S7 Ep88 Therapy Words Translated: Counseling Isn't Magic

Therapy has developed an impressive vocabulary for some surprisingly straightforward things. Resourcing. State recognition. Emotional regulation. Distress tolerance. Generalization. Sometimes the terminology is useful. Sometimes we have simply put a tuxedo on a coping skill.

In this episode, Piper translates common therapy jargon into regular-human language and looks at what actually makes those concepts useful outside the therapy room. Because understanding why you do something is important, but insight alone does not create change.

Good therapy provides assessment, direction, tools, practice, and accountability. Then comes the part your therapist cannot do for you: taking notes, following through on between-session work, practicing skills before you desperately need them, paying attention to your patterns, and learning to use what you've learned without your therapist sitting beside you.

Counseling isn't magic. It's insight, skills, practice, and repetition. The goal isn't to become exceptionally good at therapy. It's to become increasingly capable of living your life without needing it.

#untangledmindllc #umpodcast #UntangledMindInnovations #therapyhelp

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hi, I'm Piper Harris, licensed professional counselor, and welcome to the Untangled Mind Podcast. This is a show for people who want to understand why their mind works the way it does, not just how to cope with it. Drawing from neuropsychology, neurophilosophy, and data-driven CBT, we look at how anxiety and trauma shape perception, behavior, and choice and what actually helps people change. I'm an integrative CBT therapist based in the Atlanta suburbs. Each episode is designed to teach you something concrete, how to recognize what's keeping you stuck, how to interrupt unhelpful patterns, and how to move forward with clarity and steadiness. Ah, therapy words. Therapy has developed a remarkable talent for making relatively straightforward things sound extraordinarily complicated. You may think you're learning how to notice when you're getting anxious and calm yourself down. Nope. Apparently, you're developing state recognition and resourcing for autonomic regulation. You may think you're practicing how to tolerate an uncomfortable feeling without immediately escaping it. Again, you are incorrect. You're expanding your window of tolerance through graded nervous system capacity building. Maybe you're learning to recognize an unhelpful thought and determine whether you should believe everything your brain tells you. Absolutely not. You are engaging in metacognitive restructuring of internalized cognitive narratives. And heaven forbid, I simply tell you, you need to practice this when you get home. That's far too easy. Let's call it generalization of therapeutic resourcing into an externalized environment. There you go. Now it sounds fancy. Today I want to talk to you about two things: what some of the therapy words actually mean, and what clients have to do with the information once they leave the therapy room. Because counseling isn't magic. Good psychotherapy can be sophisticated. The things that actually help you change are often remarkably basic. And basic does not mean ineffective. Well, welcome back, everyone. So before I irritate half of my profession or maybe everybody, I want to make something very clear that this is not me speaking hypocritically. I understand that uh I too have perpetuated therapy jargon. Um, and recently with some exchanges that I've had on more my professional side of things for Untingled Mind innovations. And if you don't know about that, you can check it out at untingledmind.com. But all that to be said, I've been having a lot of these conversations with um individuals in my field. And um the therapy jargon is starting to drive me nuts. And so I imagine it's extraordinarily confusing for my clients. And then they come in to a therapist like me who's pretty direct and blunt and is like, what are you saying? I don't understand the words that are coming out of your mouth. And then because my industry has really perpetuated this idea of therapy jargon. So I'm gonna try to be the therapy jargon translator while also recognizing that um I have taken part in this, so I apologize. So listen, clinical terminology actually exists for a reason. Um, we do need precise language and some theoretical models within psychotherapy that conceptualize psychological problems very differently. And so there are certain terms that have very specific meanings within those models. And I'm not arguing that clinicians should abandon their professional terminology altogether. What I'm arguing is that sometimes they want to put a tuxedo on a coping skill and act like they've discovered this like whole new branch of neuroscience. Um and again, I'm not throwing stones without recognizing or no, what's the plank in my eye? I recognize the plank in my eye. But I really do want to talk about this because these are some of the more frustrating things that I have run into as a clinician. So let's talk about some of these words. So let's talk about resourcing. Okay, so this is a new word that's being talked