Suzi has always been a disruptor at heart, which led her to create the first condom store in the US, and defend her rights against religious extremism. She takes you down memory lane of her intriguing journey towards becoming a therapist and how her adventures, mishaps, and personal trauma have been her stepping stones. She explores how sometimes therapy can be more harmful than helpful.
Brace yourselves for a peek behind the curtain into some of the ethical dilemmas of therapy.
Music credit to Kalvin Love for the podcast’s theme song “Bee Your Best Self”
Tune into our CHW Streaming Radio and the full lineup at cominghomewell.com
Download on Apple Play and Google Play
Online-Therapy.com ~ Life Changing Therapy Click here for a 20% discount on your first month.
Contact Suzi at suzigma@gmail.com or (818) 470-2013 and share your story.
suzilandolphi.com
vetsandplayers.org
wildhorserescue.org
Thank you for listening! Be sure to SHARE, LIKE and leave us a REVIEW!
Suzi has always been a disruptor at heart, which led her to create the first condom store in the US, and defend her rights against religious extremism. She takes you down memory lane of her intriguing journey towards becoming a therapist and how her adventures, mishaps, and personal trauma have been her stepping stones. She explores how sometimes therapy can be more harmful than helpful.
Brace yourselves for a peek behind the curtain into some of the ethical dilemmas of therapy.
Music credit to Kalvin Love for the podcast’s theme song “Bee Your Best Self”
Tune into our CHW Streaming Radio and the full lineup at cominghomewell.com
Download on Apple Play and Google Play
Online-Therapy.com ~ Life Changing Therapy Click here for a 20% discount on your first month.
Contact Suzi at suzigma@gmail.com or (818) 470-2013 and share your story.
suzilandolphi.com
vetsandplayers.org
wildhorserescue.org
Thank you for listening! Be sure to SHARE, LIKE and leave us a REVIEW!
I'm Susie Landolfi, and welcome to be crazy. Well, I'm doing it. I'm using StreamYard, I'm not using Zoom, so this is my first time using a new app, a new recording app called StreamYard, and I'm just going to look to see how my room looks. Here, I should probably take down my bathrobe and my thing oh, that's a little better. Ok, we're just trying to get used to here. Oh wait, I know another thing I should do. Everybody, just hang on, you're helping me here, decorate my set here. So I'm going to shut the overhead lights off. How do I do that? I'm going to do that. Oh, I think that's much better. What do you think I like? That little lamp in the background, another lamp in the background, and here I am hosting my own podcast called be crazy. Well, and today I am my guest I decided that it was probably time for me to interview myself.
Speaker 1:You know, after all, I just made my grandson interview me. No, I interviewed him. And so I thought well, gee, you're asking people to do things that you're not doing. And there's my dog barking out there, because every time I get on and I do a podcast, the dog has to bark, much like how children have to ask your question when you get on the phone. So I thought you know one of the things that I dislike a lot. That gets me, as you know, irritated, frustrated, angry, rageful, murderous. Those are the five levels of anger. And if you've listened to me before, you know that all anger comes from unwitnessed, unprocessed, unacknowledged fear and sadness from the past, or you wouldn't be upset about it. So I want to talk about and I want to interview me as the antitharapist.
Speaker 1:Therapist. You know, some people think I've been doing this all my life. I haven't. I became a therapist at 50. And I know what you're saying. You're going, yes, but you only look 45. Not true, don't even go there. So I am proudly 73, proud of it. I have all original body parts except my eyebrows.
Speaker 1:So I remember when I decided to become a therapist and I had been in my first degrees in theater and I'd done many, many, many things, including opening the first condom store in the United States. I used my theater training for safer sex education. I had my own video and film production company. I've done a lot. I even helped write two films actually got credit for that and they were made and did a lot of theater. I also did a lot of speaking in colleges around the country about safer sex, and I made it big, big to do, because someone was actually telling the truth about sexuality and what we could do to keep ourselves safe. And then I got sued by the religious right for $3.4 million Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Anyway, I won that and went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said that all the times that we won before should stand. And I tell you all this not because I'm bringing in religion or politics, but I tend to be a disrupter, like I tend to do things that most people don't think about doing or don't think it's a good idea to do, and one of which was again opening the first condom store in the United States during the AIDS crisis. It was called Condomania. I opened it with a young man and we both invested in it and we were $70,000 in debt the day. We opened 400 square feet on Bleecker and West 10th and then we made $1,500 in the first hour and we didn't look back. Now again, I tell you all this because it wasn't a sex shop. It was a place for people to go and get a life saving product, because at the time the United States was not making the safest condoms in the world, so we did that.
