Imagine being too scared to drive literally

six minutes across the neighborhood that you've been in for 20

years. They're trying to deport American citizens. Where do you deport a

citizen to? Where do you deport somebody who was born

here? Equity feels like oppression when you're the oppressor, bro. And

so they made a police force out of them. All right, here

we go. I'm going to pretend I'm pushing record, because that feels right. Okay, I'm

pressing record. Boop. Hi, everybody.

I'm Lauren Howard. Welcome to Different, Not

Broken, which is our podcast on exactly that. That there

are a lot of people in this world walking around feeling broken, and the reality

is you're just different, and that's fine. I have a rant to do, and I'm

so fucking tired of having rants to do. Like, why do people

keep lighting basic, like, human rights

and dignities on fire so that I have rants to do. I don't want to

have rants to do. I just want to, like, eat snacks and watch shows

about murder. And instead I have to go on the Internet

because I don't know what else to do with my hands. I was like, what

the fuck else am I supposed to do? Like, my. She used to be my

nanny. Now she's my assistant who I do not get through

a day without. She is the functioning part of my brain. Day to day, she

lives, like, maybe six minutes from us in a house in another

neighborhood. But the neighborhood we live in is considered part of this

larger neighborhood in Orlando, and it's gotten very, very large.

It's basically become its own community, even though it's part of Orlando proper.

She's been showing up to this house nearly every day

for almost eight years, seven and a half years,

because she started when my youngest was two months old,

and she has not left us since. And that child is seven and a half

now. So she's been showing up here every single day for that entire time.

And every single day, like clockwork.

I look out of my front window at 8:58, and

her little egg car, she drives a little, like. We call

it an egg. It's like a little Toyota Yaris, and it looks like an egg.

We call it the huevo. And anyway, her little egg car parks right outside

my window, and I'm like, okay, the day is starting because the functioning part

of my brain has arrived. The ways she knows to harass me to get things

done, the ways that she makes sure my children have what they need.

The ways that she communicates with people without me asking to get things on my

behalf. I cannot function without this human, like, on

the other side of this door. I always think that I'm, like, in here with,

like, all my privacy and stuff. And then I'll walk out and she will make

it very clear that she heard everything I just said and parrot it back to

me. And I'm like, oh, I'm so glad that I have. Anyway, she's allowed to

hear everything. She has access to all my emails. If it exists, she's seen it.

So I don't need privacy from her, but I certainly don't have it. Anyway,

one morning she texted me and she was like, I don't think I'm going to

come in today. Which has never happened, except for,

like, maybe one time where she had a cold. I don't think I'm coming in

today. I was like, is everything okay?

Because clearly some sky was falling in. I mean, this person

lived with us, like, lived in my house for two years

during the first two years of the pandemic, because it was the only way to,

like, keep everybody safe and have her rather than having her.

Like, her not showing up was a big deal. I wasn't upset about it, but

it was a big deal. And so I was like, is everything okay? She was

like, I mean, sort of. And I'm like, that doesn't sound right. But

apparently ice was crawling all over our neighborhood and she

was worried that if for some reason she got stopped that they would grab her.

Here's the thing. Aside from the fact that nobody should be worried about that at

all, should not be a concern, full stop. She's a

citizen. She's been a citizen her whole life. Her dad's a

citizen, she's a citizen. But

she looks kind of brown. And her concern was not that

they were going to incorrectly assess her citizenship, it was that they

weren't going to give a fuck. Which is a valid concern, a very

valid concern. And so she said,

kind of sheepishly, honestly, but she said, do you mind if I just work from

home today? And I was like, absolutely, of course. I don't care. But imagine

being too scared to drive literally six minutes

across the neighborhood that you've been in for 20 years,

maybe more than that, because there's

unnecessary federal agents everywhere, and they have

made it their mission to terrorize people based on

how they look and based on their lack of quote, unquote compliance.

Compliance is a bullshit myth. It's not that I didn't understand

what was going on, and it's not that it wasn't miserably

troubling to me. The whole time I felt completely

powerless. Like, what do you do in that situation? Obviously she is

allowed to stay home if that's what she's concerned about. She can do whatever she

wants. She can stay home as long as she needs. But why should somebody have

to stay in their house? Somebody who is actually, I don't even care if you're

here legally, why should somebody have to stay in their house because there's an

unregulated fake army outside your door

who are deployed here not for any reason other than to terrorize

people. Why should that be a thing? Why should she be scared to go to

work? And you know, as the resident

Mayo Sapien of the group, I asked if she wanted me to come pick her

up because I would very happily drive her here. And

in my 6,000 pound SUV that goes broom very

loudly. Because I've reached the point where I'm like, come at me,

bro. I will protect the people. Oh, actually I will.

