Awakened Anesthetist

SERIES: Part 3. A Road Map to Self-Discovery- Going to Therapy

• Season 3 • Episode 42

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My road to self-discovery was laid over many years, and spoiler alert* the work is on going. But I can identify 3 pivotal moments in my journey that created a profound shift towards a deep sense of knowing who I am  and what I am meant to be in this world. In this 3 part series I recount how a shift in my mindset gave me the permission to appreciate the privileges in my life while also wanting more; how the birth of my gratitude practice reoriented my brain towards the present moment and how a brave step into therapy challenged and healed my limiting beliefs.

As a CAA, I know how important it is to share the messy middle- the why and the how- as well as the end result. That is how we learn in the OR and in life. After listening I hope you feel a sense of empowerment that you too can discover the life uniquely meant for you, whatever that may be.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Awakened Anesthetist Podcast, the first podcast to highlight the CAA experience. I'm your host, mary Jean, and I've been a certified anesthesiologist assistant for close to two decades. Throughout my journey and struggles, I've searched for guidance that includes my unique perspective as a CAA. At one of my lowest points, I decided to turn my passion for storytelling and my belief that the CAA profession is uniquely able to create a life by design into a podcast. If you are a practicing CAA, current AA student or someone who hopes to be one, I encourage you to stick around and experience the power of being in a community filled with voices who sound like yours, sharing experiences you never believed possible. I know you will find yourself here at the Awakened Anesthetist Podcast. Welcome in, hello Awakened Anesthetist community, all my CAAs, aa students and anyone hoping to become one. Welcome to Awakened Anesthetist Podcast and to this three-part roadmap to self-discovery. We have reached the final episode, part three, and probably the most vulnerable episode, the one that I'm most hesitant or nervous to put out. I was really wanting to be careful with what I said. Of course, there's a lot of me in these episodes and, in particular, this episode is dealing with the decision I finally made to go to therapy and the impact of that decision on my self-discovery journey and how that was such a lynchpin in catapulting me towards identifying who I am at my core and what I want and discovering myself on really, really deep levels. And I don't want anything to feel prescriptive or like this is how I did it and this is how you're supposed to do it, but I do deeply know that I'm meant to share this journey because one of the reasons is because, when I was going through all of this, it would have mattered so much to hear another CAA discuss this unsettled feeling and how they went out into the world with their analytical CAA brain and problem-solved their way towards a deeper sense of self. And I didn't know at the beginning that that's where I was going to end up and it just would have been. Comforting is what I think I want to the word I want to choose. It would have been really comforting to have heard another person's story. So if you're listening to this and this is all resonating, I just want to say that I'm happy you're here and that I'm probably speaking right to you. I'm speaking to the parts of you that really need to feel supported and really need to see someone else have done it before you. If you look at your life and say I'm happy but I'm not quite fulfilled, and maybe my sense of self-worth doesn't feel where I want it to be, and I just know that there's something more, I hope that this episode is really going to fill up your cup and let you know that you're not alone. So I have been talking a lot in the previous two episodes part one and part two. If you've not listened to them, I do suggest you go back and listen to them first, not because there's such a clear timeline, but because this is really a stepwise journey and there was absolutely no way I would have been ready to go to therapy as the very first step. I, like you maybe, felt resistant to therapy. I would have said that I'm a happy person and that there's nothing wrong with me and what would I talk about? And so for most of my life I just I never thought I would ever go to therapy. That was for people or other people who had other problems. It wasn't for me, especially when you're a high functioning perfectionist who has a great job. If you're a CAA now or you're going to become one, like it feels like successful people don't have problems, and that's just so far from the truth. The CAA career is so powerful because you can achieve sort of relative outward success and then have the privilege of leveraging that success and that place in the world to discover a deeper sense of self, and that's one of the things that I love so much about our profession. You can leverage it and all that it can give you in terms of finances and resources and sense of value and sense of self and sense of community to launch yourself wherever else you might want to go, and one of those places can be to look inward and to figure out what's inside