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Hey, what's up, y 'all?
My name is Kir gains and welcome to radio headspace and to Monday morning.
I have the pleasure of guest hosting a radio headspace this week, and I'm so excited to be here with y 'all.
For those that don't know me, I'm a therapist and a mental health advocate, and my area of expertise is men's mental health.
So establishing healthy relationship dynamics, that's kind of my thing.
I'm really pumped to be here with y 'all this week in honor of Movember.
Yes, Movember. Movember is all about bringing awareness to men's health problems, and that includes mental health, which is very close to my heart.
So this week, we're going to explore different ways to de -stigmatize men's mental health.
And one thing that I really want to stress is that this is a group effort.
So if you're not a man, there are most likely some men in your life and we need to all work together for things to change.
To kick off this week, we're going to start at the root of it all.
Stigma's around therapy specifically with men.
As someone who's been on both sides of the therapy couch, both on the couch and in front of it, as a client and a therapist, I can tell you that therapy is very often misunderstood.
And I've seen firsthand how we can change lives.
We're going to dig into why it's taboo, how stereotypes hinder some people's experiences with therapy, and how we can reframe how we view and approach clinical health.
So there are a lot of misconceptions when it comes to therapy, and I understand why, but let's separate it into two categories, misconceptions that a lot of people have and misconceptions that men have specifically.
So the reason that people have misconceptions about therapy, one is because you've never seen therapy really work.
A lot of us, even in grad school, as I was studying to become a therapist, I noticed that I didn't get to see a therapy session in action.
And because we don't get to see it in action, the imagination makes up some remarkable things.
It's a mix of what we saw in movies, what we see in TV, and kind of what we hear from casual conversation amongst peers.
Therapy used to be specifically for people with profound psychiatric challenges.
Now those people weren't treated very well back in those days.
And because we don't have our eyes on what a therapy session looks like for individuals with different lived experiences, it's hard to fill the gap between what used to be that mistreatment is only for people who are quote unquote crazy.
And what therapy is now a really brilliant experience, conversational experience, that's transformative in the way that you see yourself and the way that you see the world.
The misconceptions about therapy in terms of how men think about it come from the fact that masculine ideology is really hinged on two things, profound self -reliance, and the masking of emotions and vulnerability.
To go into a room and talk to someone about issues that you struggle with deeply that you probably don't mention to anyone else.
It violates both of those things.
In some men's minds, it makes you not self -reliant because you're not pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
By the way, that's not a thing emotionally most of the time.
And also it is the place where you expose your vulnerabilities, which can make you feel lesser, and it can make you feel weaker.
So I think it just leaves a lot of room there for people to not fully understand how therapy can help you and even vilify it in some ways.
The way I like to frame it is that I have a bag full of breadcrumbs, and in this bag of breadcrumbs, we're going to drop a crumb along the long trail between where you are and where you would ultimately like to be.
And how we leave these breadcrumbs is we reframe your thoughts, we challenge your perspective, we validate some of the things that you're dealing with in your mind that you deal with alone.
We say the quiet part out loud in a room where there's no judgment, there's no shame, there's just relentless understanding.
And those breadcrumbs are meant to help you guide yourself from where you are to where you want to be.
I had an individual come in one time, who had some thoughts around family.
They weren't in a great place with parenthood, they weren't in a great place with the idea of being someone's partner.
And they expressed to me that they hated it.
This is something that I hate.
I do not like. And that's not something that you can admit out to the general public, but in a therapy session where this individual didn't understand is that they get something from me that's called unconditional positive regard.
And what unconditional positive regard means is that no matter what you say, no matter what you think, no matter how you feel, I will not judge you.
I will validate that experience to a point and then I hope you sift through and find the goodness that's in that experience.
And then some of the things that you can probably do away with.
So you're probably wondering, well, how did you work through it?
How do you get from, I hate my family.
I hate my marriage.
I hate my life to find and joy in these experiences.
Well, the first thing that I do in the therapy session is I ask questions.
I try to get a baseline.
And some of the questions I ask is about history.
What did family look like for you growing up?
I also asked specifically, what stressors are you having?
What exactly is it that makes you hate this marriage?
What is it that makes you hate parenthood?
What is it that makes you hate the season of your life?
What we grew to understand is this individual didn't hate these portions of their life.
They hated the way that these portions made them feel.
They hated the pressure that these parts of life were putting on them and how it changed their character in a way that they were not ready for.
So the second stage of what we do is compartmentalization.
When we separate the person from the problem, when you're able to separate the person from the problem, you learn to decrease the amount of blame that you put on the individual for the circumstance that you're in.
You're better able to see holistically, why you feel the way that you feel, and you don't make enemies out of the people around you.
You just understand that they're players in an unfair situation and when you can shift the blame from a person to a circumstance, it's much easier to manage because you can't change a person, but you can change your circumstance and you can change it for the better and you can figure out a way to make
it work for you. So it's not that I hate parenthood.
I hate the fact that I have to wake up at 5 45 am every morning and drive my kids to school.
I don't hate marriage.
I hate the fact that it's so unfamiliar, comparative to the life that I built for myself by myself.
The difference between making the person the problem and making the problem the problem.
I don't think they saw that coming into therapy, but it was incredibly helpful for them to be able to find joy in their lives and move on in a really meaningful way.
Ultimately, the goal that I have for somebody who's coming to therapy and seeking my services is for them to get clarity.
It's for them to better understand how their thoughts, their feelings, and their behaviors are all interconnected in an endless loop.
Thoughts influence feelings, feelings influence behaviors, behaviors influence thoughts.
It gives you a better idea of where you are in that cycle and where there may be a disconnect that is getting you in a place of life that you do not want to be, or it's affecting your emotional state to the point where your relationships, both with yourself and with the people around you, are adversely
affected. All right, folks.
That's all for today.
Tomorrow, we're going to explore the kinds of cognitive distortions and how they have a negative impact on your mental health.
Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you back here really soon.
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