Acceptance: You Are Not Broken

Michelle Pitot, LCSW, EdD, brings over 35 years of clinical experience and lived experience to a conversation that challenges everything we think we know about mental health. After decades of helping people navigate trauma, she began asking a deeper question: Why do so many people continue to struggle, even with insight, therapy, and effort?

Her search led her to Metabolic Psychotherapy — a research‑based approach that explores how the body’s internal state shapes mood, resilience, and emotional patterns. Michelle breaks down how stress, inflammation, sleep, nutrition, and nervous system regulation directly influence our mental health, and why healing often begins in the body long before the mind catches up.

With compassion and clarity, she reminds us: you are not broken — your body is communicating.  
This talk invites listeners to rethink their relationship with their physical and emotional selves, and to discover new pathways to healing that are simple, sustainable, and rooted in self‑acceptance.

#MetabolicPsychotherapy #MentalHealthMatters #TraumaHealing #MindBodyConnection #YouAreNotBroken #EmotionalResilience #HealingJourney #MichellePitot #LivedExperience #ClinicalWisdom #MentalHealthPodcast #MrTraumaTalks #RahSpeaks #HolisticHealing #MentalHealthAwareness #TherapyWorks #StressAndHealing #TraumaRecovery #WellnessJourney #MentalHealthCommunity

Metabolic Psychotherapy podcast, Michelle Pitot LCSW EdD, mind body mental health, trauma and metabolism, emotional resilience therapy, lived experience therapist, mental health healing journey, connecting physical and emotional health, long‑standing patterns healing, mental health conference speaker, Mr Trauma Talks podcast, Rah mental health conference, holistic mental health approach, stress and mood connection, trauma recovery expert, mental health storytelling, healing through lifestyle changes, emotional wellness podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_13 0:00

I don't know what happened. It got a little frozen here for a second. All right, so let's do this. So next amazing speaker is Michelle Pittett, therapist and metabolic psychotherapy specialist. With over 35 years of as a therapist, Michelle combines clinical wisdom with lived experience. Her journey led her to metabolic psychotherapy, a research-based approach connecting the body's state to emotional well-being. She teaches that long-standing patterns can shift through substantial lifestyle changes and reminds us that we are not broken, and healing is definitely possible. All my amazing rasters, I give to you all, Michelle Pittett.

