Welcome to Headroom, the podcast where we explore all things essential to mental health and well being. I'm Jim Owens, your host and licensed mental health counselor at Lansing Community College. While you're about to hear from some phenomenal people who have incredible ideas for you and your life, podcasts are no substitute for professional medical advice. So if you need help, Please call or text 988. Okay, having said that, let's get into the Headroom and begin today's conversation. Okay, welcome back, everybody. Hope you enjoyed part one of my interview with Jason Riley. Licensed professional counselor, Certified advanced alcohol and Drug counselor, Jiu Jitsu master, Judo master.

I don't know about master, but I've definitely spent a good chunk of my time in life in those areas. And I like to think of myself as OG at the gym. Yeah, well, because time is going by, so I do well, I think, for myself. But I also like, you know, in those places and spaces that are therapeutic, I think I can make an argument for that. Trying to be a really good peer and model things that we want in those activities, support my peers and help the next generation. Coming up. Yeah, so those are kind of some of my goals or the things that I try to do.

I'd love to hear about how that connects. In our first episode, we talked a lot about purpose and meaning and what the trends are in addiction counseling and things like that. Maybe how things are changing. But I'd like to talk a bit more about the sense of community that you brought up in that episode. And, you know, like, again, I'll make general statements here about how maybe mental health is typically viewed. It's a kind of, I think, viewed as an individual project. An individual person goes into an office with a shut door and another therapist sitting across from them, and they're kind of there doing their own work. And it kind of forgets, if it's not careful, it forgets about the community outside in that person's life, all of that person's relationships, the places that they work, the places they spend time in all the other dimensions of their life, frankly, that they're a son or a.

Daughter or all the hats that we wear.

I mean. Yeah, thank you. Even better. So it's just not one clinical. I'm treating a biological organism in front of me. It's. I'm treating. I'm part of the treatment of a huge complex organism and system. I mean, that's pretty wide, but how would you phrase it?

I agree with that. For the most part. I think that with an individual, we gotta Try to get them to recognize that they're part of that. So we see that because of our training or other folks. I don't think sometimes the folks that we sit with realize that they're part of a system or all these other things play a part, or all the hats that they wear play a part as well. And finding ways. We were kind of talking about when we just started again, you know, like, what are other environments that are therapeutic? So it may not necessarily be therapy, but it's helpful or good for you or it's therapeutic in some type of way.

Yeah.

Also, you know, I think engaging in. Some folks have talked about just like reading or podcasts, you know, other things that seem therapeutic for them that they can hold on to. So it's not necessarily therapy. But can I listen to a book that is about therapy and what can I glean from that that might be helpful and look into the community to find connection that you feel a part of and that will be helpful in some type of way, not only for yourself, but for all the hats that you do wear. So, hopefully I answered your question.

No, you did. Yeah. I mean, I think it's obviously, again, it's always this interplay of polarities between you're an individual, but you're part of a system.

Absolutely.

And therapy isn't meant just to be an individual. I mean, we call it pretty much individual psychotherapy. There's also family counseling, there's couples counseling.

Yeah.

My experience in addiction counseling is it's pretty good at pulling in support systems, probably better than any other treatment.

Yeah. I think that goes back earlier in our conversation that. Because it seems obvious, like, oh, they do need help.

Yeah.

Because of the behaviors that the support system is seeing or others are seeing at times.

That helped, too. When I was first introduced to the field, it was in my own family. I mean, I started going to inpatient treatment for family members, not my own treatment, but that's when I first learned that there was such a thing as, like, addictions treatment. And there were treatment centers. And I was like, I don't know, probably 12 years old and going in because I had an older sibling who was in and out of rehab for several years. And I thought what the therapist was doing in the room with adults and getting them to talk to each other with their teenage kids was really, really amazing. And I remember seeing that person and thinking, like, that's like a superhuman adult. Like, I've never seen adults communicate like this. They were so calm, like, had presence. They were engaged with everybody. You can kind of picture this like a huge group therapy room with parents and kids. And I was just like, my jaw was kind of open at this one adult in the room who was doing it right. Kind of. I just had this sense, I was like, they're a good communicator. They're empathic, they're sensitive, they're smart.

