292 - Should You Go To Therapy? Pt. 1
Normalizing therapy
Therapy is something that most, if not all, people would benefit from, but for a multitude of reasons, many people people might not ever go. Some of the more common excuses people give are:
It’s too expensive.
They would rather talk to friends and family about problems.
Not enough time.
Feeling awkward opening up to a stranger.
Not believing talking about problems will actually help in the long run.
Believing their issues aren’t “big enough” to go to therapy for.
Difficulty finding the right therapist.
Traumatic past experiences with therapy or being forced to go as a child/teenager.
Therapy types
There are different types of therapy, since it’s not a one size fits all kind of deal. Everyone has different needs, and so what works for one may not work for another. Some of the more common and well-known types of therapy are:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): Also known as talk therapy and used to build cognitive awareness and an understanding of what thoughts do to your mental and emotional state. Particularly helpful for those who have mental health disorders such as eating disorders, depression, or PTSD.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT): Designed for those who have extreme emotional responses to certain situations and focuses on centering the patient and allowing them to get back to rational thoughts more quickly. It emphasizes the psychosocial aspects of treatment and is especially helpful for those with borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, or those who attempt suicide.
Trauma Focused Therapy: Created for those who have experienced trauma of any magnitude and often used to treat those who have PTSD, such as war veterans or sexual assault survivors. There are multiple different types of trauma focused therapy, such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), cognitive processing therapy (CPT), and prolonged exposure (PE).
Psychodynamic Therapy: Freudian in origin and connects to the roots of emotional suffering, family of origin, and how the past has shaped any challenges the patient is suffering from.
Interpersonal Therapy (sometimes related to Relational Psychotherapy): Focuses on the doctor/patient relationship being a “corrective experience,” and particularly helpful with those who have had challenging parental relationships, friendships, or romantic relationships. The treatment is centered on the patient’s outside environment.
Listen to the full episode to get some more personal anecdotes about therapy from the hosts, and stay tuned for part 2 of the series!
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about therapy. Should you go? What kind should you do? This is actually the first of a two-part episode where we're going to be going in-depth about all of this. It's something we talk a lot about on the show but we haven't really gone into a lot of the specifics about it before. In today's episode, we're going to be focusing on some of the things that can hold you back from going to therapy, as well as talking about the wide range of different types of therapy that there are, as well as some of our personal experiences with different types of therapy. Then next week we're going to be getting into considerations for how to choose a therapist. What type of therapy might be most effective for you as well as some resources for going about finding things like non-monogamy supporting therapists or LGBTQ therapists or things like that.
Emily: We talk a lot about therapy on this podcast and we talk a lot about going to therapy. We tell all you all out there to go to therapy but full disclosure, I have not gone to therapy since I was in college. When I was in college I had, I wouldn't say a traumatic experience with it, but I just recall being treated by this man who was a therapy student and he was not particularly-- I guess he was a PhD student but he wasn't very warm. He just sat there and listened to me with this pen and paper and that was it. I just would sit there and cry and cry and cry for the entire hour. I think I went to eight sessions or something because that was all that my university would pay for for free. Needless to say--
Dedeker: Hold on, what'd you say at the end of eight sessions of crying at a man with a pen and paper?
Emily: Just to die. There was maybe, I don't know, perhaps a few years older than I was at the time, truly.
Dedeker: Do you feel like you got anything out of it other than just the catharsis of crying?
Emily: I don't think that he told me to do anything in particular. I really think that it was just catharsis of crying and just telling someone what was going on, what has happened in your life and it didn't feel particularly productive. I tell people on this podcast to go to therapy and I know that I should do it. My partner has been like, "You should go, I go You would love it," and my mom is like, "You should go. It's great."
I researched this episode to try to help myself pull the trigger and actually go. I'm sure that I'm not the only one out there who has these kinds of thoughts and these feelings surrounding therapy. I hope that this can help someone out there with this kind of dilemma.
Dedeker: Our listeners should know that Emily titled this episode, "Should you go to therapy?"