of you. I may be am someone who is more interested in that than others, but I think it's one of the ways that we can use the CAA profession to just be uniquely happy and to find this unique path that's meant for us. So I digress slightly, but I wanted to just normalize that I was absolutely someone who thought therapy was not meant for me and that I would never have gone to therapy, and it's just really funny to look back now because, again, I think there's a time and place for everything and that sometimes you hear the same messages over and over again, but at one point they just click and for me I needed to have that mindset shift from part one. I had to have that first. I had to tell myself that it was okay to be happy but to want more, to feel grateful but to want more or different. I just had to be there before I could even open up my mind to consider seeking outside help. And then the gratitude practice made such a difference in my life and when I look back I can really tell that what the gratitude practice did is it put into very stark contrast how good I felt and how bad I felt. So I was one of those people that, in a social situation, was, you know, kind of flitting all around and talking to people and I was so lit up and, you know, appeared really happy and I was really happy. I had that sense of joy and gratitude and emotion to me. But when I would be alone or on, you know, before going to bed or like on some of my darker days, there was a sense of I didn't know this at the time, but what it was was shame, which I'll get to, but there was just a sense of utter discomfort inside my body that I had carried since I was a child and it was always there. So I didn't always notice it, because you kind of habituate to the ugliness inside of you oftentimes or you learn to cope, and so when I was alone or feeling down or you know, maybe life was harder, it would. It would bubble to the surface and when I was doing that active gratitude practice circa, you know, 2018, when it was freshly introduced into my life, it brought into such light how wonderful life can be and that also the the dark side of that is it. Then, when you flip the coin and you see how shitty you feel sometimes, it was just so obvious that something was wrong, like something deep inside of me wasn't just gonna magically get fixed and it was that sense of light and dark or like the, the highs and lows that became such like starkly contrasted, that gave me my first glimmer of like okay, maybe there is something inside of me that there's a chance could go away. I think it was a permission of maybe I could feel better, maybe I don't have to carry this darkness with me every day, all day. And yeah, it was a really big moment. I can almost remember exactly the moment, and it was sort of a slow burn type of thing. And then one day I was like I think I'm ready to ask for help. And my first step because, again, I wasn't surrounded by a community that talked about therapy a lot. I certainly would not have gone to my parents and asked them for help at this point I was in my mid 30s and so I, you know, had some agency and was like I'm just gonna do my own search. So I think I called, called my insurance company and saw which providers in my area were covered. Interestingly, I've learned that a lot of therapy is not covered by insurance, but you can use your flexible spending account or your HSA account, which is what I used at the time, to pay for it. And so, again, just such a wonderful privilege to have $150 a pop is usually what therapy has cost me $150 per hour session. And so I collected sort of that like initial data was my first step. And then I did a google search and looked for therapists in my area and I was really specific with the type of therapists that I needed, because when I got really quiet with myself and after I allowed myself to say I don't need therapy and that's not for me. What would I even talk about? My initial? My mind would say, oh, you don't. Everything's fine, it's great, but my heart knew that there was this one thing. That was the thing that haunted me and just ate me alive from the inside out, and had been since I was seven and and that's the part that was really scary to look at and in fact I had only ever told one other person in my life, who is my now husband, what happened, and I'm not going to share those details on the podcast. But we all have a thing. We have a thing that happened to us that, like, our life changed from that moment forward and in my case it was a childhood sexual trauma and that wasn't and that wasn't just a one-time thing and also was multiple experiences. I'm a woman in this culture and oftentimes there is sexual abuse or sexual misconduct. That is in a lot of women identifying histories. I'm not unique in that, but I didn't know that at the time and I I had so much pain that I carried around since I was seven, since the event and the ensuing events that just became a part of who I was and just changed every piece of me from that moment forward and when I got really quiet, I knew that that was the thing. That was the thing that I could never believe would have ever felt better. I never knew the depths that it had changed me or influenced me or kept me small or, you know, developed my entire personality was like a result of