Substance, not Psychobabble with Vanessa Londino, LPC

The global state of mental health is in decline as more people than ever before report living with chronic mental distress, more people are on psychotropic medications, and more are dying by suicide, not less. Effective therapists are in high demand, yet graduate programs are churning out new therapists who are trained to diagnose and treat the diagnosis rather than the human being. The model and approach clearly aren't working, but the train keeps barreling down the tracks. What are new therapists being taught? This week, I sit down with Hannah and Kate, two women who are in the process of becoming therapists. One in grad school, one just out, they share their reasons for entering the field and what, they are learning, it's going to take to be effective. I'll confess: their compassion and intuition gave me hope that the human being is still the most essential requirement, not the degree.

In this episode, we take a deep dive into what makes dysfunctional families dysfunctional and when it's time to cut things off. We examine the responsibilities of parents and the rights of children and what happens in role reversals, when children become responsible for the emotional wellbeing of their parents. Not all family situations require a full cut off, but are families wholly unaccountable because of their status as "family"? You decide.

When someone says, "I don't really get angry," this should be a red flag. Anger is a vital, functional human emotion, but it is vastly and consistently misunderstood. This week, we take a deep dive into the healthy purpose of anger and an even deeper dive into the dysfunctional expressions of anger: the explosive type and the suppressed type. So whether you can get aggressive or passive aggressive, this episode is for you!

Have you ever said, "I'm okay" when what you were really saying was "I'm not even close to okay"? This week, we pull back the layers of denial, fear, and shame that keep us from getting the help we desperately need. Then we look at the growth process... what does it really mean to be okay? And can we ever get okay with that?

Most of the time, when people say they want to work on communication, they mean they want to improve on how they express themselves. This is worthwhile work! But the other side of communication, the "silent partner," is how we listen. Today we dive into the relational dynamics and some light neurobiology on the practice and skill of listening. This has the power to change our relationships and our lives. And the good news is: it's totally within our control.

You're doing your work. You're coming out of denial. You're starting to see your patterns and coping mechanisms. AND... you're starting to realize your family of origin ain't changing all that much. What to do? This week we tackle the delicate and confusing moments that arise when we're trying to do things differently, but at home it's the same old song and dance. Never fear! There are many pathways forward.

This week I explain the devastating loss Jared and I just endured and some of the lessons learned from pain. We seek joy in our lives, understandably, and we avoid pain. What we are actually avoiding is a cave of tears and treasure. Learning how to grieve, receive, process pain, and be gentle with ourselves is part of coming back into emotional balance in the wake of hardship.

I posted this question on my Instagram story - "What's the worst advice you've ever received?" - and it sparked some serious feedback from y'all, so I decided to pick the best of the worst advice you sent me and talk about why the advice was so bad. Advice - both seeking it and requesting it - comes down to our relationship with authority, so this week we dive into Dr. Diana Baumrind's three styles of parental authority and how that shapes our relationship with authority figures in general. We go one step further and take a look at the interpersonal dynamics of power, and what kind of power we allow others to have over us.

In the annals of bad advice, this might be up there with the worst of the worst. Like telling an emotionally dysregulated person to "calm down," the words "get over it" have been said millions of times. You have to wonder... how many times have they worked? I'd bank on zero. If something is signficant enough to cause long term emotional distress, chances are it's not something we can just "get over." This week we unpack this bad advice - what it really means and, more importantly, how to actually process our wounded places. Instead of expecting us to propel our hearts OVER a wound, let's talking about getting THROUGH it. (Please bear with my frog voice! I'm still getting over laryngitis!)

Communication forms the basis for connection. The more skilled we are as communicators, the better our chances are at forming meaningful, lasting, and deepening connections. This week, we take a look at one major reason why communication breaks down: we don't know the difference between our thoughts and our feelings. Confusing these two important flows of information confounds our communication and makes emotional connection almost impossible. While we journey toward mental and emotional strength, we need to grasp this all-important concept and decide, starting now, we're going to be more precise and accurate as we communicate the contents of our inner world.

