Katie's Story: How Therapy Changed Her Life

<cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>0:06</time> <p>Welcome to 90834, the weekly podcast that asks just two questions Why did you originally go to therapy and what did you discover once you were there? I&#39;m Shannon Miller, a licensed clinical social worker currently in private practice, who has the privilege of sitting across from people every day as they make their therapeutic discoveries, and now I share them with you. This week, i have the pleasure of welcoming Katie. Katie is an American woman living in Europe in her mid-30s, and her therapeutic process was spread out over about two and a half years. Katie began therapy because she wanted to better understand how she could manage other people&#39;s emotions without being exhausted and overwhelmed, particularly in the workplace. By the end of therapy, katie is getting divorced and is in a new relationship. Welcome, katie. Why did you go to therapy? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>1:00</time> <p>So originally I started with kind of a hard time managing certain emotions. I&#39;m an English teacher and I spend a lot of time talking to people and listening to their life stories and I teach primarily through conversations. So from my perspective I was feeling like, okay, i&#39;m essentially feeling like a therapist, i am doing a therapist&#39;s work, but not qualified. But I&#39;m thinking I&#39;m having a hard time dealing with other people&#39;s emotions and at the end of the day, feeling exhausted and overwhelmed with everything that I had heard throughout the day, not knowing how to decompartmentalize things. So I decided to reach out to you for therapy and the main thing was okay, i&#39;m thinking therapist to therapist, i can get some tips, but also I&#39;ll kind of sneak in there that I&#39;m also an expat and I also have no independence and I&#39;m also having a little hard time with that. But ultimately the focus was not on me, it was on the outside world. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>1:59</time> <p>The process. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>2:01</time> <p>So I specifically remember, like as we had our first meeting, you were asking me okay, what do you do? And I was explaining the life of an English teacher and doing this kind of like cheap therapy work sometimes, and when I started to explain the kind of conversations that I was having and then also my reaction to these conversations, you very like no bullshit asked me why does that bother you so much? And I remember thinking like I don&#39;t know why it bothers me that much. That&#39;s strange. Maybe it shouldn&#39;t bother me that much. Maybe you&#39;re right. Like from an outside perspective, these are not major things that are bothering other people when they hear these stories. but why is it bothering me so much? </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>2:51</time> <p>So he&#39;s right. From the onset of the very first session that question kind of started everything. It was one question. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>2:59</time> <p>Yeah, okay. And then as soon as you asked that question, then I started to kind of go introspective And then I was thinking, okay, it seems like there&#39;s a lot of emotions in myself that maybe I don&#39;t know how to name, i don&#39;t know what to do with. As we got to talking, more and more, some more things started to come up And I remember having a really hard time with anger, and anger was something that it was so intense it was almost scaring myself And I just remember thinking like I don&#39;t know why I&#39;m so angry. And again, another blatant question that you asked that was actually wasn&#39;t a question You just mentioned like I remember telling you this story. I don&#39;t remember exactly what the story was, but at the end of it you just told me that anger is a mask for sadness and for grief. And that was also something that really kind of got punched me because it wasn&#39;t something I was even thinking about, it wasn&#39;t something I was identifying with, it wasn&#39;t anything that was even on my radar like that I could possibly be sad in my current situation. And I remember going that day to the park and being super angry still, but sitting there by myself alone in the park and thinking like I&#39;m so angry, but why am I so angry? And then it turned into but why am I so sad? I know, my god, i&#39;m really sad and oh my god, this is some sort of grief and sadness I&#39;ve never felt before and I didn&#39;t know what&#39;s to do with it. but it was heartbreaking for me because I started to kind of see where my life was. and You know, one of the biggest things is as an expat. You live a life of loneliness, like the first couple of years is so exciting, it&#39;s so fresh and it&#39;s so new. and You have all these bragging rights to your friends and your family that like, look at me, how, how well I&#39;m doing, i&#39;m blending into this new society. You think you are, but you&#39;re not. you&#39;re always a foreigner and That&#39;s. you know that, that little dopamine kick that you get from telling your family Oh, i&#39;m learning the language. well, you&#39;re learning it, but it&#39;s not yours. and and it just goes deeper and deeper and You start to lose this identity about yourself and that&#39;s where I found myself about three years into. living abroad was a loss, a big last loss of identity, and There&#39;s a lot of grief that comes with that. So that&#39;s kind of where it started. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>5:34</time> <p>So did the sadness come just from being a lonely expat that&#39;s not fully integrating into the local culture. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>5:42</time> <p>No, it was definitely like that was one of the, the many things I think it was. I think there was like the, the new and the old hurts, that kind of surfaced It was. And we started with the old hurts. I think that those were a little bit easier to explore because they hadn&#39;t been touched for a while. So it was easy to kind of take a look and Peel back a couple of the layers, like, okay, it doesn&#39;t feel great but it&#39;s manageable. But then when we started to get to the new hurts, with the I think especially At the time my marriage, i think that was that was a hard hurt to have to explore as well. The loneliness I felt Living abroad was one thing, but then when I paired it to also the loneliness that I felt in my relationship, that was a lot harder to accept and that was a lot harder to manage and deal with okay, what about the connection between the old and the new? </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>6:42</time> <p>lonely, because there&#39;s a compounding effect there. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>6:48</time> <p>Having the, the old lonely and the new lonely kind of be interwoven, it&#39;s. it was difficult because there was a lot of pieces of myself I felt like fragmented. I&#39;ve lived a lot of different lives and I felt like none of them really had any interconnection And they didn&#39;t flow into the next. so I had pieces of myself at different stages. Hmm, and it is this a hard question, i would say the pieces of myself that experienced the new lonely had the reaction of a really young person I would say, and that was the old lonely that was speaking. So it was, you know, was quite difficult. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>7:48</time> <p>So, as you&#39;re unpeeling all of this stuff and realizing the connection between the old lonely and the new lonely, what started happening to your relationships in present day, or present day when you&#39;re in therapy? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>8:01</time> <p>I think that was probably the one of the most positive things that I have gone through when it comes to my therapy process was the impact that it had on my personal relationships. I would say, like going into therapy, probably like everybody, there were some things about my family, or my parents especially, that I struggled with And it was an opportunity for real dialogues to happen and some real healing to happen. And I think that probably one of the greatest gifts that therapy gave me was to repair this relationship I have with my dad. You know my dad worked a lot, so there was, i think, this also lonely piece where he was gone a lot and he traveled and I didn&#39;t get to spend as much time with him during childhood as I would have liked to And the bond was not as strong as I wished it had been. And I remember having a conversation with you one time and you had said that I needed to grieve the dad that I wished I had and accept the one. Choose whether one I wanted to or not, to accept the one that I have. And I did and I didn&#39;t really accept, but I just kind of was like, okay, i accept where I&#39;m at in my life, i accept the situation that I have. I don&#39;t know what kind of relationship I&#39;ll have at the end of this therapy session or in my progress, my healing process, but I think the greatest gift was that therapy allowed me to have the dialogue that I needed to have with him in order to repair a lot of these bridges that I had set on fire, that I had said full stop no to, and I think my dad was. I&#39;m grateful because my dad was the kind of person who met me down in the hardest parts of my therapy And I had a lot of hard conversations with him. And when I was a kid I don&#39;t know if you remember this, but when I was a kid I had this, this hedgehog that I used to send with him on vacations or not vacations, but on his, his business trips, and Mr Prickles would go on all these different trips with him and my dad would always take pictures of Mr Prickles And it was kind of our way to try to reconnect in in a roundabout way when he would come back home And when I was in therapy one of the parts that I was thinking of. Ok, you know how do I connect myself now to this younger version of me And I felt like I needed something tangible And because when I moved to Poland also I don&#39;t have anything, i didn&#39;t bring anything with me. No, you know mementos from childhood. I basically came here just with a backpack And that was it. And so I had nothing that really kind of connected me to my previous life and especially to my childhood. And I was talking to my dad one day and I said, you know, i&#39;m thinking about here&#39;s, i&#39;m trying to connect these pieces, and you know, at this point he&#39;s a very good listener, So he was listening to it and asking me a few questions, but just mostly listening to me as I spoke. And At some point, like a couple of weeks went by and I had asked him like do you remember what happened to Mr Prickles and do you know where he went? And he&#39;s like no, because after the divorce of my parents, like things kind of shifted and a lot of stuff went missing just through moves and whatnot. And then a couple of weeks after that he sent me a photo that he had found a Mr Prickles. And at this point I had also found Mr Prickles thanks to the internet. So we both had our own version of Mr Prickles And my dad. That&#39;s when my dad sent me this letter that he wrote the story about Mr