Emily: I'm sure the answer is yes. We all probably could use something from it. Let's talk it out everyone.
Dedeker: First of, I will say that it sucks. I'm sure it's probably not the direct fault of that PhD student because it sounds like he was learning too. I feel like that's a common refrain that I hear from people who feel hesitant about going to therapy or going back to therapy is that. Is just like, "Yes, this person just sat there while I vented and then nothing happened."
Emily: I'm like, "That doesn't seem very productive to the person who's doing the therapy," and maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe that is ultimately what some people need but I felt like I wanted real concrete answers or help or something. Maybe that's half the battle, is even knowing why the heck you're going in the first place.
Jase: I think there's also something to be said for discovering that as you go. I think that there can be this tendency to think of starting therapy as I'm committed to now, the next year I have to go to this therapist and I'm stuck with whatever I've committed to, instead of thinking of it maybe more like interviewing someone for a job. Like they're going to work for you essentially.
Emily: I feel like you're really good at that, Jase. You've told me to do that for-- Even with acting managers or whatever that I've had in the past, you're like, "No, they work for you. You should be interviewing for them," and I'm like, "No, I feel bad."
Dedeker: Emily, I feel like over the course of this show, the three of us I think have helped each other grow in so many ways. I feel like seeing you step into more of your boss energy is something that's really exciting to see.
Emily: I appreciate that. I'm glad to hear that.
Dedeker: Can we talk about some of the most common reasons why it is just inherently difficult for some people to feel motivated to go to therapy or seek out therapy?
Emily: We have this list of nine things, maybe it'll expand from here. I feel like 10 is a good even number but whatever.
Dedeker: Before we get to the end of it, maybe we can think of 10.
Emily: Yes, exactly. Here's some common excuses, including many that I have used. We're going to go down the list. Why don't I say the excuse and then you two can be like, "No, here's the answer to that," or something. We'll see how it goes.
Jase: We can just discuss it.
Emily: A really common excuse and one that I have definitely used in the past is that it's too expensive. I don't have particularly good insurance. I did once upon a time look up therapists that take my insurance and I called quite a few and none of them were taking any new clients.
Dedeker: Right. That's the thing, is you're not wrong with that excuse necessarily. It's expensive. It is expensive. That's maybe a blanket statement but I feel pretty close being like, "Yes, this is just objectively expensive," for I think the majority of our population if you don't have an insurance plan that can cover it. Of course, there's a lot of alternatives that you can look into.
Later in the episode, we're going to be talking about things like apps and things like that. You can look into group therapy. You can look into therapists if they don't take your insurance, if they take reduced rates or if they do sliding scale, stuff like that. There are options for sure. It makes sense that that's often the initial prohibitive obstacle that prevents people from wanting to go to therapy.
Jase: I feel like I'm going to use this analogy a lot in this episode, but I think the same thing can be said for a lot of different wellness-based things. If you think about something like massage, for example, that it's like, yes, I would also argue massage is just objectively expensive to do regularly. Same with, you could say that about a lot of different things like having a gym membership or going to a yoga class or buying supplements that you take.
It's like a lot of different wellness things that do cost money. There is a certain amount of just having to decide what's worth it to you and what are your priorities for how you spend your money. I will say that a lot of times if there's something that I've known I needed, times when I'm like, "Gosh, I'm really having a lot of pain and I really need to be having some regular massage or physical therapy or something."
I know that I need that and I just keep not doing it because it's expensive. Once I've finally been like, "Okay, I just need to do it and it's going to suck for a while while I'm paying this," often I find that that cost isn't as bad to pay as I thought it was, partly because I can tell that I'm getting a benefit from it. It doesn't feel like I'm wasting money. I don't know, that's just something to throw out there as something to think about, I guess. It's like, yes, it costs money and it's more just about is that worth it? Is that wellness worth it right now?