coping on a lot of levels, and I didn't know any of that. I just I gave myself permission again sort of a similar theme to consider that I might be able to feel better, and so the Google search brought me to a therapist in my area I live in like just generic suburbs, and there were several people who sort of fit the Google description. I will put a link in the show notes, maybe like a few steps to find a therapist in your area. You don't actually need to call your insurance company. I did not know that at the time. I thought you know, like most doctor visits, that you needed insurance, but the truth is most therapists don't take insurance. Some do, and if it's very important for you financially or if you just, you know want to make sure it goes through your insurance, that is possible. But there's many more options. If you just accept, I guess that you're going to have to pay out of pocket. And I think once I made the decision to go to therapy, I was not willing to be stopped Like. I was like, okay, whatever it takes, I'll do it. You know, I made a decision of a therapist. I picked one mostly randomly. I think I called two or three people and I happened to pick one because you know a lot of things like likely. This person was just available quickest and seemed aligned. There's not a huge intake process before you actually arrive to the office. So you are taking a bit of a leap, and I know that a lot of people can be deterred by therapy because they feel like when you pick a therapist, you have to establish a relationship and tell them your story and then, if you don't like them or you don't like their style, you've invested all this time and energy into the relationship and to do it with a different therapist is like reinventing the wheel and can feel very daunting. Fortunately, my initial experience with my first therapist was just so synergistic and I immediately knew when I walked into her office that this was the person who was meant for me. So I want you to, I hope, hear my story like it's possible to find a match right away. But I also want to honor that not everyone finds a really perfect therapist to patient match at their first time and I want to encourage you to keep going because you deserve to find someone who understands you in a way that you want to be understood, because so much of it is that trust relationship from the beginning. So in 2019, early like January 2019, I said yes to you know, potentially seeing what therapy could offer me, potentially feeling different or better. I hoped and I found a therapist her name was Holly and walked into her office and sat down and the most striking thing about our initial meeting was that it was the first time in my life that I had shared my absolute, darkest, scariest moment and she heard it and she deeply, deeply listened without speaking. She just her presence to accept what I had said and to not judge it and to not have any sort of reaction except for absolute compassion was so felt and I had never been listened to like that. It was just an absolutely pivotal moment in my life to share my scariest, awful, terrible, horrible thing that's ever happened to me, that had so much pain around, and someone just to just almost easily hold it with me. It was absolutely life changing. It happened on the first time, like on the first day we I walked into her office and we kind of figured out what, how we were going to get going, and she just kind of flat out asked me what I wanted help with and I said I think it's this thing that happened to me and I told her it. I cannot express the healing from just uttering the words allowed to third party, to someone who had no stake in me, who did not know me, who knew nothing of me, just to hold the my own humanity and to know that I think what she made me feel was normal. She made me feel like I'm not a awful, horrible, disgusting person who's carried this awful, horrible, disgusting thing around with her that it had nothing to do with, like what I was actually saying. She just deeply saw my humanness and it was incredible. It was amazing. And then she swore like shortly after that, like she said something about something and she cussed and I was just like you are my person, like it was just such a deeply healing experience and then also the levity of it and just the realness of her made me feel so safe. And then I want to also share the particulars a little bit about the type of therapy I ended up doing. If you resonate at all with sort of taking this chance or maybe even thinking about going to a therapist. And you know, I just want to further normalize the action of going to therapy and the healing that's possible, and also that I wasn't doing just kind of traditional talk therapy I was doing unbeknownst to me. I had walked into a therapist who specializes in EMDR therapy, which is a type of trauma focused therapy, and let me pull up Google real quick to tell you exactly what the EMDR acronym is and a little bit about what Google has to say about what EMDR is. Okay, so a quick Google search brings me to an explanation that literally says at the top, four lay people. So EMDR is eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing, and Google says it's a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from symptoms and emotional distress that are a result of disturbing life experiences, aka trauma. Emdr therapy shows that the mind can in fact, heal from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma. When you cut your hand, your body works to close the wound. If a foreign object or repeated injury irritates the wound, it festers and causes pain. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. Emdr therapy demonstrates that a similar sequence of events occurs with mental processes. Yes, that feels actually very valid and it feels like what happened with me. So let me give you just a little bit more of a first person understanding of what EMDR felt like, especially what EMDR felt like for a skeptical first timer who I. She certainly asked if it would be okay if we proceeded in this EMDR therapy fashion and because I didn't know what it was and I just trusted her that I agreed to do it. But what it meant for me in particular was that part of the theory is that you activate the right hemisphere of the brain and the left hemisphere of the brain and when they're both activated sequentially so right, left, right, left one than the other it creates sort of a middle way. And that middle way allows you to sort of unlock some of your deeper subconscious memories, beliefs, thoughts, and just allows the healing to happen in a subconscious, in a subconscious way. I don't know that I can really explain it further and it definitely out loud. When I'm saying it now I'm feeling people be like what the heck are you talking about? But when she explained it to me, she was like this is what you need, this is what's going to help you, and it was so sanitized in terms of like there was no spirituality to it, it was just very scientific when she explained it to me and so I was like, okay, that seems right. And for me, the way that my right and left hemispheres were activated as I was holding two little buzzers, basically like little vibrating, I don't know almost buttons, and I held one in each hand and they would go off sequentially so I didn't have to move or do anything. Oftentimes in EMDR therapy or, if you have any familiarity with it, sometimes, well, it's called eye movement therapy, but they'll have you follow something with your eyes, like a pointer or a finger, going right to left, right to left, so that your eyes are moving back and forth, activating both hemispheres. I've seen it done where there's tapping on your right side of the body and then left side of the body. There's, I think, a lot of different ways to activate your brain, but Holly and my experience was doing EMDR with these buzzers, which was nice because I didn't have to do much work, and one of the or two of the other big tenants with EMDR that actually opened me up to so much more understanding of what's possible in the human brain is that one of the first things you do is that you identify a safe space in your mind. So you kind of build out in your mind's eye or imagination the safest place you've ever felt. You like really envision it, and you put all the little pieces in it that you would need and at the beginning and end of each session, with your buzzers going off and your brain being activated, you start and end the session in that safe space To really give your brain and body the felt sense that you're safe and that you can either proceed into the traumatic event, if you're at the beginning, or that you can Sort of turn off the traumatic events. You're not then haunted by it because often times you're reactivating the event during these therapy sessions. You end the session in your safe space to kind of, like you know, close it up and kind of package it up for a little while and get y'all feeling good and then off your way to you come back. So that was one piece which I've always been an imaginative person, a creative person, sort of like, a person who I like as a little kid or talking to myself like my future self. That sense of like being able to kind of time travel between past, present and future has always been very tangible for me. So that part was fine. And then the other part that was a little bit different was that the scary thing, the scary memory, the scary, the traumatic event at the end of the session you would put it In her description was like a bank fault and you would put it behind closed doors. You would lock those doors, you would have this whole Visualization, basically, of putting your awful thing away so that it couldn't get you, it couldn't haunt you, it couldn't, you know, tear you down between sessions, so that, and then, with the safe space building out was really a way to protect yourself. Because part of the MDR is Reactivating the experience so that you can go back in and give yourself the healing that you needed. But that means that you're reactivating your worst, most awful event, and oftentimes there's more than one event, and so it was a really comforting way to experience my scariest, awful thing and then be able to go back home and be a mom and take care of kids, and go to work the next day and take care of patients and it just really what I guess it did, what it was supposed to do, which was made me able to cope and proceed and keep healing and keep living my normal life, even though I was doing this really deep inner healing work. I just consulted my notes because I