about all the time. So depending on the therapeutic model, this term can actually mean something very specifically. So in EMDR, for example, using resourcing within it is it's part of its framework. That it really is. That's it. Resourcing is kind of part of what she built into the EMDR protocol. But what I want to say in a much broader way is that I'm hearing people increasingly use this term. And what they're actually talking about is learning ways to regulate themselves rather than being distressed. So this is where we're talking about grounding and breathing, um, like imagery, you know, recognizing safety cues, you're using supportive relationships, you're learning, you know, what regulation strategies, strategies, excuse me, um, settle your body. So really honestly, resourcing in clear terms is coping and regulation skills. That's it. That's it. Perfectly useful. So regulation and coping skills are absolutely uh super easy, right? It's it's unnecessary, I believe, to use this word resourcing as clinicians. So if those of you are, you know, on your social media figure and going, okay, but what's resourcing? This person said this is resourcing, this person said it's resourcing. You have to be able to dig through the jargon. If they're not specifically talking about the EMDR protocol, they're putting a tuxedo on coping skills. That's all they're doing. And there's nothing wrong with calling it coping and regulation skills, but they're just not doing it. So if you have heard that one, that's a new one lately that's um been driving me bananas. The next one that I've heard so much about therapy jargon is state recognition. Now, we do have state recognition, and this can sound very impressive, like neurologically, but what does it mean for you? Well, what it means with state recognition is that you're learning to notice what's happening before you're completely overwhelmed. Okay, so state recognition could be maybe your jaw gets tight, um, maybe your chest gets tight, maybe you stop actually listening to the person talking because you started preparing your defense, um, your stomach could drop, your thoughts could speed up, um, you could suddenly want to leave. Um, you might become louder, you might become quieter, you might feel like you need to fix something immediately. Those are data points, and they recognize what it is is that you're recognizing those changes. Um, you're at state recognition, we're trying to recognize those changes at like a three out of 10 distress level. Does that make sense? So 10 is extreme distress. What we want you to recognize at state recognition is that you're noticing these things at a three so that you have more open options when you get to a nine. That's all state recognition is. So, in regular human language, it means just pay attention to yourself. And so I talk to my clients about state versus trait all the time. We talk about this, especially with our um our baseline assessments or our reassessments. And I'll say to them, hey, you know, your assessments were really we're seeing positive change, and like this month they taint. Tell me what happened, what the three days preceding this assessment took place. And wouldn't you know it's because the state, the state that they were in is actually what was reflected in the assessment, not trait. Trait meaning this is the thing that's really like the thing that we came to Piper for. So, like the depression, the trauma, that sort of thing. So we can see a state change. So state recognition is just pay attention to yourself. And so we do try to fluff up the language. State versus trait is very important, I think, for clinicians to teach clients. But can we just stop calling it state recognition? Like if you're in a session with your client, please, for the love of all things holy, don't say, let's practice state recognition. No, let's pay attention to yourself. Where do you feel this in your body? You know, scale it zero to 10. I mean, make this basic, it just gets a little um obnoxious with the terminology. All right, so the next one is emotional regulation. Listen, this is very important, but I do think that this term can get misunderstood. Regulation does not mean you're calm all the time. That is not what emotional regulation means. A well-regulated human being still gets angry, they still get anxious, they still get embarrassed, they still get overwhelmed, they still have grief, they still get irritated. The goal isn't emotional flatness. And I think this is really important when you go into therapy. The goal is not to eradicate everything that you're feeling. You can't do that. Regulation means you can experience an emotion without automatically allowing that emotion to determine what happens next. So, for example, you can be angry without exploding, you could be anxious without escaping, um, you could be embarrassed without replaying a conversation over and over again for like six hours. Um, you can feel uncertain without immediately demanding reassurance. What we learn with emotional regulation is that the emotion is information. It doesn't have to be an instruction. That's what emotional regulation is. And again, I think this gets misconstrued, especially on social media these