Emily: I guess it's, as so many things that I read said, it's an investment in yourself. That is a really important thing just in the long run because maybe it can help you with things that may have come up even later on down in your life. Perhaps it's a really good reason to start now as opposed to waiting to do it later or never doing it at all.
Jase: Yes, absolutely.
Emily: The next one is, I would rather talk to my friends and family about my problems or to all you out there, dear listeners.
Dedeker: You just rather use a podcast to talk about everything that's going on.
Emily: It's interesting because I definitely have done that over the years/just have been like, "Well, I'm learning so much on this podcast by doing all the research that we're doing and learning stuff from you too and that should be enough."
Jase: Emily, what makes that one hard, if I could ask, that idea of reaching out to someone besides just your friends and your family?
Emily: That's a great question. I'm not quite sure.
Jase: You can tell that one really got you. That surprised me actually and I was just curious.
Emily: Maybe because I feel like I should have the fortitude to deal with it on my own.
Dedeker: Oh gosh. Wow, you want to talk about that and baggage from that. I can talk for hours about that.
Jase: Right, in this first episode of our five-part series on feelings about seeking therapy.
Emily: Oh boy.
Dedeker: I think that actually leads to one of the excuses that I wrote down that I've used myself, is sometimes you can come from a background, a family of origin or a culture or friend group where no one really has experience of going to therapy, or there's very much a narrative around you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and you bite the bullet and just do what you have to do.
You and I have already talked at length about coming from moms who are like that. The sense of just like, "Okay, just nip your emotions in the bud. We got to just get shit done." I know for me, that kept me out of seeking help for a really long time because there is a strong narrative, you should be strong enough. You should have the wherewithal to deal with all these things.
Emily: Yes, that's interesting. I guess sometimes we don't, is to the point.
Dedeker: It's also not a failing either.
Emily: That we shouldn't have to put that on our friends and family. It's their responsibility to help you or fix you. Having an actual third-party involvement in these types of things is really beneficial because they don't necessarily have that care and love for you in the same way that your friends and family do.
Dedeker: Or you may just not have friends and family that you trust enough to talk about what's really going on with you.
Jase: Even if it's not that extreme, but it could be that if you don't feel like your friends and family could be objective about something. Maybe they really don't like your girlfriend. It's hard to go to them for advice because you know that that's coloring how they're going to respond to you and so you don't feel like you can get an objective sense of what's going on.
Emily: Absolutely.
Jase: Also, to go back to the analogy of other types of wellness going on. It's like when Dedeker has, or her feet are cramping or hurting. She can ask me like, "Hey, could you do some rubs tonight?" It's like, "Sure. I can help with that," but I'm not a reflexologist. I'm not a physical therapist. I can help a little bit. If she's like, "Really, every day I'm having trouble with this," the answer is to go to someone who is an expert in that. Someone who is trained in it, who can make more educated recommendations, help you know what's going on.
You could say the same thing about any sort of physical ailment. Like, "We get that." Yes, your friends can help you walk off your twisted ankle, but they're not going to be able to reset your broken bone in your leg.
Emily: Sure, that's a really good point.
Jase: Or with something like a chiropractor. Your friends could crack your back for you but if you really want someone to get in there and adjust your jawbones and neck bones, it's like, "Maybe go to someone who's had some more training and insurance and stuff like that for doing that type of thing." I think there's that. Then yes, maybe your friends can help but it's also tough to always be asking them to just in terms of putting that extra-- Asking a lot more from them, I guess, of their emotional energy.
Emily: Another one is I don't have enough time.
Jase: I get that one a lot.
Dedeker: It does take a time dedication. It depends on the kind of therapy that you're going to and what your reason is necessarily. It is the kind of thing where often you get out of it what you put into it. Often that says investing time. Investing time in showing up. It's also the thing where you do have to make that time and defend it as well.
Jase: I feel that not enough money and not enough time to me feel very similar, usually because I've used the two at the same time in the past, when there have been times when I knew that therapy would help me and I just kept not doing it. Those are two of the big ones for me that was like, "Well, no one can argue with that. I just don't have time. I just don't have money."
