The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Kay De Simone, Discusses Trauma and the Importance of Mental Health Support

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Kay De Simone, Discusses Trauma and the Importance of Mental Health Support Puravidawellnesscenters.com Show Notes About the Guest(s): Kay De Simone is a clinical psychotherapist and the founder of Pure Vida Wellness Centers. She is certified in gold standard modalities for the treatment of PTSD, trauma, and loss. Katie is known as the "mental health engineer" and specializes in working with high achievers in high-pressure environments. She collaborates with Fortune 500 companies and top-tier educational institutions, providing staff training, wellness services, and therapeutic support. Katie is also a doctoral candidate and adjunct professor at the University of Alabama. Episode Summary: In this episode, host Chris Voss interviews Kay De Simone a clinical psychotherapist and mental health expert. Kay shares her personal journey growing up in a family with a high psychiatric load and how it led her to pursue a career in psychotherapy. She emphasizes the importance of developing emotional vocabulary and understanding the impact of trauma on the nervous system. Kay explains her approach to therapy, which focuses on providing clients with tools and skills to become their own advocates for mental wellness. She also discusses the benefits of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) in treating trauma and stressors. Throughout the conversation, Kay emphasizes the need for individuals to take control of their mental health and seek appropriate support. Key Takeaways: Trauma is any event that overwhelms the nervous system and affects a person's level of functioning. Developing emotional vocabulary is crucial for understanding and expressing one's emotions effectively. Therapy should have a treatment plan and deliverables, with the goal of empowering clients to become their own advocates for mental wellness. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a somatic intervention that helps reprocess traumatic events and negative cognitions. Most people do not need therapy forever; therapy should focus on addressing specific issues and providing tools for self-improvement. Notable Quotes: "Trauma is any event that overwhelms your nervous system to an extent that affects your level of functioning." - Kay De Simone "Therapy is a paid service with deliverables. It should have a treatment plan and a curve that shows improvement." - Kay De Simone "EMDR allows you to address challenging things, recalibrate your nervous system, and integrate them as something that happened but is not defining your present." - Kay De Simone

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Katie Simone is on the show with us today. She's dubbed the mental health engineer. And boy, if she could open my brain, there's a lot of work for the engineer there in my head as we all know after 15 years of listening to the show ad simone is a clinical psychotherapist certified in gold standard modalities for the treatment of ptsd trauma and loss or what we call fridays around here k is a sought-after speaker and wealth mindset coach who uses evidence-based tools to powerfully address life's challenging events and limiting self-beliefs. She's a therapeutic expert in the treatment of complex trauma and stressors of high achievers in high-pressure environments. She collaborates with Fortune 500 companies and top-tier educational institutions, providing them staff training, wellness services, and therapeutic support.

She is a doctoral candidate and adjunct professor at the University of Alabama. In addition, she splits her time between New York City, North Carolina, and provides eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, known as EMDR, and intensifies in her offices in Cary, North Carolina and Manhattan, New York. Her mission is to support the community in pursuing optimal performance and joy by strengthening themselves in mental health and life skills. Welcome to the show. How are you? Thank you so much for having me, Chris. I am doing well. It is such a great opportunity to be in touch with your audience and to get to know you better. I really

appreciate the time. There you go. The more you get to know me better, the more you're going to be like, this kid is fucked up. So give us your dot coms. We want people to get to know you on the interwebs. So one of the things that I'm very interested on is just providing the community with skills, with tools, with tips so that they can become their best advocates when they are pursuing mental wellness, when they're pursuing upgrading their life skills. So at the end of the day, we can have the things that we want, right? It's a high performance. It's a joy. It's a peace. Is it a better way to communicate with others? So it's putting people on the driver's seat on their mental health wellness journey so

that they can be their best advocates and their best leaders. There you go. And so people can look up your website. They can find out more about what you do and how you do it there at puravidawellnesscenters.com and find out more about it. Look at you. Very good. There you go.

