Let’s Talk Therapy

Oct 24

In Episode 9 of Season 2, Rev. Christie Bates, a licensed professional counselor and mindfulness-based spiritual director, joined co-hosts Meagan Rosenthal, Ph.D, and Alexis Lee on The Mayo Lab Podcast. During the episode, Bates led a discussion aimed at breaking down barriers surrounding therapy, offering a comprehensive insight into the therapy landscape in Mississippi.

She guides listeners through the essence of a successful therapy experience and highlights factors that contribute to a positive turnaround, including the pivotal role of the patient-therapist relationship.

“Really, what you are looking for is an experience,” Bates said. “After all this time and all these neat innovations in the field, the thing that most predicts a successful therapy stent is the relationship. It is the relationship that you feel with your therapist, your counselor, your psychologist or whoever it is.”

Bates also talks about how societal stigma often plays a significant role in the decision-making process when it comes to seeking therapy. She delves into the reasons why many individuals hesitate to seek therapy or counseling, among them the negative stigmas and misconceptions most common in the South.

During her discussion on why people in the South struggle to seek help,Bates pointed out one societal challenge: the additional stigma placed on families.

“Trauma doesn’t cause addiction, but generations of family trauma keep families from responding helpfully to addiction.”

— Christie Bates

“One of the things [hurting our dismantling of stigma] is the secrecy,” she said. “If there is a family habit or family legacy of feeling like we have to present a certain way, then when problems arise, we are really stuck.”

Bates highlights persistent pockets where stigma remains deeply rooted. She acknowledges that small towns tend to harbor stigmas, illustrating the ongoing challenges faced in altering public perceptions of therapy.

“I do think there are pockets, and a small town is typically one of them,” Bates said. “Pockets where stigma is not much better than it was when I was in college.”

To hear more from Episode 9 of Season 2, scroll down to listen to the episode or read the transcript.

Watch the podcast on YouTube:

Meagen Rosenthal:
I'm Meagen Rosenthal.
Alexis Lee:
And I'm Alexis Lee, and this is The Mayo Lab Podcast. Welcome to The Mayo Lab Podcast season two, everyone. I'm so happy you're back. We are going to talk about counseling and therapy today in our stigma conversation. So, we would like to welcome Dr. Christie Bates to the podcast. Welcome.
Christie Bates:
Welcome. I'm not doctor.
Alexis Lee:
Not doctor. We're so kind. Well, we're going to call you doctor.
Meagen Rosenthal:
You just got an upgrade.
Alexis Lee:
You just got an upgrade. In my heart, you did. Well, Christie Bates, welcome to the podcast. If you'll give us a little background on who you are, how you got into this field, and the work you do currently.
Christie Bates:
Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, I'm a licensed professional counselor and a mindfulness-based spiritual director. I'm an ordained contemplative minister, and so some people see me specifically around spirituality, mindfulness development, that kind of thing. So, I'm in private practice here in Oxford. I also practice throughout Mississippi and Tennessee, which is where I grew up professionally. Originally from Alabama, went to college in Memphis, ended up in Tennessee, until moving down here to be closer to family a couple of years ago or a year before the pandemic started actually. So, yeah, while I was up there, I did work in a couple of different residential treatment settings, one strictly around substance addictions. So, that was a seven-year stint.
First with adolescents and their families as a family counselor, facilitated family week, and all that. Then moved to a treatment center where it was a trauma-focused treatment center. So, there were a number of programs that actually overlapped. So, we treated intimacy disorders, eating disorders, really any process or substance disorders. That was a wonderful bit of experience, just so much fun to learn. So, I had this role as the mindfulness lady at first, developed a contemplative program there, and over time morphed into a trauma specialist as I got training in something called brainspotting, which is a really highly targeted mindfulness practice for addressing trauma, creative expansion, that kind of thing.
Then when I knew I had a granddaughter on the way, I shifted into private practice full-time, because by the time I left that place, I was a program director and was never not working. So, I shifted into private practice and then a year later threw up my hands and just moved down here.
Meagen Rosenthal:
As one does.
Alexis Lee:
Right, yes.
Christie Bates:
Yeah. In my private practice, I do get to work with folks that are... It's interesting actually. There are a couple of groups of people. So, there's folks that are in early recovery that are stabilizing recovery. There are folks that have been in recovery for some degree of time and are ready to do a deeper level of healing work. There's also two sets around age. So, I do have a lot of people emerging adults and then a whole group that you might could say are their parents. So, it's just people at these different phases of life.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Wow. So, you really see the spectrum except for the little littles.
Christie Bates:
That's right. Rarely I've gotten an opportunity to work with littles in the room, but not very little.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Fascinating.
Alexis Lee:
Well, I'm really excited about this conversation, because I think there's a lot of stigma or misconceptions around the idea of counseling and therapy. So, we're going to dig in. So, can we start with counseling versus therapy? Is there a difference?