This week it's more personal. Rather than a deep dive into theory or the latest waste of time in the world of pop-psychology, I share an intimate lesson I've learned in the past year or so that solidified in my mind during a recent session. So many of us acclimated to harsh life conditions and we live our lives as if we're still fighting those battles. This week I introduce a different way of living. Away from our engrained trauma responses and survival skill sets and into a more peaceful, trusting, connected way of life. This is one I'm learning with you in real time.

This week, we take a deep look at the choice each and every one of us has if we want to grow more mentally and emotionally healthy: whether or not we choose to LEARN. We may want quick steps, a fast track toward feeling better, but I believe it's safe to say that anyone who's selling you quick and easy is making a buck off of your pain. The reality is: it takes a lifetime to become who we are. It takes a commitment to living and LEARNING to reach our potential as human beings and transcend the things that have weighed us down. There are no short cuts. This week, we face what it really takes.

It's not a subject we touch on frequently, but it's one we need to look at: the deep and lasting imprint of our family of origin, namely our parents. We lovingly and protectively resist attacking or blaming our parents for weaknesses and wounds, but in the effort to keep our family narrative unsullied, we fail to process our own experiences - good and bad - and our healing falters. This week, we address the very real and lasting impact and responsibility parents have with their children and why we need to keep talking about it.

We're living in a society where we are enticed, tempted, and invited to sink into a subtle narcissism and take on a victim mindset, every single day. This is what the new mental health system is peddling: the notion that your situation is out of your control, your LIFE is out of your control, and the only way forward is to see yourself as a victim, passively accept help, or narcissistically see your pain as some kind of exceptional anomaly. The reality is: most of us are just living life on life's terms. And it's hard. This week we dive into the latest idea to hit the cultural landscape that turns personal accountability on its head (again). We're all supposed to act and think like victims, and this is supposed to win us mental health. It will not. This week, we talk about the subtle attack on our adulthood and how to not fall for the tricks.

Last Thursday, I had a difficult conversation with a family member that left me feeling sad, disappointed, and exhausted. After processing the experience with safe people in my support system, something was missing. It wasn't until I realized that a much younger version of me needed some healing attention that things started to feel like they were coming around to a resolution. The Inner Child is not a "sweet idea." It's not an imaginary playmate. And it's not psychobabble. The child we once were still resides inside each one of us, often in the form of our deepest needs. This week, we dive into inner child work as a healthy response to triggers. If we're going to learn how to love ourselves in a healthy way, we need to learn how to love who we were at every stage, not just who we are now.

BIG SHOUT OUT to my listeners in Australia and Hungary! You are the top two nations listening besides the United States! Keep sharing this podcast! THANK YOU!!!

In the wake of the Nashville school shooting, we are understandably brought once again to the seemingly unanswerable question: what in the world drives people to do this? The common answer from armchair therapists everywhere is: "childhood trauma." No. That's not it. Many of us were traumatized, and we didn't become violent. So what is it? This week, we look at the real reason people turn to violence. Here's the bad news: our society is on a slow march to more and more violent crime if we don't stop this in its tracks. Here's the good news: we can stop this in its tracks. The choice is yours.

How do we really find rest? Is a good night's sleep? A massage? A quiet afternoon with a book? It's much simpler than that, but we can easily miss it. This week, we dive into the real path to finding rest and my own lessons learned in the past couple of weeks. I slipped into a pattern that needed to be stopped, and it got me thinking: do we over-complicate self-care? (We do.) Stunning in its simplicity, the best way to care for ourselves is as obvious as the breath in our bodies.

Now that life feels back to normal after the worldwide COVID pandemic, we look at where we are as a human race. Did we progress or regress over the last few years? Perhaps we can make the case for both, but in this episode I'm going to look at the pandemic that slipped under the radar and infected all of our minds: emotional reasoning. This dangerous relationship with our subjective reality - where we believe everything we feel - has eclipsed rational thought and rendered people more vulnerable to mental distress. We're seeing surges of mental illness like we never have before. This week, I tackle the complex cognitive distortion known as emotional reasoning and give the listener the tools you need to resist emotional manipulation and retain a sound mind. 