It's all about the plugs. That's what people hear on the show. I've been on podcasts where I'm like, when do I get to say my plugs? Because that's the whole reason I'm here. And they're just oblivious. So it's always about the plugs. So talk to us about your journey

and how you got to where you are and what you're doing. What was your journey through life that got you into psychiatry? So I practiced psychotherapy and the way that I merged into this journey was by birth. So I am very open about my own personal journey and that of my family. So I was part of a family that was dealt very heavy cards when it has to do with a very high psychiatric load in genetics, which means that you have the potential higher than other families to develop all kinds of issues with mental illness regarding emotional regulation only has to do with depression, anxiety. So I could, I say many times that my therapeutic training started since birth. My mother was one of nine children and many of my uncles and aunts suffered from very debilitating mental health issues. One, because of the lack of knowledge back in the olden days, I appreciate that you said, you know, a young lady is coming to join us. I'm 51 years old. So when I was born,

you know, mental health, mental health wellness psychiatry psychotherapy were not terms that were readily available that regular people in the community had access to which delayed a lot of the access to treatment also poverty created a very big obstacle as well so my training or my exposure to mental health, mental wellness, but also psychiatric illness started very young in my, you know, as I was growing up. I became very interested on how things break and how we can fix them. But even also as how things are breaking or the systems, the nervous system, psychological systems are getting affected,

what things we can do. I became, you know, involved in psychotherapy, social work and clinical work as my career. And I go from that place as a provider and also as a learner from the space of one month, one week, one year, one second suffering is one second, one year, one week too long. So it is within our best interest to resource ourselves, to fortify ourselves within the circumstances that we have, but also in preparation for whatever comes next.

Working in life, we have to develop the skills. If I get nervous talking to people, it's not that you're permanently damaged, it's that you were simply not taught how to do that. You didn't have appropriate models so that we can completely live in our growth. There you go. That modeling, especially in youth, is so important.

Right. And one of the things, Chris, as you showed, you know, I share my practice and any of my practice and what I do, it is the understanding. The reason why I'm participating in podcasts, I have a TED Talk coming up in April. I'm writing a book because I have the full understanding that most of the people in the community will not be able to work with me. There are a lot of challenges when it has to do with your license and what states you can practice regarding insurance obstacles regarding price.

So my intention is to share the knowledge so that everybody can find an appropriate therapist life coach wealth coach to work with even if that is not me so that we can help us to know who is the right fit who is culturally competent to understand my experience and give me hands-on skills so that i can get better um what is therapy what is going to happen and and i go from the place where therapy is a Google of what is therapy, what is going to happen. And I go from the place where therapy is a paid service and I need deliverables. So whatever you go into a therapy center to do that looks like what you do with your friends for free, it is something that you want to stay away from. There has to be a treatment plan. There has to be deliverables. There has to be a curve that shows a great improvement from

when you started getting services to where you are. We have to become, as citizens and as people, we have to become better equipped with knowing what are the modalities, right? There are certain presentations that there are modalities that are the only modalities that actually work and provide relief, right? Talk therapy is wonderful and it gives you a space for you to share and for you to have somebody else be a witness of your experience. But as I said, I'm the mental health engineer. I come from a family of engineers. And for me, it's I want results. I want process. I want structure. And I want a finished result that you can be proud of. And that allows you to graduate from working with me or the therapies that you're working on so that you can rejoin life.

Most people in the community do not need to be in therapy forever. People think, oh, I'm going to go to therapy. I have to be in therapy for two, three, five years. That is a fallacy. And it is a fallacy that has been supported by what we see in the media. It's a fallacy that has been supported sometimes by providers that just keep people in their caseloads for an inordinate amount of time. Right. But 99, 90 percent of the population do not have issues with chronic mental illness.

You have a challenging thing that happened right you know you were this you were displaced you were fired god forbid your grandma died you have a chronic illness these are specific things that we can create skills and a structure in so that you can get better so that you don't need me so when i work with my clients i work with you know emdr what you mentioned is eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing, and is a somatic intervention. So it's not only that you're talking about it, but it's that we're gonna unearth whatever is there, what is the base of the negative cognitions you have about yourself? What is the base, not only in your heart, in your mind,

but also in your somatic body right the chest pains right your eyes start twitching you cannot sleep and now all of those things and integrate them not so that we can cope with them i i really don't like oh i'm gonna be coping with this thing no i want this reprocessed and gone i don't want to all the time forever feel this anxiety when they have this particular input. I want to have reprocessed it and release it so that my brain and my mind and my body understand that that was then. And this is now. And now I have other options. I have other resources.