It's not just the people in my universe. I will protect whomever because

fuck these people. But that was actually before

or the most recent thing where they shot

a ICU nurse in cold blood. Who was rendering aid. He

was rendering aid. They didn't even know he had a firearm with

him. He was rendering aid. And then they tried to say

after they murdered him and emptied an entire clip into him, that he

brandished a firearm at him. Except we have video.

We have video. They can't even lie

about what happened because people know better than to let

them breathe in front of them without video.

On nearly every occasion that they have stepped out of bounds, there has been video

proving that they are outright lying. And this was

before that even happened. And again, your

status doesn't matter in these situations because it doesn't matter

to them. They're saying that they're trying to deal with

immigration issues, but if they were trying to deal with immigration issues, there are

10,000 ways to do that without hurting

people like cattle and being completely non

discriminatory on who you're grabbing. They don't care. They're trying to

deport American citizens. Where do you deport a citizen to?

Where do you deport somebody who was born here? It's not deporting

if you're sending them to a place they're not from. That's kidnapping.

But they don't care. They don't care. It's the threat,

it's the attempt to silence. That's all that's all it's

about. It's not about the rest of it. There is no rest of it. And

the thing that keeps, like, just playing in my head on

repeat that I can't shake is that there's

this narrative. Well, if they had just complied. If they had just obeyed.

Obeyed what? There was not a lawful order being made. There was

nothing illegal being done. Complying with somebody just

because they have a badge is not required

when they're not doing anything within the boundaries of their position.

You do not have to comply with the police just because they said so.

You don't. But the bottom line is, let's say that person

didn't comply. Let's say there was actually a lawful order made and

that person didn't comply. You're not supposed to empty a magazine full

of bullets into a guilty person either. It's not like there's a

situation where this is acceptable. Not only was he

lawfully carrying a firearm, but he hadn't taken it out of his

pocket. The only thing he was brandishing

were the requirements of him of being a licensed

individual. Seeing someone in pain, seeing someone who

needed help, he has an ethical obligation to intervene.

You're not supposed to just let someone die. He was

doing what he's supposed to do and they emptied a

magazine into him for it. And I want to be clear, this is not

the first time. And I don't love that there's so much public

outrage now when this has happened. I think it's like nine previous

times in the last month or something to people who weren't white.

And the outrage is around these two white individuals. But

the outrage needs to go far beyond that. First off, the outrage needs to be

not in the fact that they're killing people, but that they are in the position

to exist and supported by this administration to do the things

they're doing anyway. Baselined. Even before somebody gets hurt,

we have a big problem. But now people are getting hurt.

And instead of it being about these people are in places where

they shouldn't be doing things they shouldn't be doing.

It's about, well, if you just listened, this would be fine. If you

just did what we told you, we won't shoot you. It's like the

governmentalization. I don't even know if that's a word of,

if you stop making me so mad, I wouldn't hit you. If you have friends

right now who are abuse survivors, what is happening in the government

feels very familiar to them because that's what they're moving the Goalposts.

Every time, every time it's somehow a new version of your fault.

When you do what they said the last time, they will find a new way

to encroach upon your freedoms because there's a new thing

that you've done wrong again and again and again until you have no freedoms left,

until you have no ability to take care of

yourself, until you are not allowed to move freely in your community, until

in the same way that you watch abuse victims lose all

their access to money, lose all their access to friends and family, get their

phones taken away, get all of these different ways that they could ask for help

taken away. That's what they're doing. They're making it so

it's silence or death. And if you're not

silent, you're being non compliant. And if you're non compliant,

we can kill you, or we can come into your house, or we can rip

your children out of your arms, or we can try to deport you even though

you live here legally. And the thing is, the courts aren't behind them. The courts

are ruling against them over and over and over. And so instead of trying to

do it through any legal means or any. Not that they were doing it legally

before, but instead of trying to do it through the processes that

do exist, because they keep getting shot down for trying to use

those, they've just decided to go for full violence. Why not? It's a

hard time to exist. And I don't want to make it sound like the field

that I am in is harder to be in than any other, because I don't

think that's true. Though it seems like kind of a fun time to be in

federal law enforcement. If you're an untrained, fragile little man that does

seem like they're having fun. They might be the only people having fun right

now. But it is such a difficult

time to be in mental health right now because, like, what the fuck

are you supposed to say to people? Like, do we have a mental health crisis

or do we have the world just falling apart around us and everything's

terrible and I can't pay my bills crisis, there's no medication for that.

