Hello everyone, welcome to the Said in Therapy Podcast. Have you ever considered going to therapy and you ended up not going? My question is why? In my humble opinion, I believe everyone can benefit from therapy. In fact, I believe everybody should go at least once in their life. My name is Iman Tohami and I'm a psychologist. This podcast tells you all about everyday cases with everyday people who have everyday problems and difficulties, and sometimes they carry around really deep wounds. These are their stories.
SPEAKER_00So I've been asking a lot on social media what type of content you would like to listen to or read. So I've been working on a few things that I will be publishing for all of you, and I hope you're going to enjoy this. And today I'm going to talk about something that I get asked about pretty much every day. And I decided to actually record an episode about this because I believe it's important. Everybody has a different understanding about healing, and this is what I'm going to talk about today. And I want to share with you all the things I wish someone had told me about healing. Even before I became a psychologist, even during the time I was training to be a therapist. And I think it's pretty impactful that I actually share a little bit about my point of view and what I learned throughout the years, not only working with patients, but also dealing with my own pain. Alright, let's start. So, as you all know, I'm a psychologist, but there are a few things that I had to learn the hard way. People assume just because you learn the theories behind something that you already know all the tools and how to use them and that your life is pretty much, you know, pulled together and you know exactly what you are doing. But to be honest, that is so untrue. It couldn't be further from the truth. Yes, there is a few things that we we are a therapist are maybe ahead of than the regular person, but at the end of the day, pain is pain. And I think understanding your own pain doesn't necessarily stop you from hurting. Actually, I'm sure it doesn't stop you from hurting. And I want to go back to a time where I was pretty much at the beginning of my career. I was still training um to become a therapist, and I was dealing with a loss in my life, and I think I've talked about this extensively, but to be a little bit more specific, during that time I wasn't even licensed yet. Um and I still had to learn how to deal and sit with other people's pain. And suddenly, throughout that, I had to deal with my own. So I remember very early on when I was sitting in in a lecture learning about grief and all the concepts about grief and how to deal with grief and treat grief. I would often go home and realize that there is something else entirely that people are not looking at. And it is in your body. It is the silence that you're sitting with when you're actually dealing with loss. The way time stretches and collapses sometimes when nobody is watching you, and you're dealing with your tears and your pain and how everything around you seems to change, but nobody really is. The world is turning, the world is moving on, as if nobody's really recognizing what you're going through. I didn't have the words for this, and I didn't know how to be with that pain. It took me a long time. So when I would hear or read about concepts that would take healing or grieving in a time frame of a year, it was a very foreign concept for me. Because I know for a fact that I was grieving for longer. And that was the time when I really understood something nobody else had said in any lecture yet. Knowledge doesn't protect you from pain. And I know that this is a very when you think about it, when you listen to it, knowledge doesn't protect you from pain. It's really something that goes without saying. You say, yeah, of course. If you know that someone is hurting because they broke their leg and your leg is currently not broken, you know that you're they are hurting, but it's not your pain. So you don't really relate to that pain in that moment, but you understand the concept of pain. So you can can show empathy when it comes to this. I think grief didn't soften because I could explain it. I could explain that I was grieving. I think it didn't move faster because I really didn't know how to make it move faster. Or to be more clear about this, I didn't know that grief actually needs time. And at the time I didn't really care that I was becoming a psychologist. This wasn't really the headline in my life. I know that this is something that I was doing, and I had I had the hunch that I'm that I was actually capable and maybe even good at this. I basically did what a lot of people do. I functioned, I separated my private life from what I was doing. So I showed up to my training sessions, I went to all the lectures, I kept going, and very early on I learned how easy it is to confuse functioning with healing. Because years later, when I actually started my own practice, when I basically started working with patients on my own, I had to recognize that I wasn't ready yet to deal with people who are grieving, especially when that grief was still fresh and new. I knew that I was self-aware and that was good and that was helping me in my work. It was something very insightful. But it also told me that I also had to do work on my own. It was still hurting. So when someone who was grieving was sitting across from me and would say, I know where this is coming from, but I don't know why it's still affecting me, these were questions that I actually took home. And the whole idea of Said in Therapy started throughout the early years that I was working with patients, because a lot of the questions and things that people would say to