Speaker A: Foreign welcome to the Therapist burnout podcast, episode 61. Hey therapist, welcome back to the program. Today I am talking with you about friendships again.
So I talked last week about hey therapist, you need a friend.
And I wanted to kind of riff off some of the posts and responses that I got from you guys on LinkedIn and also from the email.
So yeah, I’m just gonna go do that and I’m gonna give you a little bit of a preview for March. So I will do that. Let me start with that.
So in March, I am gonna start you off next week with a therapist interview.
So I have a guest coming on and the name escapes me at the present moment, but I’ll be there next week for you. Look forward to that. So I know some of you is enjoy when I have guests and so I’ll have that on and then in March.
So it is National Brain Injury Month and I am a certified brain injury specialist. So I am going to do a little play off of overwhelmed brains. And so that’s what I did for 10 years.
I worked with people and I still work with people with overwhelmed brains. It has been one of the through lines. Burnout has been a through line. Overwhelmed brains has been a through line in my career and I still write psychological reports for the school setting.
So I definitely still work with folks who are overwhelmed.
Yeah. So I will do that next month and go from there.
I wanted to talk with you about a post that I put on LinkedIn.
I’ll just start by reading part of it. So when I was a therapist, one of the hardest things to witness was loneliness.
I’d encourage clients to find support in their own lives, but depression makes that feel impossible.
And I don’t know about you, but as a therapist I felt like physiological depression was one of the hardest issues that I found to treat. And for most of my practice I did not understand personally what it was like to have physiological depression until probably,
yeah. So 2019ish. So not all the way through my practice, but I happen to have some of that happen coinciding with medical menopause. And that’s fun.
Oh, I. I keep saying I’m going to do an episode on that and let me think I’ll just do one. I gotta figure it out when I’m gonna do it.
Yeah. So when you have someone with physiological depression, all the interventions that seem like, hmm, this seems like cb. No, CBT is evidence based, especially for. Especially for depression. So likely most of the time when I had someone who was depressed, I typically used a cognitive approach and you know,
interweave that with other modalities, of course.
Gosh. Because just major depression I just feel like doesn’t happen in isolation.
Right.
There’s usually some, typically some kind of anxiety or trauma or other thing happening.
Yeah, I don’t think I’ve had one client that didn’t have any other presenting issue than straight depression.
Yeah, I certainly had clients with a. Because I was an EMDR clinician, I had clients with a single incident trauma which was fun to treat because it’s pretty straightforward and that happened probably like two to three times.
Most of the time. I feel like folks had more nuanced issues and you know, weaved in and out of modalities that I needed to use to target those issues. And especially when I worked with the brain injury population because I’d have to target first, typically nervous system dysregulation due to their brain injury.
And so I was really focused on helping them regulate, doing grounding skills, doing a lot of that phase two of EMDR where I kind of help them with relaxation training, things of that nature.
And then, you know, if they need a trauma work, then straight EMDR with modifications for that population certainly. And then various other things like dbt. All the things, all the elemental P’s that we do.
It’s interesting because I started my practice in 2014 and that’s right around the time of the smartphone. And I think we often as adults believe, and that’s part of this posts, is that our adult friendships and I talked about this all last episode.
So check out the last episode where I had a number of resources on friendships. But I talk about this concept that Mel Robbins coined called the great scattering and that’s the slow drift away from friendships as careers, families and life demands pull us in all these different directions that life pulls us.
Right. And so last week I talked about how when we’re in school, friendship is just effortless because we have the same people in our class, we have the same people in.
There’s just these natural social structures that support our relationships. Whereas when we become adults that changes. So we don’t have the same built in structure that we had before. Right.
So I talk about that in depth last episode. So that’s episode 60, check that out.
I think we have the belief that friendship should be effortless, that we should be spontaneous. And I think there’s parallels here between dating culture and friend culture. Right. It’s just if they’re the right match for me, then it’s just going to happen.
Or if they’re the right friend for me, then it will organically happen. And part of that is true, right? You need to have a level of chemistry. You need to have a level of compatibility with someone if you’re dating them or if you’re trying to be their friend.
So I think friendships and romantic relationships, there’s so many parallels that we need to think about. So it’s. I talked about proximity. We need to be close to that person.
We also need to have that vibe or the chemistry. And research does, you know, point to this. That has to be there. Also timing, you know, is it the right time?
Are they in a similar life stage? All of those things. Whereas when we’re younger, we go through the same folks in school and we’re in the same life stage as them.