There's no amount of therapy that's going to fix the actual world around you.

And it's not to say we can't help. There are ways that we can help.

Like, what do we do? How do we help people in any way that

actually matters? There are some days where I just sit around and I'm like,

I don't even know what to do with my hands, because I'm over here telling

people that we want to help them. And the reality is I don't know how

much we can actually do. I don't know how much we can actually do. No

idea. And the reality is we can do something. There's always something that

we can do as trained professionals. The

therapists, the psychologists, the psychiatrist, et cetera, who I work with, they

have arsenals of toolkits of ways that they can try to help

you process these things, help you work through these things. Those things exist.

And that's not to say don't rely on your mental health practitioners, but, man, it

feels so futile to wake up every day

and run a business or try to run a business that is

focused on making people's lives better or

trying to make their lives more livable. And then the reality is, on the outside

is this toxic hellscape that I don't like. I don't realistically know we can do

anything about. I mean, I know we can't do anything about it, not in that

capacity, not from a mental health perspective. We can protest.

We can write our senators, we can write our congresspeople. We can be

loudmouths on the Internet. We can help people find community. We can

build other communities. We can try to find safe spaces. We can do all of

that, and all of that is helpful, but all of that is stuff that we

shouldn't have to do. We shouldn't be doing things to protect people against their

own government. And that's what we're doing right now. We're spending time and energy and

resources to try to protect people from their own government. Because one

sad, scared little man with giant ankles and tiny

hands was given the keys to the kingdom. His

followers see no limit to the power that he's

allowed to have. And so he surrounded himself by an army

of sad, scared, little, fragile men who feel oppressed by the

existence of other people who are allowed to exist. That's

the nature of their oppression. These other people are allowed to exist, and

therefore I am threatened by them, and it

oppresses me. Equity feels like oppression when you're the oppressor, bro. And

so they made a police force out of them. They made a police force out

of them. You're not supposed to empty a magazine full of bullets

into guilty people either. There's some

dude bro on the Internet who said, you're oversimplifying. You're taking all

of the nuance out of law enforcement and what it is to have those

jobs and These are people who were giving orders, and they were just

following orders. The people who enforced the Nazi agenda, you know what

we called them? Nazis. These are

grown people who are making choices. And signing an

employment contract does not mean that you have a responsibility to stand

by silent while one of your colleagues murders someone in front of you

and then reinforce the lie that it was the fault of the person who died.

If the reality is that these are people who

got put in a bad situation by bad federal orders that they didn't realize were

going to be their responsibility, then they shouldn't be following

them. It's illegal to enforce an illegal order. You're still breaking

the law. You can't cop out and say, well, I'm just doing my job. Yeah,

so we're Nazi enforcers. And as the descendant of

Holocaust survivors, that doesn't sit right with me. If you're

scared, if you're overwhelmed, if you

feel helpless, if you feel powerless,

that's very reasonable, entirely

reasonable. And that's the goal.

The goal is to make you feel so powerless that there is

nothing else that you can do but sit and let them do what

they want. Now, that doesn't mean that today has to be the day you fight

back. It doesn't mean that you have to go get in a picket line for

a protest. It doesn't mean you have to figure out how to process through this.

But you are not doing anything wrong. There is nothing wrong with you. If the

things going on in this world are so fucking overwhelming

that you're finding yourself feeling completely inept at the things that

you do every day, feeling underproductive, feeling like you can't catch up, feeling

feeling completely burdened.