Christie Bates:
Yeah. Okay. I actually made myself some little notes just so my thoughts would be organized. So, to me, therapy is a larger umbrella to describe all kinds of helper. We have physical therapy, occupational therapy, mental health therapy, but all of these are helpers who see us struggling with functioning in some way, get to the root of what's happening, make a plan and address it. So, that's therapy. So, in the realm of mental health therapy, that umbrella can be anyone from your psych nurse practitioner who prescribes meds or a counselor or a licensed clinical social worker. Yet counseling, specifically the licensed professional counselor role began... I'm not super, super knowledgeable about this. I just remember this from grad school, that it began as the school role.
The school counselor role was at first and then over time grew beyond that. So, in that realm of you have people that are psychologists that maybe they've been trained from a heavy research place, and you have people maybe that are looking very much at just the internal workings of one individual. Then on the other end, you still call it counseling, but it would show up as therapy or those terms used interchangeably like a licensed clinical social worker or really any trained social worker is going to have the lens very much on the systems that they're dealing with, schools, communities, whatever.
I find or at least it's been my experience, that licensed professional counselor role has a bit of both. There is a tension to what's going on for people inside. There's also attention to where do we need to be advocating and hopefully in a helpful way, disrupting systems, so that they support wellness, instead of struggle.
Alexis Lee:
I love that continuum. That's a very good picture. So, if people are just entering in this space and they've heard all this and said, "Well, I don't even know where to start now," how would you suggest people find that entry point into this realm?
Christie Bates:
As far as if somebody is looking for counseling for themselves or for their families and let me just say to, there are also licensed marriage and family therapists, so I don't want to leave them out because that is really a beautiful specialty of its own. So, some of it is very much word of mouth. People come to me. They have no idea. I'm not a doctor. They don't. Just somebody referred them. Oh, I heard that lady does brainspotting. When I first moved here and thankfully this is not true anymore, but when I was first moved here, if you Googled brainspotting in Mississippi, there were four of us that came up and only two of us lived in the state.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Wow.
Alexis Lee:
Wow.
Christie Bates:
So now during the pandemic, lots of folks got trained and I've been making a big push to make people aware of it. So, a lot of times it's what you specialize in or what they're looking for. It's like you have your credentials all over the office. Do they even see them? So in looking though for help for yourself, really the word of mouth thing is probably the most helpful, because really what you're looking for is an experience. No matter what type of grad school degree somebody has, still after all this time, after all these neat innovations in the field, the thing that most predicts a successful therapy stint is the relationship, is the relationship that you feel with your therapist or counselor or psychologist or whoever it is.
Alexis Lee:
In this word of mouth, I'm going to enter the stigma piece into this, because now I'm sure if people are talking or want to ask about it, there might be stigma around asking or there might be stigma around talking about your counselor and who you go to or where you go to. How have you seen stigma in your years in this field... Have you seen it change, evolve? Has it gotten worse? Has it gotten better, your experience?
Christie Bates:
In some ways, I feel like it's better. I do think there are pockets and a small town is typically one of them, pockets, where stigma is not much better than it was. I would say when I was in college. I still have an outsider's perspective. I've only lived here a few years, but the word of mouth does seem to have to be very much word of mouth. Anybody local who's sharing, somebody's coming to them to say, "Hey, who do you know?" It is a rare and it has to be a relatively courageous person that's very vocal in a smaller community about what they're doing for themselves.
But then in other places, I mean in Nashville, it's not that big of a town in some ways, but there was a bit more of an attitude in Nashville that a family could have a counselor they worked with just like you would have your family doctor. Of course, everybody that lived there didn't feel that way, but I'm just saying there was this understanding there. Of course, a lot of that has to do with having several universities there and lots of good programs there and the treatment centers and a recovery community that is thriving. People do grow into this awareness that, oh, part of being a responsible adult is undertaking your care. It also helps that and I think that is true in certain places even here, that in the churches, if the people in leadership make reference to their therapist, it's just a humongous help. It makes so much of a difference.
So, in some ways, it's better, but then also I was considering the email you had sent a couple of weeks ago, Alexis. The issue was about, "What are some of the things that we do that help or one of the things that we do that hurt?" I have to say, coming from somebody who has a lot of empathy and trauma healing is a focus of mine. But I think one of the things that we've accidentally created extra stigma for families is wanting to move away from acknowledging that addiction is a process of its own and blaming all symptoms on trauma.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Interesting.
Christie Bates:
Because then people feel like, "If I'm bringing my kid to you for help, it's like I'm saying I've traumatized them." Of course, I mean if you've raised kids, we all probably have had moments that we were less than nurturing.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Sure.
