Take Heart

Therapy Part 1: How Can Counseling Help Me?

• Amy J Brown, Carrie Holt and Sara Clime • Season 3 • Episode 118

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In part one of this three-part series, Amy, Sara, and Carrie share their experiences with therapy or counseling. They discuss how they began going to therapy, how each has personally benefited, what they’ve learned practically, and how it has helped them see themselves in a more compassionate and life-giving way. 

Ep. 118; March 7, 2023


Key Moments:
[2:12] Why & When To Begin Therapy
[7:54] Valued Benefits 
[8:10} Prioritizing Feelings
[10:17] Ignoring Depression


Resources:
The Allender Center
The Allender Center Podcast
Healing Care Ministries
Resilient: Chapter 8 (Reference to living in the shallows)


If you enjoyed the show:

Sara Clime  0:01  
Welcome to Take Heart, where our goal is to offer encouragement, give hope and insight, so you can flourish in your journey as a special needs mom. As we explore monthly themes, share inspiring stories and practical tips, our desire is for you to feel connected and encouraged. 

Hi, this is Sara Clime. I'm here with Amy J. Brown and Carrie M. Holt. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to a special three-part series on therapy. Today's show is called Therapy: How Counseling Can Help Me. Next week, in part two, we will talk about why moms don't go to counseling. The third and final week of our series, we will be talking about our therapy expectations versus reality. Before we get started, we want to state that we are not experts in therapy, nor are we licensed therapists. We believe in and have our own experiences with therapy. The following podcast is advice only from our perspective as clients. One's mental health is as individual and unique as each person's. What works for one person may not work for the next. Finding what works for you is a personal journey, often full of trial and error. Because we feel that mental health is so essential yet overlooked in the disability community, we have decided to take these three weeks and talk about our personal experiences with therapy in the hope that it may help in some way. 

We are starting with what I feel is the easy week, the pros, and the benefits of therapy. I know therapy often still holds a stigma to it for a lot of people. I want to begin with a quote I love. It's by my BFF Brene Brown. She doesn't realize she's my BFF. That's beside the point. Anyway, that probably makes me need a little bit more counseling.  Brene Brown says, "Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage; truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weaknesses." I want to start with the question. Actually, it's not really a question; it's just more sharing. If either of you is comfortable, let's just start with a brief explanation or share why you began therapy, or maybe complementary therapies or counseling, and whether you still go,

Carrie M Holt  2:14  
My journey started working with a mentor through my church who had been trained in story work through the Allender Center, which was started by Dr. Dan Allender. What it was was just me recognizing behaviors in myself that I didn't necessarily love and ways that I was reacting and wanting to work with someone who would help me get to the core of those behaviors. Then, also all the trauma that we have been through with our son over the last many years. That's kind of what started the journey of counseling and therapy for me. Then that same mentor, about a year ago, as we were finishing my process of working with her, was her asking me this question, "Who cares for you?" It just completely disarmed me because, of course, there are people in my life that care for me. I realized that a lot of times, it is really hard to care for ourselves and to care for our souls, and to nurture our souls. I had a lot of barriers to therapy, which I won't talk about until the next episode. I realized that it was time for me to see someone professionally. I was in my mid-40s, when I started seeing a counselor, and I still go on a monthly basis.

Amy J. Brown  3:43 
I came to therapy through a tragic experience. About 17 years ago, my sister died of cancer, and I was with her. It was traumatic at the time of her death. Then immediately after she died, my niece and nephew, and brother-in-law moved in with us. Over the course of that first year, I was taking care of everybody and dealing with everybody else's grief, and got to the point in my life where I wasn't sleeping. I was having behaviors that I knew weren't normal. I was afraid to go out in public because I was afraid somebody would get sick or need me to medically help them, and I wouldn't be able to. It was unreasonable fear. I ended up going to talk to my therapist and found out that I had PTSD and complicated grief. In the midst of all this, we had our child that has RAD and FASD; her behavior was ramping up. I was taking care of her and everybody else as I do. Like we all do. I was taking care of everybody but me. It's almost like I couldn't breathe. It was almost a crisis situation for me. I thought I can't live like this anymore because I'm so anxious, I'm not sleeping, and I'm afraid. It felt like my heart was racing a million miles an hour. I went very willingly, and I still go. I've gone to the same counselor for 17 years. That initial time it was definitely a crisis situation.

Sara Clime  5:26  
My husband came to me right after diagnosis and gave me the statistics on the percentage of marriages with children with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. and those that end up in divorce. It really concerned him. We had a few years before that went through some serious marital issues and had really started to kind of get our footing back. It really concerned him that we might lose our footing again. We quite arrogantly went to therapy as a precautionary measure, thinking that we would just go and pat ourselves on the back that we were being so proactive about it. We left the first one; I was crying, and he was angry. We were rather arrogant about it. We ended up going for quite a while. I still do therapy on my own. He went on his own for a while, and both of my sons have gone, and my youngest still does. We are very big proponents of therapy or any kind of counseling.

Amy J. Brown  6:48  
All eight members of the Brown family have gone to the same therapy office. We should have a discount.

Sara Clime  6:57  
We actually joked around; where's the BOGO card? Do you have a punch card? I think after the 10th one, we should at least get an ice cream cone or so. Carrie, I'm so glad you said, "We will talk about this the next time." So, everybody is aware; we have talked to each other that we need to stay on topic;no rabbit trails. We have a three-part session. With that said, staying on topic. Amy, what is the most valued benefit of therapy that you've experienced so far?

