The Hemp Del Soul Podcast

EP #15: We All Need Someone: Why Having a Support Network is Essential for Mental Health

• Marilisa Lawless

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Ever wondered why therapists also need therapists? This revealing conversation dives deep into the critical role support systems play in our lives, regardless of profession or expertise. Our guest therapist shares powerful personal insights about the importance of having trusted people who can provide perspective when we're too close to our own challenges.

The discussion explores how finding the right mentors for different aspects of our lives creates a comprehensive support network. Rather than expecting one person to fulfill all our needs, we benefit from building connections with individuals who excel in specific areas—whether that's meditation, spiritual guidance, or personal growth. As our guest beautifully explains, "I'm not expecting one person to be an expert in everything in my life."

We tackle the fascinating concept that "beliefs are just things we think over and over again," highlighting how external perspectives help us break free from limiting thought patterns. The metaphor of a therapist as a "coach on the sidelines of life" perfectly illustrates how outside viewpoints can transform our approach to challenges.

The conversation takes an unexpected turn into comparing natural healing modalities with pharmaceutical interventions. You'll learn why lavender can be scientifically as effective as certain prescription medications and why plant medicine isn't "alternative medicine" but the original healing practice.

Most powerfully, the discussion reveals that genuine connection might be the most healing aspect of being human. Finding communities where you feel truly heard without judgment—where others believe in your capacity to find your own answers—creates the foundation for deep healing and personal growth. Whether you're struggling to find your tribe or hesitant to seek support, this episode offers practical guidance for building the connections that will sustain you through life's challenges.

Explore our wide range of organic products here: https://www.hempdelsoul.com/ or email us at HempDelSoul@gmail.com

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Hemp Del Sol podcast. All health, no high. Here's your host, Mary Lisa Lawless.

Speaker 3:

Well, hello, hello, friends, family, great universe. We are back in full force, and today we are going to talk about support systems, because it's difficult to go at it alone in life, right, marilisa?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, it is. It's very challenging. You know, we often need the helpers, need helpers.

Speaker 3:

The helpers need helpers Indeed. Yeah, so kick us off off talk. I know what you do through. Your business is largely centered around counseling. I know that that you work. You've worked with your sister for for decades now offering support systems for those around you. Talk a little bit about what that role looks like, and then we'll kind of get into that more broadly.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so my mom, my sister and I got into being family therapists based on our own healing work and things that we had done and learned through doing our own healing, doing our own trauma work, doing our own experiences or healing our own experiences in life, and when we became therapists, we realized that we need also support in what it is that we're doing. So it's always been where we had. We would have, you know, sometimes weekly meetings, other therapists. We would get together, we would brainstorm ideas. You know, hey, I'm dealing with this. We would get together, we would brainstorm ideas. You know, hey, I'm dealing with this. How has you know? And talking about how things that were going on in the work world may have impacted us personally and what do we need to do for ourselves. So one of the things that I had always and we've always said to people is you should really find out what your own therapist believes about therapy. Have they been in therapy? Before you start therapy, ask your therapist, and they should be comfortable saying whether they've had their own therapy or not, because I have met other people who have said you know it's, you know what, what do we need to do to heal? And then I've had.

Speaker 2:

Other therapists who I've spoken with are like we don't do therapy. You know this community doesn't do therapy. Why would we be? I'm like, but you're a therapist, yeah, but that's not us. You know, a lot of people get into being therapists because they come from really dysfunctional families that haven't done their healing. So they think that if they become a healer they'll be able to heal that mess. And you can't. You have to do your own work, otherwise your mess gets spilled on to your clients.

Speaker 2:

So throughout our whole careers, everything that we've done has always been about also seeking support for ourselves when we need it and being able to hear from people that we trust, love and respect, to say, hey, you know what? There's something not quite right with you right now and maybe you need to talk about this. Um, and it's not something I can help you with, but call your therapist. So we've always been about support Moving forward. It's my sister and I, but we have other therapists that have been in and out of here and again we would have meetings. We would do staffing, so to speak, and a lot of agencies do that. They staff clients I still have. When a peer has a client that's really triggered them. They'll call me and say, hey, I need to run this by you. Is this my stuff? Is this their stuff? Suggestions. So we always are reaching out to each other.