Christie Bates:
That's not the thing. The way I'm going to say this may sound harsh, so we might keep it or not. It sells well because people have such a fear of being labeled in some way. One of the things I think about in terms of families is that trauma doesn't cause addiction, but generations of family trauma keep families from responding helpfully to addiction. So, one of the things is the secrecy, right? If there's a family habit or family legacy of feeling like we have to present a certain way, then when problems arise, we're really stuck. So, it's more that our habitual ways of responding to things can be helpful or not.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Well, I think that's real because had inklings of this throughout the season so far where we've been talking about this idea of the stigma attached to making a recognition that maybe something didn't go according to plan as a parent.
Christie Bates:
Sure.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Then you couple that with the ebbs and flows of what's "sexy" or popular or catches on and trauma. I think what you're saying is one of those things that it's absolutely without question a huge issue that needs attention and concern and treatment. But when it gets popularized in the way that it has been, it now becomes something a beast of its own. That prevents people from actively seeking out, because who wants to put up their hand and be like, "I absolutely messed up my kids, and please go ahead and help them"? Nobody's going to admit that, right? But that's really what it comes down to when folks are looking for those kinds of services for their families, if you're a parent or a guardian or something of that nature.
I think one of the things that you've said already, that you mentioned and I want to dig in on is this idea that finding a counselor, finding somebody to assist you with whatever might be going on or assist your family with is really about developing that relationship and that rapport and having that work through the process of whatever plan it is that everybody puts into place to address the issue that's happening. So, to de-stigmatize, can you walk us through what that relationship building looks like from your perspective? If somebody comes in, if I come in and talk to you, what are clues, ideas, bulb moments that you're like, "Okay, yeah, this is going to work and we're going to be able to jive together and have this work out"?
Because I know that the patient probably feels that, but what do you think? What are you looking for in like, "Yes, I can work with Meagen. She's not going to make me crazy, or she's not going to be a problem," or "I'm not the right person to work with her," whatever the case may be?
Christie Bates:
Oh, that's interesting. I mean I'm talking over 10,000 hours of working... I mean just maybe 12,000 hours of working with people. You really can't always predict. There's some people, they'll come in, they'll be so excited, they'll be like, "This is the most hopeful I've felt in a long time," and you will never hear from it again.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Really?
Christie Bates:
That can happen.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Interesting. Okay.
Christie Bates:
It does not happen very often. I mean, maybe in some situations, it does, but I think in private practice, it has not. I do think that part of that, let me just say, I don't think that has anything to do with magic on my part. It is that word of mouth thing, because when they come in, I can feel as a therapist when they're already giving me some trust just because their friend said, "This was a safe person."
Meagen Rosenthal:
Sure.
Christie Bates:
You can really feel it. Especially I still have colleagues that I used to work with. I mean, I still work with them. I used to see them for lunch in Nashville. My friend who's a marriage and family therapist, she might send one of the folks to me for individual online. I know that, oh, he really feels comfortable with Bethany. I've got a good few weeks here where he can build some rapport and feel comfortable with me. So, for instance, if I misstep or if I'm as a counselor, as a therapist, if I'm too quick to make an assumption, he'll forgive me one or two of those just because it's like, "No, I trust Bethany. Bethany said this is the person that's a good fit for me."
So for the counselor, you really can feel that. I mean everybody has, I think, areas that they feel that they do a really good job with. Therapists also work really hard to expand their bandwidth. For us, part of our training and part of our work as people is that if somebody is driving me crazy, that really is not about them truly, truly.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Interesting.
Christie Bates:
Part of my contemplative training and I wish I could remember who I was hearing, this was a retreat that somebody recorded. So, I wish I could remember who the speaker was because this teaching I feel was so important, but it was about dealing with difficult people. She asked the people that were apparently in the room with her to define who was a difficult person, and they made all sorts of guesses at what a good definition would be. She said, "That all sounds fair enough, but when it came right down to it," she said, "the difficult person is the person who's operating outside of our comfort zone. That's who we find difficult."
So it is important that when you're looking for a therapist that you want either somebody who is really seasoned because it's not that they're going to know everything. It's just they've been exposed to so many different types of situations that our comfort zone is pretty wide, but it doesn't mean that you can't have a brand new therapist. You might have somebody who, for whatever reasons of their own life, has had all kinds of exposure. Maybe they're just recently getting schooling, or maybe they're just in their mid-20s, but that doesn't mean that they don't have a depth and a breadth of people that they can respond to in a helpful way.
One of the things that I want to find a way to create here in a way that's sustainable also for my life and other people's lives is situations where people can do multifamily groups. I was actually talking with a friend about this just yesterday. When I was at Cumberland Heights, it was a four-day program back then for families. The first half of the first day was just each person sharing their story. The young people weren't in the room. That even just by lunchtime, people were visibly relieved, first visibly relieved that they weren't being told it was their fault. I mean, even as they're naming mistakes in the ways that they handled things or just saying, "I don't know what my mistake is, but I know I'm not doing something helpful."