There is this concept of allostatic load, which is

the things around you that put pressure on you. At

the beginning of the pandemic, there were lots of people who weren't working,

who were furloughed, who didn't have a lot of

responsibilities, and they just reported feeling exhausted all the time. They weren't

doing anything. They weren't job searching. I don't say that critically. They

weren't doing anything because there wasn't anything to be done. They were watching tv, they

were baking sourdough. They were doing all of this, like, very minimal stuff

and would still crash out every day and want to nap all the time because

that's all that they could do. And it's because the allostatic load, the just

amount of environmental pressure and worry

and grief and things that are happening around you is so draining

that you Feel like you have been working 80 hour weeks when in

reality you've been staring at the TV. Because just the existence of

stress puts stress on the body. The allostatic load of this

situation is completely unmanageable. So if

instead of bouncing out of bed and going to the gym like you

normally do, you're exhausted and you don't feel like working,

that's the reality of a hyper stressful situation. And if

you are having trouble finding the motivation because there's this thing

lingering in the universe and maybe it doesn't affect you personally, but it affects you

just by existing. You know, maybe you're not in Minnesota and you didn't know somebody

that's been harmed, but the idea of it happening is enough to hurt you.

That's how these things work. That's realistic, that happens.

So you have to give yourself time to process and grieve and figure

out what the next step is. And the next step might not be for a

little while because you need time that's realistic.

You can figure out your plan of attack, whatever that is, without jumping on a

pick a line today, without jumping on a protest line today. Now, if you want

to do that, if that feels productive to you, if you want to be very

active about it, I support you in that too. There's local protests almost

everywhere. There's organizations that are putting together response

campaigns. You know, I've said this over and over. If we really

want to find out what these people are up to, we just need to organize

a group of like Gen X moms with a Google account

and they will find every skeleton in the closet of every one

of these politicians who has facilitated this. And we will get them out of office

post haste. Because clearly there's something about every one of them

that they don't want somebody else to find out because they have

compromised all of their supposed ethics for

this. But if anybody wants to put together that army, I

will very happily facilitate because I am certain that a couple

of pissed off besties in a room with some margaritas will identify every

single thing that we need to get these human piles of

excrement out of office. But the reason you feel

terrorized is because this is terrorism.

That's why you feel terrorized. And so there is nothing

wrong with you. If this is hard for me, you, there's

nothing wrong with you. There's lots wrong with what's happening in our federal

government. There's lots wrong with what's happening in

Minnesota, literally outside, in my neighborhood, lots wrong.

But your processing of it is not the problem. And you have to do

that however your brain and your body need to so that you

can. I don't even want to say get back to normal, because what the fuck

is normal? Like, how do you get back to normal

when we have a modern Gestapo invading our cities, but

so that you can get through it? And if you can find community and a

group who can support you when you need to be supported, that's going to be

the key to whatever the next step is. Maybe it's

being vocally outspoken, maybe it's going to

protests, maybe it's running for office. Fucking run for office. We need more

people like you. Please run for office. But whatever it is,

if getting there seems insurmountable, it's because

you feel terrorized, because you're being terrorized. That's the point.

That's their goal. That's what they want. And I'm sorry for that. And I'm sorry

you feel that way.

Hello, everyone. Thanks for hanging out with us today.

I have a very special guest with us. This is somebody who I

am very lucky that I get to work with almost every day, who I have

worked with for about the last year, is an incredible therapist who

brings the most lovely

depth of experience, both lived and

employment based, I guess is the best way to put it. Fantastic

intersection of all the things it makes her. Aside from the fact that she is

just like inherently an interesting person, it makes her just fantastically interesting.

So, so glad to have my lovely

friend Maya here. Maya, do you wanna say hi?

Hi. Hello, world. Tell us a little bit

about your background and what you do every day and

maybe some of the things that, you know, I find fascinating.

Originally from Oklahoma City, born and raised.

I used the word raised loosely. And then I

moved to Chicago when I was 26 by

myself via Craigslist. Yes, I would not suggest that today,

kiddos, but it was very rewarding. And I feel like

that's where I grew up and that's where I got to really figure out a

sense of myself without the background noise of politics

and family. I've always had an interest in psychology,

and I'll admit it was piqued by the movie Silence of the

Lambs. I watched it in high school. I was like, that's

fascinating. So I got my BA at DePaul

University in Chicago and I also got my Master in Education

there as well. It was in clinical mental health

counseling. And I've done that for about six

years. And I've learned so much from my

clients just as they've learned from me, which I think that needs to be

shared more often. My main focus has been

LGBTQ with the intersection of

BIPOC people. 1. That's my

intersectional identity. And I remember how

hard it was for me growing up with all of

that shame and fear of just being myself. And then

growing up in the Baptist church made it a lot harder.

I get a little tearful, but I have healed from it.

