In part three of her mental health journey, the host recounts her experience with an abusive therapist starting in 2020. Believing she only had PTSD, the therapist dismissed her OCD and turned sessions into self-focused conversations, avoiding the host’s needs. Despite feeling something was wrong, the host invalidated her own instincts, attributing them to her mental health issues. She began EMDR therapy with a second therapist after learning about its effectiveness for PTSD, but feared telling therapist one. When therapist one and two met, therapist one misrepresented the host (e.g., denying she dissociates), highlighting her incompetence. The host’s improvement during this period stemmed from addressing physical health issues like thyroid dysfunction and autoimmune conditions, as well as psychedelic exploration, rather than the unethical therapy. She emphasizes the power dynamics in medical relationships that make patients doubt their own red flags. The episode concludes with reflections on lessons learned and the importance of seeking proper care, empowering listeners to trust their own knowing. She notes that her functionality improved from multiple factors, not the therapy itself, and shares this to help others avoid similar harmful dynamics.
(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to a chat with Uma, with me, your host, Uma R. Chatterjee. On this podcast, I bring together all of my roles as a neuroscientist, researcher, board certified mental health peer specialist, mental health advocate, community builder, and a survivor with lived experience to bring you honest and unfiltered conversations exploring our true human experiences in their fullest form. Every week, I'm bringing you conversations bridging the gap on all things neuroscience, psychology, mental health, lived experience, advocacy, psychedelics, and more. This is a space for raw unfiltered truth to truly explore ourselves for who we are and how we are. I cannot wait to connect with you, answer all of your questions and co-create this with you. Welcome to a chat with Uma. Hello, my friends, and welcome back to another episode of a chat with Uma. If you've made it this far to part three of my mental health journey, then I am so grateful for your time and care and keeping up with this very long and detailed story. It is admittedly not the easiest thing to do, but so worth it. I should say, and so worth it, because in this world everything can coexist at once. It's pretty rough because it's really taking everything and putting it together and just sharing it in a cohesive way, but also giving different parts of the story due diligence, which brings up a lot of the details and the reliving of it. And I won't say that it's too hard for me because I wouldn't do it if I couldn't, but it's a unique situation to be in, 'cause other than maybe some therapy sessions of having to catch people up to speed, which I have done many times if you haven't caught on to by now. It's really interesting just putting it all together to distill it down to lessons and reflections, because ultimately this is for you. Me sharing all of this is for all of you, and it really comes from the questions that I have been asked so often in so many different ways from so many people, from so many different angles. It's not even just from one shared diagnosis or one experience, it's from so many different parts of identity, so many things I've already shared out there. And that has led itself to so many questions from y'all because we don't talk about this enough, and I have ranted about this. In another episode, so I will keep this short, but I am just really grateful to have this space that's been really supportive and really safe, and I'm just grateful to be able to be of service in a way that is supportive to y'all and to feel safe at this moment to do it. So here we are, part three of my mental health journey. And I'll start by saying that if you have not heard the episodes that come before this, so my full story and my mental health journey is part one and two, I would highly recommend listening to those first because they all build on each other and really make what I'm about to share make sense. So I would catch up on those, and if you already have, then here you are with me at part three for now the end of the series, but of course, there will be more because I will continue being alive and having more to share. So part three will take us from where we left off in part two, which was in 2020, I was 23 years old, I was getting into the beginnings of a very abusive and unethical therapist relationship, which I've never talked about before. And we left off there, how I got into it in part two, and today we will go from how I got into that all the way through how I got out of it, what happened in between the different therapies I've been in throughout this time, the realizations I've had about my diagnoses and how I have sought proper care after not receiving it in various different ways. What I've done since then, the testing I've gone through, what my functionality has looked like and just really honing in on the reflections and lessons and things I wish I knew through this whole process and things I wish everyone knew. And what I hope to share with all of y'all, so it can help you along your journey, it can save you some trouble, it can empower you to listen to your own knowing and to seek out care and just above all know that you're worthy in navigating all this, so that you can be a less alone and just more empowered and willing to accept yourselves for who you are and do what you need to do with your life. So let's get into part three of my mental health journey as always, there's the disclaimer that anything I'm sharing here is all my lived experience, none of this is professional medical advice, none of this constitutes a relationship with me as a mental health peer specialist and anything I talk about in regards to therapy, medications, anything of that sort, again, it's just my lived experience and the intention of all of this is to be education and to provide you with different vantage points of looking at your own experiences, to empower you to make the best decisions for yourself with you, your loved ones, and your medical providers. So here we are in 2020. I am 23 years old. I have been in this abusive, weird, therapy, therapist situation for about seven months now because as you recall from last episode in 2019, after starting cancer treatment and whatnot, I started working with this therapist and it was in the name of PTSD, her belief was that I only had PTSD, I didn't have OCD and everything that I was experiencing was some sort of trauma response and everything that we needed to do was basically just uncover the cause of every single thought or problem I had, some sort of formative experience or trauma I had at any age of my life that would explain my symptoms and then think about it enough and it would resolve itself. So it's definitely a contraindicated situation for me mentally, psychologically, and then on top of that, as it talks about last episode, the parts of her ethical issues that were coming up were that therapy quickly became not therapy at all. It was just me coming in and asking her in a very people pleasing and avoidant of myself way, how she was doing or just asking her something about herself that would set off a hour long session of us just talking about her life and me learning about every single person in her family and life, all of her friends, all of their names, all of their diagnoses, their issues of medications they were on, the infantility and different parts of her life, all about her and her own business. It just was completely, I mean, of course it was unethical because I'm just learning these personal details about everybody that I shouldn't know anything about, but of course it's also just not therapy because we were not doing anything with me. I was successfully being able to avoid myself, which of course I'm not thinking in my head, like let me avoid myself, let me not talk about myself and contribute to the situation. It's just that I was in a space of being very deeply fucked psychologically and my MO was to avoid myself and any good clinician would figure that out very quickly, but it also would never have gotten to the point of getting into the weeds of their life because that's just unethical. So none of that would have happened with a remotely ethical or competent clinician, but nonetheless I was with a psychologist and I really thought that it was working because it started becoming this situation where she would tell me that I really didn't need therapy and I was her mentee and she was my mentor and I really just needed to figure out how I'm gonna live my life and what I'm gonna do with myself. And this weird commonality that really didn't work for us, which was that she happened to have had a non-traditional path herself and then did her schooling before her PhD at the university that I'm at right now, UT Dallas. So it was really odd. She did her undergrad in psychology like me and then she did her master's degree in neuroscience and then did like more of the cognitive side. And so the point with all of that is that because we had that commonality, the only times he really talked about me were in terms of she wanting to know about the professors and wanting to know gossip and like talking shit about the people there and like in the name of trying to quote unquote mentor me. And so it was just a very confusing relationship again. I'm seeing a psychologist like through insurance for a day.
diagnoses and Nothing's happening, but I'm also kind of gaslit into a situation that I don't need therapy because I would come in with all this insight and I'd be able to talk about things from a very rational perspective So given her framework of I just need to figure out why I have problems and me coming with these solutions Because I had done that my whole life. I had figured out some sort of rational logical way to look at everything as a How we're gonna learn later a compulsion In her perspective, I was just all good and I just needed mentoring and obviously looking back I was a great source of money because You know charge my insurance charge me do nothing and get to talk about herself and feel good about herself So it was a very very weird situation from the get-go that had been going on for about seven months and then We're at the beginning of 2020 So I went back to school. I started my undergrad again Because I felt like oh if I don't have OCD and if all of my problems are Just for me being traumatized and I've talked about these traumas by figuring out the logic or whatever behind them and finding some fears out and just like being aware of them well then all I really have to do is pay attention and sit on my hands Literally and metaphorically and not do compulsions So that way I can get through school And so I started school and I started doing really well. I was struggling very much But I was doing really well like I started passing all the classes with A's Sometimes even with hundreds that I had failed miserably the first time I went to UTD and so in my mind I perceived that One on one hand has a fluke because I tend to doubt my capabilities and my reality But the part of my brain that was looking at the situation and thinking that maybe I am doing better and maybe there is a chance for me and School could look different than I previously thought because this was a kind of experiment Then I'd come to with my husband of trying this out again because as you've heard I meant the previous episodes There's a lot of factors that led up to this point I started thinking that maybe I Just had to continue on gritting my teeth and I could do better In hindsight what was going on was that number one I very much still had Unreeded and unresolved OCD and PTSD and the whole list of other diagnoses The parts that I had become better in that had equipped me to be More functional that I was seeing in those moments were the parts where And I can't know this for sure, but this is kind of what me and my team have come to understanding Of the trajectory of my life so far The parts that had actually contributed to me becoming more functional That we know of are that number one a lot of my medical problems had been addressed for the first time My physical problems such as my very very deficient thyroid for my whole life that Ironically got addressed by my cancer surgery which you can hear all about that in the last episodes A lot of my general dysfunction in my body was Finally looked at and a lot of diagnoses came through like my autoimmune conditions and deficiencies and Just overactiveness of my immune system Because of that there is a lot that we're starting to get tempered and worked on and looked at more thoroughly there hasn't been like a clear cut linear answer as to resolving all of that but it was definitely Helped and looked at and considered so overall my physical health had improved a huge amount compared to where I was before and Especially with the thyroid stuff. I mean the thyroid hormone and the thyroid gland runs so much of your functionality in your life and if it's not working for Like 23 years There's a lot that can go wrong and it includes and impacts mental and psychological health as well. So there's parts of my total cluster of dysfunction that had been helped by Just getting the right amount of hormone in my body through medication through all that long winded discovery So in some my medical Side was starting to improve and contribute to my overall functionality as a human because it's all connected right and also In