But just hearing each other's stories, that was just the beginning, but it was an important beginning. I do think sometimes when we only work with people in individual families or only work with people as individuals, we don't get that benefit of realizing, "Oh, there's lots of families out here struggling and these people in my group that come from all kinds of situations and backgrounds." One of the things I do want to be sure to say because I think it's important is that part of the genesis of stigma around having a problem of any kind is that there's something about our human conditioning and especially the way our societies are set up that we consider... I mean, I'm saying in the mainstream, not everybody's like this.
We consider ourselves successful to the degree that we can get life to go our way. I mean for many of us, if we have a lot of privileges and life goes our way a lot of the time, if we're living in fortunate situations, then when we come up against this thing that matters so much and here I'm thinking about parents with kids, but it can be any loved one.
I mean, I can't tell you how many people I've been privileged to really watch them start to grow, because this was the first thing they cared enough about to be willing to open up to their own trauma, like going, "Oh, there's something in my history that I need to look at, that I need to heal that would allow me to be a better support or at least not get in the way of my kid's healing." Their kid was the first thing that was most important, more important than feeling protected.
Meagen Rosenthal:
You just dropped so many gems, right? So many gems to think about this from the perspective of what a flip from I've messed up and screwed up my kid to I have to be brave enough because my kid matters so much to me to open up and do something that's going to be wildly uncomfortable and put me in a vulnerable and potentially dangerous feeling, position to do that and then this idea that where we are uncomfortable is where people are pushing us outside of our comfort zone. That's going to be in the show notes. We're going to come back to that later, because those are the things that we're really digging into for this season to start to think about in a different way.
It's just flipping that script of I've done something wrong to think about, "Okay, how can I be better in assistance to or at least not hindering, as you said, my young person, whoever that could be, or my family member?" We can broaden it out from there. I'm just going to stop saying how cool is it, but how did you get to that process? Because we've talked in this space to a lot of different people at this point, and that's the first time I've heard it framed in that way. So, what do you think brought you to that frame of thinking in this area?
Christie Bates:
Yeah, part of it is, and I did mean to say this at the beginning, I have been involved in my own family recovery. There's, just for people's information, various 12-step programs around family recovery, Al-Anon, Families Anonymous, Co-Dependents Anonymous, S-Anon for families and loved ones of people with sex addiction. So, these family recovery programs, that's where a lot of the juice is, I find, for some of those understandings around the things that I would normally do to help a sick person actually feed this disease. I'm using the word disease in its hyphenated very broad form. I'm not getting medical, although I do think there's medical components, or I'm told by people who know better than I that there are medical components.
I'm not making claims, but just for instance, if we have somebody who's down with the flu for a few weeks or if our partner's down with the flu, if we are at all a decent person, we're going to pick up the slack for a bit. I mean if it gets to be two or three weeks of it, we can get resentful or tired and worn down. But the thing is that as we're overfunctioning, that gives them time to rest and then they'll start to naturally pick back up. Then we can come back to more balance so that we're participating in the family in a more balanced way. When we have forms of addiction and really other mental health disorders, the things that we would do to support somebody through chemotherapy, the things that we would do to support somebody through the flu or even just a 24-hour stomach virus actually just give the addicted brain more time to work on the person.
It ends up locking us into a situation where the family becomes polarized in these very rigid roles. So, that's where in the early '80s, it's interesting I got to attend a training years ago by a woman who was part of in the early '80s, creating this description around at the time what codependency was. It was all in. She redid these trainings decades later, almost like in amends to the community, because at that time, it was just like, "Well, if you love somebody who is an addict or who's dealing with mental health issues, then you're codependent. That's your sickness and you're making them sick." This is very much a personal observation from working in treatment centers.
Very often the people that tended to think like that were addicts in recovery who still struggled with understanding, "How could somebody have loved me through that? They must have been really sick." That description of codependency came from the low self-esteem of the people who were describing what codependency was. What is more understood today is that codependency is this collection of symptoms that develop under chronic developmental stress.
Chronic developmental stress happens in families where there's addiction, but also families where there's chronic poverty through the generations, where we live. We deal with the generational traumas, some of which we know, some of which we just carry in our brains and don't know, having to do with being enslaved or having enslaved other people. That's a big part of the trauma that goes on that people are carrying forward, that sense of just guilty for being alive feeling. I feel like I've wandered way off whatever you were asking me.
Meagen Rosenthal:
No, this is fantastic. No.
Alexis Lee:
I was hoping this episode was going to wander quite a bit because it is so vast.
Meagen Rosenthal:
It is.
Speaker 4:
You are listening to The Mayo Lab Podcast. For more information and resources, visit themayolab.com. Now, back to the episode.