days, because people think emotional regulation is basically stoicism or it's emotional flatness. And that's not what emotional regulation is at all. Um, I talk about this with clients and I call it holding. Um, it is just holding it. You're you're holding the emotion without being swept up with it. Another uh term that I've been seeing a lot of is distress tolerance. Now, distress tolerance is absolutely a key term. I've discussed it, but in a human regul translation, I want to say this a regular human translation, it means sometimes you're going to be uncomfortable and not immediately make it stop. That's all it means. Distress tolerance means I'm uncomfortable and I don't immediately have to make it stop. It's seriously that simple. It's not easy, I won't say that. A tremendous amount of human behavior is designed to make uncomfortable internal experiences go away. I mean, it really is. Our brain wants to escape all the time. So we might avoid it, we might check out, we might be doing a lot of reassurance seeking, we could cancel plans, we could um go into hyper control, we could overthink, we could withdraw, we could distract. But the problem is that a lot of those, those simple tools the body and the mind use are actually, they work. It's just temporarily. So what happens is you avoid the thing you're afraid of, and then your anxiety drops, right? And your brain's like, oh yes, excellent. Avoidance has saved us. But the next time anxiety appears, your brain recommends the same strategy. So in treatment, what that sometimes involves is learning that I can feel this anxiety and not immediately have to do this, doing something about it. That's distress tolerance. It's very much like emotional regulation as well. We're learning to tolerate, tolerate what's taking place internally and externally without jumping into not so great adaptive skills. All right, the next one I see is called experiential avoidance. Um, I laughed about this when I saw this one the other day because I remember growing up, my mom told me I was an experiential learner, and all she was saying is, Piper, you're contrary and you're driving me crazy. And actually, as she got older, she used to tell me I gave her all the white hairs on her head. So just hear me with this one. So I saw this one the other day and I laughed about my mom saying that to me. So experiential avoidance, which brings up naturally, brings us naturally to uh translation that means I don't want to feel that. That's all it means. Experiential avoidance means I don't want to feel that. So I'm gonna organize my behavior around making sure I don't. That's all this means. So avoidance is one of those things that makes absolutely perfect sense until you look at what it costs you over time, right? We've talked about this just a second ago. If I avoid everything that produces anxiety, I'm actually not learning how to handle the anxiety. And I learned that that anxiety is something from which I must escape. And so that distinction really matters a lot in treatment. But when someone says to you, you know, this is called experiential avoidance. And if you get like that, um, what was RCA dog, you know, he was so cute and did his little headcock. That's probably what you're doing to the therapist. All they're saying is, you don't want to feel that. That's all they're saying. They're just dressing up their language. Okay, so now this one, I will say that this one, I am absolutely um uh in trouble for this one because I am a CBT clinician and it is really well known. So it's not really dressed up, but I want to explain it. Cognitive restructuring, okay. And it does sound wonderfully technical, it really does. Um, but what it means, the translation is your brain said something, let's determine if it's true. That's cognitive restructuring. That's it. So what it is is like your thoughts are not subpoenas, you're not legally required to comply with them. Your brain generates interpretations, predictions, assumptions, and stories all day long. And some of them are very accurate, some of them are very useful, some of them are very, very distorted, and some of them are complete nonsense, and they're delivered with like this extraordinary confidence that comes into your brain. And so cognitive work, this cognitive restructuring helps you to learn the difference. So it's helpful. Our brain creates heuristics, shortcuts, those predictions and assumptions, interpretations, but it doesn't mean every thought that comes through your mind is factual. I say the same thing with like, um, feelings aren't facts. Your thoughts aren't facts all the time. They're automatic. But what we have to learn through the use of cognitive restructuring is being able to identify the ones that are accurate and true and useful and the other ones that are stored or distorted based on, you know, our our background, whether it's trauma, anxiety, whatever, is feeding this new narrative that's coming through your mind. It's it's all it is cognitive restructuring, is just let's determine if it's true or not. That's it. I know. Um, sorry, clients, when I talk to you about cognitive restructuring, that's all it is. Here's another one interoceptive awareness. And listen, this is