Speaker 1:When I finally decided to be a therapist, it was between being a cowgirl and a cowgirl or therapist. Now, I want you to know, I grew up in New England. I grew up 20 miles north of Boston, so I didn't know that much about horses. I didn't know anything about horses. I'd done a couple of horseback rides in Provincetown, galloping out to the lighthouse, and I thought, well, gee, at 50, I could just like go to a ranch and they could teach me how to do things with horses. And then I don't actually remember how I came up with the idea well, maybe I should be a therapist. Oh wait, I do remember I started to want to be that cowgirl.
Speaker 1:I saw an ad to go sleep in a barn and learn how to gentle wild horses and I thought that was a great idea. I mean, just shows you how. I think, yeah, go sleep in a barn, let them put you in a 64-round pen with a wild horse and helmet, and then you get the first touch if the horse doesn't kick you or run you down. And somehow I thought that was a good idea. So anyways, it went. It was Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue. I'm now on the board of directors and I'm now the program manager and I spend a lot of time at our sanctuary and I actually started to teach veterans how to gentle wild horses with the help of wonderful, better horse people than I stayed the therapist.
Speaker 1:Anyway, when that horse allowed me to touch it, I burst into tears and all of my trauma came to the surface like a tidal wave and then subsided and I realized I said, oh my god, that was the fastest experience I've ever had to take a look at what happened to me, how it affected me and what I must do and deserve to do to create the person I want to be and the life I want to live. So I thought, well, if I want to do this, I have to go be a therapist, because I have to get some credentials in order for people to trust that I'm safe enough, and so is the horse to do this. So I signed up to Antioch University in Los Angeles and I took all the courses. Now I was older than most of the students by about oh, I don't know 25 years easily, but I had a lot of life experience and I remember too, that you know theater when you learn about characters and you learn about story. There's a lot of psychology there, and as a child and as a teenager and young adult, I was always interested in self-help books. So I had some wisdom, had some experience and I had done some work on myself as well, and now I'm a therapist, I'm working to be a therapist and I'm in therapy.
Speaker 1:Here's the problem, and why do I call myself the anti-therapist therapist? So as I started to study what the model of therapy well say, the science of the craft of I noticed that there were some things there that I really didn't want to do and I actually didn't believe was probably some of the best ways to help people create the person they deserve to be, and I was really struggling and there were things that I was told I must do. I can't say I have to do, and I'm kind of looking at this medical model and I know that doctors take the Hippocratic Oath we take an Oath that we will do no harm and I noticed a lot of things that we were asked to do like I don't know, diagnose people and then, as long as I had the right number of symptoms, and then do therapy with them and maybe even support the psychiatrist in giving meds. Now, remember, I got some of my greatest healing from a wild horse, so I can only imagine I'm a little bit concerned about sitting in an office once a week for an hour at the same time when I know that my shit used to hit the fan all during the week. Like I couldn't guarantee that my shit would hit the fan on, let's say, sunday and I would have to wait till Friday to be able to talk about it. That did not seem safe for me. That was not a good idea.
Speaker 1:So some of the ways that we set up therapy really was difficult for me to understand. How was this going to be the best way? Now I will say that when you go into treatment and some facilities again, you do and can get treatment every day. You don't have to wait the whole week. I get that it's mostly inside, if not all, and so I was still struggling with this idea of how am I going to do some of the things that they want me to do according to my license, and not only that. You have to get many hours of supervision, which is great, I totally believe in supervision and then you get to take some tests. Now I don't know about you. Now I know some people because I went to college in high school and all the schools and I noticed that some people are really good at taking tests and they're not really good at doing what they can do well on the test. Then I know some people that don't do well in tests yet are terrific at doing that thing that they can't test for. Now I'm really nervous about this. I'm nervous about how we're making sure people are safe to be therapists. Here's the kicker. This was the worst part of it all.