general, I was more aware of my psychological well-being to at least be able to identify what was going on and start to realize that a lot of my thoughts and patterns and beliefs were rooted in Pathology and trauma now while I wasn't receiving the proper treatment for it even just that conceptualization of sort of beginning of the conceptualization of those different parts of me that were flaring rather than just accepting everything going on about me as Objective full truth like the interests of thoughts I had and the beliefs I had about myself just realizing that those things were Something else contributing kind of helped in continuing to exist and push forward rather than just totally succumbing to them. So that was slightly and How full enough to get me by at the very bare minimum and then also psychedelics I know made a huge impact because It will go into this another day. I briefly touch on this and my full story but the period from Cancer onset the middle of 2019 to You know really the beginning of 2020 was a lot of Psychedelic exploration and so whatever that did to me, you know, physiologically in my brain For better or worse at the time for better and what I'd experienced As insight and awareness all helped me move forward as well So there was just a confluence of variables. It's a very very messy Scientific experiment for my scientists out there like there's really not a way to pinpoint stuff I'm zooming out and tell you this now to give you context for what was going on then But it's important to know that my then In 2020 my perception was that Whatever was going on in therapy and in treatment was Working enough because for me the fact that I could even do school at all was so Wild and absurd and astronomical given how much I struggled in the past and how I really believed I would never like Maybe I'd do other things with my life like Most things are possibility that was the one that I thought was impossible. You can ask my husband It's almost just so funny that the one thing I said I would never ever do is the one thing I'm just going Completely down the path of now. So that's funny But at the time going back to 2020 I was just Thinking that it was working enough and I just need to keep going and also just like the cult just like abusive situations I was in the past. I had this really deeply uncomfortable feeling that something was wrong But I had learned to not trust that feeling because I kind of just pathologized it and told myself that I have problems trusting people. I have problems trusting things. I'm probably wrong I'm paranoid. I have so many issues and that really goes to highlight the power dynamic issue and to the clusterfuck of specifically being a subordinate in a sense in a medical relationship especially some sort of psychiatric or psychological relationship with a practitioner because It's so easy to invalidate yourself in the context of while you're showing up as the patient Because something is quote-on-quote wrong with you. So of course you're the last person to trust to make Any sort of judgment of the thing because you're the one with problems especially when it's trauma related and You have an mo of not trusting people and being paranoid anyway It's so easy to just file that all in the category of pathology rather than actually listening to those red flags. So That's really something that played a huge role in how long this lasted and the dynamics and everything that transpired since so At that point I Was in therapy with her and What's interesting is I touched on this in the last episode Around I at that time I'd been there for seven months, right and I realized on one hand that I was Doing okay, I guess based on the standards I had for myself and I also thought that I don't know that the PTSD is necessarily getting a whole lot better And if that's my whole problem then maybe I should be doing everything I can for it And so this really came into play when I was watching a grazenatomy episode and they highlighted EMDR therapy for PTSD in a patient or character on the show By the way EMDR stands for I motion Decentralization and reprocessing therapy and what was shown to me on grazenatomy was that it was Really really effective for deep-seated PTSD and traumatic episodes and really reprocessing them in a way
that translates from nervous system, limbic system, brain, all the way to conscious experience. So I got really interested in that and I started researching and then I decided maybe I should look for someone who does EMDR therapy for PTSD around me that takes my insurance and I happened to find someone who was incredible at it. And so I decided to take the risk and see her. But what's interesting about that, and again, this is the beginning of 2020, what's really interesting about how I navigated that looking back is that I was so afraid to tell my therapist at the time in this instance to make this easier. Let's call abusive therapists, psychodynamic, PTSD started in 2019, therapist one, and let's call my EMDR therapist therapist two. So in going to start seeing therapists two, I was very afraid of telling therapist one about it because I just had a sense that she was going to dismiss me or be upset with me, which is really fucked up in retrospect to have that feeling about a therapist, but I listened to it and I didn't tell her initially. I just went to therapist two and was like, yeah, maybe I'll just do the CMDR thing on the side. I read online. It was like 12 sessions roughly and I'd be done fast and therapist one didn't even have to know. But meeting therapist two, like after giving her my extensive history, of course she brought up that she probably needed to talk to therapist one because that's my main therapist and make sure that treatment priorities and treatment plans are in conjunction and working together rather than working up, posingly and just getting information about me outside of myself from someone who had gotten a good amount of information about me. So turns out I had a tell therapist one and so I did and I told therapist one why I wanted to do EMDR in my thought process and I really navigated it like in a very guilty way and like towing around it and even being like, well, I really don't need to see her if you don't think I showed him blah, blah, blah. And she ended up being really dismissive about it and saying that it was kind of weird that I would go seek out another therapy when I'm seeing her and I should have just told her that I wanted to do something else because she has better options. But you know, she can't stop me from doing what I want to do so she'll maybe talk to her. She has time. It was just very weird and petulant and confusing and at the time I was so in mess with the dynamic that I felt bad. But she ended up meeting with therapist two and what's really funny is the version of me that she gave therapist two. We figured out it's just so inaccurate and so telling of how poor therapist one was at her job and also how fucked up the relationship was. For example, therapist two asked her if I dissociate and therapist one was like never, there's no dissociation involved whatsoever and I really don't even think she needs help. Honestly, but I guess you can try and then therapist two and I quickly discovered that I indeed dissociate quite often. But of course, therapist one wouldn't have known because one, we didn't really do therapy and even if I did dissociate, she wouldn't have noticed and she would have written it off. So that was just an example of the whole thing and basically what happened from there, this is so nonlinear but I'm just trying to tell chronologically as much as I can and include just context around things as they come up. So I started EMDR, I was still in therapy with therapist one and what's interesting about EMDR is basically it didn't work for me but it took me a long time and my therapist two a long time to figure that out and that will play a huge role into like the comorbidities and everything we talk about later. And me, let's just say at the time, I was engaging in the EMDR process as accurately and fully as I could and what I felt in the moment was that I was just so scared and everything that came up for me was so negative because of how traumatized I was but really I was doing the work and I was trying really hard and I would basically come out of every EMDR processing session with this very clear, cut logical, rational, almost spiritual insight if you want to call it that about whatever I was processing and just find the very detached, forgiving, compassionate reason for what happened and that looked like I had processed the whole thing because that's what I was saying out loud and it sounded to my therapist like most people they came to this realization. She did mention that I went really quickly so I was probably really good at it and I very much like fed off the validation like I was doing it well as if it was something some sort of performative act to do and that should have been a red flag because people don't usually go that fast and the reason that I was quote, quote, going that fast is because I wasn't actually doing it was actually happening which we know now and I'm giving you the perspective I have now about what was going on then but I of course didn't know then was I was doing compulsions the whole time. Basically I had a very small window of tolerance being able to tolerate reprocessing things because in general I do have a small tolerance before going into some sort of very often maladaptive coping mechanism to not feel because feeling is something I didn't learn to do because things were so astronomically wild for me as a child that it just was a normal or safe to feel stuff and it wasn't monoled to me so my long standing coping mechanism was to dissociate and to not feel things and then to try to conceptualize my reality so that I could continue living by just coming up with some sort of rational reason and oftentimes it wasn't rational and ended up being some very self-oriented belief that was very maladaptive which we'll talk about later but nonetheless I was able to come up with a reason and so I would go a teach session I would try to get into the space of the memory because that's part of the process and just tap into the feelings and you know relive it and I really couldn't do that I could do that for very little and then I would go into figuring out the reasons and so that's why I looked really fast but a reality I just wasn't doing it and I couldn't do it I just didn't have a choice at the time my brain just wasn't having it so but we didn't know that I didn't know that she didn't know that I did know that I was navigating EMDR like I navigated most things in my life which like from from a very little age I was petrified like literally petrified of doing anything wrong so as a kid I'd be in class like I'd be told to fold a paper in half and I'd have like 50 questions about exactly how and what direct and basically long story short seeking reassurance because I couldn't sit in the ambiguity of figuring things out myself and being uncertain and doing something wrong because I was so afraid of doing something wrong and everything falling apart so in trying to follow directions for EMDR I was so afraid of doing it wrong that that would be something that came up a lot and I just thought that I would by doing it at all I was tolerating it in reality it was definitely taking over and shutting down my brain and having me go into like the part I was comfortable with quote unquote which was going to the rational logical side and that's definitely not what I needed because I'm very good at that and I just skip over the actual processing part so that was happening that felt a little weird but I could chalk it up to that's just part of my process and I'm working on it and I also just felt very stuck and confused throughout EMDR and so like I would voice that sometimes and then I would be told to just go back into it and so that again intolerance and retrospect of the confusion that would come up would go straight into doing what I was comfortable with so again those are two things I could tell in the moment but I I nor therapist to really knew that this was impacted by OCD or anything and another thing that was happening in EMDR that no one figured out for a while was that the themes and the memories that I often times would bring were also were exclusively OCD themes so in terms of EMDR part of what happens is that you come in with like a map of different themes that you want to work on and from there it would you one would assume that the themes are PTSD themes and then you go through each theme and you do this whole technique to trace back to as many memories associated to that theme that you may or may not be consciously aware of and what was in retrospect interesting is that I would come with so many themes to resolve and it seemed on ending and part of that on ending this was the fact that they were the themes that were actually OCD and not to say they weren't oftentimes related or interrelated with PTSD experiences which we'll get into later the dynamic functional comorbidity but at the time we didn't know that and so it just felt like I had so much trauma and had so many things I wanted to work on and work through like different habits and different beliefs really it was like different fears and different beliefs that took over my life and what really that was was the guacamole of OCD because OCD has on ending numbers of fears and can latch on to anything and so I started off with the ones that were kind of pervasive throughout my entire life and then they became things that were showing up in the moment.