Checking in with everybody.

Yeah.

Making connections for everybody when the connections are off. So I was going to go there, too. So we're kind of aligned, I think, in some ways, because you're talking about it. So I think a microcosm of what we see happening to a certain extent is like, when you do group therapy, which is one of my favorite things to do, is that you actually kind. If you can, you kind of build your own little community.

Yeah.

Within there. And hopefully we get to cultivate some connections there. Not that you're forcing those things, but when we're together long enough and talking about things in our lives, we start to cultivate those connections. Hopefully.

Yeah.

And then when that happens for folks, they can start to take some of that out of the group room into the next group, which is their life.

Yes.

And so aligning with other groups, bigger groups, and having skills to connect now.

Yeah. I don't know. We didn't talk about this ahead of time, but are you familiar with a book or. It became. It was a popular TED talk by Yohari. Can't think of his last name. Johann Hari, actually is his name. Johann Hari, who wrote a book on addictions called the Lost Connections. And he kind of talked about addiction and depression. He wrote a couple of books talking about this, but he's a journalist and he went around and kind of studied epidemiologically or sociologically what's going on with addiction. And he came back from it and he basically concluded. And I recommend people to go look at his TED talk. It's probably 10 or 15 minutes long. He pushed pretty hard on the hypothesis that people are addicted because they lack sufficient connection and community or they couldn't get on the other side of their addiction because they didn't have enough support to do it.

Yeah. I think there's another individual that articulated same stuff. I think his name was John Harai.

Okay.

In a TED Talk as well.

Yeah.

He talked about rat studies.

Yeah. We're talking about the same person. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yep.

Okay. Yeah.

H A R I is the last name.

Yep. Yeah. So he used the rat studies and he. There could be a good argument. And I do bring this up that, you know, Community recovery has to do with recovery, but it could be that it has a lot to do with connection and community and people being together. And I think humans find that in different ways. Right. Like we both do activities that we're connected to other communities.

Yep, absolutely.

Whether that's judo and jiu jitsu for me or mountain biking.

Yeah.

More for you. A little bit me. So we're finding these therapeutic communities to connect with, engage. And sometimes it doesn't even have to be the deepest relationships within those groups.

Groups.

It's just like, hey, there's a group. And I get to go do something that's good for me and good for us. And then it gives us some support, some relief, and then we can go on to wear another hat that day.

I remember thinking when I first went into this field, I don't know about you, but the gold standard would be one on one therapy. And group therapy would be like a tertiary type of support therapy. That's how it was always presented to me in school and in my life experience before I became trained. How did you see it before you got into the field? Has it changed?

Oh, I don't know how I really thought of it. I think outside of the field, I just thought therapy was like this one on one thing.

Yeah.

And then going to school, I think it. I feel like I thought they were equal in a way or they both serve their purpose accordingly. And then as you know, I cut my teeth and you know, working with at risk youth and then being an out patient setting.

That's right.

Similar as to you. And there's a lot of group kind of activities. You know, with the kids, we did a lot of group stuff. Yeah. And then in outpatient, a lot of group stuff, which I enjoyed because I get to see those things happen.

Right.

Like individuals connect or something else goes on or they start. The community starts regulating itself. Yeah, right, right. And those things start to play out and we see those folks be able to progress and move through that. And I think individual sessions are maybe certain times depending on the group. Right. Maybe for things a little closer to the vest and we could save those for the individual session. Yeah. But I think the groups, from what I can tell, are opening up quite a bit.

Yeah.

And not to go down this road too far, but you have open and closed groups.

Right.

I think with closed groups you can do more maybe trauma based stuff and get a little deeper because. And what that means. I'll explain it. Closed group is like you have 10 people sign up. That's your group. Nobody Else comes into it. And you're going to work with those individuals for like 8 to 16 weeks or something. Open group is, it's constantly open. Like new people filter into it all the time.