I don't have to hyperventilate. I have developed my communication skills, my assertiveness, whatever it is, the gap, we have worked on it, right? Little by little, by listening to podcasts like yours, by reading books, by getting, you know, free services. If you go to a college and there is a counseling center, if your job offers, you know, employee assistance programs, with life coaching, executive coaching, giving ourselves the permission to pursue the knowledge and use those resources so that we can feel better,

so that we can do better. But the reality is that most people don't need to be in therapy forever. There are people that have chronic conditions that need the support, totally. But there are some of us that is an issue or there is a particular history that we can reprocess and release, not only COVID. That's important to realize because some people,

I think that's why they shy away from therapy is they see people that are in it for long periods of time. And I've known people that go in and game the therapist, you know, they, they dance around the therapist or they, you know or they just go in and talk. And usually they're just sitting there blaming everyone else. The therapist just goes, and not taking self-accountability for anything. So I see a lot of that. So you have an office in North Carolina, in New York. You talked about places where you're, where are you licensed so people know who can reach out to you to work with you? So I am licensed currently in New York, in DC, North Carolina, New Jersey, Florida,

and Connecticut. So because my specific niche of a specialty is working with high achievers on high pressure environments. Those are the main cities where there is a lot of colleges, the arts are tier highly competitive. I have a lot of D1 athletics, a lot of people that work primarily on finance, tech, law, and medicine. So I work with a lot of the colleges that have those tracks. I also work with preparatory schools, independent schools, both in the Northeast and in the South,

in where I work with the students, I do workshops, I do trainings for their staff. And I also do seminars for the parents, because being the parents of a child or a young adult that works or studies in a high pressure environment is a very, very big responsibility. And based on our own history of our own families, sometimes many of the parents don't know what their role is, what is too much, what is too little, how involved they should be. And also when you add issues related to oppression and racial inequities, there's also a lot of parents that use my skills and my trainings

to be able to find their voice when their children are merging to those environments and still stay true to themselves, but also bring value and share their stories and their own talents. There you go. So help me dig into a little bit more into this eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. Is one way you use it to identify traumas and different issues, like by people's accelerated eye movements, if they're put in that state? If you remember the old Pink Panther movie where the sergeant, you know, whenever he'd get around the one guy, his eye would start freaking out. You're stressing me out. Is it like that?

Is that kind of exaggerated? Yeah. So there are a couple of things. So we start when we work with a client, we start first developing a very strong emotional vocabulary for them so that they can explain their experience to themselves and eventually to other people. So that's one with the emotions. So society only gave us happy, mad and sad. And what happened when you were little if you were happy or even now it's oh my god life is beautiful you know cupcakes and

rainbows right but if you're mad or sad it's an emotion that is so big that is very hard for you to explain it to other people so that they know what you want when you were little most families you were like oh she's mad and your mom would, go fix your face and go to your room. Or if you're sad or if you call your friends, you say, I'm so sad this week. They don't know what to do. There's not a task attached to that. So we first work on helping people develop their emotional vocabulary so that they have these big emotions. And they're able to say, I am mad, but I am mad because I feel disrespected so being mad and feeling

disrespected is two very different things even though it is weaved together if I tell you Chris I'm mad at you you're like oh my god how am I gonna fix it I don't know so you can avoid me you can not me you can block me right but if I go up to you when I have enough emotional regulation to make sense and I say, Chris, I am mad at you because I felt disrespected in the way that you spoke to me over lunch. We are disrespected. We can create tasks around it. Or is that you say, oh, I'm so sorry. Didn't come through like that. And I say, well, don't ever speak to me in those terms again.

It's very upsetting. And we have a way to move forward the same thing when you say to yourself you wake up and you're like and you scan yourself and you say i am so sad today sad is too big sad shuts down your brain the cortisol is up i don't know what to do you're going to freeze mode but if we wake up and after we scan our emotions as we're you know facing our bed how do i feel i feel very sad today and if we make up and after we scan our emotions as we're facing our bed, how do I feel? I feel very sad today. And if we make it smaller, which becomes an automatic process to you when you're doing the work, then you can say, I am sad because I feel lonely.

