← Take Out Therapy: End Overthinking & Overwhelm for Empathic High Achievers
Take Out Therapy: End Overthinking & Overwhelm for Empathic High Achievers
The Final Lesson On How To Maintain & Improve Your Mental Health
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Most people are not lazy or broken. They're overwhelmed and avoiding starting. I built the Everyday Calm app to make starting feel possible. Short lessons, simple practices, real relief, no big commitment. Just tiny actions that actually move the needle. Get it@studio.com Rebecca welcome to Takeout Therapy, the podcast for people who are done with overworking, overthinking and overwhelm. I'm Rebecca Hunter, an anxiety expert and a therapist helping busy, big hearted people like you learn practical skills to qu quiet your racing mind, overcome self doubt and actually be present in your life. If that sounds good to you, you're in the right place. Visit me at takeouttherapy.com any old time. Thanks for listening. Well hello there friend. I'm so happy that you can join me today for this, the very last episode of the Takeout Therapy podcast. I've recorded 325 episodes that can serve as short mental health lessons, tips and tricks and skills from seven different therapy modalities. I've taught you everything from how to set boundaries to how to have difficult conversations, to how to love yourself and understand your emotional life. The intention of this, the last episode, is that I want to talk with you a little bit about why I made this podcast in the first place and what I am leaving you with as I put down the mic. I started my career as a therapist in community mental health. Up until then, I'd worked with kids in juvenile justice in alternative school settings. I did a free counseling program for a domestic violence agency and a free group education program for another shelter in my community. I worked in the community mental health system where the majority of our country actually receives their therapy and addiction recovery services. And then I started my private practice about 10 years ago. But it took me about 30 seconds to realize the biggest problem with the mental health system is a lack of basic education. I got really fired up about it as I realized that most kids or adults were never taught anything about how the mind or their body or their nervous system work together to create their mental health. It was incredibly frustrating for me to have this realization in a system that's underfunded, understaffed, and burning therapists out left and right. I saw an opportunity there actually very early on to be able to be an agent for change, which I believe is the role of a social worker. To be an agent for change. You go out, you see the problems. You don't just marinate yourself in the problems, you. You do something about them. Takeout Therapy became a way for me to offer basic mental health education to literally anyone that was Willing to listen and great news. A lot of people have listened. This podcast has never been about trying to diagnose yourself, trying to adjust your identity around your labels that have been given to you. This was never about using diagnosis as explanations for not living a life in which you feel that you're thriving. It's always been about teaching you to take action in order to feel better in your life. The entire podcast of takeout therapy has been centered on three core teachings, and I'm gonna remind you about them today as a way for you to remember three really important places to continue to focus in your personal growth work. Emotional understanding and emotional processing are probably the most important skill that people can develop in order to improve their mental health. You see, the human experience is experienced through emotion. Welcome, Earthling. This is how we navigate life, and so many people are trying to get out of it. But humans experience life through emotion and learning to recognize what feelings you're having instead of kind of pretending you don't have feelings or avoiding them. Making room for your emotional life is very important, but most people are busy judging themselves for having emotion. In this project, I've tried to help you have a deeper understanding that your emotions will be felt one way or the other. You can avoid them for as long as you want to, but eventually you're gonna have feelings. And being able to navigate that is very, very important. But that's not enough, because in order to understand and process your emotions functionally, you have to be able to show up. You have to be able to be present in your life to notice yourself, that you're having emotion, that you're feeling something. We're really good at noticing our thoughts, not that good at noticing everything else, right? Good mental health actually requires the ability to be present in ordinary life. If life can only be tolerated through sitting on your phone or moving to your computer and then off to your game console and then into your book, right? If we can only tolerate life, when we're distracting ourselves or numbing ourselves or. Or stimulating ourselves constantly, we're not present. And presence is not a spiritual practice. It is literally just showing up in the moment of your life and being willing to ask good questions and accept what is happening. Our culture right now and the world at large desperately lacks the ability to be present. And I think the cost is fairly obvious. Presence. It matters when you're at your house and you look around yourself at all of the things that your hard work has afforded, and you look around at the people that you've brought into your life. My Question for you has always been can you stay right here with what you've created in your life and can that possibly be enough? That is not to say don't be present in the larger world, but we have to be able to be present with ourselves