Amy J. Brown  7:46  
I think for me; it has been a place to normalize what I'm feeling. I tend to be really hard on myself and think, Well, it's not that bad, or I should just buck up. Why am I feeling this way? Our situation with our kids is hard, but I can just keep going. I think it's a place for me to, first of all, know that what's been going on is normalized. And for someone to tell me this is really hard because I tend to minimize that and just keep going. For someone to acknowledge that our family has been in crisis or that I'm not okay. I don't think I've ever given myself permission to say that because everybody counts on me. It's just a place to admit what's true about me at that moment and to be accepted. I can't dance around it and say I'm fine, or it's going be okay, or this is normal. When the therapist's eyes get really big and say, "No, you're in crisis." That's helpful for somebody to name that. I am? We're a family in crisis? Uh, yeah. That's been helpful for me. Definitely. Me It's deeper so

Carrie M Holt  8:53
I think for me; it's just been the time taking the time to dig deeper. There's a part of our lives where it was almost 14 and 15 years of chaos of hospital stay after hospital stay after hospital stay, and not really understanding the buildup of trauma in my body that was happening after putting out fires, riding in ambulances, and making life-saving decisions. My monthly appointments have caused me to take a step back and take a time to talk to somebody about everything that is going on, the stress and the trauma. I also feel like we live so much of our lives in the shallows. Actually, John Eldredge calls it the shallows, where we don't dig deeper into the depths of our souls and our hearts and minds. I think going to a counselor or therapist allows me to dig into the depths a little bit because life just moves at such a fast pace. 

Sara Clime  10:00  
I think for me; the biggest benefit of therapy so far for me (I've shared this a little on past episodes of mine) is that I have chronic depression. I ignored it for a long time. I was really embarrassed by it; I think I covered it up a lot with jokes. It didn't seem like it was okay to be depressed; it wasn't okay to be that way. A lot of people don't understand it. To meet me, they would say, but you're so happy, you're so outgoing, you're so whatever. They just didn't understand that side of things. I treated depression with medication a lot, and I think that masks symptoms, but when you miss medication, or your insurance changes, or this medication is no longer covered, and you would need to do something, things changed. For me, the biggest benefit of that is I've been able to manage the behaviors, and that was being able to do that in a safe place. Along those lines, has there been a positive surprise that has come out of therapy?

Amy J. Brown  11:21  
I wouldn't say it was a shock. I would go back to something Carrie said first before I answer that; we are in the shallows, and I think as special needs moms (all of us do this), we're so busy with our to-do list that we don't stop to examine. I think that's really important that you brought that up, Carrie. I think for me therapy, the biggest surprise was I came in with the list. Here are the things I want to talk about. It's helped me to stop hiding my own narrative under the idea that I've got this; it's okay; I'll be fine. It's helped me to be myself. I was looking for: "Here's the problem. What are the solutions? Give me tools?" I would always say, "I want homework, and I want a lot of it." My therapist would kind of roll her eyes (okay, calm down). It's really helping me find my own narrative.

Sara Clime  12:11  
I think that's a better question. Instead of was there a better surprise, what's the best lesson? A lot of times with homework...because there is homework with therapy, and that was a big surprise. I didn't want homework. I don't want to know more. In 50 minutes, I want you to fix me. I want to go home and be happy again, but it is actually really beneficial. There are a lot of valuable lessons.  Let's switch gears a little bit. So what is a valuable lesson that you've learned so far that you can credit specifically to your therapy or your counseling or whatever you want to call it? 

Carrie M. Holt 12:56
I think for me; it has been learning to pay attention to my body. I know I've said that a lot in the podcast. I have learned (through listening to podcasts by counselors and seeing a counselor) that your body holds the score. Even though sometimes your brain may not remember things your body does, you have implicit memory. There are imprints on your brain. Even something like one of my children would come up to me and say, "I have to talk to you about something, and it would completely trigger me into this fear." I have had to dive into that with my therapist why; when he comes up to me and says this, I panic and want to flee the situation. The valuable lesson has just been understanding how to pay attention to my body and the deeper things that it is telling me about myself and the trauma. Some of those traumas are a big "T", and some of those are little "t's" disruptions to life that are a lot of times rooted in lies that I've believed along the way and along my journey just in life.

Amy J. Brown  14:09 
Well, as I said earlier, I think it helped me understand the narrative that I'm telling myself isn't true. I ruminate. I don't think of myself as an over-anxious thinker. But I learned that I have very unproductive thinking. My problem-solving seems productive to me because I'm tackling a problem, but there's a lot of rumination or worry that tells the narrative that's not necessarily true. I've been able to step back and realize the story I'm telling myself; that's not the story. That has been really helpful, especially with mom guilt and a lot of other emotions.

Sara Clime  14:47 
I think it can be it can go a lot deeper than this. I'll just leave it at it's okay to not be okay. I didn't feel that growing up. I didn't feel that in my teens or my early years or anything. That's nobody's fault; I'm not blaming anybody. When you walk in to the office, there's trust there; there's safety there. They're unbiased there. It's okay to not be okay. That's comfortable. It's freeing. 

I mean, we could really go on and on and on about this. Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of time. There are so many more benefits to therapy and to any kind of counseling. This has been a great discussion. Next week, we are going to go down the rabbit trail of the barriers to therapy, which there are a lot, so tune in next week, and we will discuss that. Before we go, Amy, will you pray for us? 

Amy J. Brown  16:07  
Thank you, Lord, that you love us and see us, and these things that we hold in our heart matter to you. I pray for the moms listening today the parents listening today that this would this episode would help them and that you would give them wisdom as they seek to take care of their own mental health. Amen.

Sara Clime  16:25  
There are links to anything we mentioned in this episode, show notes, and all of our resources, including an entire written transcript of this episode, are available on our website at www.takeheartspecialmoms.com