Meagen Rosenthal:
I don't want to leave us hanging on the brainspotting piece, because I remember when you and I first met pre-pandemic really, that feels like ages ago in the pre-times that we talked about brainspotting and that was the first time I had ever heard about it. I did follow up and tell everybody, "You need to talk to Christie because she has this really cool thing," but can you tell our listeners what it is and how it works and how you've applied it in this space? Because I think for many people, at least, if you're anything like me, you had not heard of this before I talked to you the first time.
Christie Bates:
Yeah, yeah. Well, so brainspotting is, one way of looking at it is as a highly targeted mindfulness process. Now, it's not necessarily meditation related, although people find themselves in that state of paying attention to their bodies and such. But to simplify a bit, so this was Dr. David Grand in around 2003 stumbled onto the fact that where we look affects what we're accessing. He was doing EMDR, which many people are more familiar with. A lot of his focus through the years was in sports psychology. He lives in New York, so creatives, sports psychology. So, people would come when they would be having glitches that they shouldn't have, stage fright or whatever.
There's this iconic brainspotting story about an ice skater, a figure skater who there was a particular loop that she struggled with. She could do things that were more difficult for her level, but it was this particular loop. So, they were doing some work around it, and he was using his finger to do EMDR with her. Whereas in EMDR, there's all of a lot of this back and forth motion.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Can you explain EMDR?
Christie Bates:
Yeah. So, EMDR is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, if that's still the correct acronym. I think they did update it at one point, but EMDR has to do with the fact that the way that our brain is designed, that bilateral stimulation of the brain allows the brain to process things. That's why when we want to clear our heads about something, we go take a walk, that kind of thing. That's why when we're sleeping and if we are fortunate and we have a safe place to sleep and a generally safe life, a good night's sleep, we get to that deep REM sleep that's the back and forth of the eyes that allows the brain to process. So, in ideal situations, that's just happening with a good night's sleep.
The thing that inspires me about this work is just that recognition that we are designed to heal from everything and not without support and not without appropriate... I mean, there's a difference between a scratch on your arm where you might need a Band-Aid and you might need to go get stitches. But both of those things, the healing still is we're built to heal. So, EMDR was an innovation. It has evolved to a place of being heavily protocol based. For some situations and some clients, that highly structured effect is beneficial, but that's not for everybody. But Dr. Grand was doing work with this ice skater, and he noticed her eye just did a weird little wobble in one spot when he was doing this with her. Her eye did a weird little wobble, and he describes the experience that...
I mean, it was almost like he couldn't have moved it forward if he wanted to. That has to do with really what's at the root of brainspotting is the attunement. Again, like I said in the beginning about the relationship. It's not the gimmicks and the tools that we have. It's the relationship. He was so attuned to what was going on with her, not only emotionally, but just observing everything about her and that eye wobble. So, he just stayed there for about, I think, 20 minutes and afterward debriefed a little bit. She talked about just all the memories that came, times that she had fallen on the ice, times that her parents had had a fight in the car on the way to practice, all kinds of things, a coach yelling at her, or falls. Really in this town, we need to be aware of it for sure.
Kids who grow up as athletes are being traumatized all the time in terms of the brain is experiencing trauma. That doesn't mean it's life-threatening, but it does mean that they'll develop habits of their muscles will just go into bracing or freezing or flinching. That's something where the brain, for whatever reason, just hasn't processed that through.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Fascinating.
Christie Bates:
So in this scenario, they finished this session and she calls him the next day and leaves him a message and she says, "I can do it every time. I can do it. The glitch was just gone." So he and his colleagues at that time, they were like, "Ooh, this is really something we've stumbled onto." So I actually first came into contact with it through Sounds True. I don't know if you ever listened to their audiobooks. They do wonderful interviews. Tami Simon is the woman who is out of Boulder, Colorado. She had him on.
Sounds True sponsored this online training and pieces of it were live. Pieces of it were not live. I had given notice at my old job and was working out a month long notice to begin the work at the trauma treatment center. I called my friend that had recruited me over there and I was like, "Let me tell you about this thing I'm getting this training in." She said, "Yeah, I think you're going to find this is going to be a good work home for you." So that started there and then being in a scenario where I have lots of opportunities to use it. So, to get back to a little more structured way of talking about it-
Meagen Rosenthal:
No, you're fine.
Christie Bates:
... this aspect of where we look affects what we're accessing and affects how we feel, it's not about sight. Blind people can do brainspotting. The issue is our optic nerves that are actually a part of our brain and that are these orienting mechanisms.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Interesting.