Yeah.

So when you have new people come into an established group, you have to pay attention to the vibes of that and the dynamics of what's going on. So I've done both and I think there's benefits to both. And I think group. I've seen group do a ton of great things for individuals.

Yeah, it gets bad too. There's no one cookie cutter, one size fits all type of thing.

Absolutely.

But I know my thinking shifted when I started looking into the research on is group therapy just a corollary thing or is it better or worse? And the American Psychological association had something published on their website for a long time. It's probably still there. Reviewing the outcomes for. I think they compared several types of therapy and one of them was individual therapy versus group therapy.

Oh, interesting.

And actually in the study that they cited, group therapy came out a little bit ahead of individual therapy. Now it wasn't what we would call statistically significant, but the numbers came out ahead. And so basically what that showed is you're not missing anything. For those who belong and it's appropriate and they get sorted into group therapy, they're going to get as good outcomes or maybe better than they would an individual. Yeah.

And you could talk to the individual about that. Sometimes we're required things to do. But hey, would you rather do individuals or you're interested in this group about this?

Yeah.

And there could be more buy in to go to this group and see what it's like.

Yeah, I know I've had some clients going way back. I had one in particular who. And I'm not too much into diagnoses, but I'll use the terms here just to help be brief. This person checked all the boxes for narcissistic personality disorder, which everybody throws that term around in the public square. Like everybody's a narcissist. But especially now, this person truly had no regard for other human being. They were objects in their world and they were, you know, they were involved in the criminal justice system. Never had an attorney or would accept a court appointed attorney because even though they had a high school diploma and that's it, they could represent themselves better than anybody else, Right? Absolutely. And they were the smartest person in the room always. And I did individual therapy with this person for like two sessions. And I was like, this is a battle of wills. I Gotta get you into group therapy because I need literally 10 other guys to help me. And it worked. It took like a couple of weeks of this person basically being told, are you sure that that's the right way to see it? That's the only way to see it. Before they finally started to open up to, like, the possibility that they might be wrong about some things.

Yeah. I think in the numbers game or in the group, you can. Individuals that are stuck, sometimes they starts. What happens is, I call it. They become the common denominator. So, oh, wait a minute here. What's going on? Or I think in a treatment team, whether that's an inpatient, what I do, or we've experienced an outpatient, it's a team. So that person may be signed up for more than one group and still have individuals. So now it's. Now this individual's seeing, like, three clinicians through the week. And so the message is starting to sound a little different, but the same. So why are all these. It's saying the same thing.

Everybody's saying the same thing.

Yeah, yeah. Like, well, wait a minute. So should I start to think about this? Or what's going on for me?

Maybe it is me.

Yeah. So you're the common denominator. We got to figure out what's going on with you. And that's not a bad thing. That's maybe, like you said, it's a battle of wills or how do you present the evidence enough to get somebody to consider changing? And then we could go back to the stages of change and other things to kind of.

Yeah, yeah. In that case, that's really what it was about. I want to talk about those stages of change, because for this person, there was no need to be in therapy. There was nothing in this person's life that they saw that needed to change. It was the system outside of them that needed to change. Right.

Yeah. I mean, that's going on now, too, a lot. To a certain extent for individuals.

Yeah.

But, yeah, that would be pre Contemplation.

Pre contemplation. And so our role as counselors whenever we're working, especially with people where there might be some resistance to therapy, is just entertaining the notion of, like, do you think anything in your life could get better if you changed anything in your life?

Yeah. Whatever way you want to say the miracle question. Yeah, yeah. I also think that sometimes how we view resistance needs to be challenged on our part as professionals, too. So it gets weird, and then maybe we take it personally or all that kind of stuff might start to Happen. But sometimes maybe it's fear.

Yeah.