So it's just based on my experience of being told that

being homosexual back then is worse than

a child molester, a pedophile, a murderer.

I'm glad I took the time to really get to know myself. When I was

in Chicago, I never felt more seen and more uplifted and

loved. And that's also where I met my wife. And that's what

has motivated me to switch for religious trauma.

I had no idea how much of that is still going on in our world,

and now I bet it's even more heightened with. With the political

climate. I will try to keep the shade to a minimum,

but you don't have to. Okay, so Cheeto requirement,

basically, COVID variant

number 2 47, is a part of

that big religious conflict. Right. He's

had so many changes in identity, and unfortunately,

conservative, rigid, oppressive system

of religion is now having a louder voice than it was

before. What does your wife do for a living? And ironically,

she's a pastor,

so that's how we met. So

I was on the board of trustees at a church that she came

to after I joined it a year later. And the reason why, I'll

say I joined that church. And it's Holy Covenant in Chicago.

It's one of the most affirming churches I've ever been to. Before

that my relationship with God was just me and my own. And then

I went to a place where I could actually feel the love and

acceptance. So stayed. A year later, we had a

new pastor come in. I'll admit I Googled her

to see if I

can get to know a little bit about her before she started. And I was

impressed. And it's funny, she'll probably

kill me for sharing this, but when we first met, it was at

a trustees meeting. And I called, introduced

myself, try to be friendly. Her first words. Aren't you a

little young to be on the trustees committee? And I was like,

I'm gonna let that slide. But then.

We got to know each other, we built a friendship, and then

we fell in love. And I never thought

someone of her stature, especially in the church,

could love someone like me. It's not because I don't think I'm lovable. It's because

I'm a heathen. And I didn't know if that would go over well, but

it did and it still does. I'm honored to

be the type of pastor's wife. My own identity,

which we've had to deal with that in her new church here, they

expect me to bake cookies and be nice and take up all

their crap and internalize their

work and local work. They need to be done.

And I love that. I'm like, I have no other career.

I'll attend some services, I'll support my wife.

I'll say, I think my identity as a pastor's wife

is based on Medea and

Maya Angelou. So it's not typical. I say this as a. As a

relatively agnostic Jewish person. Right? Like, like

definitely Jewish. Believe in something, don't

spend a whole lot of time figuring out what it is. But

I also did not have a particularly

traumatic faith based upbringing. There was a period of my

life spent in an evangelical Christian cult, which is another story for another

day. I can't wait to talk about that. And did very much happen, right? Exactly.

But it is fascinating to me that despite all

of this kind of negativity toward who you are

that came out of your faith based upbringing,

that you found your way, you were open to

faith as an adult. Once you got out of that, was that a process

or did you have to, you know, was there healing

that had to be done or was it just finding the right place that made

you feel seen? And then the rest just kind of fell into place. I think

the healing was done in the process

of accepting that I can have a different

relationship with God versus what people kept telling me.

And I had to find that relationship outside of organized

religion for a while. And that's

one of the reasons why I started that group, is to help

people recognize faith. And religion can look any way

you need it to. I even tell my clients,

you know, you can believe in anything, but it's helpful to believe in

something as you navigate a very hard process of

healing through therapy. Kind of like myself. So I tell people, you can believe in

a rock, tree, leaf, dog, cat, whatever

you need, but we do need something outside

of ourselves to take on all of the stress and

shame and worry that we tend to keep

in. So even if it's believing in community, it's just

making that connection because there's a lot of

divisiveness, unfortunately. So when I

piloted my group, what Would queer Jesus do number

one? I knew I was pushing buttons. I've gotten to the age of life, I

don't give a shit, just going to call it out.

And I also did that too. So queer people knew

that there are options. And if you decide

to have faith, it can look any way, but you can

still build community. And I guess looking back is

based on the ideal of we are the world, we are children.

Knowing that this day and time, it's important to

be able to connect with people even if they seem different

from you. Because at the end of the day, as humans, we all

have something in common. It just takes time to

see it. And a lot of that is acceptance. One of the things

that I find people kind of verbalize to me as they

leave a very faith based upbringing. I'm not

advocating for anybody to go find faith. And I think if you

listen to what we just recently did, an episode with Libby Alders,

who is a. She's a chaplain. First off, I need to have you two on

an episode together and just let you do like BattleBots. Cause it's gonna be great

anyway. But she has a very similar

vibe to yours. And we talked a lot about what

it's like to find a faith tradition. And I'm not necessarily an advocate for

it, but I do think the thing that we don't verbalize enough when people are

processing through faith based trauma or religious

trauma is that there are a lot of bad things that can come out of

organized religion. And I am like the first to talk about those things.