Christie Bates:
So with addiction in particular, there's a brainspotting practitioner probably... I'm sure she's a consultant. I know she's a trainer for sure, Robi Abeles in Australia who stumbled onto... So much in brainspotting, people stumble onto things and then they develop it when they realize that with addiction, what was happening for her clients and she was realizing what happens in addiction is that the part of the brain where somebody feels a compulsion... Really to broaden it beyond addiction, addictions, attachments, and compulsions, that craving for some relief. We're outside of our system of feeling like I can be at ease, I can operate. Our whole system is just screaming for something. That spot is not talking to the part of the brain that remembers consequences.
Yeah. I mean we may intellectually remember it, but people don't really remember. Yeah, last time you nagged him about drinking. That didn't actually help at all. Because family members also have our own compulsions and that feeling of I've got to do something, I'm responsible here. So, what she found was that helping people get in touch with the craving spot, helping people get in touch with the spot connected to the consequences, and helping them understand just a little more about addiction in general in her particular case, and then having people work between those two spots.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Interesting.
Christie Bates:
So that when the person had the thought to use or to act out in some way, it's not that that thought might not rise. Anything that's really, really persistent for human beings gave some relief at some point. The body gave a big old chemical stamp of remember that, do that again. That was the thing. So, the thought, it's going to arise at times, but now with those two spots connected, immediately with it are the consequences. It's like, "Okay, that's not really an option because that's miserable." Then when people are doing that, they finish up with finding a spot connected to freedom. What would that look like? What would that feel like in your body? So, I'm talking a lot about the eye position and all that, but really it's actually a very somatic practice.
But what I love about it as a therapist is the flexibility to be able to work with people who... I had one client who said, "I just used to feel like a walking head." I've worked with her for a few years now, but she said, "When I came in here, I just felt like I was a walking head and the ground's down there," but she just didn't feel connected. There was just so much stored that she was afraid to deal with or really not even afraid, you have to have certain things have to be in place. I don't know. This is a sidebar, but not really. I tend to speak in book recommendations.
Meagen Rosenthal:
You're our people.
Alexis Lee:
Me too.
Christie Bates:
So there's a classic book on grief recovery called The Grief Recovery Handbook. One of the things that they talk about, and I find this to be true for really people who have therapy to do, is that the things that need to be in place for a grief process to do its natural healing work are time for it, space for it, permission to feel, and a sense that somebody is there. Now, they don't have to be there in the room with you, but there has to be the feeling of I could call them up in the middle of the night if I needed to. So, when people don't have that...
Back to the thing you were asking me, Meagen, a little while ago about who might be difficult to work with, if we tried to go straight into the trauma work for somebody who doesn't have a safe place, who doesn't have enough community, that can sometimes be the challenge, because sometimes people are coming in and they want to talk about the worst thing that ever happened to them. It's like, "Okay, we will and let's get you situated so that that's not so flooding. Let's get you in a situation where you have enough support." Because when we release that here, you're going to experience like this euphoria of, "Oh, freedom." But really there's also this experience of I've been living my life as if a hand was in front of my face and I've learned to navigate like this.
Then I resolve this trauma and now everything looks different. I don't know how to navigate anymore. So, that takes having support and grief over the time that was lost and all of that. So, that I gave the example of Robi's. There also is a particular setup that Dr. Pie Frey in Boulder developed around OCD and just the recognition that there are three different parts of the brain involved in OCD and helping people don't stay in this. You only visit your OCD spot long enough to check how upsetting is it, but you don't hang out there, because you don't want that to grow tentacles even further. The thing that I like about it though in terms of people that struggle to feel in their bodies at first is that, because for lack of a better word, the brain communicates directly with the therapist.
So, for instance, I can be looking for a spot when somebody is saying, "Well, I had this argument with so-and-so. It made me furious at the time, but I can't feel anything about it right now." That's fine. Just think about the argument. Sometimes people use pointers, sometimes other things, sometimes people just gaze, but if they can't feel it for themselves, the therapist can just watch. It's astonishing. The brain will signal you. Some of it's just reflexes like extra blinking. Sometimes people do a flinch.
I've actually also had people like nod and they did not know they were nodding. It was just their brain went here and you just work. Then in the process, that's one of those things where sometimes with trauma work for people, things can sometimes feel "worse" before it's better. They might have to feel something for a minute before they release it.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Yeah, true.
Christie Bates:
But there are just so many ways to help make that so much more gentle and manageable for people. So, when people are working with a brainspotting therapist, there's this saying in those circles, they talk about following the tail of the comet, that you are not here to wrangle in your client and tell them how it's going to go. It's to follow them. Yes, you might have some education for them, but it's so astonishing that if we will let the brain do its work, the client will come up with their own recommendations. Oh, I think I need to do some breath work. I hold my breath a lot. That was one that happened recently. I really love my essential oils. I need to take some of those to work. When they get a chance to just angle and view things literally from a different perspective, then their brain...