Like, the person's literally scared, unsure, anxious, don't want to say yes to anything. So I think resistance is the thing that we see because you don't want to go along with our plan.

Right, right.

So being more open to options, to deal with resistance or know that it's not just necessarily resistance or rebelling, like, what else is going on? Being curious.

What's behind that?

Yeah, yeah. I think that just kind of popped up for me. Being curious is probably how I got here and also what I try to employ, not only professionally, but personally.

That is my experience of you being curious.

Okay.

Earlier I was saying, like, you're an educator, and I'm sure you've coached in your athletics and stuff, obviously, but you're a student of the mind. You're a student of the field. You're a student in your jiu jitsu and judo. I know you approach it like, what can I learn?

Yeah. In those, like the martial arts, you know, try to. You're gonna get your rank, you put in your time and you get your skill level. But can you keep a white belt mentality, which is. Can you keep a beginner's mentality? And I think that's important to carry with us and talking about things that are therapeutic, like, those worlds for me, like, what I do professionally and what I do, like, therapeutically or for fun or. There's a lot of crossover there. So being open and being, I think, curious about what's going on for folks is a. For me, has been a good place to be because it keeps me from being judgmental.

So I want to see if I'm drawing similarities in my mind between therapy and judo. And I've rest. I've rolled enough.

Yeah, yeah.

You dabbled back. I've dabbled back in the day, back before, it was really a really popular thing. But I know what the experience, like, is of those of you who've wrestled or done jiu jitsu or judo or anything like that. When there's another human being on top of you with all 150 or 200 pounds of their weight, you want them off, like, instinctively. Your amygdala is like firing, saying, get this person off of you. And you have to control and become calm with, let's say, being in a position which is uncomfortable for you, you're being oppressed physically in a certain kind of way. And then your opponent may do something like start to get you into a lock or start to roll you in a certain position. And the Resistance can be to counter attack directly. Right. You could use much better language here, but for the layperson, you see what I'm saying? Like, you just want to fight back against every maneuver they do, but sometimes you have to sweep it and go along with it to get yourself in a better position.

Yeah. So like out of a judo philosophy, and I think this goes with a lot of combat sports or activities or martial arts. Sometimes yielding is winning.

Okay.

Right. So if I yield or I go with it, can I take advantage of that now? Or can I just avoid the situation or problem now? There are times that maybe I don't yield. Like, I show that I have base.

Okay. Right.

Or connection.

Sure.

And the situation will call for that. I think that's part of learning as you go through that. And I also think that those things have been healthy for the individuals I know and even myself to deal with your. Your personhood yourself. The ego. Yeah. As you work through that and you come up through the ranks. Because there's always another human that's just another type of human. That's okay.

Yeah.

It's good. I'm glad. I know that they exist.

Yeah.

Because I think some folks know. Think that they don't exist, but they do.

Yeah.

But also being able to be there. And I think teacher is a good. I think of myself often as a teacher. And that's the root of our. As well. It is being some type of educator. And I think that's why I like group, because I think I get to thrive there. And some type of instruction and back and forth and good dialogue with individuals and clients in the. In the room and hopefully sparking something in them that gets them going. Right.

Yeah. It's funny because we go back to those. In the first episode, we talked about the three Viennese schools of psychotherapy, pleasure, power and will. And here we're talking a little bit about power yielding to some power sometimes so that you can maneuver forward or this or that. But ultimately, I think education. Here's what I wanted to bring it to. When you talk about being an educator in group and even our field counseling grew out of education and guidance counseling, and it turned into clinical mental health counseling over about 40 or 50, maybe 60 years. But when we educate clients about things, they become empowered, which people want. People want a certain. Not everybody wants to be a power maniac. Right. But they want to have some autonomy and some understanding.

The way to say it is autonomy. And that's why I like CBT or cognitive things and teaching the skill sets within them. Or even educating folks generally on what we've been educated on, like fundamental psychology stuff. We call it psychoeducation. Because all of a sudden, there's a label for this thing I do.

Yes.