But people don't realize that separating from that

often represents a lack of community. And if you don't find a way

to replace that community, that's often what you're grieving.

Exactly. And that's one of the really most important,

important goals of the group. So when I got to pilot,

I had, or we had five

people from different backgrounds, including

Catholicism, Methodists. And so

one thing I like to lift up to, I guess we want to get technical,

is social discernment theory. So that's a way to look

at scripture or those oppressive messages

to reclaim them and reframe them into something that's

meaningful and that brings about love and connection. So we're

back to the group. We brought up the topic of

abortion, which we all know is very controversial

regarding faith, political, whatever.

And there was someone who identified as

Catholic. And by the way, most of them were Catholic. Actually

they were all queer and bipoc. And this person

was very kind and said, you know, I accept that other People

feel differently, but I still connect to my Catholic faith

and believe in pro life. And I was

surprised that the other people in the cult actually

took the time to embrace that versus critique it.

And it ended up being a really good, deep

conversation. So that's kind of something I've always wanted to

do, again, is just bring some of those people that are different together.

And I mean, there's incredibly powerful messages there on

how, like, queer people are not a monolith. There is all kinds

of variation in their belief structures. And it's one of the reasons

why I love that we have so much focus on.

I think inclusion means a lot of things, and

a lot of people think finding inclusive spaces means you're going

to find a space that is completely outside of

the faith world, because faith worlds are not inclusive.

Right. And that's the reality for a lot of people, and I get

that. But it also represents this nucleus

of community for so many people that they lose.

And by finding a way back to it or finding something similar that does

something, you know, similar for them. I know we've seen

a huge amount of impact that that can have on people. And as you said,

it could be 75 different faith traditions in the same place, but

reinforcing that. Like, there's nothing in this book that says, you're

not welcome here. There are people who say you're not welcome here, but there is

nothing in the thing that actually drives our decision making that says you're not

welcome here. And that's really big focus

for Kelly because she probably did a queer Bible

study, which that was the first time I ever wanted to go to Bible study.

No shade. Because before it seemed like very fucking boring and

people just throwing scripture back and forth. And I was like, why?

But she did that and she let me help

her, like guided. And it was just

astonishing how a lot of

people in our society who are not part of

the. The privileged and the predominant

don't know if they have the power of choice or even to

challenge things. And so we brought up the

story of Sodom and Gomorrah and people were shocked

to hear that it's actually not about sin against

homosexuality. It's actually about something very, very

different. I mean, it was a messed up situation, but it's.

People use it as a weapon and it's really not true. So

we did a few more things like that and people were just like shocked,

Number one, that they could just take the space to reflect and

make it their own. Number two, there was still some fear of

like, Am I going to hell if I challenge this? And we had to help

them sit in the space of like. No. The thing that gets lost in

religion for me is the power of choice. Because

a lot of times people are told that if you lean

into choice, then you're going against God and you'll probably end

up doing Satan's work. Right? So not to trust

yourself. And so I like to uplift that, not only

in this group, but in therapy, too. I mean, I deal. I work with a

lot of people who are like, I thought I had to do this. I thought

I had to shrink myself. And it's not true. So,

quick story. Before. Before we're done. One of my favorite, favorite television

shows of all time is the West Wing. And there is an

episode in the second season of the West Wing called Two

Cathedrals. Yes, I

lied. It was a sin. I've committed many sins. Have I

displeased you, you feckless thug? 3.8 million

new jobs. That wasn't good. Bailed

out Mexico. Increased foreign trade. 30 million new

acres of land for conservation. Put Mendoza on the bench.

We're not fighting a war. I've raised three children.

That's not enough to buy me out of the doghouse. Hey, credo.