But that changes when we’re adults.
So I pose this on a LinkedIn pose. What if friendship as an adult just requires a new strategy? So instead of waiting for those invites, we send the text.
Instead of assuming we’re excluded, we initiate the plan. Instead of seeing it as rejection, we see it as logistics.
And that’s tricky, right? It’s hard when you don’t get a text back from somebody and you ping them again and ping them again, and it’s hard not to feel like that’s rejection.
But I think what a lot of the research is telling us and thinking about how communication and relationships have changed since 2010, what happened then? Everyone got smartphones. Everyone instantly became busier because we have so much information coming at us.
You know, it’s when I was in Neurorehab, when I was in training, I had gotten my first smartphone. And when I was in training, we’re like, wow, there’s this memory compensatory strategy right here that someone can carry around.
And now, yes, those tools are there. They’re on your phone. But you know this now. We all know this now. That phone is a huge distractor. And it overwhelms us.
It overwhelms us with the media that’s coming at us. It overwhelms us with negativity from social media.
And so we have to think about these strategies where we have to take our time back and take our relationships back and being intentional with our relationships. So while we can see it as, yes, it’s logistics, but we’re also bumping up against a cultural shift dynamically that is just different than any other time in human history,
right, That a lot of people are not reaching out and they’re using this device as kind of fake connection. Through social media or through texting or through likes or whatever.
So I say in this post, the rules of connection have changed, but that doesn’t mean that deep friendships aren’t possible. I think when I looked at some of the data that I’ve discussed last week, I felt like it’s hopeless.
Friendships just aren’t for me.
And legitimately, in my own therapy sessions, I have been talking about this for years,
four years, that I feel like something is wrong with me,
that people don’t like me, that I don’t seem to form these deep friendships. Yes, I have surface level acquaintances and work relationships. I work fine with people, or so I think.
I think I do.
But not that deeper level connections that I’ve desired. And perhaps I needed that shift. I mean, this shift. It was like one of those ideas when I heard this podcast.
And then I started, you know, getting into the research and I haven’t completely read Dr. Franco’s book on called Platonic, which I’ve mentioned several times now.
So I probably will do another episode on friendship after I read that book because I’m just like, hey, we’re talking about friendship again because it’s so important to everything we do see that I’ll probably do it after March or something.
Who knows? I could always change my mind because this is my podcast. I can do what I want.
I asked this question, how have you navigated friendship as an adult? What’s worked for you? And most people didn’t really answer that question,
which is fine.
Melvin Varghese, who I love, who has the Sat on the Couch podcast, says the shift in adult friendships is real and it’s easy to feel isolated or like you’re doing something wrong when those connections aren’t as effortless as they once were.
But as you said, it’s adjusting our approach. And so he said, I love this recommendation. I found that actively initiating plans, whether it’s a quick text or simple coffee invitation, has made all the difference.
Sometimes it’s as simple as putting the effort and understanding that friendships, like everything else in adulthood, takes intention.
He says that having a small ecosystem of friends that I have calls with, I’ve found this really helps to build depth and connection versus trying to do a whole bunch of calls and not reconnecting for many months.
So I have really before. I know Melvin has posted about this, but it’s just, you know, serendipity, right? All this stuff is coalescing for me that he’s been mentioning this too, like in his post, but not explicitly, but I just Found like this is my growth edge for 2025 to curate my small group of people that I’m going to try to go deeper with in 2025.
So if you’re one of those people, feel lucky.
Okay.
Another person said the great scattering reflects our reality, reminding us that adult friendships require intentional effort. It’s a powerful reminder that it’s about not about rejection, but rather logistics.
Also, another person said rejection happens frequently in the adult world of friendships, although it’s the non personal kind of rejection due to how busy everyone is. And if rejection is especially difficult for us, that’s a recipe for loneliness.
Very true.
And I think Marie, back a kiss. I think I’m. I’m getting her name so wrong. Probably she’s saying that this is a tricky one. So many people value the other initiating and they feel deep rejection.
I can see the importance of reaching out and see so many people fail their friendships and loved ones by not reaching out. And other times they’re overwhelmed and unable to.
It’s very tricky. And I can, I can see that when like I’ve struggled in depression or when my clients have struggled that they are literally unable to do that. They literally have no energy for that.
And of course, right with depression,
we see the world differently. We literally see it as rejections everywhere. I try and no one responds. And that’s like, you know, I must not be worthy. All the things happen.