I am sad because I'm feeling unprotected. I am sad because I felt silly or incompetent. That is a task, right? So when we look at ourselves first from the place of emotions, right? From the space of symptoms, and we say to ourselves, we give ourselves the permission to say, and I use an example of my clients when I'm doing presentations, if the iPhone is the most fantastic invention, technological invention, right? Of this century. And the iPhone upgrades itself, whether you want it or not. The iPad starts texting you. I'm going to upgrade today.

12 point iOS is coming. Why can't we give ourselves the permission and internalize that we can upgrade ourselves also in that all the input we get from the world is simply data. When you're presenting, you're speaking in public, if your hands get sweaty, that is data. If you go into an interaction with somebody and your words don't come out and you feel it in your throat, you're not permanently damaged. That is data that says, I am not so great at confrontation, right? That's more kind than you say, oh, I'm so weak. I'm whack. i never can i

don't know how to fight and hold my my stamp you internalize it and say to yourself from a kinder place i need to improve my conflict resolution and then you can start listening to podcasts and maybe you give yourself permission to buy a book and maybe if you have you know if you have the privilege you have an insurance you can reach out to a provider and say, I, all these bad things happened to me, but I specifically want to work, starting working on my conflict resolution, my communication skills, my assertiveness. People have a concept that when you go into therapy, you have to tell these people your whole life, the horrible thing that happened, the crazy uncle that touched you go into therapy, you have to tell these people your whole life. The horrible thing that happened, the crazy uncle that touched you

and you told nobody. People think that when they go, there is, oh, I owe this person everything. But the reality is, I practice from a decolonizing perspective, which means that the client and I always stay within the same level of power. I am not the expert.

I'm not going to fix them. I don't have, you know, the special magical of power. I am not the expert. I'm not going to fix them. I don't have, you know, special magical juju. I am simply a witness and a shepherd and a companion in their journey of healing themselves. So when you start from there, when you give yourself your permission to say that you look at a provider

from the place of we are equals, and this is the end goal. So that gives you the possibility to walk into somebody's office or virtually if you're meeting virtually and say when they're doing the intake and the stuff you can say but nobody tells us this this is why i do this work and i want to do this podcast so more people have access to this information you can first of all you should have a consultation and interview these people for 15 minutes any therapist that doesn't have 15 minutes to meet with you to see if you're the right fit is not the therapist for you this is a paid this is a paid service edna blue cross blue shield

whatever foundation is paying them to see you to provide services for you there has to be a right fit so you guys have a consultation 15 minutes where what are your credentials what modalities are you working what have been the different outcomes for people that have a presentation like mine how long do clients work with you you can weed out who's the right fit who understands your personal experience. So if I was to see you, Chris, and we are talking, and it takes you five sessions to explain to me, Kay, what it is to be Chris based on your upbringing, who raised you, your family's income, how you navigate the world.

If it takes you five sessions to school me on what it is to be Chris and what the stressors are having a major podcast and the structure of your family. If it takes you five sessions for me to have an understanding in my mind, how to treat you, I should be paying you. Cause I am not in the niche. I'm not in the niche. I am not culturally competent and I am not prepared to treat you because you're having to do training on the job. Right. So all of these small things we have to be able to incorporate. You can go into a session where you're a therapist for the first time when you're doing the intake, the registration. And you can say you're entitled to say, hi, my name is Kay.

Example. And something happened to me that was horrible when I was 12 but I am not comfortable telling you because you're a stranger and I just met you you can write down something traumatic happened to me when I was 12 and eventually when the therapeutic relationship develops I might give you more details when I am comfortable with it or it might be that I go from a place of, I never want to talk about this again. It's a wrap.

And then I have to find a modality like EMDR, where you can hold the image and the information of what happened in your brain. And as your provider, I never have to hear it. I never have to know exactly what happened. You can say to me, something happened to me when I was 16 and I had a blue T-shirt and I'm riding my little pet. Traumatic event at 16 years old.