SPEAKER_11 0:52

This is what I was taught acceptance is. This wave the white flag. Wave the white flag. That's what I was taught. And what I have found is that acceptance is the beginning of healing. Hi everybody, I am Michelle Pito and I'm a metabolic psychotherapist and wellness coach. And I will tell you what that means. Most folks, when I say that, they kind of look at me and they go, cool. They don't what does that really mean? And in order to tell you about what I do, I really want you to know a little bit about who I am because I bring my whole self to everything I do. I feel that that is so critical in my work, in my life, in my healing, in how I love, in how I show up, is I bring my whole self. And so I'll start by telling you a little bit about where I came from. I grew up sixth of eight kids in the Midwest, and um growing up in my family was for me exceptionally painful. It was a quiet household with eight kids. To me, what that says is there was no I did not experience joy growing up. I experienced a life where I felt that love was something I needed to earn, that happiness was something that happened once in a while and it was fleeting, that in order to be loved, I needed to perform. I needed to get all the best grades, I needed to show up. The main thing I want to say about that is that part of the acceptance of my childhood for me, and where I talk about acceptance being healing, is that it comes to a point in our lives where we need to recognize that true healing comes when we no longer want to rewrite our history. And I have come to a point where I recognize that my parents, my whole family, gave each of us everything that they could with what they had. And I no longer have anger and sadness about how I grew up. I have appreciation because everything made me who I am today. And at the same time, how I got from there to here is important because the way that I survived my childhood, it didn't affect my other siblings the same way it affected me for whatever reason. Maybe I'm a triple Pisces, maybe uh that's why, maybe I just am a deep empath, there any sort of reason, it really doesn't matter why. All I know is that my childhood affected me so deeply that I needed to escape. And from a very early age, all I looked for was escape. My earliest friends were I found books, fantasy, food. Those were my earliest escapes. I was a very bookish kid, not very social. I never understood any of that social stuff. By the time I was 19, I was actively trying to die. And I say that not to shock you or impress you, but just to impress upon you how the reality of my life is that by the time I hit the end of my teenage years, I no longer wanted to be on the planet. And I was actively self-destructing. What happened at that point is my parents, my family, um, staged an intervention and got me some help. And my whole life since then, since that point, I had just turned 20, was on a different trajectory. And I got some help from some talented folks in the mental health field and substance use field, and I looked at what they were doing and I thought, hey, that's a cool way to make a living, sitting in a chair talking to people all day. So I went into, I spent my 20s getting into my career as a psychotherapist. I got my undergraduate, my master's degree, and started working with teenagers because that's who I could relate to. Moved out to the Bay Area, and um at that point I was in a whole new world. I grew up in the Midwest and moving to Oakland, California, and I got a position where I was working in some inner city high schools and very felt very much out of my depth and struggled because I felt at that point I had gotten some experience. I thought I knew what I was doing, and all of a sudden I was this scared little white girl running around these inner city high schools having no clue how to help these kids. And so I did what I knew how to do, and I went back to school. I got a doctorate in multicultural education. All of these things moved me forward in my career. My healing story is a little bit on a different trajectory because as my career took off, my healing stalled at a certain point, and I became true to who I grew up as, which is that we don't talk about our feelings, we don't process our feelings, we just go on and we perform. What I knew was that in order to be considered a success in the world, I had to get all of the things, and I did that. I followed the path of getting a position. I was at a certain point at the top of my game, really. I was working for a very large company that was, we were across the whole country. It was still in human services, but I was a an executive at this corporation, completely not who I am. But this is where I went. You climbed the ladder of success. And I was working as an executive and I was traveling first class and working with Wall Street investors who were helping us grow this company. And um at a certain point on the outside, I had everything. I had a flashy car, this beautiful home and swimming pool up in the mountains of Tucson, and just really living the life. And I inside was miserable, even though I had just a beautiful life on the outside. And um, one day I was leaving work and I got caught in the middle of a police action, and my life was threatened by a carjacker. And in that moment, when this man was holding a weapon, pointing it at my face, and I absolutely knew I was going to die in that moment. I didn't, clearly, but I knew I was, I just felt this is it, my life is over. And in the aftermath of that experience, and and there's a longer story to that whole piece about what happened and why it is that he ended up running instead of um hurting me, but in the aftermath of that trauma, I was plunged back into where I had been as a 19-year-old and 20-year-old, and I went back to some old self-destructive behaviors. And in order to get through that trauma myself, I sought a new kind of help. Because what I knew in that in that experience is that trauma truly does live in our body, that it is a physical thing. Bessel Vanderkoelk's book, um, The Body Keeps the Score. That's an awesome title, mostly because it says it says it all. Our body keeps the score of the traumas that we go through. And in order to heal at that level, the work I had been doing for the previous 20 years or so was powerful. It moved me forward. I became a whole new person. I don't want to minimize all the work that I did through the years of talk therapy