior this year. And I've been married for an eon, longer than I thought I would be.
I've been married for 21 years. So I've got that experience under my belt. And I'm just kind of a straightforward, down to earth lady.
I grew up in a house that was, I'm a product of divorce and alcoholism. And if you dig around or do any research, most therapists and helpers and healers, they come from a life of difficult things. Because when we rise up and we take charge of our lives, we want to help other people do the same thing.
And so that's kind of what I'm doing. So I have my private practice. I live in rural Oregon.
And it's a successful business and I love it. But one day I just sort of made this realization or had this realization that I was only going to be able to help as many people as walk through my office door. And it just wasn't enough.
I don't overwork. My life is super structured around my life. And then work comes next.
And so I see like 10 or 15 people a week in my practice. And so I like had some time to play. And I started playing with a lot of different ideas.
I developed a course for people who have anxiety. I developed a different program in my practice where I'm doing some like remote and on-demand type of coaching, which is super fun. I speak publicly about mental health to businesses and other organizations that give a shit about mental health.
So what I what I'm kind of doing on the side of just helping individuals is like, I really want to push some knowledge out to the bigger world, because we're suffering, you guys were really suffering. The rates of depression, anxiety are at an all time high. And also in our teen population, that's the case as well.
And as the parent of two teenagers, that really concerns me. Number one, that we're so into like labeling what is basically just life difficulty, and pathologizing kind of what is normal, right in in life, which is hard. Life is really hard.
And we're kind of saying that it shouldn't be or that we shouldn't feel certain things or like we need to get a handle on that. And so I just am calling bullshit. And I'm saying no, life is hard.
We could cope better with it. But we don't always need to label it. So I don't do any diagnosing anymore.
In my practice, the people that work with me, they don't need to have a label. I don't need to have a label. And most people don't need to have a label.
The only thing, the only reason that we really label people is for the insurance companies. So the insurance companies really have stigmatized difficulty in our culture, which is such a bummer. And so I am doing this podcast in order to help de-stigmatize struggle.
So that's what I'm doing. I specialize in working with people who are anxious or depressed and have a lot of success in actually helping people to recover from those things. They're not permanent conditions.
They're not identities. You know, you hear a lot of people say like, I'm anxious or I'm depressed. And I'm kind of like, well, that's true.
But also there's a part of that that's like, you don't have to label yourself like that. Right? I mean, we all get anxious from time to time. And you'll hear me talk about that a lot.
And we all go fetal. It's kind of what I call depression, you know, get disconnected from ourselves and others a lot of the time. And that's like pretty normal.
And we all kind of have had that experience in one capacity or another. So I'm just really nerdy. I love to read.
I love to access the resources that are out there. People are doing brilliant work in my field and getting outside of this box of what therapy and mental health help should look like. And so I'm just like, I've already done it in my private practice, but I'm doing it here as well.
I'm just like stepping outside the box. I'm not the kind of therapist who doesn't swear and who never talks about themself or who doesn't, isn't able to relate. I do all of those things on a regular basis and we'll do them here.
My plan for this podcast is just to be myself and just to be a therapist, but also and spread my knowledge and give you some wisdom, but also like to just show you that like I'm struggling too. Like this thing isn't easy and I will sort of help you through modeling some of the techniques that I, a therapist, use in my own life to deal with stuff. So that could be kind of fun, right, to just kind of hear the inner workings of a therapist in the midst of problems.
So that's my plan. I'm also going to just like be pushing a lot of information out there, both on my social media. I use Instagram and Facebook.
Those two things feel like in line with who I am. And I also am, you know, I'm just going to push resources out. That's I'm a resource junkie.
So like I'm going to tell you about books I've read or podcasts I've listened to and like we'll talk about them. And then the other thing I'd like to do is just answer some questions because I think we have a lot of questions and we don't ask the questions because we feel like we shouldn't have questions. So please get in touch with me and ask me some questions and I will do a podcast.
Maybe I'll do like a Q&A sometime. So anyways, hopefully this gives you a little bit more information about who I am and what the heck I'm doing with the podcast and I'd like to have a relationship. And so what that entails is I will work hard to bring you information and you will be able to help me by just spreading it further.
So let's like work together to get rid of some of this bullshit mental health stigma. And if anybody wants to invent a new term to replace the words mental health, that would be amazing. I've been thinking about that for a while and haven't really come up with a stroke of genius just yet.
So let me know. Let me know what you got. Okay, you guys take care of yourselves and I'm looking forward to our relationship with each other and to learning together.
I'm pretty stoked about this. So thanks for showing up. It can be a great way to learn about yourself so you can navigate a bit easier.
I'll see you next time.