things I was becoming more aware of and I just figured I had to work through them and figure out the cause of these fears and the memories that were causing this train of thought because there had to be a reason according to the way I was primed by Therapist 1, right? So that was part of the dysfunction of EMDR and how That can very much not work for someone with OCD or at the very least with untreated Pete or at the very least with unshreated OCD that has not been taken care of or understood by a clinician so that went on for Almost a year Way longer than it was supposed to because it just felt like we weren't Getting everything it felt like I was doing really well in bringing things down from SUDs which is a distress scale of super high super low It's just that a lot more themes are popping up So it just seemed like I was just very traumatized, but I was doing well every time I did EMDR in reality I was very afraid of failing and I really wanted to answer with a zero because I thought I got to that logical rational place so Reality wasn't actually working. What was so interesting and such a serendipitous coincidence in picking my EMDR Therapist therapist number two at the time. It's what we're calling her Was that not only was she a PTSD and EMDR specialist which is what I was looking for But what I found out really early on is that one of her main focuses of work is in spiritual and religious abuse and trauma so cult specifically in fact she In her dissertation thesis work for her PhD Actually developed the very first spiritual abuse questionnaire to ever exist in psychology so that was just such a wild coincidence and If I want to call it a sign or at least some version of luck in my life to start dealing with the cult that Basically dropped into my life out of total coincidence So that was also part of our work from the beginning because as I learned about that I realized like this was a space I could start unpacking The cult especially in a way that I couldn't do with therapist one which also should have been a red flag but Again wasn't in a place to listen to my red flags so what Basically all of 2020 look like on top of you know the pandemic and everything was I was seeing both of them and I was seeing therapists to doing EMDR that wasn't really working and also working through the Spiritual religious abuse of the cult and starting to unpack it and give it language and get so much insight into how that all unfolded Which was so interesting and also overlapped with classes. I was taking it school with social psychology in particular that studied cults and we learned all about the specific ways that cults do their abuse and Kind of contextualizing it and realizing that who that had been when I was a part of it was very interesting and very Awesome that I started to get to work through that during that year Other than that what was really happening was I was in school I was white knuckling and getting by thinking that that was proof that I was getting better because of the therapies I was in and It was just a year. It was the whole year of seeing therapists one before cutting it off with her and It was just a lot of invalidation and gaslighting gaslighting about the questions I had about the therapy and about my condition because I was struggling so much that I kept bringing it up and it was just immediately Shot down like no you're fine. You just need to keep moving forward and do what I say and if anything The other treatment that EMDR bullshit's making you worse because you don't even need that and it started becoming this weird thing like she had a very competitive egoic like Trigger issue with my other therapist and so as soon as I started seeing therapists too Therapist one as part of our lengthy discussions we had in therapy of things that had nothing to do with therapy She would start talking in like a really weird way about the school that therapists two went to they both went to universities for their PhDs and whatnot and DFW so like we know what schools are around here and So she would just talk about how therapists two went to a lower school and therapists one school made fun of therapists two school which was just so weird and was talking about how it's so like Impossible that therapists two could have started such a big support there a Big successful practice because therapists one worked alone and kept Oddly enough leaving practices because it didn't work out quote-unquote which I heard all about by the way Just hearing about why everyone sucked and everyone was wrong and all these therapists that she worked with were They just learned either dirty laundry. It was just very odd like I talked about last episode and then would make Draw comparisons just as to why therapists two just got lucky with having a practice obviously was so jealous at therapists two and then so many other weird things were happening like just Basically invalidated any form of religious abuse saying that I just said PTSD and looked at everything like it was abusive So that would cover including looking at her as abusive right and Again was just sharing confidential information about people in her family people in the community her other patients Talking and naming literal other psychologists in the area and talking about their dirty laundry and the Medications they were on almost to invalidate Their practices it was so so weird. I can't I mean as I say it out loud. It's like So obvious but in the moment I it was just such a weird abusive power dynamic relationship and I Thought that's what it was supposed to be and I wasn't supposed to listen to what was inside myself and then It there was a particular thing that happened towards the end of the year that really like spearheaded the process of me exiting from this therapeutic relationship with therapist one which was that At this point I'd been an EMDR therapy for I don't know like eight nine 10 months something to like that and randomly in a session I guess we were talking about me seeing Therapist who an EMDR and she said this thing that was so weird she said you know I haven't told you this and like I haven't really brought it up But I just feel like you should know that if I had an ego Then I would have been really offended and irritated by you going to see therapist you But you're lucky that I don't have an ego and it doesn't bother me like it with other other people and That was just such a weird thing to receive because on one hand I was falling in the moment and was like oh well Thank you so much for being someone who doesn't have any go and like for being so great Like you're so great. You're so amazing. That was very much a relationship. I was just like hyper up Like she was amazing because that was the only thing that would get her to keep talking with anything of substance But on the inside it felt disgusting like what the fuck like you're actually validating that the fears I had about telling you this in the first place were real like I didn't just imagine it and just didn't I was just being paranoid like I was telling myself like you actually did think that or why else would you say that like you wouldn't that thought wouldn't come Across your mind to tell me that you weren't having if you weren't having it So that was just kind of so on it finally got me to start talking to therapists too about what the fuck has been going on and I just started like putting all that together and started contextualizing things kind of like of course in the process of Moving through a traumatic abusive relationship of any kind. It's not just like a flip of a switch like oh Yeah, you can contextualize on a very logical zoomed out level everything that's happening It's like there's a transition in between and like this repeated choice of do I trust myself or am I crazy and I had a very safe space to move through that with therapist to and just started realizing essentially telling therapists to which is very hard about all the shit that therapists want to talk about therapists to and That on top of then telling therapists to that therapist one was actually seeing my sibling as well because That's actually unethical and not a thing one should be doing unless it's like sibling therapy like therapist one was literally seeing me and then at my unfortunate recommendation to my sibling because my sibling was really struggling and that's the only person I knew to help therapist to or therapist one was seeing my sibling and would talk to my sibling about me about confidential stuff and then me about my sibling about confidential stuff which is illegal and unethical that was another turning point to realizing how fucked up the situation is and just realizing that there was such a weird control dynamic of therapist one trying to tell me exactly what are applied to schools and who to work with and who not to work with and Basically having me be her little minion For a lack of a better term like it just got so weird and then here's the kicker like here's really like I wish I could tell you that it was just all the abuse and all the red flags
stuff that had been accumulating that finally empowered me to leave, but what really pushed it over to the finish line was the fact that I found out at the end of the year that Theravis 1 was actually committing insurance fraud with my account and charging for far more sessions like multiple times a week than I'd actually been going to. And also like because of that insurance started kind of picking up on it because on Benos to Theravis 1, Theravis 1 was like booking some of sometimes the same time that I was seeing Theravis 2 and since that was all of my insurance it was all like laid out there as a calendar and it didn't make sense to insurance and because of that insurance sort of denying claims from Theravis 1 and also insurance said that Theravis 1 was like super behind and even filing a lot of those claims so like by the by December like only it had been filed till May or some weird stuff and then Theravis 1 started trying to get me to pay for everything that had been done wrong by Theravis 1 and also a lot of the fraudulent stuff and all of that was like what I've decided I was like this is the perfect way out. I now have a financial reason to doubt this person and I can just use that to get the fuck out and so I did like I didn't really even say anything I just didn't book anymore appointments and like ignored her outreach so that was my way of getting out of it and it was such a cluster fuck because again like I felt so guilty and I felt like I was doing something wrong and like at that point I felt like how could so many things happen to me like I'm the common denominator I must be the problem I must have a warpsense of reality and I'm crazy and I'm causing these problems I'm either causing them or I'm imagining them and so what is wrong with me and thank goodness I had my other Theravis my EMDR Theravis at the time not in a sense that I fully believed her reassurance because again I have rampant raging OCD and one doesn't necessarily get reassured by most things but I had pockets of validation and at least a legal level and understanding that this is not okay and none of this should be happening and this is calls for ethical reporting like to the board of licensing like this is that bad so that really helped me at least like stay away and not go back in like an abusive situation Stockholm syndrome way because not gonna lie it took me a while to not like feel like I should try to go back and repair things or just come up with some excuses to why I went off the grid or whatnot and so yeah that's the beginning of 2021 and at that point I had been in school for a year I went through all that with that therapist not really understanding what was going on and so now I'm just seeing my EMDR therapist and yeah we're doing EMDR but I'm starting to move away from doing so much EMDR number one because like within me I kind of knew it wasn't working for me but also like the more logical excuse that I could use to avoid my people pleaser dynamics of telling her I didn't want to do that thing and I didn't know if it was helping me was that now I didn't have a main therapist at that point therapist one was considered my main therapist and my EMDR therapist was like my side therapist even though I saw them equal amounts a week it was supposed to be like she kind of handled my PTSD EMDR stuff exclusively and did it step on the toes quote unquote of my main therapist but now I didn't have one and I had a lot of weird shit to process with that and just also needed help across the board so my EMDR therapist became my therapist my full therapist and so we were just doing a lot of talking and addressing whatever was coming up and there had been a lot coming up and in the first few months of 2021 interestingly what happened is that in Texas also in Texas because it's not the gaze of the whole country Texas kind of stop giving a shit about the pandemic I mean they really didn't give a shit most of the time but especially not at the beginning of 2021 and so work was starting to return in person school was returning in person and all of that at the beginning of 2021 my husband well he was my partner at the time now husband who of course I've been living with for many years at that point he was working from home and just virtual like everything like all of us through the pandemic and then his line of work at the time started to move towards being in person so he started working full time outside of our home after being together all the time for a few years at that point because he had traveled for work as I talked about last episode a lot at the beginning of our relationship and then you know pivoted in his work and then was not traveling and then it became like very at home mostly remote work for what he was doing at the time and that was before the pandemic then I had cancer and so I was home and better it in and go through treatment and all of that so we were home together for basically like two to three years through the pandemic and before that and then at 2021 he decided to take out an opportunity that was in person and he started leaving all day every day he was not out of town but he would leave like a normal job-ish time so that left me at home alone for the first time in a very long time consistently because school was still online at that point that semester that first half of 2021 so what was happening was he was leaving our home every day for you know eight to ten hours and I was home and other than working and doing school given that I was alone I very quickly relapsed into what I had conceptualized as my compulsions at that time and keep in mind again that at this point I still have not received accurate OCD treatment I have only been aware of some of my physical compulsions I didn't know anything about mental compulsions so I thought that I had a handle on my quote unquote OCD and I quote unquote say that because I had been conditioned by my last abusive therapist to not even consider that OCD to consider it just trauma so whatever that was quote unquote OCD I thought I had control over it because I wasn't doing the physical compulsions I was just like white knuckleing and like shivering sometimes shaking and not doing it but not doing it most of the time and then when he left I started doing those physical compulsions again which was very interesting because number one I thought I didn't have OCD I didn't have that problem number two I quickly realized that what was really motivating me to not do those anymore on top of my own awareness and like my shame around doing that stuff was this added shame of possibly doing it in front of my husband because of course he's along with me through all of this believe me he has been through all of this with me and knows it sometimes more than I do and he learned that I had OCD when I learned that I had OCD or at least what I thought that was right so in a sense once he became aware he was watching to see if I would do stuff because that's what you do when you live together you're witnessing the other person existing and I realized that I was motivated to not do that to be a good person and to not do my compulsive weird behaviors by him being around and witnessing me and so given that that was a primary motivator for me once he was not around all the time I relapsed into doing them and so what I thought was going on I told eventually after a few months my EMDR therapist and I told her that I think I have very untreated bad OCD and I need help and it was really hard for me to say because I felt like I was letting her down because of my own internalized beliefs of she needed to feel like she was good at her job and she could you know see everything because obviously she had not seen that I had that issue she didn't really know anything about OCD other than what most therapists know she didn't invalidate it ever but she figured she was going with the narrative I was going with and didn't really catch that I had the issue and so I was very afraid especially even my last several therapy situations but especially the the two prior the one who tried to help me with religion and art and CBT traditional CBT which is contraindicated and then my last therapist who was abusive told me I didn't have OCD and then also tried to treat me with psychodynamic therapy which also didn't work so it was very hard for me to tell my OCD therapist I should probably start calling her my main therapist now so let's transition EMDR therapist therapist two is now just my therapist my main therapist so I told her and she surprisingly treated me completely differently than my last therapist or anyone which was very telling for the quality of her work at her as a human being and being someone who was safe for me even if she.