and professional personal development, all of these different things I did over the years of personal growth. I don't want to minimize those. And yet it wasn't until my body got it that our life here is temporary and that I thought mine was going to be over. Then to heal from that, I needed to go deep within my physiology. And I started with a therapeutic approach of getting EMDR and doing some somatic work, and I did a lot of healing. And I'll tell you what the turning point is, and this leads me back to how it is that I became a metabolic psychotherapist, is that I started learning about how our habits and our behaviors and our choices that we make every day regarding our health, how they impact our brain and our mental well-being. I started learning the science, the chemistry, the biology. Look, I have a bunch of doctors in my family, and I at a young age said, I am not going that route. I am not going the doctor route. And I went the brain route instead, the emotional route. And yet, when I started learning about the physiology of healing and of mental health, I moved right into what's called metabolic psychotherapy. And I got trained by a psychiatrist called Dr. Georgie Ede. She's amazing. And what I learned is that our mind is not where our mental health lives, it lives in our whole body, and yet it's our thought that expresses, like we put things into words. We put things into words, and that's our brain working. But if I'm not taking care of my gut, if I'm not taking care of my sleep, if I'm not taking care of my hydration, all of those things, then my brain is going to misinterpret my lip, my words are going to misinterpret what's going on with me. Raul said earlier that if I'm having a struggle, I might just need to drink a glass of water. That's so true. If I'm not hydrated, I'm not going to feel great. So what I learned is that certain things that we do, and food is huge with our metabolic health, sleep is huge, circadian rhythm, getting the right amount of sleep and making sure that it's quality sleep. Because what happens at around midlife is a lot of our behaviors that we have followed all our life that we've tried to stay healthy with, a lot of those behaviors are not keeping us healthy, but we can get away with a lot in our younger years. But around midlife, it really matters that we have to recognize that our behaviors build up, our behaviors build up, and our body gets less and less able to handle behaviors that are not healthy. So what I teach people and what I do in my own life is I learn at a baseline what my physiology needs nutritionally, what my physiology needs with regards to my hydration, what my physiology needs with my sleep. Now, let me bring this back to acceptance. Because this thing about waving the white flag and believing that we just have to accept things, for me, acceptance does not mean putting up with unacceptable situations. To me, acceptance means recognizing what is true and then moving forward from there. That's what I learned with my physiology and with my physical health. So when I learned that, oh, you mean what I eat actually might make a long-term difference to my mental health? And when I started exploring, and I call it biohacking, hacking my own biology, I was on three different medications at one point for my mental health, but also for a couple of physical illnesses that I had. I'm on no medications. All of these other things fell into place when I started attending to my physical health. So I used to have tinnitus, my ears would ring, that's gone. I had physical pain, chronic pain in a couple different parts, my neck and my back from old injuries, all gone. I started working with this as a psychotherapist. I started helping folks because I recognized that when they started attending to their metabolic health, they were able to deal with their emotional health. I was working with one woman who had obsessive compulsive struggle so bad that it would take her about 45 minutes to get out of the house in the morning because she had to go back in and check to make sure she unplugged the iron, made sure she turned off the stove, she'd go out to the car, go back in the house. It would take her 45 minutes up to an hour sometimes. We started working with just making some slight changes in her habits. One morning she came in to see me and she sat down, she said, Michelle, I left the house this morning. I said, Yeah, I know you're here, that's great. And she said, No, you don't understand. I just left the house. I will never forget her. Because in my understanding and my learning, this new way of helping people and accepting that the ways I had worked before were not wrong, but they weren't complete, that opened a door to a whole new level of healing for me and for the lives I touch today. So the main thing that I want to leave you with around acceptance is first, it's for me, it's about truth, acknowledging what is. Next, it really is about gaining strength. When I accept what's true, I have the strength to move forward with it. Because truth is what brings us strength. They say that only the truth will set you free. Absolutely. If I'm denying what's true and what's real in front of me, I'm never going to be able to accept it. The other piece about it is it's around faith and truly believing that there is a bigger power at work in the world. And that also gives me the strength to move forward and to walk away from situations that are not acceptable to me. I can't fix them. Maybe I don't even need to. It's not about right or wrong, it's about accepting what is. And if that's not right for me, I need to change my geography. And the last thing I'll say about acceptance is that acceptance has brought so much joy into my life. Because when I can accept life on life's terms and I can let go of all these things I don't have to control, I get to recognize the beauty that is all around me. I get to recognize that things are unfolding as they should. Maybe not always as I would want, maybe not as always I think they might, but they are unfolding as they should. And in the face of all the struggles, that life is fabulous and it's beautiful, and that we get that. We don't have to earn it. Joy and love and faith, they are our birthright. And what I have learned is how to get out of my own way so I can accept it and let it all in. So I'm gonna stop there. And I wish that on all of you. Thank you for bringing me here today. I appreciate you.