And the fact that you hold worried about in the future. I'm not going to graduate. My grandma is going to die. Whatever it is, the thing that paralyzes you and that infuses your day to day with anguish and sadness and concern is something that can be reprocessed and is actually reprocessed and integrates not only from your mind because intellectually you know well everybody's grandma has to die she's lived a long life for certain people your grandma raised you and it's your last living parental figure it's a ridiculously high blow that they cannot even fathom thinking about.

But it is that you integrate the intellectual part with your heart and your emotions in what your body somatically is feeling. And we do this through, you know, doing bilateral stimulation of the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain, and you heal yourself. So the brain goes to wherever it has to go to heal. And all of our memories, all of our experiences, I would like for you to imagine almost like we have an interweaved string

that attaches them all together. All the way from when you were little, things that you don't remember, things that you remember, but you have purposely blocked in your unconscious so that you can survive, so that you can show up and let's say do the job get the credits get the promotion you know challenging things have happened to many of

us growing up because of lack of resources or lack of parental oversight many of our parents were kids themselves when they had us nowadays people get married at 30 and 35 or whatever age they want if you go back a little bit people were getting married at 17 18 19 20 years old and they were literally children many people have parents that were you know in the military when we had all those big wars and they were drafted and they were sent there so those parents came back with a lot of complex trauma that was untreated and they never spoke about again. Right. So many people were displaced. Many people had to immigrate people from diverse backgrounds.

Also that come from other countries with parents that immigrated and came here for the pursuit of the American dream. Also have a very heavy burden because we have parents that escape natural disasters right that escape dictatorships that escape great waves of violence so our parents not only were in many times undereducated impoverished but they were themselves survivors of complex trauma that we have never talked about it has never been processed because they were too busy having two jobs three jobs to have a roof over our heads to sending us to school and there are all of these other situations are happening so the beautiful thing and one of the reasons i am training a lot of other modalities and certified in cognitive behavioral therapy and and tfcbt and all these other therapies and i love

emdr because emdr gives you results you can go to therapy and do talk therapy and if that's where you are in the journey it is a wonderful step to take but when you have for example you know there was the first responders from 9-11 the treatment the gold standard for them was EMDR for them to be able to release the smells, the sounds, and all of that. Not that it makes it that did not happen, but that they can integrate it as something that happened, but that that was then, and this is now, and now I have other options. Now I have secure safety. Or to forgive themselves, and you say, I did the best that I could, right?

I did the best that I could. Or when it has to do with stuff like, for example, Prince Harry, he received the EMDR in order to process the passing of Princess Diana and the great effect that he had in his own life and his emotions. So EMDR allows you to address the challenging thing, recalibrate your nervous system around it, and be able to integrate it from a place where you're not always in fight or flight, when you always think you're not safe, when you always think you cannot trust others, or even in a worst case scenario, you cannot trust yourself in your judgment.

There you go. Trauma is an interesting thing. Talk to us about trauma. I've seen how trauma from childhood especially shapes one's whole life and the impacts of the decisions they make, etc., etc. What is trauma for those people out there? Let's lay a foundation for that. And how do people know if they need support and help and to see a therapist like yourself? Thank you so much. I really appreciate that question. So there are a lot of high level, you know, doctoral level type of definitions for trauma. The way that I like to describe trauma so most people can understand it is trauma is any event that overwhelms your nervous system. So it's not only that it affects that is that overwhelms it to an extent that affects your level of functioning, your ability to sleep, your ability to eat, your ability to, to be who you were before this thing happened. Even when challenging things happen in the world,

let's say there are a hundred people in this challenging, horrible thing happened and they were all there only roughly 20% of the people there are going to keep lasting consequences of that event and that has to do with so many different things it has to do with where were you when this thing happened who else was there that you cared about and you felt responsible for when this event happened so you were internalizing the event that was horrible but you also had your little cousin you had your daughter with you you had your mom with you so there was a more ample window of stress and liability when this was happening it also has to do with what previous things have happened to you

before. So there is a scale that they developed that's called the ACEs scale. And that's A-S in Apple, C-S in Carol, E-S in Echo, S-S in Sam. And people can Google it freely. And the ACE scale, they created a short scale that allows people to figure out in this particular space the traumatic things that have happened to them so the higher your aces score is there's a lot of studies hundreds of studies that have determined that the higher your number in the aces score the higher is your probability of developing complex trauma diagnosis or challenging psychiatric illnesses. And the things that the ACEs cover are things like, were you a witness or a victim of domestic or physical violence growing up? Were you, did you, did you feel safe at home? Were you, you know, customarily