At one point, there is quite a bit of research around brainspotting over the last 15 years. I don't know if this is still true, but when I was getting started in it, one thought about what was going on was maybe an idea that somehow in the eye to eye that somehow that the therapist's eyes were acting as a mirror for the person's brain. Our brains are constantly scanning our bodies for, "Do I need to go to the bathroom? Is there a scratch? Am I wounded? Is there a bruise to heal?" The brain's just doing all that, but it does need some technology, for lack of a better word, to see itself. Meditation mindfulness practice is the longest known technology for that, for the mind to see itself. Brainspotting just allows people to have the support and to be able to get there quickly.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Got you. That is so cool. Isn't that so cool? Oh, gosh. I love that.
Alexis Lee:
What I love about this too is that I know when I first went and took therapy counseling, I just thought you laid on the couch, talk about your feelings. I know that that's on the movies. I think there's a lot of stigma around though the tools and how much is actually involved when you go to counseling, brainspotting, EMDR, other types of techniques. You don't have to sit in chair or on a couch and talk about your feelings, but I think a lot of people still think that's what you do. So, thank you for going into that depth and the backend. The brain is so involved, our emotions, everything, our muscles.
As a former athlete, I identify with the muscle flinches and stuff. That happens still. It's like there's so much that goes on in that if you haven't just even been open enough to do the work, even if it's just a little freedom you find, there's something there for everyone.
Christie Bates:
Yes. Because what we know consciously is only... I mean, what? If we're lucky, 6% of what our brain had. So, that's the other piece is that this work is happening. At the end of the session, sometimes the therapist is like, "Well, I don't know why they feel better." Sometimes you can hear it. They'll share with you some big insight they had, and you can go, "Well, yeah, obviously, that's going to make life feel better," but other times you don't know what happened. To be willing to be in that unknowingness is the thing, is partly what makes it just an adventurous way to work with people and yet one that has a lot of built-in safety. The thing you were saying too about what to expect or just how it might make people nervous, on the question about what to look for.
If you are currently in a situation where you're pretty isolated or you just don't have a trust level to know who to ask for word of mouth recommendations, if you're looking at people's website, the word experiential would be valuable. Looking for things like, it could be brainspotting or EMDR training or somatic experiencing or psychodrama. That does not mean that other things that are out there are not helpful, but other things that are out there are often the things that people already know about or at least they feel like they already know about. To be fair, sometimes people say, "Oh, yeah, I already tried that. That didn't work." It's like, "Oh, you tried that?" Oh, yeah, I went for two sessions. It's like, "Okay, well, dude, you didn't try that, but okay."
But what that tells you is, okay, maybe cognitive behavioral stuff for whatever reason shuts him down. So, he might really love something that's more active. I'm just using a he. It's like if he's having trouble forgiving his 14-year-old self for starting drugs, then we're going to bring an empty chair right here and let him talk to his 14-year-old and let him move over as the 14-year-old and answer and to get out of thinking that the relief is going to come from thinking our way to it. That is one other thing that I think is so important to understand about contemplative body-based therapies and means of growth is that so often, we've all had those moments of there's like a ding and we feel better. We mistakenly think that we had a thought and that that's what gave us the relief.
That's what keeps us chasing sometimes, chasing, chasing, chasing for the thought that's going to give us relief, but actually what happened is the body solved it and in that moment of relief and then there's the insight. So, anything that puts you in touch with your body, we are so close to the monastery over here in Batesville, where somebody can go and really just practice in the safest, kindest environment possible. This experience of just allowing your body to nourish you by just being willing to give it some time and attention to just settle down and to stop striving, striving, striving. When we were talking about forms of developmental stress, that striving is one of them.
That can be true, and this can be extra confusing for families that are working really hard to give their children a better childhood than they have. So, that might be they're trying really hard to do it emotionally, and they read all the parenting books. They're trying to do everything really right or it might be materially that they're trying to give them something better, but the whole underlying experience of striving when you have folks that really haven't given themselves the time that they need and deserve to resolve things, there's nowhere for that to go except downhill to the next generation.
Meagen Rosenthal:
I think that's a beautiful place for us to wrap it up now. I think that's a really great place because you're given us so much to sit with and chew on and think about. You've covered a ridiculous amount of ground, and I am incredibly thankful for all-
Alexis Lee:
We're going to have to bring you back.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Yes, no, I totally agree. I totally agree. But I think, so far this season, we've been trying to leave folks with things you can do today for yourself, things you can do for your family, and things you can do for your community. So, you've covered a lot of ground and I think I can pull out in my head things that would fit each of those categories, but I'm going to leave the question to you. What is something we can do right now for ourselves? What can we do for our families and what can we do for our communities?