SPEAKER_13 16:41

Actually, thank you for coming. Thank you for taking your precious time out and doing this for everyone. You know, you you touched on so many amazing points, especially as like what's this? After we take a stroll on Wall Street with the times that we realize like it's too really hard because like I was telling someone only a few days ago, I interviewed on Travel Behna Glamour, another girl who worked on Wall Street. I was like, she had some of the the things she said, like it just was like, oh wow, you you have an eye opener when you go down to Wall Street. It's a fine, it's a different type of financial dog eat dog world on there. I'm serious. Yeah, it is. All right, so let me bring everyone up and they can ask you a question. And I see so many amazing, amazing comments here. It's saying you're awful. I think it's uh I can't pronounce our name. So let's just use that. So everyone of you listening on, thank you so much. We're gonna post these on, they're gonna go up on Spotify, on iHat Radio, on anywhere there podcasts. It's all gonna be heard. So you can listen back to some of these, check us out, and if you have any questions, we can shout you out. I I saw one question here from Angie, and it's it's for me. So we'll come back to that because this is my first time. So here we go. Sharon, even Dr. Jan and Susie to the stage. Let's hear you all what questions you all have to ask. Questions? Anyone? Susie, nothing?

SPEAKER_10 18:32

I'll make a comment. I think Michelle did such a great job in just sharing her story and explaining how she got to where she where she is and why she believes what she believes, and then she's awesome at helping others. So I don't really have a question. I just want to say thank you for being so raw and open and honest. So thanks, thank you.

SPEAKER_11 18:56

Thank you.

SPEAKER_04 18:57

Yeah, I want to did all that. That was fantastic. And I never heard the title metabolic psychologist before. I think that is the coolest. I'm like, that was a showstopper for me. It's like I'm up on all this stuff, and I never heard that. I'm like, oh my god, this is so cool. I never heard of that feel before, and I'm really excited. I want to learn more because that was really cool.

SPEAKER_11 19:14

Yeah, I have to say, I had never heard of it, and it was a game changer for me. I I was working at the university, fabulous position there, loved what I was doing. I couldn't stay. I was so excited about what I was doing, and it's groundbreaking. Read Chris Chris Palmer and Georgia Ede are the are and um Shibani Sethi, who's out in Stanford. Those are the some of the leaders in the field. And a lot of what you shared, um, Susie, is very, very on on course. It maybe in some ways we're using different words to describe the same thing. Like when you spoke, I'm like, I need to learn more about sound because I believe that that really we redo reset our body when when we use whether it's metabolic healing or sound healing. It's so powerful. Thanks.

SPEAKER_04 20:07

Yeah, it's resonated with everything you were saying. I'm like, that is just like so on point. I loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it.

SPEAKER_11 20:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:13

So I I want to learn more.

SPEAKER_11 20:15

Great. Anyone else?

SPEAKER_13 20:20

Okay. Actually, Susie, you could just chime in there and tell them a little bit about your workshop that you're having.

SPEAKER_04 20:27

Oh, okay. I do a couple of things. I do have a podcast called The Happiness Now Network, and I love bringing people on to tell their stories of what they overcame and how they did it. So I love all the different healing modalities out there. So I want to know them all and share them all. And I have a workshop coming up for autoimmune disabilities. I don't know what I'm losing the voice. And um basically want people to know, like what I was talking about before, that your body's not attacking itself. And what I love is that even though no matter how much we say them, it doesn't anchor in. I mean, I'm kind of um I'm incorporating scans into it, so they're gonna get a full body scan so they can see how they're progressing. Because I know even for me, like I totally believe in all this stuff. But I'm just gonna take a money healing convention and then they did a scan on me, and then I did my tuning full treatment, and then they did another scan, and I saw how it improved. I was like, oh my God, you know, I know it works, but seeing it and like, oh my god, like this is registering, I feel that's gonna be like the healing tool for people that they need to see it. And that was always my thing that if we have in the back of my mind that it's not working, it's not gonna work. But if we actually see it on print that it's working, so I'm all excited to share um that resource with people and let them experience it and get their scams.