put down or head or you never had a place that was safe? There's another question that has to do with, have you ever been inappropriately touched or sexually abused by anybody? You know, ask a lot of different questions or really big core situations that have happened in the higher your ACE score it is, the more careful you have to be with the way that you take care of your mental health, and what kind of structure you create for yourself. So that's one of the ways. So that's one of the ways to look at the trauma just from the get go. But I also because I train in the highest level of psychiatric and psychological dysregulation and illness. So I was training in the Zuckerman Hill Psych Hospital in New York, which is one of the most reputable psychiatric hospitals in the country, because I wanted to learn how to treat people that were on the all the way on the side of the spectrum where there is hallucinations, dysregulation, there is psychiatric inpatient admissions and all of that.

Not only to help that population, but also because I wanted to see how did we get to where we are. training and in my years of schooling when there is a challenging presentation that a client or a patient has when you go back if you wrote down their life story you can see that there were several things that happened and there was lack of protection there was lack of access there was lack of resources in many instances so there was lack of skills there was lack of tools right even one challenging thing that happens in a particular temperament your temperament that you're born with also is part of how trauma gets processed by your body and by your brain right so looking at all those things i work to get training have that knowledge all the way to that side of the spectrum because i wanted to bring it to this side of the spectrum so that the

bulk of the population can get themselves the support or the tools or the books or the pockets that they need so that we don't get to decide right there is such a big scarcity of providers like you read it every day oh there's no therapist there's no psychiatrist so if we can do the work preventive here so that when something happens, we have that acknowledgement of, let me figure this out on myself, on my kid, on my community, so that we don't get the dysregulation and the chronic illness, which is what the bottleneck is. So many of us are able to be preventative and proactive in our own care, right? And looking at these things that we ruminate about that always

comes to our minds that that oh i had this dream about this thing that used to happen if we see that's just as data that any skill has to be upgraded that healing has to happen in a particular part of our life then we just go in okay i'm gonna go for therapy for three months for six months for whatever long and then i'm going to heal i'm going to get the skills and then i move on with my life my intention is for us to get better sooner so we can go on with life pursuing our dreams and also so that the providers have the chunk of the time for the people that have the more chronic issues and that need additional support so when you look at trauma from anything that overwhelms the nervous system it's a lot easier and it's a lot more suitable for people to say wait a minute maybe maybe i'm included in that

right because we all think we're just fine right if i would ask to anybody which is fine we're fine nothing bad happened to me and then i was like okay so let's sit down for a second and i'll give you some examples i'm gonna throw stuff you, in the air and see what sticks. And when I throw it, you know, one of the things that might apply to a person in your audience and many people in our audience, there's going to be two, three, four things that I will apply to them. So I say, okay, so nothing horrible has happened to you. Let's say the stuff that's in the ACEs score, domestic violence, sexual abuse, major accidents, major illness, stuff like that. But let me just give it to you very simple. It's where you bullied in school, where you bullied in school and made fun of. And now to this day at 30, 40, 25 years old,

60 years old, it still affects the way that you navigate groups, the way that you enter a space where you heavily criticize about your looks or your weight or your color or your hair growing up. And now it has developed into social anxiety symptoms where you prefer to stay home or you have your two best friends and that's what you mess with only, right? Are you or somebody that you love dearly living with an illness that cripples them? We have so many people that their parents are in hospice that they've had to put their older parents in memory care. Right. Because they cannot longer stay home. Many people that suffer from endometriosis or gastritis or all of these chronic things that affect your day-to-day do you have that right so you have an experience is there substance abuse in your family and history it's not that those things determine who you are many of us have pulled ourselves by the bootstraps right and

going on with life I had a bad daddy I had a bad mama I live in a bad neighborhood or or my best friend died an accident and really traumatized me but i'm gonna live for the both of us those things are valid but it doesn't mean that you don't need attunement right it doesn't mean that getting a tune-up right about letting go of those experiences and how they have affected the way you see yourself did you were you raised by a by a family by parents that got divorced and that really tamed to you or they stayed together in their toxic in their toxic cycle and now that tames how you see relationships and how you experience love yeah they're all did your pet die six months ago and you're still crying about it because you're just blocking it in the