Speaker 2:

The other piece that's really important, and what we've always done, is we keep learning, we keep adding to our toolbox the proverbial toolbox and what we do to keep our own lives in order. You know, I don't go home and all of a sudden I'm not a therapist anymore. I go home and I still have all of that training and everything else. You know, and my kid used to say mom, be my therapist. Like no, you need your own therapist, I'm your mom here.

Speaker 2:

And but it it. You know it's so, it's so crazy, so, but with our kids, with our families, you know, being able to honestly say yeah, no, I can't, I can't do this one, you got to go get some professional help honestly say, yeah, no, I can't, I can't do this one, you got to go get some professional help. But also knowing what we do have the capacity to do for each other and the compassion and empathy that we can have for each other and ourselves, that's really really important stuff for getting the support that you need. The other thing that I do is I have mentors. I have specific mentors that are teaching me specific skill sets. One is my meditation Dave Smith. He is my meditation mentor. He is who I connected best with when learning about silent meditation. Barry Ocotillo he's somebody that I'm using as a mentor right now and learning all new things and it's a different form of healing, but it's about changing the vibration and the frequency with which I function in the world and how am I bringing this positivity to the world? So he's one that does that.

Speaker 2:

I have Mauriceice israel, who's a medium. When I am feeling like there's stuff that's going on that I don't understand on the spirit world. He's who I reach out to, he mentors me, I study with him on how to listen to myself and listen to both sides. So, sides, so knowing who. Who are the skills? What are the skills that I need to learn? Who is the best at teaching that? And that's who I'm going to go after. So does that make sense?

Speaker 3:

Yes, yes, putting a good system, support system in place is crucial.

Speaker 3:

I'm curious, though what would you say to somebody out there who? I mean, there's a lot of people that are raised kind of with the thought that therapy is a little bit taboo, right, going to get help like it's a sign of weakness, right, and so there's a lot of people out there that are reluctant to the idea of creating a support system through outside help, right? What would you say to somebody that has that mentality? Because I know from my own experience it is incredibly important to have somebody to talk to, because we all go through a bunch of shit in life and we're all human beings and we all have problems processing, and it is a lot of dark, deep work sometimes and having an outside objective already there that, like you said, is not immediately related to you, right, it's one thing to call a friend to kind of vent to them and have a conversation, but it's another thing entirely to have, again, an outside third party sit down and listen to you and then give you thoughts and feedback from an objective standpoint. So what would you say to somebody that has that view to kind of open their mind to the possibility of getting some help getting somebody to talk to.

Speaker 2:

One of the things that I've done recently is created lawless coaching for people that really don't want to do something labeled as therapy, but they want some direction. That's one piece. When I started in this industry as a psychotherapist, as a family therapist, I have always described myself to people as a coach. Coaching has become a thing now, but I've always described myself as a coach, and to men in particular that are sports oriented, it made perfect sense to say I'm the coach on the sidelines of your life. You're on the field, you have all the players around you and you've been running your own plays. I'm on the sidelines and have a different perspective and I can call out different plays to you and then you can choose if you want to try them or not. So coaching and that metaphor has always been present, because as a therapist, I am on the sidelines. I'm not in your life on a daily basis or a regular basis. You see me in general for an hour a week, an hour and a half, maybe two hours a week. That's a lot of free time and option availability to make choices For people that have never, and that's for somebody who stepped through the doors to even come once.

Speaker 2:

Someone that's questioning and they're like I don't know if I want to do therapy, I'm not really sure about this whole thing. And I don't know if I want to do therapy. I'm not really sure about this whole thing. And you know why? Would I pay somebody to listen to me? So what I tell people is you pay for expertise. When it comes to sports, when it comes to a restaurant, when it comes to a movie, when it comes to anything that we do in our life, it comes with a recommendation. Everybody will give you advice about parenting. Everybody will give you advice about how to live your life or how to clean your house or how to organize things. Therapy is just about how do we organize our minds, how do we organize what's going on in our life, and creating a different perspective.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, you just nailed the word you hit. I was going to. I was going to chime in and say that same word about perspectives like you. You hire professionals and all these other aspects of your life. Why wouldn't you want somebody to come in and kind of help you analyze your own perspective from which you see the world, to potentially open you up to new ideas and thoughts?