did arguably miss a lot. She totally owned it and was like a hundred percent on board. Like, you know, I really want to support you to get the help you need. I will do whatever I need to do to support you and to talk to whoever I need to talk to. If we need to take a break, I completely understand. I always have a spot open for you. If we work together in conjunction with those CD therapy, I'm fully here to collaborate with that therapist. Like she just was completely validating and supportive and that has never left me in terms of just having a model for a new experience. And I'm really happy to see what that could look like. So I was very lucky to finally have that in my life. And at the same time in these first few months of 2021 and I'm 24 here by the way. In this period of relapsing into my physical compulsions and starting to realize that I have some really severe issues with those CD. So started seeking out this content on social media because I had never really met anyone with OCD. And I just wanted to learn more. And social media was kind of the safe place to do it. And so I happened upon thank goodness. Some of the most amazing advocacy and education accounts on OCD on social media, particularly Instagram at the time. And I very quickly learned that OCD is not what I thought it was. Number one, it's definitely not the weird quirk or choice that the media at large and especially and also therapists think that it is. It's also just not physical compulsions. That's the tip of the iceberg almost because it's not about just stopping the compulsions first of all. It's figuring out why I was doing the compulsions in terms of the fear that they have and then allowing themselves to expose themselves to the fear and tolerate it. Right. And not do the compulsions. So I learned that basically the genesis of what we're going to talk about later exposure and response prevention therapy. And I also think the most in addition to learning about the first and only evidence based treatment out there for OCD, the gold standard of OCD treatment, which was exposure and response prevention therapy. It's a modality of therapy. It's a subset of cognitive behavioral therapies, but it's not traditional CBT. It's specifically for OCD and works very differently than traditional CBT or any other therapy. So on top of learning that, I think the other equally important part that I learned was that mental compulsions were a thing. So I had no concept of what that was. And as I learned about mental compulsions, what they look like, the function that they served, how it was different than thinking, I realized that my OCD was so much more than I thought it was. And I really had no idea how much OCD ran my life. And I really thought that was just existing. And that was just me being myself. And perhaps because of the intensity and the fear around my mental compulsions, I thought they might be related to PTSD or trauma. And/or they're just me being myself or just anxious, but did not realize that I did so many compulsions. So that was a revelation and really little fired or my ass to go try to seek therapy for OCD. Now keep in mind again, you've heard parts 1, 2, and now 3 and also Bifold's story of this podcast. So you have heard the very long, very traumatic set of experiences I've had, this journey I've had of incorrect treatment, abusive treatment, ineffectual, all of that, right? So going into OCD treatment and seeking that, just try to imagine the amount of distress I have and fear I have, and not just from pathological sense of already being distrustful and fearful because of my maladapting coping mechanisms to try to keep myself safe. But just like, and objectively, everything I had gone through and even the healthiest of people would feel that way. So I was so afraid of not being able to work with someone who would understand or help me or worse me getting myself into a horrible situation because at the time I felt responsible for getting myself into all those situations. So who's say that wouldn't happen again and it would be just my fault and life wouldn't get better. So that was very hard and I did it anyway. Luckily this time I was equipped with enough information to be looking specifically for someone who did ERP and not just said that they treated OCD because a lot of therapists say that they treat everything and guess what? They don't they don't know OCD. They don't know how to treat it. It takes a specialist who knows ERP and is trained on specifically OCD and how it shows up in every way. So I was able to look for that in particular. Of course I got to use the IOCDF, the International OCD Foundation's website, which has an amazing system for finding literate and trained professionals specifically in OCD, basically vetted. And so I was able to use that to narrow down to practitioners who didn't live near me, but were in Texas so I could do teletherapy and also took my insurance. There was a few variables at hand. And I was able to start and I just remember when I finally got my first appointment set, I did this thing that I didn't really do, which was I went into my room and I cried. And I didn't really cry or feel emotions that intensely and I didn't really know how to label it at the time, but it just was this sense of there's a lot of fear packed into it and there's also the sense of relief that oh my goodness, this thing that I have a feeling because a huge part in my dysfunction and has racked me with despair for my whole life is finally going to be seen by someone. Hopefully, maybe, be helped. And while in retrospect, I definitely didn't know what was coming for me in the future and how nonlinear that would be. And also I did have this fantasy idea that treatment equal I wouldn't have OCD anymore. It's not the case. Whatever that was was able to get me to at least get into therapy so it worked the way it did, but that was where I was at at that time. And so right after I turned 25, I started therapy for the first time with my first OCD therapist. And it was really interesting to start because of course I have a very long extensive medical psychological history to share and I thought I had a grasp on what my OCD was and I shared it and then through our intake session and him basically giving me psychoeducation on OCD and then starting to teach me about different beams and ask me questions and have me kind of put together where I could see this pattern of having me fear and then doing something about it, especially mentally, like all the themes came up and the severity of my OCD on top of like the testing I did showing that I was in a very severe range. Like it really blew my mind how pervasive this was and pretty much every aspect of my life in my line of thinking. So I kind of had every theme or most themes, false memory, real event, magical thinking, moral and religious scrupulosity, what they call pure O, relationship OCD, contamination, suicidal OCD, which is actually different than being suicidal. Like I had both harm OCD, hoarding that I do of sexual orientation OCD, just right sensory motor, perfectionism, checking, counting, existential, confessing, just so many different versions and themes and compulsions that I had. And it felt so overwhelming and I was able to at least logically start to conceptualize that all OCD was treated the same. It didn't matter what the themes were. It also didn't matter what the compulsions were. The only reasons they mattered were so that one, you could know what was showing up and then two, it helped normalize some of the very taboo themes that are, if you don't understand OCD, you just think that there's something very wrong with you and if a clinician doesn't understand OCD, they think you're psychotic or that there's something actually morally very wrong with you. So it's helpful to understand themes in that way and also that not all OCDs can find within the theme. There's just names for themes for common things that are found within people. So with all of that, I started treatment and I wish I could say that it worked the way it works in everyone which was basically in 12 to 24 sessions. There's supposed to be like a massive reduction in OCD symptoms to where you don't even score on the Y-Box or at least are in the very mild range if you were severe. So I thought in like six-ish months it would be better and you know three to six months and very quickly me and my first OCD therapist realized that I was in a good mood.