Speaker 1:So doctors take the Hippocratic Oath. We're supposed to do no harm. And I realized that I was gonna get a license that I could tell you to quit smoking, quit drinking, lose 100 pounds and anything else about your emotional wellbeing, your physical wellbeing within reason because I'm not a physician and discuss things about how you are changing your way of being Some okay and some not. But I could tell you to stop yelling at your kids. Hang on, I'll let my dog in, because I can hear him scratch out the door. Hi there, my three-legged, four-tooth dog. So I could tell you to do things how to talk to your spouse, how to nurture your kids. I could do all of that. I was licensed to do that. I had some credentials, I had some expertise in things that I had been trained for, and I could go home and I could smoke several packs of cigarettes, I could drink a carton of wine because, you know, don't want to spend a lot of money and then I could eat a whole cheesecake myself, and then I could yell at my kid and you wouldn't know that. You wouldn't know that I'm not doing that which I'm asking you to do, that I am licensed to be a hypocrite. So maybe we take the hypocritical oath as opposed to hypocritical oath.
Speaker 1:Just saying I had a heart doctor once out in Virginia when I was out there working with veterans, and we're on the same exact dose of high blood pressure medication. Remember, we've talked about in the past that childhood trauma oftentimes not only does things emotionally but it actually can create physical illness, disease and all kinds of issues later in life. We now know that. We've researched that. So he and I have this high blood pressure and we're on the same medication, same dosage, and over the course of months my blood pressure goes down. Why? Well, because I'm out with the horses. I'm eating well, I'm doing bar classes those are not the drinking classes, those are the ones like ballet bar, b A R R E. So I'm doing all of these wellness practices. Oh, and I'm meditating. And every time I went in my blood pressure was going down and his wasn't. And that doctor looked at me with all seriousness and he said I don't understand. We're on the same medication and your blood pressure is going down and mine isn't, as if only the medication was the answer he wasn't doing. And when I sat there and I said to him well, are you meditating? Are you doing yoga? You're doing a bar class, you're taking walks with your dog and are you laughing a lot with your family, like, are you doing all those things that I'm doing? Are you resting? Are you not? None of them. So that's when I keep getting this information about how we are not doing, oftentimes what we're asking other people to do.
Speaker 1:I remember when I first became got my license as a marriage and family therapist and this was before gay men and women could get married, transgender, the whole LGBTIQ plus population community, and yet we're going to call ourselves marriage and family therapists, and yet we're supposed to do no harm. So this idea that I'm going to have a title, I'm gonna sit, say, with two women or two men who would love to get married but the law said they couldn't. I'm going to talk about marriage and family things they are not legally allowed to do. I couldn't think of anything that's more harmful. How do we get away with calling ourselves things that, just on its merit, right at that moment, people sitting in front of me cannot do so? I called the Board of Behavioral Sciences and I let them know how I felt about my title and I said I wouldn't use it. I would use psychotherapist Not gonna call myself a marriage and family therapist until gay men and women have the legal right to get married.
Speaker 1:You know, you've heard me say before that it's times like this that I look at our world and I think how hypocritical are we really going to be? How much are we going to use a hierarchy to decide who's more well, who deserves healthcare, who deserves therapy? Why is it that, all of a sudden, the only way that you can get help is through a diagnosis, that you literally get to be called names and told that there's something wrong with you? The insurance company wants to make sure there's something wrong with you or they won't pay for your help, as opposed to being someone asking you about what happened to you, what happened to you? And, by the way, if we're gonna talk about things like post-traumatic stress, why aren't we talking about post-traumatic growth? If we're gonna talk about historical trauma, why aren't we talking about historical greatness? Why are we not looking at people and all that they've gone through and discover and help them honor their greatness, their strength, their courage, all the things that they are, not just the diagnosis.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you know this, but up until 1973, the book that we use to diagnose people if you have to have so many of the symptoms, actually had a diagnosis in their mental illness for anybody who was gay. That's right up until 1973, that's 50 years ago that if you were gay, you were mentally ill. So we don't always get it right about this idea that somehow the therapist knows better. Somehow the therapist has their shit together and you don't. So that makes it even harder for people who are already reluctant. They've already been betrayed by family members, they've already been abused, they've already been betrayed by organizations and places that they've been and people they've been with, and now you're gonna ask them to sit with a stranger who has a license to not do what they're asking you to do.