Speaker 3:

Because we we get so caught up in our heads right, marilisa, like we get.

Speaker 3:

We have comfort, we have confirmation bias, we feed these. In many cases, we develop belief systems within our thought process that in many cases aren't even true and we're so blinded by the fact that we are stuck in these loops. And for me, therapy has been instrumental throughout my life to really sit down and have somebody kind of dissect how I'm seeing the world, how I'm projecting myself and what I find the more and more work I do is that I've said this before the things that trigger me the most more often than not are my own shit. It's things I'm projecting out to others and I'm seeing things like, especially with my kids, when they misbehave, my son will have a temper tantrum and it triggers me to my core and I sit and reflect upon it and I realized that I act like that many times in front of him and he's just mirroring that back to me and it's like wow, and sometimes you don't. You don't have those realizations without doing the work and sitting down with somebody and having them dissect how you're behaving.

Speaker 2:

I had that happen once, and I think it was in a laundromat or something with my son and he did something or said something. I was like, oh my, he has picked up that bad habit from me. He sounded just like me, the way he was speaking or yelling or what. I don't remember what he was doing, I just remember the feeling of wow, he's listening, he's paying attention, you know, and our children do. Our children pay attention to everything that we think and say out loud, and sometimes they're just watching us.

Speaker 2:

So in our everyday life, what do we need to do to be transparent with ourselves and the way we see ourselves in the world and knowing what it is we have to offer the world? So and what that means is, is about how do I project kindness? I'd be kind. You know I am kind. I'm not by am I perfect, but overall I try to be a kind and loving person. I try to call people on their behavior when necessary. I let a lot of things go by because it's just a control issue on my part and it's like, not my life, I don't have to do this.

Speaker 2:

But perspective is the most important aspect of how our days go, how our world moves forward, because beliefs are things that we think over and over again. That's all. A belief is so what we hear, what we see. It is altered by the things that we think. We see. It is altered by the things that we think, and learning how to pay attention to the things that we think and not believing everything we think. I actually had it as a bumper sticker. I got a new refrigerator so I don't have it anymore, but I had a bumper sticker on my refrigerator that said don't believe everything you think. And it's true. Actually, reaching out to other people to bounce ideas off of them, whether it's a particular type of treatment, whether it's about substance use, whether it's about religion, politics there's so many different ways to alter our perception of the world, which ultimately alters our perspective in the world.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

When I'm treating trauma, when I'm treating addiction, when I'm treating all of these different things, it often goes back to where did you learn that? Where did that become the way that was acceptable in your house, in your family, to move forward? My mom used to make fun of me. I've always been someone that's a little on the fringe of general society. If you can't tell by my hair, if you can't tell by my hair, um, my um mom one time said why do you do chiropractor and acupuncture and herbs and all this stuff? And my mom was a very traditional woman. She, she had her moments, but she was catholic. She said the rosary every day. She had these very rigid beliefs for herself. She never wanted anybody else to have to believe the things that she did. But that was her. And so she looked at me one time and she's like why do you do all these things? And I looked at her and I said because you're a perfect example of what not to do for self-care, because you're a perfect example of what not to do for self-care. She started to laugh and she's like you're so fresh, you know. But that was the thing. Everything that I was doing functional medicine, acupuncture, chiropractor, herbs and vitamins and all these things that I was doing were outside of the traditional medical model. It wasn't going and having a doctor tell me that this is what I have to do, period. What pharmaceutical I should be taking, because I did that round as well. You know I went around that I took antidepressants for a period of time. I've done all of these things but none of them really helped me find me. So what I do now, besides the talk therapy, is I you know, I'm into the crystals.