I think it's the same thing with money of prioritizing and just deciding, "Okay, let me try this and trust that I'll get enough benefit out of this to be worth the time that I took to do it." We'll talk about this a little bit more later, but maybe that would involve going to a few different therapists to find the right one for you, or trying one for a little while or somethings. I don't want to say like, "Oh, it's 100% going to double your efficiency with the rest of your time after one session." Not quite like that. It's the same as exercising or getting massage, something like that. It'll take a little time but if you do it for a while you should notice a difference. That it does improve the quality of your life so that that time becomes worth it.
Emily: How about I feel awkward telling my problems to a complete stranger?
Dedeker: Yes, definitely. The therapeutic relationship is such a weird relationship when you think about it because it's very much like, "Yes, I've never met you before. Now, let's dive right into everything you feel vulnerable about or ashamed about or your weaknesses or things like that." It is weird. I think people who are used to going to therapy who have a longer background, it becomes less weird over time. Just the unknown and the newness of it can keep a lot of people away for sure.
Emily: When I think back to sitting in that room with that one paired 25-year old kid that was trying to help me out or whatever, it does. It felt awkward then. I don't know.
Jase: I will say, of the different therapists I've gone to there's somewhere I almost feel like I am having to give a presentation about what it is that I think is going on and what I think that I want.
Emily: Just a PowerPoint about my life. I can see you doing that.
Jase: It can sometimes feel that way. I've had others where we just hit it off right away and connected and things would come up then in those discussions that I had not even anticipated. I didn't even realize that was-- I guess either that I didn't realize that that was a thought I was having or something that was going on, or that it was something that I had no idea wasn't just a fact, that was actually just something that I thought and was projecting onto the world.
I think this also goes back to the only talking to your friends and family. Those people are very likely to share a lot of these same worldviews with you. While in some ways that can be helpful, you have a common language with each other, in other ways, it could make you totally blind to something that you just take for granted. "Oh yes, everyone thinks this way." Then someone who's a professional can go, "In my experience, there's this range of different ways people can think about it and here's how that could affect you." It's such a weird relationship, though. Also where else in life do you have a relationship where you get--
Emily: 100% one-sided.
Jase: Right, that the help is one-sided and that they're legally obligated to do their best to help you and to protect your privacy. That's such a strange different relationship. I guess that the thing that makes it weird is maybe also its greatest strength.
Emily: What about, what good is talking about my problems actually going to do in the long run? I know people who go to therapy for decades. Decades and decades and decades.
Dedeker: I feel like there's a couple of things there to think about. One of them being that I do think it's a good thing that therapy, in general is becoming more normalized and less stigmatized. That's great. I do think that's something good that has come out of our generation, is that.
However, I do think that a lot of us carry I suppose some assumptions about the therapeutic process that we've just osmosed from our culture, from what we see in movies, from what we see in TV shows. The way that therapy is portrayed in movies and TV shows is very rarely accurate. Very rarely accurate, necessarily. I think sometimes people, I know I certainly did for a long time, just have an assumption of I know what therapy is already. I know that it's probably not going to be helpful to me. I can sit there and ask myself, "How do you feel about that?"
Just ad nauseam or the assumption that I'm going to be on a couch with a Freudian therapist who's going to ask me about my parents. I think that people often don't realize if they don't have any touch point to the therapeutic world, is there's just a smorgasbord of different types of therapy that you can try out and that you can experiment with. It's not all this one size fits all. Just sit down and talk about your problems for a decade, and then maybe we'll have a "breakthrough." Even that is controversial actually about, is that a good thing to be in therapy for 10 years or is that a bad thing, because it depends on the person and the type of therapy.
Jase: We're going to go through a little bit later in this episode a list of some common types of therapy as well as some of the different ones that we've gone to, just to give a sense of how big a range there is, how different these different types of therapy can be because I think--
Emily: Yes, I had no idea. I had no idea.