actually, there's a lot, a lot of literature on interoception. Um, so this one, um there is actually scientific uh evidence used around what interoception is. So I do want to talk about that. Um, this all this really means is noticing internal bodily sensations. That is it. So we're trying to help you notice internal bodily sensations. So it might be like your heart's beating faster, your chest is tight, maybe you're hot and you're shaky, you're dizzy, or your stomach feels strange. This is really, really important in trauma and anxiety treatment because people can be beginning reacting not out of just external situations, but to those physical sensations of anxiety themselves. So, what I always tell clients is that your body is whispering far before your brain picks up on it. So a sensation could appear. So maybe it's heart palpitations, the brain then interprets it as dangerous. That interpretation produces more anxiety, and then more anxiety produces more sensations and off we go. So learning to notice bodily sensations accurately without immediately catastrophizing them can really um help you interrupt that cycle. So when you hear interoceptive awareness in all the therapy jargon that's out in woo-woo land, just know that it really is important for us to help you understand internal bodily sensations. Some people are acutely aware of these, and so oftentimes for myself, I work with these clients a lot because they are so acutely aware to their bodily sensations. We almost have to turn down that interoceptive awareness, whereas there's some people that have completely blocked it off. And so I'm having them do body scans. So it's really different for everyone, but that's all it means. Interoceptive awareness is just body sensations, it's what it is. All right, behavioral activation. This again is a big CBT term. There's nothing wrong with this term, but if you want the translation, it means do something. That's all it does. Just do something, preferably, uh, preferably something useful. But you know, for you to know one of the greatest lies that our brain tells us is if I'll do it when I feel motivated. Okay, first of all, there's really no such thing as motivation. Sometimes you will and sometimes you won't. So behavioral treatment often works in the opposite direction. You don't necessarily, you really shouldn't wait for motivation to create behavior, because sometimes behavior can create the motivation. So get out of bed, take a shower, walk outside, um, call a friend, clean the house, go to the gym, return something that used to matter to you, uh whatever it is, that action can precede a feeling. And so when we talk about behavioral activation or do something, what we're actually trying to encourage the brain and the nervous system is that motivation. And what's fascinating about behavioral activation is that when it takes just a modicum of effort, the brain thanks you through numerous different neurotransmitters, dopamine being one of them. And that is actually what creates additional motivation. So often I'll know clients are going through things and I might text them, like, hey, can you take a shower yet today? Um, just to try, because I know, hey, I need to get you up and moving. I need you to get you doing something because then the neurotransmitters, the have the feel-good chemicals in your brain and body actually provide more motivation. So, behavioral activation, all it means is go do something. That's it. That's it. All right, exposure. I use this one all the time as well, but I do again want to clear up the therapy jargon that's out there because it can get awfully confusing. So, exposure, it really has somehow acquired this reputation as though therapists are throwing terrified people into elevators and locking the door. And that's not competent exposure therapy. Exposure is really structured learning. So, if you spent years teaching your brain, for example, that something is dangerous by avoiding it, treatment may involve gradually and deliberately approaching what you fear while reducing the behaviors that have been maintaining that fear. So we're not necessarily teaching this the brain something new. It's not, okay, nothing bad could ever happen, but often it's okay, I can actually tolerate this. I don't need to escape this. I can experience anxiety and let it change on its own. I'm more capable, then my fear has begun to tell me. So that's what exposure is. We're exposing you to the very thing that you're avoiding or that brings about fear. Um, and exposure therapy is widely used and widely effective, but you have to understand what exposure is. Going in and talking about your week and your bad feelings about your neighbor or your friends and the gossip and all of that, that is not exposure therapy. And if your therapist says that's exposure therapy, then they don't know what they're talking about. Exposure therapy truly is something that is um thought about, it's part of the treatment goals, and it's something that um I believe clinicians should absolutely be taking data on to ensure that it's um an effective approach. And listen, there's a lot of different ways to target exposure, and I don't think willy-nilly approach talking about a bad day as