Christie Bates:
Yeah. Let's see here. Yeah. So, on the thing about the things that people can do for themselves, one of the things is there's just no reason not to have some community anymore. Even if you want it to start out completely anonymous on Zoom in your room, like I said, there's all kinds of family member programs. If people have a discomfort for whatever reason with 12-step stuff, there's Buddhist recovery circles, there are recovery circles out there. So, finding anything that you can relate to and getting plugged into that, even just finding. The thing you can do today is just go online at a Families Anonymous or Al-Anon or something and look for where the Zoom meetings are. Okay, here's two times a week that I could hop onto a Zoom meeting.
Maybe later you'll graduate to talking to people live, but actually, there's a lot of help that goes on in those Zoom meetings. So, that's one thing. Also, there is a book called Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice by Dr. Robert Firestone and some other people helped him write it. It really does a great job of helping people understand that if we are being run by that critical inner voice, we are going to pass it along to our children, even if we never say the words out loud. So, again, just parents need and deserve help, but also sometimes helping people know and this is also the way you're going to help your family members.
For family units, I really love the work of Harville and Gay Hendrix, the giving the love you want and giving the love that heals. That's about couples and about kids. There's also a pair of books that Michael Bradley wrote. One is called, "Yes, Your Teen is Crazy!", that's for parents. The other is, "Yes, Your Parents are Crazy!" It really does a lovely job of explaining to teenagers like, "Hey, for a lot of people, if they have unresolved stuff, it's usually in their adolescence unless it's egregious stuff earlier." So you are not a bad kid. It's just being the age you are is what triggers your dad that you are the age he was when this thing happened for him. So, that pair of books is a great way for families to have some humor and also be able to discuss some things.
Meagen Rosenthal:
I love it. What great names.
Alexis Lee:
Yeah. I can see a lot of Christmas gifts.
Meagen Rosenthal:
Yes.
Christie Bates:
Within the communities, I think for sure, things like this that you all are doing, that the Mayo Family is doing, that other families are doing, the McGee Family, just to help bring awareness. My daughter, who Alexis knows, helped coordinate this Overdose Awareness Day that we had at the end of August. That was really something beautiful, because a person could arrive there. I don't care what part of the community you were from. You could find a booth that you could connect to. It was a mini gathering. I don't know how we would address this, but I do have to share, it was something that might be hard for people to hear, which is we have some kids that are so angry about the fact that adult drinking culture in this town is what it is.
I really remember strongly, a young man that talked to me, but I had not lived here very long, but before the pandemic. He was experimenting with whatever he was experimenting with, and he said, "I really don't want to hear it. I run into my teachers at The Grove all the time, and they're plastered. It's not just my parents." They're so angry. The anger comes from I want somebody I trust to be like, "How else can you deal with things? How else can you have fun?" Of course, the anger also partly comes from just that teenage judgmentalness of not understanding people's struggle. Adults struggle.
That's their only means of entertainment, but that somehow addressing the fact that... Not just in our town, but our economy runs off of inebriation to a large degree. So, it's like we're not going to be able to help our kids very much unless we get very creative about changing that, but I have no idea how that would happen.
Meagen Rosenthal:
It's a do as I say, not do as I do type of situation. I think that's a really key observation. I mean, if only we had the answer to it today, but it's certainly something worth our considering and thinking harder on, because if we see it through that lens, it does seem absolutely, from that young man's perspective-
Christie Bates:
These people don't have a leg to stand on.
Meagen Rosenthal:
... it's tricky. How do you justify that, right? So I totally get it, but I think we have an amazing group of listeners. So, let's start thinking about that and having conversations, continuing this conversation in that space to figure out what we want, what we value, and aligning what we say with what we do. We have so many gems from this episode. I can't even, I'm just so excited, and we are absolutely going to have to have you back again. Thank you so much for making the time for us this afternoon.
Christie Bates:
Of course.
Meagen Rosenthal:
We are incredibly appreciative of it and all of your wisdom and your ideas and keeping us practical, things we can do, books we can pick up, stuff we can start thinking about. It's just been a real pleasure chatting with you again. So, thank you so much.
Christie Bates:
Thank you so much.
Alexis Lee:
Yeah, appreciate it.
Voiceover:
Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Mayo Lab Podcast. The Mayo Lab Podcast is produced by Dr. Natasha Jeter, Dr. Meagen Rosenthal, Alexis Lee, Slade Lewis, and Hanna Finch. This podcast is recorded at Broadcast Studio in Oxford, Mississippi. The show was mixed and mastered by Clay Jones, and our original music was composed by Slade Lewis. The Mayo Lab Podcast is brought to you by the William Magee Institute for Student Wellbeing. For more information on The Mayo Lab Podcast, head over to themayolab.com and follow us on social media, @TheMayoLab.
If you enjoyed listening to The Mayo Lab Podcast, we'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and give a review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you're listening to this podcast. This podcast represents the opinions of Dr. Meagen Rosenthal, Alexis Lee, and their guests on the show. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for the medical advice of a licensed counselor or a physician. The listener should consult with their mental health professional in any matters relating to his or her health or the health of a child.