Jase: Not only do we have this idea we've absorbed from our movies and our TV, but also Emily's experience. The first time I went to therapy was also in college. Actually, I went when I was a young kid too and my parents were getting divorced. They had us go see a counselor a few times. I just remember mostly playing with the toys when I was there.
Emily: When my mom and dad were going through some stuff I went as a really, really young person but I also just played with toys and stuff and had someone observe me.
Dedeker: That's funny because I only recently learned that-- My mom told me that when my dad died, she tried to get me to go to therapy and I just said no, and so she didn't . She stopped right there. I'm sure it probably would have been the same experience if all I remember is playing with toys.
Jase: They had the crash test dummy toys. Those are really cool. I was really into those for a while.
Emily: Hilarious.
Jase: What I was trying to say though is that, I think even if you have gone to therapy once, that might even further reinforce this, "Oh, I know what that is and that's not what I want." I think that's why it's important to bring up that there is this pretty wide range of how this could look.
Emily: This is one that I definitely struggle with as well. I'm not trying to put this out to the world in a negative way. It's more like, I should be grateful for my life. I shouldn't have to go to therapy because my life is really not that hard or whatever. It's this question of only people who've been through really traumatic experiences or who have really difficult times in their life or have big issues come up, those are the only people that really need to go to therapy and because, for all intents and purposes, really, I'm doing fine. I shouldn't have to go.
Dedeker: I think that's a product of just a long history of, first of all, mental health issues being really stigmatized in general or mental health care being stigmatized. Then we create this association of, "Someone has to be really messed up to go to therapy and I'm not that messed up." It reminds me of, I think this was a year and a half ago or so that for our Patreon group for the podcast, I ran a trauma-informed polyamory discussion group. Leading up to the discussion group, so many people reached out to me to be like, "I really want to attend. This sounds really cool and sounds really helpful, but I don't know if I'm 'traumatized' enough to attend."
Jase: It's sounds like a joke but it's not. That really is how you can feel.
Dedeker: Yes, very much so. I had to assure people. I'm like, "It doesn't really matter. If you feel this could benefit you then show up. No one's going to make you prove how traumatized you are or not and no one's going to be putting you in a ranking system necessarily."
Emily: Like with the last episode that we did talking about capital T trauma versus little t trauma. I don't think that I've had anything that qualifies necessarily as big capital T trauma so should I even? Maybe.
Dedeker: I don't want to go off on a whole tangent on trauma. Just to put it in a nutshell, at least the school of therapy that I come from, which is somatic experiencing therapy, the belief there is that trauma is very much in what your experience was as opposed to what the event itself was. It's how your nervous system coped with it versus what is actually happening, because nervous systems react to things differently and especially things hit you at different stages in your development, it can hit you differently.
Emily: That's a good point.
Jase: I think also, something I've heard from a lot of people, particularly with couples therapy, is couples who go to a couples therapist when things are still pretty good but it's like, "Some things we want to work out or we just want to be sure we're on a good track." That almost universally the reaction they get is, "That's awesome. I'm so glad because usually couples don't come until it's basically too late." There's so much damage here.
If you think about, again, I'm going to use my physical wellness analogy because I think it's something we get on a deeper, a pop culture gets physical wellness, in a way a little more to do with mental wellness. If you sprained your ankle very badly or maybe broke it, you're not sure. It hurts a lot, it swelled and you're just like, "Well, I don't know, I'm just going to keep walking on it. Only people with bad injuries go to doctors so this must not be that."
Those bones can set wrong and you can end up having inflammation for the rest of your life in those joints or something or later, you end up needing surgery to reset that thing. My brother had that in his finger once because it broke and didn't get it fixed, he had to eventually later have surgery to take it all apart and put it back together. It's like that.
I think therapy is like that a lot too unlike if you don't feel you've had bad enough trauma, whatever, to go to therapy, it's absolutely. Then if you think you could benefit from therapy going now, we'll also make it so then if something happens later, you're already better equipped to deal with it. Would you agree with that Dedeker, from your experience?