SPEAKER_13 21:46

You're welcome. Dr. Jan, Terry, anything?

SPEAKER_14 21:56

Thank you for sharing your passions. Or you know, your transition and in that you had you had a realization that you had your inner programming from childhood. And even though it took getting into your career and then being on the other side where you're helping other individuals with that, you realize there was still some inner work to do, and you chose to do the work. That's the thing. Part of the whole topic of acceptance is the fact that whatever it is that's happened, there is a decision to be made, and whether or not you're going to choose to take up the banter of doing what you know you're capable of doing to change the course that you were placed on and maybe fell into as a child. You have to decide what does my adult year, you know, what do those years look like, what do relationships look like? And you had something show up right in front of your face in the midst of your career where you're like going, Oh, I still have some programming that I have to uninstall in in order to move forward and help more people. And you chose to do that, and that is a beautiful thing to do. And as a result, we all get to enjoy your experiences and how you help people. And thank you so much for making that choice.

SPEAKER_11 23:21

Thanks, Jerry. I I appreciate you saying that because sometimes I look back. I did I walked away from that corporate position. That moment of having my life threatened changed me so deeply. I knew I was dying inside, staying in that world. And I left. I did not leave in the most responsible way, in retrospect. And yet I appreciate what you said because what's true is that I would not have landed where I have today if I hadn't walked away from the comfort, the material comfort of that position. I needed to walk away from my own healing, yes. And um I I forget that sometimes. So thanks for that reminder. I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_14 24:06

That's a big step because you, like you said, you had the cushy world of a corporate position. You had probably a very high salary, you had the ability to move and shake with a lot of individuals that most people wouldn't have access to. And that appeared to be like the icing on the cake of your life, right? And then when you inside, like Miss Susie had said, you go, go, go, go, go. And very stoic, we're taught in the West that that you hold it in, strength is is very still, very calm. And to show any signs, because this is part of my background, is is is showing any signs of weakness can cause other people to take advantage of you because you're in a state of weakness. And so when you're looking at, okay, this person has a gun to my face, I'm literally looking at my mortality right now. What I choose can can say what's going to happen. I may be here in two seconds or not. And then after realizing that, you're going, hey, I'm worth making that step towards my soul expanding. And you chose your soul expansion, and that meant giving up your cushy job. That meant redirecting your life. That meant walking away from what everyone else says appears to be perfect for you. And you knew inside your soul is saying, hey, we've gone through a lot. We have a message, and we're supposed to be sharing that. We're supposed to be helping people. And I had to kind of put you in front of death for you to realize that. And it doesn't matter if you didn't do it in the most responsible way possible. The fact that you made the choice to do it, because you could have stayed in it and you could have had a heart attack. You could have ended up with a stroke, you could have had all these things. Your message would have died with you, like the way that Les Brown says the most valuable place is the graveyard because that's where everyone took their dreams upon their death instead of letting them out into the world, right? And that's something that we all have to think about at some point in our lives. You thought about it in a split second, you made a decision, you went with the decision. The outcome of the decision is an impact on people's lives and making sure that these people out there know that you're here holding space because of what you've gone through for them to be able to know they can step forward and make those hard changes as well. You know, we all have to choose. And your choice led to a lot of new beginnings that brought you in front of places that you wouldn't have otherwise gone for people to be able to say, hey, that's me too. And if she could do it, I could do it. So thank you so much. I applaud you for that. Not a lot of people will walk away from the security and comfort of finances in pursuit of making sure their soul is able to do the work and for you to resolve inner conflicts that you didn't know you had. You could have still chose to stuff them down, and so that's a big step. And I applaud you for that.