realized that I was in a conundrum of a situation where I had comorbid PTSD and OCD, which he did know I had PTSD. But from his education and happening to be someone who was studying the comorbidity of PTSD and OCD, he quickly realized that my OCD and PTSD were not static to where I just had OCD and I just had PTSD and we could treat one one way and treat the other the other way. What he figured out was that my OCD and PTSD were what they call functionally dynamic. So my OCD fed into my PTSD and my PTSD fed into my OCD and that's not to say that either caused the other. It's just that a lot of the themes I had were related to both. So a quick way to conceptualize my functionally dynamic OCD and PTSD, which I'm going to be very brief about to illustrate a point, but we're definitely going to go into it in more depth in many future episodes because it's really interesting and should be known about more, but also because largely my research has followed that light of thinking. So there's a lot more to share on the scientific side about this, but just briefly to explain how it looked like for me. A lot of my compulsions in OCD and my safety behaviors in PTSD looked very similar, so it was hard to figure out which one was what, but luckily I was with someone who was trained to know that that was the case. And they were related because a lot of my obsessions or my pervasive fears were about things that had actually happened to me from a PTSD lens. So like real things, not just what if scenarios about the about the future that were rooted by like a new fear I had. So for example, just one day developing an obsession that maybe someone will break into my house and so I start compulsively locking the door. That's something that is more so like purely an obsession that's not rooted in PTSD versus the obsession that I'm going to get cancer again and the cancer is not going to get caught again because it didn't last time and that's rooted in my very real reality that I did get cancer and I was misdiagnosed for six plus months and mistreated and then it actually did metastasized. So I had the obsession and I'd do compulsions of one constantly thinking about and checking mentally and making sure that I'm not having any symptoms, gaining my body, checking my body constantly for any sign of a tumor, getting biopsies and then on top of it all not believing the results because last time that happened it actually turned out to be wrong. So I just have pathological doubts about it so that's an example of the OCD being intertwined to the PTSD. It is still OCD though. It's also PTSD. It's PTSD that is unresolved, very severe, existential like almost took my life out trauma, like criterion one trauma from the DSM and the way I am now dealing with it partially is through compulsions so it's both. And the way that this complicates treatment is because in PTSD, when you're doing PTSD treatment the idea is doing exposures and being able to move through those experiences with everything that comes up for you and then ultimately develop a sense of processing and safety and acknowledgement that that's in the past and like your body learning to realize that that's not happening now. But the thing about going into PTSD treatment is that you need to have like a window of tolerance to be able to handle all of that and what was so hard for me was I would go into any sort of PTSD situation, PTSD processing and like I told you earlier with the EMDR for example, it was so distressing that I would start doing compulsions and often and most of the time they were mental so they're really hard for me or for anyone to catch so that's what makes PTSD treatment complicated. And then in terms of what makes OCD treatment complicated with the PTSD is one, in order to do an exposure, since very similar but also different with OCD treatment, you're going into exposures which are basically going into an obsession and then basically tolerating all the distress that comes with that obsession and not doing a compulsion and breaking that cycle so that you don't just constantly try to bring down the distress and fear and anxiety that comes with that obsession with a compulsion and staying in that cycle because the compulsion temporary alleviates it and then real quick it comes back and then you do it again and it's just repetitive and unending which is like what my life looked like. So the hard part about having comorbid PTSD and OCD in a functional sense for OCD treatment was that when I would try to go into an exposure my distress levels were so high and oftentimes the theme was interrelated PTSD that I actually couldn't stay in the exposure I would end up dissociating because I didn't have a window of tolerance to tolerate it and it would be I would react to exposures not in the ways that people with general typical OCD do. It would go into my complete limbic system fight or flight either wailing out of despair which was very new for me because I didn't really cry or wail like that and if not that then I dissociated. And another way that my OCD really impacted my PTSD in terms of them being functionally dynamic was any time that I would try to do PTSD treatment like try to process some sort of situation or traumatic event. The OCD would latch on so hard in terms of pathological doubt that that event or that situation even happened. That's a common theme for the way I navigate my life. My OCD really latches on to my memory and specifically really traumatic things to invalidated ever happening or doubt that it ever happened or question the validity of my memory or the experience and then a lot of intrusive thoughts latch on to that about basically character flaws of how horrible I am that I'm probably making it up for attention or that I just want to keep suffering or whatever. And I definitely internalized a lot of those dialogues from things I heard in my upbringing to invalidate me in the first place. So what you can see is a clear cut example of how I can't really process something if I can't fully believe it happened or I can't even tolerate the uncertainty of it happening. And the truth is I don't know that I'm ever going to get to the place where I fully believe anything and that's kind of not the point. It'd be nice but given the likelihood that it's probably not going to happen based on most people's opinions in the way all the biology and psychology and everything works, the real goal is to be able to tolerate the uncertainty of those doubts maybe it didn't happen and do those exposures in a PTSD treatment situation anyway. It'd be able to process them even without that utmost certainty. And if I can't tolerate that uncertainty, I can't even engage in that treatment. So that's a very salient example of how that shows up for me. So it's really hard to do exposures because it was hard to do them normally and it was really hard to do PTSD treatment because I would do compulsions and that's some of the many, many ways that they're interrelated. But that's really what came up at that time. And so luckily my first OCD therapist who I was seeing at the time, I saw him for almost a year and I'll tell you why it ended. But I saw him for almost a year and he was a, he was a trainee in the sense that he had gotten his PhD, was working under a fully licensed person to get his license and so he was being trained by someone. So he wasn't necessarily super seasoned. He, whatever he did know, he did know about that comorbidity because it interested him. So I got very lucky in being thrown into the hands of someone who at least thought about that because as I learned later from him and other people, like most OCD therapists actually don't know how to treat comorbid PTSD. No CD, they don't really have a conceptualization of the functional dynamic nature of it. So I got very lucky that at least he could identify that. That being said though, what we were trying to do was work on both, both with both my therapist and then also with my OCD therapist as both came up working on one versus the other and his general approach to the comorbidity was to work with a combination of cognitive processing therapy, acceptance of commitment therapy, and then of course, exposure and response prevention therapy. And what I'll say about that almost year was it definitely helped me with the parts of the facets of my OCD that were not functionally dynamic and related to my PTSD. So I'll call that like my more clear cut OCD, like the general obsessions and compulsions that were very future oriented and not necessarily rooted in something that happened in the past. For those things, I was able to do ERP and tolerate it and greatly get parts of my life back and be more free from compulsions. That was beautiful and it showed me that conceptually ERP did work. What was hard though was. So much of my OCD, like if you look at the OCD pie, like most of it honestly was functionally dynamic and related to my PTSD and so I Basically stayed in the severe range no matter how much I tried and it really sucked and We were getting into talks of getting into much more intensive therapy if I could get myself to do it with the way my life looked and having the resources At the very least intensive outpatient if not being in full-time residential treatment if need be although it was still hard to figure out how to do that with people who did understand my comorbidity and I just wasn't a severe case of OCD It was like severe and Related to the PTSD needed to be treated together in conjunction by one person In the talks of all of that at around like ten months in what happened was my first therapist Had to move to a different state because of the spouse and leave the practice and so I Couldn't see him anymore and I really really sucked but he was really committed to trying to help me Get in with someone who was equally or more qualified than him to handle my case and Found an amazing person who had been doing this for years within his practice It was a pretty seamless transition and they really talked about my case and Got mostly up to speed as much as one can without meeting me and so that was helpful There was like a three month gap in between because she was so booked out but that was really helpful and also throughout the whole time that I was seeing My OCD therapist of course. I was still also seeing my regular therapist my PTSD therapist and Amazingly like this was so new to me, but they really collaborated and she did so much to learn about OCD From him to do everything she could to support what I was going through with him to Make sure that that stuff as best as we could together was implemented in our work together because it was so easy to slip back into all the compulsions that she couldn't see and Basically just constantly seeking reassurance and going to the logical side and not really progressing but looking like I was progressing in my work with my original therapist so we both worked collaboratively to learn about OCD together learn about my OCD and as best as I could Advocate for it be honest about what was going on with me so that she could learn and she really did Like she would check a lot with me about is this reassurance-eaking is this a Genuine question are you in your body right now like she really just did so much she was taking her own classes and I just I'm forever grateful to her for that but needless to say You know, I wasn't really progressing on those fronts with I rear of them except for improving in general with the Quotal Court regular OCD I had and then You know like at least conceptualizing what was going on with me which was helpful and When he left and then I had like a break before I started seeing OCD therapist number two at least I had the consistency and having someone Stick around with me and just Developing safety which it's hard for me to say that because I would never want to hold her to that or You know decide that if she were to change her career or move or decides she needs to drop me that I would just you know fall apart it's hard for me to like Say that and think that that's a pressure I would put on her and yet like to be honest Emotionally there is a part that would feel that way or but you know confirm some sort of abandonment belief and that's not on her to ever like Save me from but nonetheless I am grateful a lot of things can be true and I am grateful that I've had her consistently since and through all that so Basically did CPT ACT of course ERP with therapist number one I Decided to take a break from EMDR because I think I started really realizing that EMDR and I were not Working very well Actually, I should give you a little insight on that towards the later part of my OCD treatment with therapist number one I decided to try to give EMDR a better shot because I was I felt like I was more equipped to do so and like I New more of what to expect and what was going on and I really just wanted to try to do it without compulsions and so I did a few