118. Sarah #33: Courage is Fear Walking

Explicit content warning

01/04/24 • 69 min

We’re back! Doug is joined by Kenzie on the breakdown and they pick up right where Sarah left off in her therapy sessions. Sarah has been listening to podcasts featuring other people’s experiences in cults, which gets her intellectualizing how growing up in a cult still affects issues of power and control in her life now. Doug helps Sarah get into the emotion by putting the focus on “her” own personal story and subjective relationship with “her” parents in the cult, rather than looking objectively at “one's” experience and “one’s” parents. Doug tells Sarah a story about working with a teenager to highlight how someone can access their deeper feelings by allowing anger to come out first rather than suppressing it with restraint or punishment. Sarah is motivated to let anger come up and come out to get to the real feelings that she’s compartmentalized.

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Previous Episode

117. Sarah #32: Camping In Your Mind

We discuss the issue of “control” after it came up in our small talk about parties, drugs, and past behavior. Sarah sees clearly how the abuse she suffered in the cult as a child triggers her so profoundly in her current life. She is starting to make a connection of how setting personal boundaries can keep her safe, especially when anxiety comes. Sarah is now personalizing her experiences, as evidenced by her saying “I” at several points in the session rather than referring to the general “one” or “you.” Doug tells a story about camping with his dog that helps Sarah express her own feelings about freedom and safety. It’s a great benchmark moment in their therapy for Sarah to have identified a frame of reference for those feelings.

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Meredith Levy

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119. Sarah #34: The Sarah Whisperer: (Re)Parenting With Natural Consequences

Doug introduces the concept of natural consequences to Sarah as opposed to being judge and jury as a parent, even if the punishment fits the crime. Sarah acknowledges that she is not failing as a parent; rather, she is growing as a parent. She points out that her growth is carrying over to other aspects of her life. Sarah calls Doug “the Sarah whisperer,” and Doug turns this around and reminds her that she is the one whispering to herself and growing. She is, in effect, actively re-parenting herself – and we hear it happening in this session. In the breakdown, Doug and Kenzie talk about how to know which direction to take a client during a session, especially when there are moments with multiple possibilities to process. Therapy is like a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book – if only real life let us peek ahead at the options before choosing!

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Mentioned in this Episode:

Choose Your Own Adventure books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/the-enduring-allure-of-choose-your-own-adventure-books