Speaker 2:

I last time we talked about what happened with the tourmaline and, as a side note, my sister has been one of my sisters has taken the same type of necklace with the tourmaline and she's wearing it and she says it's really weird. She told me yesterday I woke up yesterday. She said I woke up this morning and I was just like I just didn't know distressed and whatnot. And she says, oh, where's my necklace? Where's my necklace? And she went and put the necklace on and it's just a piece of black tourmaline and a cap. And she's like all of a sudden I put this on and it was so weird. I started to feel anxious and I was just like just work it through, Just work it through and all of a sudden she said I was like on. She said all that negativity was gone. She said I had an amazing day today. I was like cool.

Speaker 2:

And then it blew up, right, and then it didn't explode because apparently it's not full. You know, and everybody in my family has a few crystals around. Everybody's got a little bit of something, but at the end of the day, whether you believe in the energy of the crystal or not, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 2:

If it works for you, it works for you. You know, I pulled a couple in my place right here where I'm sitting in my office, and amethyst. You know, I just like holding orbs, the smooth, polished, but they have all this, this kind of weird feeling when you're holding it. You know so, and it's a pretty cool stone, you know, and this is called a Chevron amethyst, it's. It's just like a cool stone so, and I like that, you know. So it's, it's like I'll pick a different shape each day to just sort of have in my offices with me. Or a different essential oil lavender, lemongrass, cinnamon, so there's all these different things that just depends on my mood and I'll bring it in and it seems to also assist other people. Sometimes they're just fun, like this one. This is huge and it's a rose quartz. A rose quartz is for sharing the love, bringing the love, opening the heart. Chakra.

Speaker 2:

Bring me the love share with me, share the love with me.

Speaker 3:

Yes, yes, Very interesting. I want to go back for a moment about the medications. It's such an important thing because this is something I find myself coming back to over and over again. It's this human kind of capacity for instant gratification and wanting a quick fix and how we have access to all of these medications, which it's a wonderful thing and there's many good uses for these things, but it's become ever increasingly a crutch for so many and they really don't.

Speaker 3:

From what I understand about a lot of these medications, like antidepressants and things like that, they don't fix the actual root problem. They just address the symptoms and I think they kind of reprogram and rewire your brain around the underlying problem. So it's not again, it's not a solution. For some, maybe it might be the only thing to get them back on course. It's not a solution. For some, maybe it might be the only thing to get them back on course, but I don't think it should be kind of pitched as a lifelong effort.

Speaker 3:

Right Like, people at some level need to learn how to use holistic tools to improve themselves and ultimately reprogram their minds without the use of external medications that are really kind of rewiring you in odd ways in many cases. I think if you can get one thing out of listening to this podcast, it's just that it's that there are no shortcuts. Right. Progress and getting better and self-improvement all comes off the heels of discomfort. In many cases, pain, Right. It's something that I've been immersed in now for the better part of five years, and it never ceases to amaze me how fascinating this topic is.

Speaker 2:

I agree, I agree. So I think that one of the things that we have, as a culture, have forgotten is that plant medicine is not alternative medicine. It's the original medicine. You know, midwives and herbalist and women that were burned at the stake for being witches were women who were herbalists and healers. They were the ones that you went to in a community and they would give you an herb to heal or to do something for yourself. We've lost that art and many of us are bringing it back.

Speaker 2:

It's like lavender, lav. Lavender is one of these. It's a plant, it's a beautiful flower, it has a fragrance and there's multiple types of lavender and I carry three of them here in the store. But lavender they have done double blind studies with lavender and different um medications lorazepam, diazepam, so in the benzodiazepine family which are considered tranquilizers. They've done double blind studies multiple times and they have equal results, equal taking one or the other. It's not like the medication was this much better or the lavender was this much better equal. And they're double blind, meaning nobody knows what anybody's getting. So I have, and one of the things I do with essential oils here is when people don't know about you know well what's this or what's this? Smell them. There are some people that will smell lemongrass, which I love the smell of, and they're like, oh, that's awful.