back of your mind and you're not processing the grief and the loss did you move a lot and now you're like i don't need friends or did you develop a persona that in your core you know it's not who you are and these are the type of things it doesn't have to be like i was in a shootout i was in a major accident or my my mom god forbid died those things are valid reasons to find a therapist those things are valid reasons to join a peer support group but so are the other things is your body changing right after pregnancy are you having fertility issues your friends are your friends but i i have i have a phrase that i say to people best friends don't let their friends be their therapist that's not a good job best friends don't let their friends be their therapist no i know a lot of people that's what they do they

get together with their friends and they and they go through all their stuff and you're just like why are you talking to stuff about people like that? Because those people are just as messed up as you are. But it is also that the therapist is a neutral person. So if you come here talking trash about your husband or your boyfriend or your sister or your mother-in-law, I am a neutral canvas. I'm going to hold you accountable. I'm going to teach you how to create boundaries, very structured to upgrade your level of communication so that whoever that person is has an understanding of where you're coming from. I'm going to help you look at this and how this is replicating potentially things that happened in your past and how you're choosing to address that i'm neutral my allegiance is to my client but a

well-trained therapist never is going to agree with everything that you say you come here with this they did this to me and everybody's wrong and all my cousins and blah blah blah and i was like hold on hold on let's break this down let's break this down and see not only where they're coming from what kind of behavioral patterns they have what was their own history of trauma but let's also revisit why are you expecting the people that have done the same thing to do different what we can love them and release them into the universe and give ourselves the permission to say my mother and my father did the best that they could. That's an example. And that was not enough.

But just the way that you have emotionally immature parents, traumatized parents, or cousins or uncles, there is another 8 billion people in this earth. Just like you are a motherless daughter, there are so many daughterless mothers out there. Find yourself in church, in the YMCA, in the walking club volunteering, and give yourself the permission to say, these people that I'm surrounded with that I love, in which I understand their flaws, they cannot give me more than they're giving me. And it's never

going to happen. So let's start with that. And let's create a structure in which we can interact with them without creating more hurt for them or for us let's come up with decisions where sometimes the decision is i'm never going to have contact with them again i'll release them in love but i deserve peace and i cannot be part of this dysfunction anymore and i'm going to open myself to the universe so that i can find people that can fulfill that role dysfunction anymore and i'm going to open myself to the universe so that i can find people that can fulfill that role for me and i can fulfill that role for them that is also

an option right now going from this place of scarcity so once you get to the place where you can answer what does chris want and what does ch need? So you develop the emotional vocabulary. We check what are your values right now, not the values that you had when you were in college or you went for that career. Right now, what are the things that make your heart sing? What makes you feel complete? Once we have the emotions and the values in line,

and we start creating a structure to your life's narrative, then you can go to a place where you can't release what is not yours to carry anymore. You can buy purses, you can go on girls trips, you can go do all of the things that self-care do for you. And that is wonderful. But it's like putting a coat of paint on top of a house where the foundation is shaky. You can do those things if they make you happy and they make you feel more pretty and that's perfect but don't give up on finding the right fit for you as a provider whether it's a therapist or a life coach or the wellness coach whatever it is wherever you are we welcome you there and you start telling your brain in your heart show me

what are the things that I've been holding on to what are the lacks or the gaps that I have what are the skills I have to upgrade and then your life goes into a space where when life brings you different options opportunities or challenges you're so fortifying yourself that you know exactly how Chris is going to react so you don't go through this cycle of they said this they offered me this show they offered me this interview oh this one asked me for 500 you don't go through that cycle of anxiety oh my god should I do it should I not do it do I look like I'm a jerk they know I have it right because you're going to be centered in the knowledge of who you are and what is the priority and you're going to be centered in the knowledge of who you are and what is the priority

and you're going to have a script for that you're going to have a structure to deal because realistically in life we have 10 20 different interactions and every once in a while we get you know a ball that we're not expecting but mostly if people want to have things from you they want to give you things so when you create a structure for yourself that's cemented on what comes next what kind of life am i trying to build forget about what happened before 10 years before last week too much standing today getting clear on my emotions getting clear on my life history on my values what's really important? What comes next? And you can always give yourself permission to say yeah, I used to be a procrastinator before But that was then and this is now and now I'm working towards that that I used to drink a lot