wrote a bunch of things down that I didn't want to forget, because this is so, you know, it's hard to talk about for me personally, but also it's hard to put out into the world, because I don't want to trigger anyone. I also don't want to not give enough details that it's not meaningful or supportive, and I want this mostly to be like seeing someone do something who maybe you've been scared to do it or you've been unsure, and seeing someone else do it who feels like you and that person who's me saying like you can do this and not to be scared, and that you can, you can bet on yourself and that you can trust yourself. So, of course, in a safe, supportive therapy relationship. So I think some of the last points I want to make are some of the biggest points, which is that through this EMDR therapy journey, I healed a part of me that I had been carrying around since I was seven and at the time of this therapy again, I was probably 34 or 35. Guys, the timelines fuzzy, I the dates don't get so hung up on those but I felt so much lighter. I was able, through this EMDR therapy probably a three month journey, which is fairly quick, I would say, considering I'd carried this around since I was seven that I felt like I was a new person. I felt like I learned so much about what shaped me and who I am and how I have control over the life I want to lead, and that I'm not subject to just always having this awful thing I carry around with me, like to feel free from. That was the biggest gift of my life and I, because I received such a big gift, I think it motivated me to do some of the things I'm doing now and certainly this was like a first step in my therapy journey. I've been to therapy EMDR therapy in 2019. I then went back again in 2020, the tail end of the pandemic. I went back to the same therapist. Then in 2021, I went back to a therapist for OCD. I didn't know I had OCD until 2021. And I sought therapy for that in 2021, 2022. And now my husband and I are in marriage therapy and it's 2023. So I've this one yes to myself and seeing the healing that was possible and seeing really the before and the results I just saw the results I was like, oh, okay, this is so much better than the life I had ever lived before that. How else can I optimize my life? Like it became a little bit practical, almost Like oh, I didn't realize I could feel much better. And now anything that kind of comes up in my life. I'm like you know we'll help going to therapy. So I went. I forgot to say we also, my husband and I, see a therapist for my son I'm not gonna give any details on that necessarily, but for child therapy or, you know, therapy that's meant for a child. Oftentimes what happens, at least in our experience, is that the parents go to therapy and the child does not come at all and the parents receive the therapeutic help and then they bring that home to the child, as opposed to the child going to the therapist, which can you know be traumatizing in and of itself. And therapy, I think, looks a lot of different ways with kids. But that's been our experience with the particular reasons we've gone to seek outside help for our oldest son. So on top of all of that, you know goodness, the other thing it did was really highlight all of the ways that I've been hurt, especially as a child, that I've carried with me and how that manifests in my real life now, my current life, and a lot of that is shame. Is what shame does? I learned a lot about shame in EMDR therapy. Something really helpful was that guilt is something that we all feel and it's actually quite useful because guilt is a signal to you that you made a misstep, that you did something that you did wrong or could have you hurt someone, or you know you wished you would have done better, and so it's useful in that way. Shame is an unuseful feeling, because shame tells you that it's not that you did something wrong, but that you are wrong. And hearing that distinction and what shame is and what shame looks like in a real life, like being able to have identified my therapist helped me identify like that's shame functioning in a human body and that's what it feels like was so normalizing and so freeing to know that I had a lot of shame, I was carrying around a lot of shame and for whatever reason, just naming it and knowing that that's what it was made a lot of, it get better, and the other things I learned about myself are some of the things I picked up in childhood that were bad and wrong and awful about me. They can be called shadow words, so shadow aspects of ourselves are the things that we try to hide away. It's the part of ourselves that we don't want anyone to see, and I have several shadow words. I'm going to share them because it helps to name them and to expose them, to remove some of their power. So I learned through therapy not just this EMDR therapy circa 2019, but the other therapies I've interacted with that I am constantly trying to escape a sense of cluelessness, like other people identifying me as being clueless or not having worked hard so not being grateful or being selfish is another one that I didn't work hard for what I had, that everything kind of fell into my lap. So being clueless, ungrateful, selfish and oblivious is another word that really can hurt me, and so what's been interesting is that I