Speaker 3:

What if you can't smell, like me? I got no sense of smell. What do I do?

Speaker 2:

That's one of the things. A lot of people with COVID have lost their sense of smell. It's very interesting and that affects our taste. It affects so many pieces.

Speaker 3:

If I was going to lose one sense that's got to be smell. I think that's probably the least important of all the senses.

Speaker 2:

They all balance us out. But herbs and plant medicine and what we're learning more about, even with psilocybin and in that world and the whole world where they have, you know, the ayahuasca, there's so many different plant-based medicines that are in and of themselves would be considered medications, but they're considered plant-based medications.

Speaker 3:

Natural medicines.

Speaker 2:

Natural medicines, one of the Alzheimer's medications. I can't remember the name of it, but I remember when I was studying to be an herbalist. Daffodils is actually a medication for, I believe, treating Alzheimer's. It's one of the medications they make into a medication but daffodils was the first Daffodil pills.

Speaker 2:

And think about it. Poppy poppy plants were made into opium and then it's been made into a million other things. They created the synthetic with oxycodone and oxy you know the oxys. So I mean that they take plants and they try to remake it chemically. They find the active ingredient in the plant. Why not just continue to use the plant?

Speaker 3:

So you led me right where I was going in my mind and it's this idea of and this is interesting. I want to get your perspective on it. You have a compound like whatever. Just take a psychedelic compound, for instance, that occurs naturally in nature. And then you go to a psychedelic compound, for instance, that occurs naturally in nature, and then you go to a lab and let's say you could synthesize that same compound. So it's identical to the actual one that occurs in nature. So there's no discernible difference in a lab. It's the same chemical composition. One is found naturally in nature, naturally in nature, the other is synthesized in the lab. Like science would say that there is no distinction, these are the same compounds. I don't think you would necessarily agree with that and I'm starting to think that there's something I think that there's something that gets lost in translation.

Speaker 3:

There's an intangible, there's a spiritual component of whatever that is, something that can't, at least yet anyway, be touched by science. It's maybe called supernatural, godly, otherworldly, spiritual, whatever that is. But there's something there that gets lost in translation, where it's not the same, and I'd be interesting to see. Surely there's been studies done with that, I'd imagine, but I'd be interested to see what that looks like. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, like I said, I suspect that you think there's something else there, but what are your thoughts on that subject?

Speaker 2:

Well, I think, as a country and it's not every country that's like this, but in our country the pharmaceutical industry is such a powerful industry and the lobbying that goes on at a governmental level from the pharmaceutical companies, there is such a push to medicate versus heal, and I think that that's the distinction we want to. And it comes back to the beginning of our conversation, which is about healing the wounds, healing the hole in the soul, healing these things that have happened to us. We all have negative things happen to us. It's how is it treated? How is it heard? How do we try to heal each other in community? People give up, people get overwhelmed and they think that a medication is the only option. And yet we know that medications are only, in general, 30 or 40 effective. Think about the flu shot. It's only 30 effective in general. You know it's it's.

Speaker 2:

There are some things that help to make things a little easier, but they don't actually address the core issue, and the core issue often is about how do we feel connected in community. Do we have a shaman? Do we have a priest? Do we have a rabbi? Do we have a spiritual leader? We can go to priest. Do we have a rabbi? Do we have a spiritual leader we can go to? Do we have family that we can go to? Who do we talk to? Who do we commune with?

Speaker 2:

All of it comes back to that, and when we're listening to people that have been in similar experiences, that's what support groups are often about is listening to other people's ways of seeing the world or doing things and say, oh, I'll try that, or now that doesn't really fit for me. But being open to saying we are not cookie cutters, we are not all the same. We all feel differently and, at the end of the day, is, how do we hear each other and what support do we seek from the world? And that's where I had said I have different mentors for different things. I don't expect one person to be an expert in everything.