And so yeah, I don’t blame them for that. But I think when you come out of that mode or when you’re out of an episode, then trying to really capitalize on the energy you might have in that particular moon state to form those relationships.
So that if that happens, you have a group of people that are right there ready to kind of help you out and notice like I’ve noticed something’s different with you.
Do you want to get together? So then they start initiating. That is my hope.
Another person said, I’ve been more intentional about getting using get togethers to build community. Invites include info on who else to invite and what we’re trying to accomplish. I run regular queer community building events on a monthly basis with my nesting partner and friend.
Another friend does a monthly third place weeknight dinner, which is for meeting new friends over a potluck. Very fun.
And this person said, it’s so real. After working in the field for 20 years, I felt I had to come to the end of the road.
And what made it worse was realizing my family was making it all even harder, coming back to it after being forced to Take three weeks off to focus on myself is still a challenge.
I continue to wonder if it’s even still worth it.
Heavy. Yeah.
And this person also said, I. It really hits home with how I approached loneliness. For a long time, I assumed the lack of invites meant people didn’t want to hang out with me, that I was being left out.
But when I finally started putting myself out there and making plans, I realized no one was really planning anything either.
Now I’ve unofficially created a few friend groups. They get together regularly, and so many moms have thanked me just for making it happen. The world can feel lonely, but sometimes all it takes is one person to start.
We can all do a little bit to feel more connected.
I love that.
Yeah. I mean, I think the theme here that I’m hearing is that these people have started reaching out to other people.
So if that is the behavior, I’m thinking, because I’m in schools all the time and I work with behavioralists,
how can we help ourselves do that behavior? How can we help our clients do that behavior? How can we help them realize that it’s not them, It’s. It’s. If you keep trying, if you keep going, if you keep creating and initiating that you.
That work that you’re putting in is worth it. And I think it’s getting over that rejection, which is huge. Right. Rejection is normal. Like, I think we are primed to not want to face a rejection.
Right. Because feeling rejected, you know, made us feel like we’re not in our group, we’re going to be unsafe. And so it’s helping them kind of work through. What is that rejection for you?
And how can you help yourself regulate when that you feel that way when someone doesn’t get back to you via text or whatever? I just spoke with one of my consulting clients this week about how they were initiating, initiating, initiating with a particular friend, and they just started realizing this person.
I’m putting all this energy in this one place with this one person wanting them, where the friendship really can’t support me and her getting together very often anymore. So it really was reframing, like, that’s not going to be someone who’s going to meet my needs right now.
Yeah, maybe they can be on my periphery, but they’re probably not going to be someone I get together with regularly, and I just have to be okay with that. It’s not really about the rejection.
It’s more about their capacity.
Because just life stage was very different from this consulting client that I was working with.
So I did. I just Want you to take away from this, that when we’re working with our clients, when we’re thinking about ourselves and our friendships, it’s going to think about what is one thing that I can do to put on my schedule.
To text someone with a specific date and time. I would like to meet you for coffee at 11 or 10 on Friday. Which one works for you? And then that requires that person to look at their schedule and say yes or no, or to ping you back with another time.
So just think through this intentionality and being very specific and concrete with the friends that you’re thinking about and going back to the last episode to think about what are those ingredients for friendships to work.
So I want to put my efforts into people that are close to me in proximity, right, That I have really good energy with. They seem to like me, I seem to like them.
And our life stage is similar. Like, we run in the same circles. Maybe we are both retired or we’re both, you know, in that early kid phase, or we’re both, you know, just out of grad school, whatever it is.
So it’s kind of a similar life stage that you’re in. And it makes sense for you guys to get together more regularly. I leave you with that.
So next week I’m gonna have a guest on. Look forward to that with Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby. And then I’m gonna focus on overwhelmed brains in March. And kind of a nod to any brain injury survivors, I might have an episode just on therapists themselves that are, you know,
just a little neurospicy. Right? So therapists who identify.
Therapists who maybe identify as being a little neurodivergent.
I like neurospicy. I’m neurodifferent.
I work a lot with people who are on the spectrum who have adhd, who have dyslexia.
And so I know that typically, if you identify in one of those groups, that you might get overwhelmed more easily. So information coming at you and also potentially processing your sessions might be a little more challenging.
So I might do an episode on how to help your brain regulate more. So I will draw on a lot of the work from Cal Newport and also my time working in Neurorehab.
So I’m excited to bring you guys that in the month of March. Certainly stay tuned in and just how to take our time back, because modern life is hard. It is hard, y’all.
So I look forward to bringing you that. Have a great day.