Speaker 1:I made a decision when I first became a therapist that I wasn't gonna do that, that I was going to practice and do the things that anybody who had the courage to sit with me that they were doing, that we were gonna walk this walk and do this work together. That that's how it was going to happen for me. I know some amazing therapists. I know about some wonderful of therapeutic models of counseling and therapy and I've met some people that should not be sitting across from anybody and they should not be doing some of the things and saying some of the things that they are. How are you gonna know, how are you gonna be able to figure out who's safe, who's not a hypocrite, who's at least working on themselves and doing the things that help us become the people we deserve to be? I'm not sure. I guess what I would say is go try them out. Any therapist that won't sit with you for at least 30 minutes so that you can get to know them. Any therapist that doesn't answer any questions that you have about them. Any therapist that is being the the therapist and not being the kind, considerate, open-hearted, honest person sitting in front of you. I wouldn't be sitting in that seat with them.
Speaker 1:I also made some changes. So one of the things that I do is that not only do I do the things and keep working on the things that I ask people not I don't ask them to do, but they ask for support and then I make sometimes make some suggestions. Most of the time I ask them to come up with the suggestions. I figure they know more about themselves and what they deserve to do than I do. But if they do ask for some help or if we are having a discussion, I always make sure that I'm honest. It's hard. I make sure that I share what I see and experience from people their strength, their courage, their wisdom, their humor. I also share with them that I'm still on my journey and I have a past, and the greatest thing about all of us is that we're here together. We're here together as a team, as a therapeutic team, to help one another. And that hierarchy that we're taught just because I've gone to school and I've passed the tests, that's not what I look at, that's not what I base my work on or my life. I know that whenever I have the honor to sit across from someone and hear their story and share a bit about mine and we come up with some principles and practices that can help, I'm honored. I'm so grateful that people are coming and sharing and helping me too. That's everything for me.
Speaker 1:So I just want you to know that as the anti-therapist therapist I'm probably going to continue to be a little bit disruptive. I'm going to push back on the powers that be the American Psychological Association, which two years ago finally admitted that they were going to be a part of the American Psychological Association. I'm going to push back on talking about coping, that somehow I'm supposed to help you cope. You will never hear that from me. You deserve much more than coping. I will never tell you that we're going to learn some tools. I get tools. They're in the garage right now. Haven't pulled them out in months.
Speaker 1:I will tell you that most and that has helped me become the mother that my daughter deserves, the grandmother that my grandson deserves and the friend that the rest of my life deserves, and co-worker. I'm telling you that I am going to do the work too. I will do the practices daily and the principles that I will base all of my actions on. You won't have to worry about me reacting to my thoughts or feelings. You can be guaranteed that, even though I have those thoughts and feelings, I'm going to make sure that every action that I do in my life is based on a principle, a principle that I believe in. That I will be honest, I will be kind even though I'm irritated sometimes a lot and I will work from integrity. I will not tell you or suggest that you do something I'm not doing. That's it. That's how I became a therapist. Luckily I'm still one because sometimes I irritate people, the powers that be, and I push back a lot, sometimes at treatment centers that ask me to work, sometimes at veterinary treats, sometimes in the grocery store, anywhere that I happen to be. I tend to make sure that if we're going to ask people to do things or we're going to hold them to a standard, that that standard should be just and fair and honest and we should all be held accountable.
Speaker 1:Signing out as this, I hope Be Crazy Well, therapist. That's what I'm working on all the time. To Be Crazy Well Until next time. Be your best self. That's the most wonderful theme song that I ever was given the honor to use by Calvin Love. Look them up, I'll let you know. If I have a hypocritical slip, I'll let you know because I can still have them. Bless you all. I have a really fun guest coming up one of the most wonderful, lovely, famous wrestlers ever. He happens to be really crazy well, and I adore him. We're going to have him as a guest very soon. Stay tuned. We've got some unbelievable wonderful people coming to Be Crazy Well.