Dedeker: Oh, definitely. I think you don't need to worry about needing to prove that you should be there. Essentially, I think it's just the takeaway I want people to have, is if your therapist is a good therapist you're not going to feel you need to prove to them that you're "messed up enough" to be there.
Emily: How about, and this is probably something that a lot of people who listen to this show question and worry about and think about when choosing a therapist, but that it's difficult to find the right person out there who will specifically help me with my needs or who specifically understands my experience and things that I'm going through, or who, for example, isn't going to say that non-monogamy is the root of all of my problems or whatever?
Jase: I've struggled with this one before, for sure.
Dedeker: We'll talk about that later in the episode because there's just so many things that you can filter for and look for when you're finding a therapist such as, are they going to understand my racial background? Are they going to understand my cultural background? Are they going to understand my trauma? Are they going to understand my gender, my sexuality, my relationship status, things like that, and not judge me for that, and not oppress or marginalize me in big or small ways, in that way?
I would definitely encourage people, because something that could also happen is people can feel like, "Oh, yes. I've been to therapy before, it didn't help, this person totally didn't get it, they totally dismissed what I was going through or they judged me for this, that or the other thing. There's just no way." I just really encourage people to just not give up. There are so many therapists out there and so many just wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people. Sometimes it takes a lot to find the right fit and to find the person who offers that perfect combination of just compassionate non-judgement.
Jase: I might even just say and also don't. It's not about striving for perfection either. It's just to finding someone that you get benefit from, that the relationship feels safe enough, feels helpful enough. I could see that going the other way too where there's some people who feel like, "Now, this is the only therapist I got to go to and this is the only way it's going to go for me," versus every week going to someone else being like, "I don't know, it wasn't perfect yet." Maybe somewhere in between those two.
Emily: The middle path, as we like to say on the show. The final two we talked about a little bit before, but the first one is that there was traumatic experience going to therapy before. You were potentially forced to go as a child or a teenager and that was really tough. Didn't go the way that you wanted it to or you just didn't have good feelings surrounding going and being forced to go.
Dedeker: I ran up against that a lot with some of my own clients, is that sometimes unfortunately, you could've been forced to go to therapy under really traumatic circumstances. It was such a super traumatic time as it was, your parents divorcing or a parent going to jail or any number of traumatic or upsetting things that can happen. That gets associated with being forced to go to therapy. Even not even something that major. It could just be you were made to go to therapy just against your will because you were a child or a teen and you couldn't really consent to what was going on. That can definitely leave a bad taste in your mouth around therapy.
Jase: Now, we want to talk a little bit about the different types of therapy. Ways those are as well as some things that you can do to help select the right therapist for you or the right counselor or social worker or whatever it is. We're going to talk about all those things a little bit more but first, we're going to take a quick break to talk about how you can support this show, keep this content free and available for everyone on the internet via their podcast machines. We'll be back after that.
There are a lot of different types of therapy. Emily, when you were looking up this episode you said that on Psychology Today, they had a list of 65 different types of therapy. I think that in itself is good to know because it's freeing to say, "Wow, I had one experience. There's 64 other types of experience I could have." I think on the other hand my reaction is, "That's overwhelming. I don't know which one I would pick." There are some that are more common than others or more well-known.
I also think just as you look into it and realize these are all different, you might hear about them and go, "Something about that sounds interesting to me. I'm curious to try that." This is everything from cognitive behavioral therapy, which is pretty hot right now, or music therapy, play therapy, animal assisted therapy, trauma therapy. Acceptance and commitment therapy, COBI therapy.
Emily: What's that?
Jase: There's so many modalities.
Dedeker: We can't get bogged down in explaining every single kind. There's so many.
Emily: I don't know what a COBI therapy is but you all look it up, for sure.
Jase: Let's hit some of the big ones. These are some of the five most common.