My deo pio. If you haven't seen the episode, go watch

it. It's in the second season. It's incredible. It's one of the best hours of

television that has ever happened. And I can quote the

speech almost verbatim, which is probably a mental illness

all on its own. But the thing that I love most about

that, because the. The president in this storyline is a very

devout Catholic who wanted to be priest when he

grew up and then just happened to meet his wife in college and decided not

to. And, like, this is a big deal for this character. But

the thing that I love the most about it is before they filmed the

scene, which they actually filmed in the National Cathedral. Oh, wow. They

pulled aside the priest who runs

all of it for. I don't know how that works. But the priest who runs

all of it and says, just so you know, he's gonna say

some really awful stuff about God and he's gonna do it in your

space. And we wanna make sure that you know that and you're okay with

it. And the priest was like, I know. And I'm so excited

because. Because he was like.

Because his take on it was like. You're supposed to argue. You're supposed

to have questions. You're. You're gonna

be angry. Your Things are gonna happen and you're not gonna understand it.

And so he. I guess the, like, the story, the lore, obviously I

wasn't there, is that this priest was like, standing in the

wings the whole time, just transfixed by this very real, very

human motion, watching the supposedly very powerful man take all

of his anger out on God. Because he was like, that's real. That's

realistic. You're not supposed to. So anyway, watch the episode. It's

amazing. But it's also very much the same idea that, you know

sometimes you're going to be mad because you don't have all the answers, and that

doesn't mean that you're doing anything wrong. What you've mentioned is

something I also bring up in therapy with clients. Ask questions

and ask me questions during the consultation. I don't care.

That's your right. And if you don't want to work with me, you move on.

Just be free to ask your therapist any

questions. You need to make sure you feel safe and

aligned. And yes, when people get mad in session, I love it.

It's an emotion, and it's emotion that people are told that

they're not supposed to have. And I remind people, anger is

justified. It's like dbt. All emotions are valid. They just get

dysregulated from time to time. We don't need to go on that ramp. But anger,

for me, indicates the need that something needs to change.

There is righteous anger. It does come up for a reason.

That's such a good place to stop off at. Thank you so much

for spending time with us. It has been a delight to have you here. Shout

out to my neurodivergent peeps, I love you and hope

to work with more of you moving forward.

And now we'll go to Allison, who has this week's

small talk. All right, so we have a question. From Hannah

in Burlington, Vermont. I feel like I live in

my head more than my body. I forget to eat,

forget to drink water, forget that I'm tired until I'm

wrecked. Is that dissociation, burnout?

Just being bad at being human? Where do you even

start? With reconnecting? So, as a non clinician, I

cannot tell you if that's disassociation or not. You should definitely talk to

a mental health professional about that. But what I can say is

the world is a toxic hellscape, and it is very, very hard to

exist right now. And so if this is

something that is relatively new, if it is something that

just feels like exhaustion, there's a

lot to be exhausted by, and no one can fault you for that.

So you are probably doing the

most human thing, which is feeling your feelings,

even if you're not entirely sure what they are.

That said, one of the first signs of depression is

lack of interest in doing things and kind of lack of participation

in life. One of the earlier signs of depression, I should say so, like, maybe

there is somebody you should talk to just to make sure that.

Actually, like, I'm not even sure what to make sure of. Make sure that you

are just having a reasonable response to the toxic hellscape that is happening outside.

That doesn't seem better. But, like, maybe there is something that a mental health professional

can help with. Maybe you need some time with friends.

Maybe you need to develop some community around

you who can kind of give you some motivation to do those things. I'll be

honest. I'm the type. I have done this my whole life. I forget to eat

all the time. I forget to go pee all the time. I will be like,

oh, I have to go to the bathroom, and then find myself sitting at my

computer two hours later going, did I ever pee? Which, by the way, like, not

great for your kidneys. Don't do that. It's probably not great for your brain either

if your brain is just, like, has a hole in it that your

bodily functions just fall through. But I've done that my whole life, and

I still participate in life fairly consistently.

Not in any way that requires, like, socialization or shoes, but, you know,

still doing most of the things I need to do. But if it's, you know,

if it's bothering you, if it feels incorrect, if it feels.

If it feels like you're missing out on something that you need

access to, maybe it is time to talk to somebody. Or if

this is relatively new and sudden onset

and it is entirely reasonable to have that

reaction to the things that are happening around you in the world. Like, this shit's

heavy. And it's not the kind of heavy that you could just put down.

It's just heavy. Thanks for being here, guys. Have a good day. Love you,

Mina.

Because my husband walked into my office and took his

phone while I was sitting in front of my computer and just put it in

front of my face and was like, can we go get that? And I was

like, yeah. And that's how we ended up with a puppy.