first. Which brings me to the third theme that I've always followed based on my own trainings as a therapist. Your relationship with yourself lies at the center of your life. It is the foundation of your mental health. Your mental health is absolutely and directly tied to how you treat yourself in relationship. We form so many coping strategies when we grow up based on what we have to navigate and to deal with. But when we become adults, it's our responsibility to then come into an adult relationship with oneself. Because for lack of a better way to put it, you're stuck with yourself, friend. And if you can't stand your own company, you're going to have a really tough time. Self criticism has already been researched and proven to not be motivating. Self compassion is not indulgent or pampering of oneself. It is a stabilizing skill and practice that can be used throughout the course of your entire life. At the bottom of everything is your relationship with yourself. So keep working on it because a respectful, kind relationship with oneself is foundational to confidence, living in your values, and just being a grown human. So those are the three things that I've tried to teach you over time and I've given you tons of ways based in lots of therapeutic approaches in order to practice these skills of understanding and dealing with your emotions functionally, learning to show up in your life and be present with yourself and the people that you've chosen to share life with and to really be plugging away on having an ever increasingly lovely relationship with yourself. You know, I started this podcast for you and I also started it for myself because I was in the middle of raising a couple teenage boys and having what is very naturally a period of major personal change and self examination. This podcast served as sometimes my own journal, sometimes my own personal growth work got doing in the recording of these short episodes. Certainly it was a creative outlet and a place filled with passion and drive and at one point it became a full time job and a really defining chapter of my career and what I've cared about all this time. I'm stepping away. Life is changing. I'm in my 50s. I've pretty much said what I came here to say. I've given you a really beautiful foundation that you can always go back into to learn and pick up more Things along the way. My life is calling for me to be present here. It's kind of boring. It won't be quite as exciting as putting out a bunch of content for you, but trust that the content already exists for those who need it. If this podcast helped you or someone you know take a step closer to yourself, then it did its job. Therapy is not about getting fixed. It's about understanding yourself and taking responsibility for your own mental health, actually. And if you're considering therapy for yourself, choose very intentionally interview. Hire an expert. Choose someone who's going to teach you what you want to know, not just listen to you talk. Okay, so there's one more thing I want to say before I close out the podcast. You might already know this. I've really intentionally chosen to work in the mental health field outside of the traditional system. And I know that can feel really controversial to some people because we're told like find someone who's licensed or they could be dangerous. But for me, it was a very conscious, values based decision to work outside of the system. Early on, I realized that the diagnostic, heavy, insurance driven and controlled bureaucracy that the mental health system is is not a good fit for how I work or how I understand healing. I don't work with my clients through a diagnostic label at all. I just work with human beings. I'm trained in multiple therapeutic approaches and I've spent years studying how patterns form, how the nervous system adapts, how the mind protects itself, and how real change actually happens over time. My work has always been about helping people understand themselves more clearly, helping them interrupt patterns that no longer serve them, and building a different relationship with themselves, their thoughts, their emotions and their behavior. I've never done symptom management. I've helped people with life management. And that approach has never fit neatly into the systems that require labels, codes, and justification for care. And I'm fine with that. I chose alignment over approval, and I encourage you to figure out how you can do the same in your own life. As I close this chapter, I want to say this very clearly. If something you heard on the podcast resonated with you, if it helped you see yourself differently, or if it encouraged you to take your mental health more seriously than it did, exactly what it was meant to do. And if at any point in the future you decide you want support or guidance or different way of working with your mind and your patterns, just reach out to me. I'll be here. I work directly with people who are ready to change how they relate to themselves and their lives. Not temporarily but in a way that actually lasts. No pressure, no urgency. My door is always open to you. Thanks so much for spending your time with me again today. I really appreciate you being here and doing your work. As always, while Takeout therapy has been a great educational resource, get the level of support that you need for your situation. And always you can head to takeouttherapy.com to check out my resources and find out how to work with me. Thanks again for listening and take care of yourself always. If you're waiting to feel motivated before you take care of your mental health, you're going to be waiting a long time. Feeling better comes from action, not vibes. The Everyday Calm app gives you short, doable tools that actually calm your nervous system. No journaling marathons, no toxic positivity. Just real support. One small step at a time. Get it@studio.com Rebecca.