Emily: Thank you to the Zoe Report. I was amazed that I found that out on the Zoe Report but it was actually a good comprehensive list. Cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, this is the one that I hear thrown out there a lot. I thought that this was all encompassing of traditional talk therapy, but it totally isn't necessarily. It does focus on growing the patient's awareness of what is both inside and outside of their control.
You build cognitive awareness and an understanding of what your thoughts do to your mental and emotional state. It can be really helpful for just about anyone looking to manage stressful life situations, but it can also be helpful for those who have mental health disorders such as eating disorders, depression or PTSD.
Jase: I actually had a therapy similar to this, but he described it more as a Skinnerian from B.F. Skinner, his approach. It was very similar of finding what's in your control and out of your control and for me at the time, it was really helpful. Another one is dialectical behavior therapy. Saying that we're dialectical. This is DBT.
This is created for people who have extreme emotional responses to certain situations and focuses on centering the patient and allowing them to get back to their rational thoughts more quickly. Focuses on mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotional regulation. It emphasizes essentially the psychosocial aspects of treatment. This is especially useful for people with things like borderline personality disorder or other personality disorders or people who attempt suicide or things like that.
It's described as a collaborative form of therapy where the treatments are both one on one with a therapist and in group settings. It's about that socio-psychological thing of your interaction with other people.
Dedeker: There's also trauma-focused therapy or trauma-informed therapy. This is a whole group of therapies that are designed specifically for people who have had trauma. We talked about capital T trauma, little t trauma, everything in between.
It can be use to treat a major single traumatic event or possibly complex overlapping traumatic events or multiple small events. There are some therapists who specialize even in things like racial trauma, for instance. Where you don't have to have a specific single traumatic event that happened, but you just have trauma of being born into the body that you were.
Emily: A lifetime of oppression, yes.
Dedeker: A lifetime of marginalization. That's still considered trauma, an ongoing trauma. This group of therapies are use to help treat people who have PTSD or CPTSD, war veterans, sexual assault survivors. It could help bring closure to the traumatic event so that you can stop reliving it over and over again so that you can reduce your PTSD symptoms and the way it shows up in your life.
Currently what's really hot right now is EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. There's also CPT or Cognitive Processing Therapy and PE or Prolonged Exposure. What I'm currently getting trained in right now is SE therapy or Somatic Experiencing Therapy, which has some overlap with EMDR as well. Ideally, if trauma specifically is something that you know that you want to work on or is very relevant in the stuff that you want to work on, looking for someone who is trained in one of those modalities of certified in trauma treatments or has practices specifically focuses on trauma therapy will probably be the most helpful.
Jase: Then we have psychodynamic therapy, and this one comes from Freudian origins. Specifically, it tries to get to the roots of emotional suffering, coming from a family of origin and have the past that's shaped any challenges that we're suffering today. This is from the American Psychological Association. They say, "Psychodynamic therapy focuses on the psychological roots of emotional suffering. It's hallmarks are self-reflection and self-examination and the use of the relationship between therapist and patient as a window into problematic relationship patterns in the patient's life."
Emily: Do you have to lie on a couch?
Dedeker: Legally, you have to be on a couch or they cannot do the practice. You have to.
Emily: The doctor walks around with a pen and paper, sits on a little poof next to you or something.
Jase: It has to have a beard and a pipe, for sure. All those things are required.
Jase: Freudian therapy was what started a lot of the therapy today. It's not as popular now and there's a lot of other modalities that I would recommend first. However, some people do get a lot of benefit out of this type of therapy. It's a good one to have on there since that is the original flavor.
Dedeker: In this top five there's also interpersonal therapy, which is sometimes related to what's known as relational psychotherapy. Of course, there's all these things. There's nuances and someone out there who knows way more than we do is going to get angry about the way that we're describing it. Just sit down and have some patience with us. With interpersonal therapy, the doctor-patient relationship itself serves as a corrective experience for the client.