exposure. It's not, and I see a lot of people using that in my world. Okay, and finally, um generalization. So um, this may be the most important term in this entire episode because what generalization means is can you do it without me sitting next to you? That's literally what it means. There's this really cool thing when I do exposure therapy that the brain generalizes, and what that means is it generalizes to the entire negative network. So your brain creates negative networks and they're very, very um rigid, and it's like a giant plate of spaghetti, and they won't on you can't figure out which noodle is there. When we do trauma therapy, we identify an exposure focus. We identify a target. When we open it up and we expose you to that target, we see you desensitized to that um feared thing. So desensitized means you're not as um triggered. There's another therapy word, right? Um, you're not going to have the escalation in, you know, maybe your anxiety or a sick stomach or something like that. And so the brain will generalize to other experiences. In general, though, when you hear somebody in the therapy world use the word generalization, what they're saying is, can you actually do this with me without me sitting next to you? That's what generalization is. And that's where um therapy really does become real. That's where they become. That becomes real. The other one that I do want to nitpick on before I move on is lived experience. Can we please stop saying this? And believe me, it came out of my mouth, I don't know, three weeks ago to client and I stopped and I said, What the hell did I just say? And they kind of looked at me like, What's wrong with Piper? Because I really did kind of have a um my filter stopped working and I just kind of like yelled at myself about it. And I told them this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. There's no such thing as lived experience. Every experience is lived. So why do we have to say lived and experience? It's nonsensical. Stop saying it. It doesn't make you sound smarter, it makes you sound dumb. And then I fall into it and I say it. So please stop saying lived experience. Um, so here's the other part that I really wanted to touch on today. So not only are we talking about, you know, therapy words that need to be translated, but I also want to talk about that counseling isn't magic. Um, your therapist cannot practice for you. And this is a big one that comes up over and over again in my practice, and I'm sure in other therapists' practice too. Um, and I really do think that clients deserve to hear this clearly. Your therapist has a job and you have a job. A competent therapist should understand what they're treating. 100%, y'all know if you listen to me for any amount of time that we should have that at like the basic level. They should be able to formulate what is maintaining your problem. They should have a reason for the interventions they're using. And if all they do is talk to you every week or listen to you, that is not an intervention. I promise that's not an intervention. Holding space, that's another therapy term. Holding space is I think a way for a therapist to offset their responsibility to actually having a reason behind interventions. Holding space just means I'm giving you a safe office to sit in. Well, no kidding. I'm not putting you in an office. It's a torture chamber, right? You know, like what else would the therapeutic office be? I'm not holding space. That's not an intervention. They should be teaching, they should be challenging you, they should help you recognize patterns that you haven't been able to see. They should monitor whether treatment is working. And if it's not working, they should be willing to change course and admit, this is not working. I don't know what I'm doing. But there is one thing your therapist cannot do. They cannot practice this for you. So if I see someone for one hour during a week, they're another 167 hours when I'm not there. I it's just true. So I'm not there on Tuesday after your anxiety pops up. I'm not sitting in the passenger seat when your heart starts pounding. I'm not standing in your kitchen when someone in your family violates a boundary. Um, you know, when we spent three sessions discussing it. And I'm certainly not standing hiding in the corner, ready to jump out and say, use your coping skills. You know, at some point, the work has to leave the therapy room. It has to leave the therapy room. And if I'm I'm honest, I do understand that it takes reps. But when I have people come to me and say, Well, I'm not better. And when I say, Have you worked on the workbook? Have you been practicing skills? And they say, Well, I didn't have time. Well, but that's not that's not about me. That's about you. This is about your need to practice. So here are five things that clients can do to actually make therapy way more useful. Number one, we just did the therapy jargon that should help. But this is another five things that I think you can do to really make therapy substantially more useful for you. Number one, take notes, please. You take the notes, bring a notebook, use your phone, use whatever system you're actually going to look at again. If your therapist says