What you're. Oh, Jay, you're saying this is a thing that I do.

Yes.

And this is what it is. We brought up catastrophizing earlier. If you've had any dose of trauma in your life, you probably catastrophize. Here comes. And the simple explanation for that is that I call it just the Chicken Little.

The sky's falling.

So something happened, and it's the worst case scenario ever. So, hey, for clients, this is what you're doing. This is what it is. So now that you know what it is, can you catch yourself doing it? And when we catch ourselves doing it now I can come up with ways to challenge it. And that, to me, brings so much autonomy for individuals because now they're finding ways to self regulate and cognitively sort themselves out and become more aware of the things going on. I think it's a game changer.

Yeah. There's this interplay of people gaining insight about themselves, awareness about themselves, being educated that they can do something different about it. And I'll circle back to group therapy, which is so useful there. It's like you have 6, 8, 10 other people in the room who can encourage, like. Yeah, that actually is a thing that you do. We've noticed it in here.

Yes. Yeah.

And then they're just like, okay, Roger, that's now in my awareness right now. And now I need to kind of keep it alive. And because I have this knowledge of myself and what I can do, I'm more empowered, and I'm actually more hopeful that I can do something about it.

Yeah. Or even if we get stuck there, then what can I do about it? So now we start making the list of coping skills, or we continue to do therapy, or we check in with our support system, those types of things, so we can hopefully find an antidote to that.

I'm wondering. I feel for the people who never come to therapy because they're so hopeless that anything could change when by the time they get to our offices, it's like we can blow on that ember and get it to kindle into something. I think we can encourage hope by teaching them some things, empowering them. The people who don't show up to therapy. Maybe you're listening to this. There's probably a whole lot of things that you haven't considered that we have because we've been talking to people about these things for decades, that if you sat down to have a conversation with somebody, you might learn some things. You'd be surprised. Yeah.

I think hopelessness is tough to shake off. It can be a whole. You know, I think if you're human, you've had your experience with that. Yeah. So I think that if individuals can recognize that they're in that place, know that there are other individuals, you know, out there to assist you to get out of that place. It's not always easy, but there is assistance out there. And sometimes therapy's fun.

Oh, yeah, that's a good point.

Sometimes it's fun, and sometimes you get results that you didn't even think that you would get out of it. Or you find ways to do. Like, you realize, like, maybe I have a tendency to fall into hopelessness, and I learned skills to navigate staying out of hopelessness. Or you could even paradoxically reframe that. That maybe you have a tendency to go to hopelessness because you are a person that needs to express something about it.

You need to express hopelessness. Yeah.

Yeah. So what do you have to say about it?

Yeah.

Because it may be helpful other for other folks to hear that.

Yeah, that's very true.

Whether that's your therapist, your family, or people you're in a group that you're with. Because when we finally say something, we realize that I'm not alone. And the person next to you is like, oh, I'm not alone.

How often have you had that? You see that relief on their face when they hear, like, there's a name for the thing they've been doing, or they're not the only one.

I mean, I think I've seen that my entire career. Not that it happens all the time, but it definitely comes up in the therapeutic space in therapy and therapeutics, places that we see that. So even as a teacher, whether that was my own learning in therapy or being a clinician, or even on the mats, like, o, oh, this is what I've been doing. And I could have done it this way. Holy smokes.

We're pretty good at paying attention to body language to give us some information about what's going on in our clients. I just want to tell you a short story here, where I just happened to be at the front desk at our office here, where students come up and make appointments, which I acknowledge takes some courage to make an appointment to sit down with a counselor. But I happened to be standing up there, and somebody came up and said, can I make an appointment? I Was like, yeah, sure. And just started chatting them up a little bit. There was nobody around, so it was safe to do that confidentiality wise. And they mentioned, you know, I'm really. I'm struggling with some anxiety. And just to kind of keep the conversation light, I just threw out the old, well, you and half the students here, according to the cdc. And as soon as I threw that little data point out, their shoulders dropped, their twist their head sideways, and they looked at me like, really?