Prickles And it was probably one of the most beautiful things that I&#39;ve read, because it was so in his own way of really demonstrating using Mr Prickles as this kind of metaphor for me and the relationship that we had and how, when Mr Prickles went missing for many years, he was so distraught And when he finally got to see Mr Prickles again and to reconnect with Mr Prickles, how, what a wonderful feeling that was to him. I remember I read it to you, i was crying, you were crying And then at some point at the end you just said that&#39;s a love letter from your dad, and that was the aha moment for me. Okay, so when you told me that in therapy, i remember we had a conversation again previously as well, which was when you start therapy slowly, you&#39;ll notice a shift in your relationships And you&#39;ll notice all these things around you changing And you&#39;ll notice the people around you either accept the change and they start doing their own transformations, or they don&#39;t and they just disappear, or they move on. And I really appreciate having gone through therapy to be able to heal a lot of these pieces with, i think, both my parents especially and to be able to open up dialogue, to be able to accept them as they are, to understand them as adult humans that also had childhoods, and it just kind of it shifted my perspective on how I look at everybody now that I think I&#39;m much more accepting and I don&#39;t have such high expectations. Like a lot of people go into life and especially adulthood, we expect people behave a certain way and to act a certain way And if you don&#39;t unlearn that, then you live a very disappointed life. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>14:05</time> <p>So you went into therapy because there were big emotions coming up and you couldn&#39;t figure out why. Right, what did you come out of therapy realizing? So you went in thinking I&#39;m going to deal with my big emotions. But when the process concluded, what was actually the process for you? What did you actually learn about those big emotions? Or did we not even talk about big emotions? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>14:32</time> <p>We did, we talked a lot of it. A big, we talked a little bit. We talked a lot about big emotions And I think that the thing that I take away from it was that I&#39;m not them, that I can have them, that they exist, but it doesn&#39;t mean that it&#39;s me. And that was, i think, freeing, because it allowed me to go through this process of grieving, for example, and not get stuck in grief. It allowed me to go through the process of anger and not get stuck in anger. Like I am who I am, i&#39;m human and I have emotions, i think to allow them to flow freely, i think therapy gave me a new insight about myself and other people. That allowed me to take responsibility for my own thoughts, feelings and emotions, but not label myself as these thoughts, feelings and emotions. I guess it maybe more or less like humanized me into also stepping out of this viewpoint of having to be perfect all the time and to live in hyper-perfection and to understand that that&#39;s an unexpected reality, that I can&#39;t. I will always be disappointed in myself if I hold myself up to that standard all the time. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>15:53</time> <p>So if you were to compare where you&#39;re at today versus where you were at the start of the process, what have been some of the biggest practical or changes that we would see, like the changes that you&#39;ve experienced that have the biggest impact on you? </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>16:09</time> <p>There&#39;s been so many. Oh, my life is so different than when I started therapy. Can you tell us? </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>16:17</time> <p>about some of those differences. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>16:19</time> <p>Yeah. So number one, i think, like self-confidence. When I first started therapy, i was a shell of my former self. Because of living abroad, because of the situation I was living in living abroad, i was completely isolated. I was very insecure. I went from being extremely independent to extremely dependent and I hated that about myself. So I completely lost my identity and this strong woman that I thought I was no longer existed. So I would say that after therapy, for sure, my self-confidence has increased substantially. I&#39;ve found myself again. I think Some of the other changes. I got divorced. I think that was a big change as well And I think the best part of that is that this has been an enjoyable transition process. I think for both of us that, okay, obviously divorce is messy and obviously it&#39;s hard. There are lots of big emotions with that as well. But because of my therapy and you know he was part of the process as well he saw a lot of it happening. He saw this change too. We were able to end things on such a friendly, good note where we both took a step back and said it&#39;s not me, it&#39;s not you, it&#39;s just we&#39;re not dating it together, like, and that&#39;s okay, and to be able to shake hands at the end of it and to say thank you so much for your time And, instead of caring, i don&#39;t have any anger or hate or hurt, or there&#39;s none of these hard, heavy emotions that I&#39;m hanging onto, and that&#39;s very freeing. I think without therapy, i wouldn&#39;t have known how to navigate these processes and these huge emotions and these big life changes and come out of it stronger than when I went into it. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>18:21</time> <p>So it sounds like at the start of therapy, you recognize that you had these big and overwhelming feelings, but that&#39;s about it. And then, through the process, you learned where they originated. Are they connected to the past, to the present, And what do I want to do with that? Operating more from a place of intention around the feelings. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>18:42</time> <p>Yeah, and I think because there was a lot of stuff from the past that I had unresolved. There was a lot of stuff from the present and there were a lot of worries of for the future. What does all this mean? Where are all these very hot, heated emotions and past experiences? Where is that going to take me? I don&#39;t know And that scared me. I think that, again, when you are in a pressure cooker, small things can trigger things that you didn&#39;t even know existed. And if you don&#39;t have the help to kind of figure out where that&#39;s coming from, it just feels like a bunch of different arrows and daggers are coming at you and you don&#39;t know how to even see pass through that, to see where is the root, where is the source. And I think therapy is very important for that, to be able to kind of help guide you to the source. And then it&#39;s your decision What are you going to do with the source? Do you want to leave it there Or do you want to deal with it? And for me, i love rooting up gardens, so I&#39;m all about pulling out roots like let&#39;s go, you are messy and yeah, it sucks and it hurts, but I don&#39;t want this here. It&#39;s cancerous. I don&#39;t want to keep this. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>20:00</time> <p>It sounds to me like your therapeutic process. it was worth it for you 100%. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>20:06</time> <p>It was the honestly. when I started therapy, i did not have the money to start therapy. I put it on a credit card. It was the best investment I have made in myself And that was because I did something for me. And it&#39;s not something that&#39;s tangible, necessarily, but it was something that has so heavily impacted my life To be able to have peace in myself, to be able to regulate myself only by myself. You know, i&#39;m very proud of myself. I&#39;m very proud of the process that I&#39;ve gone through. When I think about the things like, for example, having to go through a divorce, well, you&#39;re living in another country, you have no family around you, you don&#39;t have a lot of friends around you to do all of that alone. And I did it successfully. And not only that, but I&#39;m thriving, like in each aspect of my life. I&#39;m thriving because I feel like I was helped to give a map of myself, of how I operate. Where are the places that I need to kind of keep an eye out for, what are some things that I know that if it comes my way, i need to do something to kind of counteract what is coming my way. And how do I do that? And therapy taught me how to really go through a lot of these different stages of okay. I see a boulder is coming towards me And instead of just allowing it to plow over me and then blaming the boulder, i can redirect the path. The boulder can go by smoothly and I&#39;m unaffected. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>21:44</time> <p>So if I could sum it all up, it sounds like with therapy, what you really bought was your freedom. </p> <cite>Speaker 2:</cite> <time>21:50</time> <p>Yeah, yeah, When I take a look back at whether you know this was a good investment and buying my freedom And the person I was when I first started therapy, there&#39;s a huge shift And I think one of the things I didn&#39;t realize also was all of these big, hot, heavy emotions came within the relationship that I was in as well, And this was kind of the compounding factor of the relationship and of me not really being able to process the emotions that I needed to process because I just didn&#39;t have space for it. I think therapy also pushed me to take a look more internally into the dynamics that I was living in And I think also it allowed me to take all of these pieces of myself and build them together to be the best human that I can possibly be now and to be proud of the person that I&#39;ve become and to be proud of the work that I&#39;ve put into being the person that I&#39;ve become. I think at the end of the day, when you can go to bed at night and you think like I&#39;m fully settled in who I am, it&#39;s such a good and peaceful feeling And the piece. I think that when you do the work, the piece that you get as a reward is priceless. </p> <cite>Speaker 1:</cite> <time>23:18</time> <p>So it sounds like therapy allowed you to align to who you authentically are. Yeah, i love when therapy leads us to who we were supposed to be all along. Thank you, katie, for sharing your story with me and our listeners And to my listeners. If you would like to share your therapeutic discoveries here on the podcast, you can email me at Shannon at 90834podcastcom. Stay tuned for a shameless plug for my own private practice. Wherever you go, there you are. That confused me when I was younger, but now I get it. You take your problems with you wherever you go And, as many of you might already know, a new location doesn&#39;t make things like depression and anxiety go away. If you&#39;re an expat that&#39;s ready to set down your emotional load and unpack what&#39;s going on, opricity Expat Therapy is here for you. Our therapists offer a compassionate healing space for you to explore, grow to understand and heal emotional wounds. Connect with us today to schedule your free initial consultation. </p>