something and you think, gosh, that explains so much, I should write that down. Then write it down. Um, if you learn a strategy that you're supposed to try this week, write it down. If you realize something important about a pattern that you've been repeating for you know 15 years, perhaps don't rely exclusively on your ability to remember it after you leave the office and stop at Publix for your family's meal. Like you need to take an active, active part in your treatment. I have had clients say to me, Well, you'll send this to me, right? And sometimes I say, Okay, yeah, because it might be like a podcast link or something like that. But when it comes to these strategies, I'm like, no, you need to write this down. Because here again, what happens is that if I say, Oh, sure, I'll make sure to type up all of these notes for you, what am I actually teaching you? I'm actually not teaching you anything, I'm just giving you something. Remember what I talked about the brain? If you don't do behavioral activation, you're not teaching the brain anything different. So by me just doing everything for you, I'm not teaching the brain anything. I'm not teaching you new skills. I'm babysitting. So your therapist, like me, they might provide you handouts or worksheets or summaries or you know, other materials. And I think that's great. But your therapist's responsibility um to create like a personal personalized transcript of your therapy so you can remain a passive participant is not their job. It's not their job. Taking notes also forces you to identify what mattered. Like, I want to remember that. I need to practice that. That connected something to me or for me. Hyper doesn't know all of that. I've had people say, like, I had a session the other day, and um, she's like, gosh dang it, I wish we would have recorded this. And it's like, listen, you have to, when you come to therapy, you should actively be taking notes, actively asking questions. If that's not allowed in that space, then what are you learning? If you're only using the space for emotional expression, okay, if that's how you want to spend your money, but you're actually not learning anything, all you're doing is rehearsing the emotional landscape that is has been keeping you stuck in the first place. So you really have to be part of taking ownership of the treatment. You have to. And so when you get mad at me and I say, Well, you know, I understand that you had a hard week. Have you been practicing the skills? Well, but I want you to go over it in session. Uh-huh. But have you been practicing those skills? I can't take ownership over all of the treatment. It doesn't work that way. Number two, do the homework. I know, homework. Um, and apparently adults hate the word just as much as my children do. So we can call it, you know, between session integration of therapeutic competencies, but it's still homework. And if your therapist asks you to practice like a breathing exercise or track a thought, notice avoidance patterns, um, maybe complete some exposure work, journal about an issue. Maybe it's practicing boundaries like some effective communication skills. Um, there is clinical reason for that assignment. It should, there should be, and you need to do it because here's something really important. It doesn't have to work. Sometimes the most thing hope useful thing you can bring back to therapy is I tried exactly what we discussed, and here's what's happened what happened. So homework doesn't necessarily have to have this like huge change in your experience. And did you hear that stammer? I almost said a lived experience. Um, but that it's not about what do I get out of this? Sometimes it's about this is what didn't happen. Now we actually have information to move on. So maybe the intervention needs to change. Maybe we actually misunderstood the trigger. Maybe there's a totally different variable involved and we didn't recognize it. Maybe you use the skill correct correctly and it simply isn't even useful for you. That's treatment data, and that's what gives us information. And so, um, for example, when I have my my clients practice different regulation skills, whether it's box breathing or um like the really big breaths in and out, or it's tapping, or it's cold exposure, whatever it is, I tell all of them, not all of these are gonna work for you. You have to find the ones that work for you. Um, what gives us very, very, very, very little information is when you said, I didn't do it, week after week after week. So at some point, therapy cannot compensate for the absence of your participation. It cannot. So when you get frustrated at your therapist because it's not working, you need to really um honestly assess yourself, are you actively participating? Because if you're not, that's not on the therapist. We can't take ownership of your part of treatment. We just can't. Okay, so number three, practice before you need it. This is huge. People um sometimes learn a regulation strategy and then they save it for um an emergency, which is great. That's what we need to do. That's um, but what I want to say is that, well, what I want to say is you need to learn regulation because you need to learn regulation. If you're only doing