I used to whatever it is. I used to eat this type of food. I used to spend my money in this particular way And you accept that because that's the reality. But any given morning, any afternoon, 345, you can say, you know what? Kay doesn't do that anymore. Kay is learning how to move forward. And I'm going to get the resources and the people in my team that I need, whether that is your reverend, a priest, a therapist, a school counselor, an accountant. We have to create a team. This is a holistic approach. You're not working with people. Your finances are not super tight. We're going to get your finances tight. We're going to start taking better care of your physical body. We're going to release whatever negative conditions

and trauma you have. We're going to look into into your children does your daughter need a therapist to those your daughter need accommodations in school does she need to be tested for aptitude to see what she should study in college we always try to do everything ourselves everything ourselves everything ourselves if Beyonce and Taylor Swift have a team, they have a team. They do this at an excellent level. Yes, they have a lot of talent, and maybe they were a little gifted one way or the other, but they have a team. We have to look at ourselves as our biggest asset, right?

We look at ourselves as our biggest asset and say, who else can come in the ring for me what organization should i join and even if i don't go to all the meetings i want to push myself to go for 10 minutes i'm gonna sign in walk in be there for 10 minutes even if it's uncomfortable and then i'm gonna leave and i'm gonna start doing that a little a little more i'm gonna tell myself yes i am deserving and the worst thing that can happen is well i go to this therapy as well if the therapist knows you need no help to be like well that's great that you came but it's not clinically appropriate for you to be here go find a life coach go go join the ymca take some pole dancing classes if you want to get in touch with your

sense whatever but therapy is not the thing that you need right now. Yeah. So as we round out the show, tell us, reaffirm for us the offerings that you have that people can find on your website. Tell people the best way to reach out to you, onboard with you, or see if you're a good fit, et cetera, et cetera. Well, definitely. Definitely. So particularly for the people that work on institutions, in colleges, in schools, if you need a speaker, somebody that comes in to train your staff on the wealth mindset, on allowing your parents in the school to understand that there are other resources, that everything in the school so I can come in and demystify what therapy is, what life coaching is, what wellness coaching is, so that people stop centering all their requests for help, specifically on the universities and colleges, so that they can become their own advocates and they can see the other resources in the community also as suitable. When it has to do with individuals,

I'm exclusively working on EMDR intensives offerings in New York and in North Carolina where people, it's sometimes very hard to make it to sessions one hour a week. Sometimes also we're dealing with very distressing things that one hour a week, it just takes months for us to be able to process it. So that's when the EMDR intensive model was created. So people actually go to EMDR intensive, they sign up and you have therapy straight from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. And you're reprocessing, reprocessing, upgrading, releasing, learning how to cope, learning how to address,

creating a script for your life. And people do it in sequences of one day, two days or three days back to back based on what the level of trauma or dysregulation or the needs are. So I offer EMDR intensives in New York, in Manhattan, New York, and also in Cary, North Carolina. And you can reach out to me through my website. I will also be, I am working on writing a book. So the book will be released and those updates will also be in my website. And I'll just continue being in the community if they have a podcast that they would like to invite me to i am also a keynote speaker

if you want to give people the permission to help themselves and become better for themselves in your community be sure to reach out there you go well it's been very insightful to have you on thank you for coming on and helping us out with all this data absolutely there you go thanks for on us for tuning in check out her website or and all of her wares you know if you have trauma or if you have psychological issues get help now people always ask me what would you do if you could go back and talk to your teenage person you know i had a lot of adhd was checking the door 20 times a night and stuff. So you get help early on. Cause man, I can talk to so many people and I can be like,

yes, you that trauma you had as a child. Yeah. You can see 50 years of that down your road. So there you go. Get help folks. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss,

linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss, chrisfoss1, the tick tockity and chrisfossfacebook.com. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.