can identify all the ways that I self protect so that I take back my own power. This was like a faulty coping mechanism. So, as opposed to letting people think I'm clueless for a lot of my life I kind of played that like ditzy, like oh, I don't care and I don't know. I know that was just so, just like I had no idea. And I'm actually a really intelligent person An ECA is a really intelligent person, in fact all human beings are very intelligent but I was so ashamed for someone to call me oblivious or the thing I'm clueless that I just tried to take back my power by like play, faking it like kind of making a humor thing out of it. Same with being selfish and ungrateful. Those are such deep, triggering feelings for me that I've been able to trace back to my childhood and to see why those words can really just like turn me into a puddle of tears and how most fights or most disagreements in my home life or in my family life my extended family life, like the interactions that cut me so deeply, usually hit on one of those pain points being oblivious, clueless, being ungrateful, being selfish and I just have had so much agency given back to myself, like the sense that I am more in control of my life when those words were exposed, and like the experiences that created those shadow words in me were exposed that I was able to finally see them for what they were, which was a story I was telling myself after an event that happened in my life and that as I get older and older, I've been able to take back more of my own story and then say this is a choice. I have a choice of how I move forward and I can either stay in this circle of pain or I can do the work and find a way forward. I feel like maybe that's enough for this episode. I just can't say enough how deeply life changing it's been to say yes to myself and to go to therapy. I again. It was never something I thought I would do. I wasn't raised in a family that talked about therapy. I think I'm a child of the 80s and I think children now, my children have a much different view of going to therapy. Because they've seen their mom and their dad go to therapy. We talk about it. We talk about it just like going to any other doctor and some of these words aren't as taboo. But if no one in your circle is talking about the option of going to therapy, I just hope your hair and me allowed to include that. It's absolutely possible to you and that is probably easier than you think to access. Even a lot of anesthesia groups or hospital groups have employee assistant programs, so EAPs they're called that offer free counseling services or therapy sessions. Oftentimes there's also some level of free counseling that you can get if you're a student, a current AA student and so it just takes a little bit of effort and work to kind of look around your surroundings, find a trusted friend, see if they have any recommendations and you know, just know that it's possible. If that's really, the first step is like I just had to accept that it was possible to feel better and after that it became like a problem solving thing, like you know where am I going, how much is it going to cost? How do I get there? You can do those things. You can for sure do those things. I know you can't. It's just giving yourself the permission to initially seek that help and to say also there's something I need to talk about which was really hard for me for a lot of years. So I also want to normalize that. We have come to the end here of my three part self discovery or roadmap to self discovery. I feel really good about sharing myself in this way. Podcasting for me is a way to express myself, to show you all my most authentic self and to give you a peek behind the scenes of you know what makes me me and what makes me a proud and happy person and a proud and happy CAA, and I hope you've enjoyed this little series. I'm not exactly sure what's to come in this slot. We are for sure doing process episodes once a month and then there's usually these mindfulness episodes, or I've kind of now been doing this little roadmap to self discovery in season three, and so I want to hear from you If you enjoyed this episode or you want to hear more like it. Please let me know. I would love to know what's resonating, what's not working. You can email me. You can email me. My email is in the show notes, but it's awakenannestis at gmailcom. You can find me on social media. Well, you can find me on Instagram. That's the only social media I'm on at awakenannestis. You can also join the awakenannestis community. Currently, that's a once monthly newsletter, but it's just a way to collect people in one spot. If I have any specific content or email blasts or you know a question, I need to ask the community. So people who want to be closer to what I'm doing here and want to stay connected, you should sign up in the show notes to the awakenannestis newsletter community. I think that's all for me. Of course, you can leave a rating and review. Tell people in the review why you like awaken anestis and why others should listen. That really helps other CAAs or like-minded people find the show and I think that's it All right. I hope you know that you deserve to feel good behind the drape. Talk soon.

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Mary Jeanne Roberts, CAA

Host