Speaker 2:

In my life, a husband and wife, or a husband, husband, wife and wife partners can't always be 100% there for each other. Everybody needs a village. We all need a community that we can reach out to and a safe community, one where there's not going to be judgment and opinions thrown like you need to do that or you have to do that, but I can hear that you're in pain, let's sit together. I can hear that that's upset you. Let's talk about it, without judging the situation. But truly being able to hear each other and knowing who it is you're going to for support, does that bring you a sense of comfort? Or is it just you looking for allies? And there's a difference. When you can have a community that is truly there for you and is hearing you, without telling you what to do, but believing that you have the skills to figure this out yourself, you have found the right community. Yep, we don't need people in our lives to tell us what to do. We need people in our lives to give us an alternative perspective.

Speaker 3:

Yep, don't tell us what to do. Help lead us to our own realizations.

Speaker 2:

So, coming to therapy for the first time, what I tell people is try it once, come through the door, because what we do know is that every school is different. They all have different skill sets that they teach you. None of it matters unless you have a connection with the person that you're talking to. So, when looking for a therapist, look for somebody who's done their own work. Look for somebody who is open to hearing what you have to say and is not there to judge you or tell you oh, that's messed up, you shouldn't be doing that. But somebody that wants to be there on the journey with you.

Speaker 3:

But somebody that wants to be there on the journey with you. Yeah, that's a good point. I think there's probably a lot of people out there that have gone to get help with therapy and they went to a therapist and it didn't resonate with that person and it left a bad taste in their mouth to the point where they're resistant to getting help from somebody else. But it's important to acknowledge that. Yeah, you don't just need to go with any old person. You got to. You got to find the right person for you. So if you're meeting with somebody and you're finding that it's not resonating, go find somebody else, right, don't stay with somebody for the sake of staying with them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, and that's true of a support group, that's true of any society of any type that you join. Don't judge it based on the first one. Do it a couple of times and see what you think and how do you feel. Do you feel a sense of connection? Do you feel like you belong?

Speaker 2:

I feel, I can I can, I can throw in one little piece about a church. You know I I was raised Catholic went to church. No, you know, I was raised Catholic went to church no, you know, did the right thing, you know, for fear of going to hell. What I found is that I found a church that has, or a congregation that has, the same beliefs. But even the particular congregation that I went to initially, while I enjoyed it, it wasn't, it still didn't feel like home to me and I went to a new congregation with the same spiritual beliefs. And I went to a new congregation and I literally walked in the door and I was like I'm home, sign me up. And I've been there for 27, 27, 28 years now with the same congregation because it felt like home. River of Grass Unitarian Universalist congregation became my spiritual home and my extended family, because I don't have a lot of extended family here and that's part of where a spiritual community comes in. Extended family here and that's part of where a spiritual community comes in.

Speaker 2:

But you have to find, no matter whether it's a therapist, whether it's a support group, whether it's a, whatever it is. You have to feel like you belong. Feeling connected is the most healing part of being human. And when we have a tribe and that's the those people that that love us and are willing to call us on our stuff they're not abusive about it, they, you know. They just say, hey, that that's kind of messed up. You might want to think about that. Or you know what you're doing, really great, and you just go. But it's connection. It's all about connection and I know we've been talking a lot longer than we normally talk, but I feel really passionate about the topic of finding your tribe and healing in community.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's one of the things that I think is missing from a lot of people's lives nowadays is community, sense of connection. I think, say what you will about religion, love it or hate it, there's an unbelievable utility in the sense of community that it brings for people that get together and that sense of connectedness. If you go through life without that, it could be very, very challenging and you have to have the bigger the tribe. The more folks there are there in your support system, the more likely you are to succeed. It's just that simple. Yes indeed, yes indeed. All right, well, let's leave it at that.

Speaker 3:

Okay, for anyone out there that's listening, if you've found any interesting support systems in your own life, maybe something that's off the cuff, maybe something that's worked for you, let us know about it in the comments. We're interested to hear your thoughts and we are so happy to have you with us along on this journey. We wish you all a wonderful day. Much love, aho. Be kind out there and remember we only have this one life to live, so let's make the most of it. Everyone, take care, have a blessed day. Bye-bye.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to the Hemp Del Sol podcast. Bye-bye.

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