This can be really appropriate for people who've had challenging relationships with their parents or their friends or their romantic partners. It's also sometimes used to treat mood disorders like bipolar, major depressive disorder. It's fairly relaxed and supportive and ultimately the goal of the treatment is to be the patient's ally. I think that applies to a lot of therapeutic schools. Although maybe I should open my own therapeutic school where it's about being the patient's enemy the whole time.
Jase: That's the model we have from our old movies. Is that the therapist is there to tear you down. Pick you apart. Destroy your life.
Dedeker: "This is because you're projecting all of these only to your mother," and yada, yada, yada. That's true.
Emily: You're going to bring that back, Dedeker.
Dedeker: I'm bringing sexy back with the intense, combative, the angry. As far as personal experiences, I've gone to talk therapy a number of times. I'm in talk therapy right now, actually. My very first therapeutic experience ever was talk therapy.
Emily: That's different than CBT? Talk therapy, is it really just they sit there and you're talking and then they're like, "Tell me more." What do you think about that?
Jase: What does that make you think about your mother?
Dedeker: I don't know. The first time I was ever in therapy in my life was because I just needed somebody to tell me it was okay to break up with somebody. That was literally the first reason. I only saw this therapist for a handful of sessions. For me, it was very goal-oriented at that time. It was like, "Okay, I did the break-up and I'm feeling good," and then it was fine. Then I went back to therapy when I started having PTSD symptoms from the abusive relationship. I went to talk therapy, which I believe was CBT therapy at the time.
Dedeker: Maybe things would have gone differently if I'd done CBT therapy first. I'll be honest, the therapy was helpful in the sense that it helped get my thoughts in the right place, which is very-- CBT is literally about retraining your thoughts to a certain extent, but it pretty much did nothing for my PTSD, especially the physical symptoms of my PTSD.
It felt like everything from the neck down doesn't know it was in therapy because that's still happening, even though my logical brain can understand things and can understand how I should be feeling about this, but I don't feel that way. That was what led me to seek out a more trauma-focused therapy. I ended up in somatic experiencing therapy. That was just night and day of my experience.
Emily: Can you talk a little bit about what that is, because I know it's been so helpful for you?
Dedeker: Yes. Somatic experiencing, there's much less emphasis on sit down and talk and relive the whole terrible story to me, and then I'll tell you what I think and help you through it because for a lot of trauma survivors, even just talking through the whole story is really traumatizing for some people. That's why talk therapy can both be too scary to go to and also sometimes not feel very effective for trauma survivors. Somatic experiencing is much more of a body-based therapy. Not necessarily that there's body work like being touched or things like that.
It's much more about what's going on in your nervous system and the physical manifestations of your trauma and your PTSD, and working through that and renegotiating that through body awareness, through visualization, through sometimes doing some movement and stuff like that. It's a psychodynamic process of renegotiating trauma, essentially. I had an amazing, amazing experience with it.
Of course, that's why I ended up applying to get into the training program. Now, I'm on this three-year journey of doing the training. I can't say across the board that that's going to be everybody's experience, but anyone who comes to me talking about trauma I'm very raw, raw for somatic experiencing. Things like EMDR also are fantastic as well.
Jase: Next week, we're going to continue on talking about special considerations to think about when choosing therapy, how you can go about looking at therapists, what things are worth considering, as well as some resources for ways to make it more affordable or to find people who support non-monogamy or things like that. We're excited to continue this conversation with you next week.
Emily: Yes, it's been a two-part episode. We hope that you enjoyed this first part. Thank you all out there for allowing me to get a little vulnerable with you, cry a little bit on your shoulder, I do very much appreciate it. The bonus episode for this week, we are going to delve into acronyms. Little word, little letter game.
Jase: Letter words.
Emily: Letter words. Things like what does it mean when someone is an LCSW or an LCDC? Not in ACDC, but in LCDC. I have no idea. We're going to talk about that when you see a bunch of letters next to someone's name and when you want to decide who to pick as a therapist. We want to hear from you. Have you gone to therapy? How did you like it? Do you still do it now? What has been most effective for you? Do you have any tips about how I can go to therapy and get over my little worries about it? Let us know.