it because you're in an emergent situation, that's a problem. That's like saying, I'm gonna take one swimming lesson and decide that um I'm going to go into the next session and then after falling off a boat, I'm gonna practice when to swim, when to breathe, when to manage myself. Do you see what I mean? If you go to um home with one regulation exercise um uh homework, excuse me, you practice it one, maybe two times. That's literally like saying, I'm gonna learn how to swim and then I'm gonna fall out of a boat and see how I do. That's not gonna work. What I need you to do, but you have to practice this before you need this over and over and over and over. You practice when you're relatively calm, you practice when you're mildly irritated, you practice when your anxiety is like a three-level, you notice what your body feels like, you notice what changes, and you figure out what skills work for you. The purpose is repetition. It's not a singular, I tried it, it didn't work. I hear that all the time. I tried it, it didn't work. Okay, nothing works right away. This is no different than going to the gym and working on your body, trying to lose weight, um, you know, be able to lift heavier weight. This is no different than um going to the dentist and being told you have gum disease and you need to start flossing every day so that we don't have to scrape around in there. It's no different. We have to practice repetition for us to gain the very thing that we're we're looking for, right? So practice is what turns information into ability. That's the thing. Practice is what turns information into ability. Um, number four, I want you to pay attention between sessions. Um, your life is generating tons of clinical information all week long. So use it. Ask yourself like what happened, what triggered me? Um, what thought showed up? What did my body do? Um, what did I do next? Did I avoid something? Did I seek reassurance? Did I shut down? Did I use a skill? Did something else work? Um, did something um make everything else worse? Like even a person? Um, did you react differently than you normally would? All of these observations are incredibly useful in therapy. I love when my clients come in, they pop open their phone, they said, I wrote these things down. Like this is awesome. This is data, this is what we need. So those observations are so, so useful in therapy. So, like, for example, compare these two statements. My week was okay, versus someone opening their phone and saying, Oh, I noticed these three things this week when I felt criticized. Like my fat my chest got tight, and I immediately started overexplaining myself, and then I couldn't sleep that night. I mean, listen to those two statements. The second is something we can work with. You don't need to psychoanalyze yourself all week long. You just need to become curious about your own patterns and patterns and bring it in because the therapist's job is the one that can stand there as an objective uh observer and say, okay, this is interesting. I noticed this. We're in, you know, session eight. And I remember you bringing this up in session two. There looks like there's a theme here that we need to really notice and pay attention to. And then that could even lead into different interventions. That's why it's so important for you to pay attention. You don't go to therapy just to sit on a couch and cry for an hour. It's not affecting your life as a whole. We need you to bring that data to session so we can help you navigate your life generally. All right, number five, and this is so very important, and I've been talking about this. I talked about it last week. You have got to expect your um your need. Sorry, my words are coming out too fast. My mind's going too fast. My younger son does this, his mind goes really fast and he speaks too fast. I have no idea what he's saying, and mine just did it. Because I know where he got it from. Expect to need your therapist less. Less. Number five, expect to need your therapist less. So I think um we need to say this way much more clearly in the psychotherapy world. The goal of therapy should not be to make you exceptionally good at attending therapy. It just shouldn't. The goal should be increasing your ability to function outside of it. Um, and I know this is a hard one because I tend to be pretty deliberate with my clients with this. I had one last week and there just wasn't um there wasn't a dialogue happening, homework hadn't taken place, and I understood why those things didn't happen. But if if the goal of therapy is to help you do better in life, right? And manage anxieties and and whatever that is, then the goal should to be not to see me. And if you don't have the data and the practice skills, then you shouldn't see me. Does that make sense? And maybe some therapists are okay with that. I'm not. I I value your hard-earned money. And so when I sit there, I'm like, okay, I I I don't know where where to go with this because there's no data to go with it to. I just I personally don't like doing that. Um, but anyway, the goal of therapy is not to be really good at therapy. The the goal should be to increase your ability to funk function outside of therapy. That's that's the