SPEAKER_13 27:08

I love, love, love that you said a whole lot about her. And listen, like I was checking out when I read her bio, Terry. I was like, oh my god, she actually really does the work and she's been doing it for everyone. So just just just just a shout out here again. It's Larry Ashley Pax. So I I was I couldn't pronounce it like this, so I was trying to figure out what it was, but it's Larry. I think Larry's here for Dr. Jen. Thank you so much. Of course, you're my girl. I would always support you. And she was saying that it was so powerful before. All right, so anyone else want to add anything? Um, guess what, right? So when your talk starts and I introduce you, that's where your video cuts out from or your talk that goes on to the podcast. So the entire panel with the questions and everything comes together. So if you have any other questions, ask. And it's always amazing to hear what someone else has to say based on their lived experience. So if everyone else is good, we will go ahead and oh, it's Laurie. It's Laurie, not Larry, Lori, all right, should be right by now. Sorry about butchering your name. All right, so let me put everyone backstage and introduce the next amazing speaker. You all having fun so far? All right, great. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Susie, for that. So I just want to try this one more time. A little while ago, my my um computer, I forgot to put it on the cooler, so it was overheating, and I didn't realize that. Yes, I have a like a big gamer um laptop and it carries a lot because I do all my video edits and everything. Everyone who knows me knows the type of work that I do graphics, every single thing, to make sure that I bring it on your trauma talks, as we have said before. So at this time I just wanna let's see if this is gonna play because this is the amazing, the legend himself, Paul Anthony.

SPEAKER_08 29:15

The legend, Paul Anthony. It's very, very important that you come out to hang with me and a host of other really, really engaging people. June 11th, Times Square. You got to be there at the Palladium. It's all about mental health, it's all about being resilient. That's why it's called resilience. I'ma say it again, resilience, June 11th, the palladium coming out, okay?

SPEAKER_12 29:43

As I said, I don't compare myself to anyone. See, because I always think it could have been worse.

SPEAKER_03 29:49

And from that vibration, we can start to bring it in. Because it's the emotion that brings it into you.

SPEAKER_14 29:56

Yes, that's what me the most. The greatest battle wasn't only in my body, it was really in my heart.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

My grandfather was everything to me. I accepted him as my dad because he was tangible, I could touch him, I can love him, he can love on me. So I didn't feel so bad not knowing my biological father because my grandfather was always there.

SPEAKER_09 30:12

Happiness is not a destination. For me, 2025 was a year of mixed emotions, love, philosophy, now.

SPEAKER_02 30:21

One day I was in church and I was sitting there and played this song, it's called Nobody by casting crowns, and it kept saying, I'm just a nobody telling everybody about somebody.

SPEAKER_07 30:33

It's called Binding Auto and Disorder, named after my book and my podcast.

SPEAKER_05 30:43

But when it was time for me to study for the thing, it was always the thing what type of trauma that I'm talking about today. You have emotional, physical, sexual, and we have time.

SPEAKER_00 30:58

I gave my George talk and I got 10-20 messages that oh my god, we are living in a relationship like this since 40 years ago, and we could not recognize that's called trauma by snake.

SPEAKER_06 31:08

Let's call abuse by the snake. Let's stop this.

SPEAKER_13 31:16

So that was a different conference altogether, and those were some of the key stuff they said about themselves. Like, you know, everyone has to heal. And healing doesn't just happen overnight, healing is a continuous journey, and this is why many of the times when we tell you to go get some therapy, it's not just because it is that you did not heal from the past traumas. Maybe it's too much for you that's happening right now, maybe it's it's a lot that has accumulated that you have you're not able to move forward from. And this is why we tell you go sit with someone, go talk to them. All right, if you if you don't want to see a psychologist or psych a psychotherapist or someone out there, there's someone else that could be able to lend a hair. When I started doing this, I remember putting together this because I actually believe in it. And one of the things I say is listening plays an important part in suicide awareness. Because if you listen, you will hear.