sessions and they actually felt like I was really Doing them with less compulsions and starting to process more and it wasn't as clear or cut and logical and whatnot Which felt really cool and then I had this one session where I went in and the OCD was so loud and I was so just paralyzed by doubt and I dissociated and You know that is part of the process and one could argue that just doing it and Exposing myself to it and allowing it all to happen was therapeutic and enough itself But it was so jarring to me that I For better for worse made the decision that I'm gonna take a break from EMDR for a long while until I can Get more of a grasp on all this and see if that's even something that does serve me and if so Maybe I should be in a better place for it. So that all was kind of happening at the same time. So now we're in 2022 and we are in the beginning to First few months of 2022. I should also mention in context of all of this that Between stopping medications like I talked about in earlier episodes in around 2016 till the beginning of 2022 I was on No medications the only form of medication I took that was kind of related was if you look at it like that like psychedelics for a while which Is definitely its own topic and we'll be getting into soon in another episode but vaguely that and more so like the physical medications I was taking for all my conditions and cancer and thyroid and all that stuff But no psychiatric medications of any form between 2016 and the beginning of 2022 and there are a lot of reasons for that and again This is just my experience. I have to remind y'all but in addition to just the complete stability of my treatment in general and like things being very wonky and confusing like this whole story tells you I also just Could not get myself to start taking the traditional Recommended medications for my conditions mainly SSRIs or SNRIs or other Reouttakenhibitors of that form in a traditional sense because I Could not risk in my mind like in the few years of starting to gain functionality back and Live my life. I could not risk Going back to what I used to be like on them for so many years in my mind I had to hold on to the little functionality I had now and I could not risk going backwards like That time was really bad where I was then and even you could say now but I could not risk getting it worse by the medications and What I'd experienced in the past so I just had a very stronger version to it and it was hard for me to stand my grout Without a version because it's really easy for myself and other providers to pathologize that because of trauma and irrational beliefs or you know making things a big deal and I also was developing as a neuroscientist and started learning about how these medications work and understanding the efficacy rates and while they are very helpful for some people they are so poorly helpful across the board for people and I just started feeling more validated in the research and in the efficacy rates that maybe it's not just me saying that like there's a reason that I am Not as comfortable going that route until maybe I absolutely need to have no other options. So that was a constant point of contention with OCD therapist number one Just wanting to turn down the intensity of all my conditions period which I just they respected my decision and both my practitioners, but they were very hopeful that I would change my mind and I didn't but that's important to know amongst all of this that I was not on any medications at the beginning of 2022 I was about to enter into a very intense environment of joining for the first time a neurobiology wet lab environment and again with hearing my story You know that I pivoted and this was all very new to me and so I knew myself and I knew that I very much struggle with a lot of freezing and fear and even though it's not maybe outwardly obvious my performance greatly diminishes in that state of arousal and fear and so what I did decide to do because To be clear, I am not against medications Like at all as you will hear I just did not resonate with or
feel like my body responded well to the specific psychiatric medications dispensed for the conditions that I have. But I am not against medication and I did know about beta blockers and perpanelol in particular because if you heard my whole story you know that I had tried them in the past and they worked in the physical sense to help blunt the physical panic responses I had to things as much it just really fucked with my hearing which in the context of singing and performing did not work for me. But in the context of doing most other things other than the like horrible perfect picture situation of feeling dissonant amongst everything and hearing everything wrong other than that it was probably a net positive for me to in my mind at the time start taking a beta blocker to at least ease the panic and physical symptoms and you know shaking and sweating and impacting my physical capability of doing lab work with those. So I started taking perpanelol like a lot because I realized I could just try to dull and tune down every situation that caused me those feelings like any sort of interview or presentation or classes tests. I mean I was really struggling and that helped a little bit so why not do that is what I thought. So of course I was supported by a psychiatrist to get that and I also started taking a medication called Medaphinal to help with my focus and my chronic fatigue because those are things that really impacted my well-being and my ability to function. So definitely again not against medications. I was taking those and contextually the beginning of 2022 like I said I started being in lab a lot and being aroused a lot and basically doing exposures all the time on my memory on my checking on so much of my OCD and PTSD and panic and all the things. So just it felt like life was constantly exposure therapy and to orient us back to time right this is from the beginning to like first quarter of 2022. I'm starting all these medications. I'm starting on a very very intensive like I am basically working or doing school and lab and all the things like probably a hundred hours a week if not more. I also just had some personal like research work and project snowball and so I was just like so activated and busy all the time and I was doing exposures basically all the time because all of this scared the shit out of me and were things that I avoided like the plague for years and now I was just going headfirst into everything that scared me because it's a combination of like damn I have some functionality like let me see how far I can take this and I need to take advantage of everything I have now because what if it goes away it was like very you know rooted in trauma and like almost dying from cancer and just feeling like I needed to do everything all the time now because I gave my life back I gained a second chance and I needed to just make it happen so was just going nonstop and I was exposed to nonstop and I was in very very scary situations nonstop and part of what was not caught in my OCD treatment and otherwise was that basically there was no step up in hierarchy of exposures because I kind of just started when I started grad school or like the end of my undergrad beginning of grad school which was all very very very stressful and overwhelming and so like I just kind of dove head first and we dove head first into all the things that were very very high on the list of intensity of exposures rather than stepping up and so that really didn't help with the PTSD and kind of put me into a constant state of fight or flight in a rousal and I didn't really build the skills to like tolerate all of that on top of everything else I've explained so it was a cluster and there I was but no we had it fully figured that out until kind of the middle of the year and then you know he left my first OCD therapist left the end of 2021 beginning of 2022 like ish right and then I waited a few months and I started seeing my second OCD therapist and unfortunately I only saw her for a few months because then after a few months she left the practice seems like that practice that really bad luck and I had really bad luck she's amazing and I'll get into what happened with her but basically to orient you I got to see her for a few months and then very suddenly it was over we'll get into why later but I started seeing her she was a prize of my situation but really need to get to know me and how things showed up in session and beyond and very quickly she started highlighting because she was a lot more experienced I think she started noticing some plot holes and maybe ways that treatments should have or could have looked different for me from my last OCD therapist and what could be changed to this go around which was that number one I definitely hadn't stepped up in my exposures like I said so I was kind of being thrown into the deep end and did not have what it took and was not equipped to handle it properly so there was that I had also basically in OCD speak white knuckles my way through everything rather than actually like tolerating and that's for a number of reasons with the PTSD and whatnot and also just not fully learning how to do exposures and like fully lean into the distress because I had so many safety behaviors and I had it been caught and so I had been white knuggling and just thinking I had to very strongly suffer through everything and that wasn't exposure but in reality that's not the case and I didn't know that so she quickly highlighted that that wasn't really great and she also started thinking about maybe I should get some full comprehensive psychological testing done so that we could have like a full picture of the different parts that were going on with me and maybe even things we didn't know about which I agreed with because you know I'd never had the done and given the complexity of my psychological and mental well-being and my history it's probably you know why wouldn't I want it all to be excavated given how long I'd been under diagnosed, misdiagnosed all the things so under her particular guidance I was very much like open to the idea of that full testing my caveat to all of that was I really needed someone to do that full psychological testing who was educated on OCD in particular not like treated it necessarily but was fully educated on what it was how it actually presents mental compulsions all those things because we know from my story and from the statistics that that is not the case it is the exception not the rule that someone actually knows about OCD in the mental health psychiatric psychological therapy vocations it's unfortunate it's horrific but that's the case and so I was hoping that with my very you know expert level OCD PTSD therapist that I was now seeing therapy number two that I would be able to get that kind of provider to be able to do that and that they would work together with you know my other therapist they would all work together to be as informed about my conditions that I didn't have to do that informing and I could as much as I am capable of trust that this would get figured out and just to elaborate on that like why I need someone to be literate on OCD is because if people don't understand my OCD or OCD in general then most of the intrusive thoughts and beliefs and fears that I have would be construed as you know probably psychotic because that's what happens oftentimes or just paranoid or depressed or you know with PTSD like it wouldn't be identified as OCD and therefore the unique equation of how these all play together and result in my state of being and how I should be treated would not be accurate so that was you know one of many reasons why I needed that to happen so in the process of starting to get open to going through that testing and with my OCD therapist and also starting to feel like I was turning a corner because we were doing exposures differently and she really seemed to have a grasp on what I needed and we were just dipping our toes into making changes in the way we did treatment you know she was still doing ERP, ACT and CPT just like my first one my first therapist but in a way where she was really able to help me like in the few sessions we got to do this like identify where I was white knuckleing and work on accepting and just parse out between the two like it was going really well and I was starting to get really hopeful and then I found out that she was leaving the practice and I could continue to see her but she doesn't take my insurance and I'm not in a financial place to be able to see someone that's not on my insurance so I just accepted that I would have like six weeks to two months left with her because that's how early she told me about her leaving and she really was committed to seeing me through at the very least getting me to someone else who could give me care which was really rough because think about having to rehash all of them.