me during the sessions resonated with me. And every time I think back to that version of me, trying to think my way out of something that I needed and thinking about myself, how I was constantly trying to think away or rationalize something out of my system was so wrong because the idea is I needed to feel it first in order to rationalize it. Here's the truth that I had to learn, not only slowly, but also brutally. First through loss and then through listening. Healing is not an intellectual process. Of course, the insight helps, safety is what actually changes or changes things in your perspective, but your nervous system doesn't respond to awareness, it responds to gentle guidance to something that you first need to feel and heal from, much like it is a wound that you see is bleeding and it takes time for it to actually close. It learns through repetition by being mad again and again without being rushed. The pain has to go through you. I know that this is a very abstract concept for many people, but I recently started working for someone with someone who goes through a pretty bad breakup. And I needed to remind her and me first that this is not something you can just think away. You need to let it sit and take its course in time. So basically, as I moved from training to practice, that lesson really stayed with me. It softened the way I work, it even taught me to slow down. I stopped measuring healing with milestones and started seeing it as a relationship with myself, with my body, with my emotions. Healing is never linear, it moves in circles and it comes back in waves, and sometimes those waves are so strong, and then on other days it's really calm. You have to look at it like an ocean. And sometimes I realized it revisited me when I went to old places, and I watched them through the eyes of someone who evolved and grew, and it's still it's my nervous system, still went back to that person who first experienced that loss, and then I would cry, and then I would think, why am I crying? And then I realized no, all of this is part of the grief, all of this part is part of the process of healing. And grief also sometimes looks like relief, and then grief shows up again, and it's really loud and it's very consuming. And I don't think that this is something you actually forget. Grief sits inside you. Much like trauma, you have to learn to grow around it and make it part of who you are today. When I say grief, I don't only refer to grief that comes when you are losing someone through this. No, it's also the grief that you feel when you're breaking up with someone, when a friendship falls apart. All of these relationships shape us and matter to us, and losing them is a part of the process of grief. So when it takes time, if you find yourself in the situation where grieving doesn't really move forward very quickly, I want you to know that you're definitely not failing. It just means that things still matter, and they will matter to you for a very long time. Losing someone early in my training, in my career taught me that healing isn't about becoming stronger. It's becoming safer in who you are without that person or that relationship. Safer to feel how you feel, safer to pause instead of pushing, safer not to have the right answers right away. So in my practice now, the moments that matter the most aren't the big breakthroughs. Of course they matter. I don't want to take away from big breakthroughs, but basically what I see makes people change are the quiet shifts, those moments where they're sitting with themselves and actually recognizing small differences and small things they do differently since something painful happened. Someone notices their body, for example, how they're reacting, or they stop apologizing for the way they grieve, or someone who chooses to rest instead of working harder. All of that is healing. It's not loud, it's not impressive. All of that is actually something that has real impact in your life, and it's sometimes things only you can notice, or someone who's really close to you, and by talking to them, they also see that change. If you're listening to this and you're wondering why you are still here grieving, basically you feel stuck in the pain you feel, still working through something you thought should be you should be past it from a long time ago. I want you to know there is really no timeline. Your nervous system is not late, your nervous system needs to relearn how basically to learn how to deal with things. You are not broken because something still hurts. You are not weak because something still matters. And this is really important because love doesn't just disappear, it takes time. And if you loved someone and you lost them in a more permanent way, I want you to know that this love will stay with you forever. Healing doesn't ask you to be finished with something, it asks you to stay and basically accept the absence. So maybe right now staying looks like breathing a little bit slower, maybe journaling, letting your shoulders drop when you feel very tense. Maybe you just accept that you cannot fix everything, that you don't need to analyze everything. Maybe for now it's just enough to be there. And trust me, that counts more than you think. If you have more questions about that, please follow me on social media. Please subscribe to this podcast, it would really help me a lot. And yeah, talk to you next week. Thank you so much for being here.
SPEAKER_01Hey, thank you so much for tuning in, and hopefully you will tune in again next week. It will be another episode talking to or about clients of mine, and you can find us on social media on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. The handle is always @saidintherapy. Thank you so much.