I'm not the only one.

Half the students, I was like, yeah, legit, like half this, like, yes, that's right. And that was so therapeutic. Just for them in that moment to be like, oh, my God, thank God I'm not the only one. Yeah.

Useful information.

It is, isn't it?

Absolutely it is.

That feeling going back to connection, that feeling of like, I'm the only one. I have not groked what the pain of that is. I don't understand that. Well, maybe you do, but that. But people have pain. Like, I'm the only one. It's a horrible feeling for a lot of folks.

I guess I would circle back to maybe that's to connection or isolation and being alone. So, like, I've convinced myself I'm the only one of this. And I haven't checked this with anybody else. I don't have enough. Where are my connections to kind of see, really calibrate this. If this is really true, that would be my first hunch.

Yeah, it does seem to be painful, that's for sure. I know I can speak from my own experience. I haven't wanted to be the only one. One of my best friends in middle school, I was just, like, found out. Oh, I wasn't. This is gonna sound so small, but I was like, oh, my God, I'm not the only kid in school that's poor. Thank God. You know, who's like, family doesn't have food in the cupboards. I thought everybody else's family had food in the cupboards.

Oh, you eat bologna sandwiches, too.

Yeah, right. Or didn't eat it. Didn't eat. Didn't have any food for lunch at school today either.

Yeah, cereal with water today.

Yeah, exactly.

No cow juice.

Yeah, exactly. None of that. So those things did. They were therapeutic to me when I was like, 12 years old to find out, oh, I'm not the only one. And you know, several decades later, it's the same.

Yeah, I think it's good to know that you're not the only one in certain situations. That's real good information. And for some reason, it seems like we're built to kind of think that. My first inclination is that we need to have connections to make sure we are able to check in with that. We're definitely not the only one.

So what do you recommend for people in the community? Maybe we could end on that note is like, I know we've talked about open and closed meetings, which makes me think of AA meetings. Those are Alcoholics Anonymous and there's tons of those meetings throughout the city.

Yeah. So I think the ones I'm most knowledgeable about would be, you know, obviously the Internet is a great resource for most things. So look up. You know, the east and west clubs are good hubs for the community recovery. I think that's AA and NA for folks in the Lansing area. And then, you know, through CMH in, in town here, there's the recovery center, which would be our detox center, you know, 517-267-7623. If you feel like you need detox. I think also if you're really in dire straits, like we need to go to the er. Yeah, stuff like that. Also make calls, reach out to your support system. You know, there is a process to get into treatment, so be steadfast in that. Where I work specifically is a men's residential House of Commons out in Mason 517-244-0393. So men's inpatient, residential, individual therapy, lots of groups, peer recovery activities, some case management out there. So there are options. And I think we could go on about. I bet you there's at least six off the top of my head, like outpatient places in the Lansing area. So if you don't meet criteria to be inpatient, which is where you live there and you do treatment, there's ways to be at home and then you go to classes and places, and that's where you and I kind of cut our teeth. There's plenty of places like that in town as well. And if you're not game for that, and maybe it's worthwhile just doing individual therapy and sitting down and dipping your toes in the water and giving it a try. But I think where we were earlier is that there are helpers out there. So we both chose to do that. And there's many more of us. We need more in the field.

Right.

But we're out here.

We're out here. Yeah. Well, we'll end it there. Thank you so much. I hope you found this useful. And Jay, I want to thank you again for taking time to come on the show.

Yeah, this was great. Thanks for having me and I hope this turns out well.

Thanks. Thank you for tuning in to today's episode of Headroom. Remember, if you need mental health assistance, you can always call or text 988. And if you're a current LCC student, free mental health counseling is available to you at the college. You can learn more at LCC.edu/Counseling. I want to thank our producers here at LCC Connect and encourage you to explore other amazing podcasts at LCCconnect.com. Thanks again for listening. Take care and we'll see you next time in the Headroom.