of that to another person. I trust another person, but nonetheless, I felt really secure in that she would help me make that transition. Also, she was committed to seeing through the process of finding an adequate person to conduct my psychological evaluations and then also collaborating with them and my regular therapists to just inform them of my condition and my contacts and what they know and then help parse through the results. So I was feeling pretty okay about that, but then what happened was like two weeks into that six weeks process. I received an email from the practice being like all your appointments are canceled. You won't be able to see her sorry and I'm like, "What the fuck?" and I figured out alongside my regular therapist who was very vested in supporting me through this transition again, bless her, my gosh. And also losing contact with my OCD therapist like very suddenly because again, like they were collaborating and working together this whole time. We figured out that basically that practice just got upset that my therapist was leaving the practice and starting her own and we're like, was like, bye, you can leave now. Locked her out of all of her patient's records very suddenly and she couldn't reach out because of like hippo laws and stuff to my therapist nor because she reached out to me or even had my information. So that really sucked and I had to work through that abandonment before we figured out like what happened and even though I figured out what happened after it just really sucked to it. And so abruptly and that transition not really happened because like she didn't have the time or capability of doing so anymore because of all the time that was taken from us. So that really sucked and that was like the summer, the beginning of summer of 2022. So last year at this point, I have turned 26 and man, things were not good. Through starting the year really intensely, I basically just got into a very severe depressive episode that I didn't know how to label as such, but it was just getting worse and worse and I thought I just had too much on my plate which I'm sure contributed to it. But and not to say I wasn't even depressed the whole time like apparently according to my testing, I've just been chronically depressed, but this was a very severe depressive episode. And that's all happening like through this year, then after not, you know, getting the proper care, it got worse. And at that time, I'm still on those medications that I talked about for Pranelol and the Daphneil, but like I started getting really slow and getting just, it was harder and harder to function and it started to feel like I was starting to slip back into a version of the past where I was starting to get more dysfunctional. No, nowhere near how bad it got and my situation's different now and I have my husband and my dog and a reason to get out of bed, but how hard it was and how much harder it was getting compared to how hard it is normally, which is pretty hard, but this was getting to like almost impossible. That was really scary. And so I finally was able to start labeling it as a depressive episode with my regular therapist and we weren't sure what to do because medication wasn't going to be a thing, but I did start microdosing and long story short for whatever reason, it helped enough to get me by, to keep me holding on until I could have a significant break at the end of the year to do some intensive shit, but I held on by half a thread and that half a thread I think was a combination of just getting through feeling like I needed to hold on until the end of a very, very, very stressful year with a lot of stuff that came up. A lot of good things too, but nonetheless, just so stressful and so desabelizing and have a break that I hadn't had. So contextually, that's all happening to them and a depressive episode on top of like all the other things, right? And basically from the time that OCD therapist left till the last quarter of 2022, I was trying with my regular therapist to find someone who I could trust enough to do my psychological testing to figure out if I can make any progress because I was starting to feel hopeless again like I was a hopeless case and what I find someone to be able to treat me and the complexity of my presentation of illnesses and is life going to be at the level of functionality where I'm holding on just enough and I'm working so hard to just get by and you know I could handle that now I guess if it's in the process of getting better, but I was truly getting to a point of like is this what life is going to look like and can I do it? And I don't know that I'm signing up for this level of horrific distress and pain and tolerance of existence and not to say that it's all bad, right? Like objectively my life was going really, really well. They're like comparative to what my life has ever looked like before. You know, I married to such a safe and incredible human being an unconditionally loving person and I get emotional even thinking about it and that's a life saver and so beautiful and I can never take that for granted and that's a beautiful part of my life and academically I'm succeeding far beyond my or anyone else's expectations. My research was really taking off like an independent project I was doing, I was presenting at like so many conferences, I was winning awards, I was getting some funding, I was just I mean I took like 20 flights in I think five months last year like just from all the opportunities and conferences and presentations that I had I gave a keynote last year at CancerCon 2022 like me, I gave a keynote that's wild right? I was doing independent research and getting validated by my heroes and people in the field and finding something that people hadn't found based on my own lived experiences which we'll get into another day but that was so incredible. I threw happenstance and total luck and serendipity and generosity was able to be in the first ever National OCD commercial campaign and then I was able to meet everybody involved from the research side and really bridge all of my backgrounds and just really step into advocacy and be in a community of incredible people. I was taking on a bigger role in IPN the Intercollegiate Psychedelics Network and we got to meet everybody at this incredible leadership retreat and we're doing such amazing work and I was able to lead a team and that was going swimmingly well and school you know slaying my classes as hard as they were like it wasn't easy it was so so difficult it took everything in me but I was able to do it. Lab was going so well I grew so much I you know made so many connections with investigators in the field who were giving me a chance academically you know I was really bypassing a lot of the things it took to get these opportunities because of I don't know luck and just being persistent and how the cards landed that's not even afraid as you get what I mean. Like what I'm trying to say is life on the surface level of circumstance was going better than ever and yet my what was going on inside did not match that and was getting worse and worse and that itself is a closer thought because it's one thing to have your insights match your outsides your circumstances be shit and your internal existence be horrific and it makes sense but when it doesn't make sense it's for me at least and maybe even worse at least equally worse because the dissonance made me feel like I am the problem and there's something wrong with me and how could if objectively life is getting better and I am not then do I even stand a chance so it got really dark and then I was just hoping that I could hold on till the psychological testing and then having a winter break to be able to go do some intensive ketamine treatment which is a whole other story but I was just holding on to a tiny bit of hope so like June to October is just me getting by and hoping to get the ball rolling in some sense because I wasn't really going to be able to start with another OCD specialist at this point because what would be the point if they were going to also want to do that testing it was probably better to get all that testing done get more data and then figure out what I need from there all that I really had to go off of was that my last therapist was basically trying to figure out how to sign me up for an intensive outpatient treatment situation because what we were doing was not enough and at least we need to step up care a little bit but I didn't get to do that so at that level of severity
I was just holding on for a dear life, hoping something would change, something would happen. We could figure something out. Then I finally got in with someone who could do assessments. And no, they were not really verbose or educated on OCD. But the reason that my therapist and I decided to go forward with her was because she seemed very willing to learn and to communicate and collaborate with her and even my OCD therapist if she was available. And that willingness spoke a lot to both of us in terms of at least there's a chance this could go well. And at least this person's open-minded and willing and seems invested enough. So I started with this whole testing process, which was basically like 60 hours of intensive testing plus sessions before and after to intake sessions and figuring out how we're going to go about this and then result sessions. So to sum it all up, I went into it as clear as I could be about what I wanted to learn and figure out, which was figuring out what all was playing into my experience of life that was very maladaptive and why I was suffering so much if also I was even suffering or if I was just taking the human condition and being a sensitive Sally about it. Because honestly that's something that I tell myself a lot. And I also came to her with all the diagnoses that I have lived with or had and have. And I also took it upon myself to become the or try to become the educator on OCD and my comrade OCD and PTSD and really try to get through to her that and the good news was she was very much versed in PTSD and complex PTSD and most other things. The bad thing is she was not versed in OCD and I know she was willing to learn but it later kind of came out that it didn't exactly get through in the most effective way. But we'll get to that. So I did feel relatively seen and heard and she really quickly started reflecting to me that I didn't need help with like the logic and rationality which is the most generally people need help with. She even was so open and candid to say that after a few sessions before we started testing she really sat and reflected on how does she could help me because it feels like I am on the spectrum of her version of intelligence incredibly extremely intelligent and I can't necessarily be helped by traditional treatment of getting me to go forwards in my understanding of things because that's kind of my my coping mechanism in a fucked up way. It's actually like I need someone to go inwards and backwards to go where everything I've skipped which I know so that felt very validating and helpful as much as it is also uncomfortable because I definitely doubt my own reality and my own capability so it's very uncomfortable for me to hear anything like that but I also did feel validated why I hadn't been helped by a lot of people before. So that was a good sign and long story short we went through a shit ton of comprehensive testing across the board not just psychological and not just of course self-report but a ton of projective testing, a ton of cognitive testing in terms of like IQ and different parts of my learning and my just general performance capabilities and testing for you know other more neurological conditions that I was curious about because of a lot of random things I had figured out about myself like in terms of how I need subtitles on for absolutely everything and how I get really overwhelmed really easily by different sensory things and just having some weird issues like with my visual stuff but also I have very hyper capabilities with my auditory stuff so just with a lot of information we came up with a huge like battery of testing that would make sense to address most of my questions so went through all that testing and mostly the notable things that came up there I mean without going into a 15 hour long discussion about the testing because that's a whole experience and enough itself but basically it was really jarring to go through the testing because my freezing and my memory OCD came through very strongly on the cognitive tests and it would I would get to the end and I'd be having no problem and then I'd panic and I'd freeze and I just whatever I did last time I couldn't even do this time and it would impact my performance but then when I was able to calm myself down if I was able to I could just completely finish the test and it's something she had never seen before because normally people apparently don't even get to the end of the test in terms of those cognitive measurements but me I could get there and I could finish it and I could get it 100 percent but then I would get some that were zero because I would just completely freeze and so she got to see in first hand action my system and how it just is so triggered by my obsessions and my panic and just my dysregulation overall so that was really interesting it was also really really hard to go through the rehashing of everything but you know I'm doing it here even more so and we did the testing in a way that she wanted to keep me a prize of what we were doing because she knew that otherwise I would get totally into logic brain and would be like filling in the gaps myself so she really like explained to me everything we were doing and then we'd have we do tests and then we'd have time to digest and she'd give me the preliminary results as she could based on what she could deduce from them and the score she did have and then of course there was a lot of room for more interpretation and analysis at the end but like at the end of all the testing but she would do that intermittently just because she knew where my brain would probably go otherwise and also because she knew I'd understand it because hello I do this research I'm a researcher so something that really sticks out to me is I did these projective tests a good amount of them which basically like there's these neutral stimuli and however I interpreted there's like a very specific way of figuring out like how traumatized I am and where my beliefs come from and where my head generalize at like how my brain perceives and interprets things and like what's contributing to that so after these projective tests she told me that she had never tested anyone with more shame than me like at the highest level of shame and it was really jarring for her because she was talking to me like as a human after that which was really interesting to hear and also just how obvious it was from the words in the way I interpreted certain stimuli and the words I used that I had been through some very serious and intense physical abuse and even sexual which I thought was really interesting because only certain kinds of trauma generally like and I'm probably butchering this but from the way she described it to me and it's written in my report like certain kinds of trauma correlates to like very strongly to certain vocabulary and ways of interpreting and describing stimuli so that was very interesting and it very quickly came up that the extremely high amount of shame I experience is my way of processing any emotions because conceptually as a kid I was cooked in chaos and cooked in horrific horrific neglect and abuse and all the things and there's no way for me as a kid to like attribute it to chance and attribute it to like the adult very logical rational distance way of thinking of perception of like objectively I had no control over that and these people were the way they were and did the things they did because of their own issues and what they had gone through and life just happens and it's not my fault it just is so because I could do that as a kid the only control or perceived control or way of contending with all of that chaos and uncertainty and pain was to make it about myself and that has just been my mo to an extreme degree which I'm sure people can relate to because shame is not exclusive to me but there had been so much to create shame for rather than feeling anything else like sadness or anger or just processing anything that it just has all become shame and so that's a huge amount of work I have to do but I'm getting ahead of myself because I'm still talking about the testing so we did all of that and it was long it was hard and then we had a session to talk about all the results and this is kind of where most of my story comes to an indefinite tentative culmination for now because that happened in December of last year and things have happened since then but it's kind of like a picture of where I am and where I'm going so in some we definitely confirmed the PTSD and the OCD and she labeled me at the time to be in a severe major depressive episode and that I Bye.