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What are you made of? What qualities and decisions got you through your hardest times? The hardship we face in our lives has the ability to refine us into gold or define us as victims. When we focus on our struggles without noticing our strengths, we're only telling ourselves half the story. This week, we tackle the qualities in our humanity that allow us to overcome. We're going to look at grit: where passion meets perseverance. And we're going to unfold and discover the well of strength we all have within us to stay with our goals, overcome any obstacle, and truly thrive.

Shame is a painfully universal experience. Every living human being battles feelings of shame, thoughts of being inadequate, not measuring up, being "bad," weak, or inherently unlovable. It grows inside us from childhood. Every shaming word, every experience of failure, every moment of abuse (if there was abuse), and comparison with others drives home the message: "You're not good enough." Sometimes it's just, "You're not good." It's like a bubble in the middle of our lives, inflating without our knowledge and growing without pause. Until we put an end to it. This week we're going to take a pin to the bubble of shame! We've got to take it on. We don't have to live like this. So many of the qualities and experiences we shame ourselves for are simply normal parts of the human experience. It's time we stop hurting ourselves inwardly for merely being human.

This week, we dive into the root causes of anxiety. So often, it's rooted in a belief that life is supposed to be pleasurable, easy, and satisfying all the time. This is a recipe for anxiety. Or we think that we're supposed to have an easy time of it, that things should generally go in our favor. This also is a recipe for anxiety. And then we feel anxious because we're anxious, and it's a miserable soup. Instead, let's take a look at the reality of how life really is, the nature of human beings, and the secret skill everyone can learn that reduces anxiety forever.

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This week, we have the distinct honor of hearing Jeremy Lister tell us about his journey from addiction to sobriety to self-love to ongoing self-care. Jeremy is a living example of the miracle of recovery. I remember hearing it said in a 12-step meeting, "Recovery simply means recovering what was lost." Jeremy walks us through his journey of losing much and then gaining even more. His humility, common sense, and gut level honesty drive the message home: we can change our lives, one day at a time. 

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The field of mental health spends more time identifying illnesses than focusing on health. We address symptoms, but we never seem to focus on the conditions required for human beings to thrive. In this episode, we're going to bottom line it: what conditions are necessary for humans to thrive? (There are basically two.) And we're going to talk about how you can create the conditions required in your own life for your own thriving. The goal isn't the absence of mental illness. The goal is health.

The Harvard interview: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/20/04/harvard-edcast-benefit-family-mealtime

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Folks have some interesting ideas about human emotions! "They're all irrelevant." "Emotions do not represent truth." "Your emotions are not valid." No, they're not. Well, sometimes they do. And yes, they are. Today we dive into the role of human emotions, what we can learn from them, how to work with them, and we take a look at four different personality patterns that cause us to undervalue or overvalue our emotions. What we need is balance. In this week's episode, we get intimate with those pesky things we call emotions.

The Finnish study (I mistakenly said it was Norway): https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/12/30/258313116/mapping-emotions-on-the-body-love-makes-us-warm-all-over

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This week, we dive into the internal sense of the self that allows us to relate to others. Just as the physical body has parameters, we explore what that means in the realm of the mental/emotional self. When we are caring for ourselves, who or what exactly are we caring for? And when we set boundaries, what exactly are we protecting? What is the self? Why is it worth protecting? We need a point of reference. In this week's episode, I walk through my own development of an internal point of reference, and I give practical steps to developing a sense of yourself you can know and preserve.

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Happy new year! For our first episode of 2023, we take a deep dive into what it means to actually reform and reinvent yourself. I'm going to challenge the notion that you need a "new you" in this new year, but we DO get into what actually needs to change if we're going to evolve more and more into an authentic version of ourselves. This week, we take a look at the power of our narratives and the autonomy we possess to change.

Well, Folks! We're winding down our year with a final installment of the yearly inventory. This week, we're going to look at how far we've come. All changes aren't happy ones. Sometimes the toughest decisions we've made this year have amounted to the most growth and peace we'll experience going forward in 2023. THANK YOU for allowing me to be a part of your lives and your passage forward. Congratulations on making it through another year! I'll be with you next week in 2023.

Our third week of taking our yearly, personal inventory... this week we look at the Fun & Play in our lives, our Finances, and our Home Environment. All three areas will have a direct and significant effect on our mental health.

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