Tools for your emotional health and relationships.
Hi everyone! Thanks for tuning in to a brand new episode of the Therapy 365 podcast with Lisa. Today, she discusses four indicators that you might benefit from therapy:
So, without further ado, let’s jump right in!
According to Lisa, a prolonged period of feeling emotionally off, overwhelmed, anxious, stressed, angry, or sad significantly impacts your quality of life and those around you.
Feeling stuck due to baggage from past experiences, often linked to family of origin issues. This could be due to poor boundaries, a need for perfectionism, being in codependent relationships, or excessive independence leading to isolation.
While couples therapy can often address relationship issues, sometimes one partner is resistant, or an individual may need solo support to process their feelings.
Major life changes such as moving, break-ups, illness, aging, or becoming an empty nester can be difficult to process alone. Therapy can provide a safe space for this.
Lisa emphasizes the importance of finding a therapist who is a good fit, someone you connect with, feel good about, and most importantly, feel safe with. She also highlights that it’s okay to switch therapists if the initial one isn’t working out.
In the next episode of Therapy 365, Lisa will be discussing couples counseling and when it might be beneficial for you and your partner. In the meantime, you can find emotional health and relationship tools on her website, loveandlifetoolbox.com.
For residents of California interested in individual therapy with Kift, they can visit her private practice website, californiaonlinetherapyandcounseling.com. If you are looking for other therapists, she recommends using the Psychology Today therapist directory to find local options based on your zip code.
Till next time, take care of yourselves, and remember, at Therapy 365, you are always a work in progress.
Lisa Brookes Kift:
Hey there everybody, this is Therapy 365 and today I’m going to look at four reasons to consider doing your own therapy. There’s a lot of things that bring people in to see me in my private practice and what they all have in common is a motivation for change. Something’s not working for them and they would really like to figure that out and get out of their own way.
So, today I’m gonna look at those four possible indicators that you might benefit from doing your own work.
Number one, you don’t feel your best emotionally. So this is more than just having a bad day, but a prolonged period of time where something just feels off, overwhelm, anxiety, stress, anger, or sadness in a way that impacts your quality of life and possibly those around you. Overwhelm can really impact your thinking, your bandwidth, your sleep, and so much about how you function.
Anxiety and worry can also both fuel overwhelm and high stress levels can too. And you know, with stress there could just be this sense of it’s just too much. You know, I can’t, I can’t handle it all. Not only leaving you feeling exhausted, but paralyzed. Anger can gnaw at you and for some people anger can literally become obsessive. Then there’s sadness. You know, obviously sadness can impact your ability to function by dropping your interest levels in doing the things that you normally like to do or feel good. And sadness can also lead you to a kind of paralysis.
So overall, all of these feelings and states can impact your body function. So it’s really important to get clarity on why you feel the way you do and what you can do about it. And also have an overall awareness of any deeper level roots that might exist.
So there’s some common themes that I see in my private practice around, you know, what brings people in to distress over life. Circumstances in general, right? Something’s going on that’s bringing a lot of worry and stress and anxiety or sadness or you name it, right? So they’re in distress. Then there’s, you know, feeling out of control in some kind of situation, right? Something’s going on that they feel out of control. Then there’s people that come in where they feel some kind of tension or some kind of issue going on in a important relationship, like a friendship or romantic relationship or maybe a family relationship.
And then there are other drivers that can lead people to function in a certain way that can be traced back to their earlier experiences. So that can be a driver. Something is holding them back. There’s an obstacle. There’s some conditioning they’ve had around what they’re supposed to be or how they’re supposed to behave and all of that, and it is causing them an issue currently.
So number two, you know, you have baggage from your earlier experiences like I just mentioned, right? You know, you have baggage and you feel stuck because of it. So this is really the people that have a lot of clarity that their issues are connected to their past. Cuz a lot of people come in and they don’t, and some people come in and they do. So for those people, they usually seek me out because of my work with family of origin work, that’s really my specialty and a very passionate area of my professional life and personal life actually, I’ve done my own family of origin work.
So, they have learned that there’s something that doesn’t serve them now and they are struggling to make the changes that they want. And there’s some common themes that could come up in those circumstances. They have an awareness that they have poor boundaries and they’re attracting people who violate them.
They believe they can’t make mistakes or they need to be perfect, or they are in co codependent relationships and are suffering in some way as a result. Then there’s the extremely independent person who perhaps feels a sense of isolation and feeling misunderstood, and there are good reasons why people become extremely independent. Once you can understand that, it can be helpful not only to be self-compassionate about why, but also maybe look at loosening up a little and learning to rely and to trust people.
So then there’s number three, right? Number three is they are challenged in relationships in some way and want support. So though couples therapy is ideal as a venue to work on relationship issues, it just doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes there’s a resistant partner or maybe they’re just so upset and angry at their partner or whatever their relationship is that they need someone to talk to and to process it.
Number four, they need help emotionally processing life transitions. So this could be a move, a breakup, a divorce, illness, aging, maybe being a new empty nester. So individual therapy can provide a safe space with someone trained in all of those, right? That can help you work through whatever situation that you need help with. And it’s so important to do your due diligence around finding the right fit. And it’s okay to make a change after you start if you decide it’s not working for you. The client therapist fit is really critical for therapy success. So don’t overlook that. And you need to be with somebody who you connect with and that you feel works in a way that feels good to you and most importantly, that you feel safe with.
So, in the next episode, I’m going to cover couples counseling in a similar way, indicators that couples counseling would be a good idea for you and your partner.
And in the meantime you can poke around in my website loveandlifetoolbox.com to see if you can find any tools that you can put in your emotional health or relationship toolbox. If you are a resident of California and you’re interested in the possibility of doing some individual work with me, you can check out my private practice website, californiaonlinetherapyandcounseling.com. Otherwise, you can look up the Psychology Today therapist directory via a search engine and you’ll be able to put in your zip code and then you can browse therapists in your area. So in the meanwhile, until next time, take care of yourselves and remember, you are always a work in progress.
