The Therapy Edit - On finding people who get you

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

In this ten minute epsiode of The Therapy Edit, Anna considers how you can find more people who 'get' you and welcome them in to your life.Find your tribe and feel seen and happier.We hope you enjoy the listen.

Hello and welcome to the Therapy Edit podcast with me, psychotherapist Anna Martha. I'll be bringing you weekly 10 minute episodes to encourage and support your emotional well-being. Good morning, everyone. I mean saying that you might not be listening. In the morning, you might be listening on a night shift or a night feed. And actually, as I record this, it's in the afternoon and my house is about to get very noisy. So I'm glad that the episodes are 10 minutes. It means that I get to record more. And don't forget, if you listen to this regularly, do subscribe because it means that

they will just pop up for you and downloaded ready. So today's episode is all about how to find more people who get you. This comes of the back of a newsletter that I wrote a few weeks ago. And I've got so many emails just saying how much it resonated. and weirdly, it's all about, it's all about slugs, but you'll have to bear with me, okay? I'll get to the slugs in a moment, but know that feeling got is a really deep human need. Feeling got means that we're more likely to be accepted. And actually, that's a really important part of being human.

I think often we want to be okay with the fact that some people won't get us. want to be okay with the fact that maybe someone really important in our life doesn't get or understand us. But ultimately it jars. It jars with that deep human need to feel seen, to feel known that makes us feel safe. So it's this kind of inbuilt drive really that sometimes we can battle against. I think the challenges is that we are in touch with so many people, aren't we in our digital world? So this feeling of maybe just, yeah, those relationships just being a little bit thinly spread, whereas perhaps a generation or two ago we would have just invested in less people and maybe way more offline. So we would have perhaps had more

opportunity to feel got. But I'm going to share with you a little tip on how to feel more got. So it's off the back of really early, early morning walks. I often wake up around, I know this morning it was five, but my mind was buzzing. Buzz buzzing with lots of different things, but I tend to wake up just before my husband's alarm goes off at 5.45. Now my kids, they are currently 5, 7 and 9, can be rioting around in their rooms, but we don't officially start the day properly. until 7 a.m. So before 7 a.m. I try and do something for myself to give me some calm before the chaos begins in a bit of capacity and hopefully a little bit of patience to deal with it. And sometimes I head around for a walk around the block down the track towards the train

station just around and about. And I revel, I love it. I revel in the quiet roads and the loud bird song and I never plan on these walks I just see what time I wake up and yeah if I feel like it and it's sunny there's a concrete path that I walk down and at this time of year

there are tons of slugs and they make this seemingly daily pilgrimage from the grassy edge on one side of this path to the other side and they're there they're all just every morning I don't know if it's the same slugs, different slugs, I don't know.

But there's tons of slugs just going from one side to the other. And I don't know why. I don't know where they're going. I don't know if they're same slugs. I don't know. Anyway, the other morning I did that same lap around the block. And the slugs, they were doing something completely different. They weren't just going from one side to the other, totally independently, totally on their own.

instead there were many many clusters of slugs together it's like they convened for many slug parties on the path it was the strangest thing it was like they'd all suddenly discovered that they weren't alone on their little solo journeys after all as if one of them had had kind of yeah veered towards another and be like hey you're here I thought it was on my own and they yeah they were just in like these little clusters and it was just so strange and honestly they've gone back to doing their normal solo thing and it was just really weird but I thought about the slugs and as I do I think a little bit more and I find a message in pretty much everything but I thought oh my gosh we do this too don't we we we slug along

feeling like the only ones on a particular journey struggling with a particular challenge facing a nuanced version of parenting or caring that we don't see reflected in our immediate friendship groups and then sometimes in this magical moment we cross past with someone who gets it and it's an amazing feeling isn't it you may well have a particular moment in mind as I speak a moment where you have had a conversation or you shared a little something and suddenly you have found someone else who gets it. And in that moment, we realised that regardless of how deeply alone we felt, we weren't, there are people all around us treading similar journeys.

It's just such an encouragement, these funny little slugs in their groups, recognizing that they weren't, I mean, they probably really weren't thinking anything or saying anything to each other. know much about how slugs communicate or if they communicate at all. But I just loved that little recognition that there are so many times in my life where I have really felt completely alone in the nuanced version of life or motherhood that I was experiencing. Silent Weflux. I didn't know it was a thing and I remember very specifically discovering that it was a thing and finding a Facebook group at like 4 a.m. on some random night back in 2016 and realizing it was a thing. And I wasn't alone in the darkness, literally metaphorically, emotionally. That wasn't some

failure of a mother. I remember discovering Instagram accounts talking about autism and parenting and again, just feeling this absolute relief. Now, as you listen to, to me talk about those moments of relief. I want you to reflect on whether there are any areas of your life in which you feel like you're alone. But cognitively, you know that there must be someone else experiencing this. But perhaps you haven't had the time or the energy or the bravery. Sometimes it is guts, isn't it? It's guts to think, I'm going to go and I'm going to look for that. And I'm going to, I'm going to see who's out there and it might take a little bit of vulnerability. It might take a little bit of sharing some of those thoughts, those feelings.

And that can feel like a massive thing to do. But honestly, it's such a powerful relief. And I really, really hope that if you feel alone on any part of your journey, that you will find that too and that you will chance upon your metaphorical slimy slug cluster, which is absolutely disgusting to think of it like that. So if you feel like you need to be more got, number one, there is often a grief when you don't feel got by the people you would most love to get you, no matter how well you articulate yourself. It can feel really hard. And I've got a whole chapter in my upcoming book called The Uncomfortable Truth. And it's on the uncomfortable truth of the fact that you will be misunderstood. So how can we come to more of a place

of acceptance of that? So part of wanting to be more got is often coming to a place of acceptance that not everyone will get you and there can be a real grief and a pain in that sometimes. But then finding those spaces and finding those support groups online, offline, having those conversations giving a little bit of a glimpse and an insight to a few more people into your life so that you can have more of those charts encounters of, oh my gosh, me too, that just makes your heart feel connected and in that you feel less than me. So I hope that helps and I hope that over this next week maybe there are one or two of those little moments for you where you feel a bit more got but in the meantime please don't forget to yeah go and pre-order a book my book the uncomfortable

truth and there will be a lot more in there to both give you more encouragement on how to feel more got but also to accept the fact that sometimes we just won't in fact a lot of the times we just won't feel got and that isn't you not being able to articulate yourself well that's just yeah just part of being human complex humans a lot around a lot of complex humans but i will speak with you very soon bye i am so excited to announce that my brand new book the uncomfortable truth change your life by taming 10 of your minds greatest fears is available for pre-order now and is out on the 8th of August and in this book we tackle some of life's big unavoidable uncomfortable truths such as some people don't like me i am going to fail life isn't

there bad things will happen and in this book we tackle these big uncomfortable trees that rob us of so much headspace and energy as we try and control and avoid them and as we move into a place of radical acceptance of these truths you will find yourself living more freely and intentionally with more presence and confidence than ever before. So come on this journey with me and pre-order now at Wardstones in Amazon and we can celebrate together.