whole goal. And eventually you should recognize it. And your therapist may, you know, initially remind you which skill could help, but eventually you're just gonna choose it on your own. And your therapist may actually, you know, challenge thoughts, then eventually you hear yourself challenging it yourself. Your therapist might even help you tolerate an emotion without reacting. And eventually what's gonna happen is well, we hope that'll happen is I don't actually have to do anything about this feeling. That that's all progress. So needing less and less assistance from your therapist doesn't mean the relationship wasn't important. And I want you to hear that. Just because you're gaining skills and doing well doesn't mean that we care about you less, doesn't mean that we don't care about our relationship with you, but it does mean that you've progressed and that you need to start um practicing these tools and skills without us. And it may mean that the relationship has accomplished exactly what it was to accomplish. And I know it's hard to say goodbye to your therapist. Hell, it is hard for us therapists to say goodbye to our clients, but we have to start recognizing that when you're able to challenge your own thoughts, when you're able to manage feelings, remember we're not trying to flat flatten feelings, but we can hold their feelings. Um, you're able to function daily. Gosh, you've done really good work. And it might be time to say goodbye. So, what I want to finally kind of finish up too with is that insight is not the finish line. And this is one real big distinction I want to make because I think um modern therapy today really gets stuck here. Understanding yourself is not the same as changing. Understanding yourself is not the same as changing. Insight absolutely matters 100%. It can be enormously powerful to finally understand why you react the way you do. But you understand, you know, you might be you even learn to understand attachment patterns. That's great. And you understand exactly why your anxiety um where it originated and why you continue to avoid things. Maybe you can identify triggers, name your nervous system state, recognize your cognitive distortions, understand your childhood. I mean, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can acquire enough therapy terminology to start your own Instagram account. Believe me, I have these people and I have to talk to them about this. And the problem is that they're still not changing. They've accepted all this terminology, but they're not changing. And eventually you have to understand knowing has to become doing. Insight should inform action, skills should become behavior, and practice should create competence. And therapy, it really should increasingly become something you can carry with you rather than somewhere you have to return to indefinitely to access it. That is not that's not therapy. That that is absolutely not therapy. Insight is not enough. Knowing has got to become doing, it has to become doing. So remember that insight should inform action. Then the skills, that action becomes a behavior, an adaptive, healthy behavior. And you practice that behavior because then that creates competence. And in doing so, you need the therapist less and less and less. You should not need indefinite access to your therapist. We know it's hard, it's hard for us too, but it's better for you to go practice these things. So there you have it. Good psychotherapy can be really sophisticated and it involves assessment and formulation and clinical judgment, treatment planning, intervention monitoring, and adjustment. But those mechanisms through which people change are often less glamorous, right? Way less glamorous. We don't need all the jargon. We need a notice, we need a practice, we need an approach instead of a void, we need to question the thought, we need to tolerate the feeling, we need to change the behavior, rinse and repeat. Notice, practice, approach, question, tolerate, change, repeat. Your therapist, what their job is to do is provide expertise, maybe some structure. Well, definitely some structure, I think, some tools, perspective, and accountability. You must provide participation. Neither side can substitute for the other. Counseling is not magic. It's insight plus skills plus practice. And eventually those skills have to work on a random Wednesday when your therapist is nowhere around. We, you know, if we go back to the whole crux of this talk, we could call that progressive autonomous integration of therapeutic competencies across externalized environmental concept contexts. But what I would rather I stick with is you're getting better. Have a great one. That brings us to the end of this episode. Thanks for joining me. I hope you learned some tools that can equip you to untangle your mind and untangle your life. If you're curious about working with me for your anxiety or trauma, head on over to my website at untangledmind.net to connect with me. If you enjoyed the show, please rate and review me on your podcast listening platform and share it with your friends and family. As always, thanks so much for listening to me, Piper Harris with the Untangled Mind Podcast. I'll talk with you next time.