So blah blah life stressors/work stuff/not fabulous habits/shitty sleep/being a queer Jewish American with a uterus in 2026/perimenopause/my baseline mental health bullshit… basically I have gone and gotten the brains in a bit of a pickle. I’ve been in a partial hospital program for a few weeks.
(Now for those of you just joining us, I’m a therapist who works with teenagers. So I had some game going in, knowledge wise. But when stressed I tend to be a brain in a jar and I have been pickling in a very toxic brine, so I needed some help reattaching my head and my body. Anyway.)
This program uses a different therapy model (ACT = Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) and there are a couple of things I’ve learned that were really powerful that I wanted to share.
- who actually is your inner critic? Like, what do they want? Imagine just turning to that horrible judgy voice in your head and compassionately asking “what is it you want, exactly?”
Like, Karen the Successful White Lady in my head needs to shut the fuck up, because her diatribes are cruel as fuck and genuinely making me want to die cry a lot. And also, when I turned and faced her, well mainly she would like me to do some movement and hydrate and have a house that is pleasant to live in and follow through on my commitments.
And in this program I was able to sit with her (myself) a little and now I’m like — you know what, Karen, you can be an absolutely hateful, judgy bitch, but these are some fair points. So how about you work on developing some compassion and I’ll take this under advisement.
And then I felt some feelings, which leads to the other thing.
- wait a minute, go back to the feeling part. I’m a very analytical person with a lot of anxiety and I can tell you exactly what the feeling is that I’m feeling, how it got there, what part of my backstory is getting triggered, etc etc. Like, give me a feeling, I will give you a nuanced understanding of that feeling’s origin. I do not suck at this either personally or professionally.
Some of you may have noticed that I missed a step. Turns out, I jump right from stimulus to analysis. I’m not actually numb or alexithymic, but l am very, very avoidant and I want to throw my big brain at a problem. So I go right to “let’s figure this out.”
Turns out, we gotta feel the feeling. Yes, you. And me. And all of us on this nerdy wordy website. We can’t skip this step. Your body will eventually be tired of quietly and politely Keeping The Score and reach a point where it cannot do it anymore. Ask me how I know.
But if we feel the feeling — like actually sit with it and cry and scream or whatever, and breathe, and do whatever we gotta do to re-regulate (I’m learning TIPP skills in my program) — if we can do that, the feeling doesn’t sit around in our bodies destroying our peace on a molecular level. We need to complete the stress cycle, like the Nagoski sisters say.
I knew this intellectually, but um, actually, our stress response cycle doesn’t care how smart we are. We don’t get a pass on this. I have been jumping to analysis because, for me, that’s the easy part. But avoiding the actual feeling just lets it stew in your brain. Go back, Sanj, you skipped a step, my good bean.
God fucking dammit, it is so annoying, i gotta breathe and jump around again. Such bullshit.
Anyway, I know lots of skills, I can go for days. But this is the really, really hard one we genuinely can’t skip.
So anyway, that’s what I learned on my winter vacation desperately necessary medical leave. These are really new habits, so I’m not immediately and magically fixed, but I have a direction to go in, and that’s something.
I thought I would share because I suspect a lot of you can relate — and look, I just saved you 5-6 weeks of intensive outpatient therapy.