I'm very severely depressed without psychosis, technically, which is great that she figured out at least she could tell the OCD was OCD and not psychosis. And then we also technically gave me the diagnosis of anxiety, like I generalize anxiety disorder like duh, and my body focused repetitive behaviors and eating disorder like it was there, but it wasn't like the primary focus or anything like that. And what was really her biggest focus of all of that was my PTSD and complex PTSD and then what was new to me that I did not know before in terms of other factors playing into my general state of existence was my nonverbal learning disability. The fact that I had pretty substantial motor deficits and sensory motor deficits and also just having sensory processing disorder, which in retrospect is really obvious, but I didn't know the thing or at least didn't know what applied to me, but yes, I mean definitely so. To the point where I find this interesting, like on a lot of my cognitive tests, she started realizing that if the fluorescent lights were on, I performed completely differently than if they were off, which wow fluorescent lights are everywhere. So that makes a difference. And really just putting it all together as a picture of not only do I just straight up have these mental illnesses as a result of biology and genetics and environmental factors and circumstance like all of those things. But also just on a disability level and processing level, like I have so many factors that play into like my perception and my intake of information that they all kind of feed into each other, like if I can't really see properly in terms of like motor function, someone's face, it causes me a lot of anxiety and distress and uncertainty about how they're perceiving things or feeling, which generally speaking on every level except motor, I am an empath to an unhealthy degree because travel response and I'm very perceptive but not visually. So if there's any ambiguity in that, it causes like such a huge like response in me and then that uncertainty starts leading to an obsession, which then I do compulsions and like it's just it all feeds into each other. And if I'm overloaded on a sensory level and my body's feeling a state of panic, then it has a lot of content to source from us to why I'm feeling that panic, even though it's just sensory overloads sometimes from the lights, from the colors, from people, just there's so many small things I can feed into that. So that was very interesting to see that interplay and how there's physical factors I can make such a difference in my already sensitive predispose being anyway. So there's all that and really to sum up her assessment of me, which taking it with a grain of salt because of what I will tell you, she thinks that I am just super, super in the throws a PTSD and complex PTSD and I'm not really going to be able to succeed at most treatments. If I can't start just learning how to feel emotions, which is very much something I agree with and totally resonate with. She also said that I was severely depressed, which I honestly didn't realize because if you relate to living with chronic depression, especially if it's not just episodes, it's like you are chronically depressed for a long time. And it's hard to know that you're that and especially when there's ebbs and flows within the depression, it can get severe or not severe. And my version of what I thought was severe was like the absolute lack of function I had in my 18 to 21 periods. And even before that, so comparatively to that, I thought I was fine, but apparently not. And that was really the genesis of everything we came to, which was quite a realization and a mind blowing moment for me, honestly. I don't know what the better word for it is, which is her assessment of me is that I am at 5% of what I can function at. And this isn't just like her pulling numbers out of her ass, like this was based on crunching numbers of a whole bunch of tests that have their own limitations, but nonetheless, apparently I'm at 5% of my functionality. And it's only going to go down from here, unless things radically change. But what's interesting is that apparently my 5% looks like most people's 90%. So that is the explanation for why I've been able to mask and function at a level. And basically my outsides don't match my insides. That's something that has not made sense to me for a really long time. Because for the last few years, my functioning has vastly improved. And so I thought that I was doing really well. And if my internally, my situation is still so bad, then how could that be if I'm doing so well, performative wise, like even though I don't get me wrong, like I am struggling. And I have no hobbies and I have no rest and I am burnt out, like endlessly. Nonetheless, I'm still getting shit done. So if I'm doing that, then how can my insides not match my outsides? It must mean, or what I, the deepest, most judgmental part of me thought was, it must be that I am just exaggerating all of my suffering. And I'm actually not suffering as much as I say I'm suffering or think I'm suffering. And it's my cop out and I'm being sensitive and I need to work on just being stronger as a person. That's what I thought, because no one could see my suffering and it didn't look evident in my work. Even though it wasn't perfect, it did not look evident in my work. What her entire assessment was was that the way to reconcile all that, what she did without even verbalizing all this, was I am at 5%, but my 5% looks like 90% for most people because of my intellectual capability, my intelligence, all the words that she used. That makes me very uncomfortable to be honest, because again, I am really, I have a distorted version of myself and I'm working on that to be frank. But that's her perception based on my scores, my IQ, my functioning, my whatever. And she said also that that intelligence is probably the only thing that's kept me alive because what she told me was that based on all of her testing and assessments and the levels of my dysfunction and my PTSD and just all of the quantitative levels of my testing. She said that she has never seen someone with my levels who was not either institutionalized in residential treatment or has died by suicide, which was really jarring to hear and also just kind of put everything in perspective because I felt like I internally and at such a place that I should be one of those things and yet I am not yet. In terms of being in residential treatment or institutionalized and of course the other and I didn't know why and her reasoning is because it's been this perfect, perfect in the sense of like absurd, Lee, like working and also maladaptive, but you get my point, right? Perfect confluence of my intelligence has been my coping mechanism since I was a kid because I've been able to form much more, I guess, abstract and insightful thought through my intelligence and I used that as my circling back to everything I've talked about this way of rationalizing and logically my way through everything and bypassing having to actually feel the depths of despair and confusion and pain of my experiences, my diagnosis, my choice. And that kept me alive because without that I would have probably succumbed to not functioning at all or ending my suffering, but because I had that coping mechanism it kept me around except that coping mechanism is also very maladaptive now and it's both of those things. So that was her conceptualization of me and that made a lot of sense to me and my husband and my therapist. So most of it was pretty jarring yet validating and made a lot of sense. The parts that didn't resonate as much were that it didn't feel like my OCD was fully understood, which I didn't expect, but I expected it to be more understood than it was and it kind of really sucked to put forth that much effort only for it to be written down in like a smaller sense like I scored severe on the test of OCD. So like that was known it was more so like the way it showed up it didn't really seem to get through like how pervasively it showed up and how it intertwined with PTSD which I even provided so many resources to learn about but nonetheless it didn't. And so the primary recommendations were for me to be in
residential PTSD treatment as soon as I can get access. And I needed to like take time off and like do that as soon as possible because while I'm functioning like I this is not sustainable which I agree but what I did not agree with and I'm sharing this and it's really hard to share all this very openly and yet it's also not it's just hard because I don't know who's gonna hear this and who's gonna think what but also I don't really care because I'm just open about everything to a fault as you all know but the part that didn't resonate with me was I know and my therapist so that I can't really engage in proper PTSD treatment because of what I described before the fact that if I can't even tolerate the uncertainty of knowing if something happened dramatically or you know know that something happened dramatically how the hell am I supposed to do a CD treatment that's the thing I tried to get across I did it really get across but it leaves me with just more work to do in terms of advocating and getting the help I need so there's that but overall I got a bigger picture of what's going on and what does life look like now with all that information because now it's February of 2023 I'm 26 and this is definitely not the end of my story obviously because I don't get to tie it up with a pretty bow and tell you that I'm in full recovery full remission and life is going swimmingly when I can't tell you that multiple things coexist at once I am living the best life I've ever lived I am the most functional I've ever been I am surrounded by the best people I've ever been life is the best it's ever been and my body and my brain are the best it's ever been that's all true and so much is opening up for me as possibility with my life in terms of like I just interviewed a PhD program for neuroscience like what and that might be a possibility working as a research scientist doing this podcast being an advocate being a mental health peer specialist like I have so much going for me and so many possibilities that I don't even know about right and I'm really suffering and struggling and I know I'm not the only one so that's why I'm really committed to being this open about it and allowing all of that to exist and one does not take away the other all that's true and it is really hard I will tell you that there has been a decently like 10 to 15 percent improvement since then because of the ketamine treatments and what's happened since which is a whole other episode but still that and that's amazing and overall it's really bad and it's not sustainable to continue on like this I do know that I will make it happen to get the help I need I'm in a place right now where I'm still in therapy with my you know original therapist we're really working on at least working to bridge that gap between my brain and my body because that kind of does need to be addressed before I can move on with like formalized OCD PTSD etc. treatment like I need to be able to actually engage with it and that requires being able to regulate and being able to feel rather than just think and do compulsions and so I'm doing that I'm in a space of transition right now where I'm in my last semester of my master's program I'm really plugging and chugging away at my experiments and my lab to get as much data as I can before I leave and finish my project because I'd love to do that I have no idea where I'm gonna be in a few months based on how PhD interviews and acceptances or lack there of go and where life will take me after graduating and so I don't even know what life will look like and or what I have to consider in terms of how life looks like based on my reality and where my brain and body are at and what they need and want and what they deserve so I guess what I'm saying is in this space in this time in the next few months I'm doing what I can while also finishing out the season of my life because that's what's supportive for me right now I think and I hope based on me and my therapist talking and me and my husband and me and me talking and I know that more treatments in my future and more recovery and more learning and growing and healing and living and also like I'm just trying to do all that and live that's something that's a huge value to me and what I've learned through a lot of these experiences because I just got done giving you three episodes on like just the journey of my mental health and all of the treatment and the signosis and suffering and all that right but like also I'm a human and that's all part of my life that can in fact color a lot of my life but that is not all of me and I really lost that for a while because for good reason I was in a season of excavating all the shit that had been missed and that had not unseen and untreated and I was literally not capable of doing anything so I was in survival mode and I can't tell you that I would look back now a year from now and not say I'm still in survival mode like I don't know but now that I'm in a place of more safety more awareness more healing even though it's not linear and done and binary like I also have to learn how to live and that's part of this whole process it's not giving up formalized like hardcore putting my head down and doing treatment every day like that is treatment to actually have feelings and thoughts and time and life and experiencing the range of emotions that apparently exist in the world that I didn't know did and actually starting to build friendships and finding out what interests me what lights me up beyond the things I fixated on that I do love that I do professionally like what else? Apparently I love the water and coin to the ocean which I learned ironically at a scientific conference in San Diego I needed that excuse but I learned that that is something I've been enthusiast about. Apparently I love sea turtles which is a whole topic for another day we need to get into with ketamine and whatnot but I want to learn how to scuba dive I want to get stronger and healthier physically and in a healthy and not disordered way I could go on and on I guess what I'm trying to say is I want to heal and live and thrive and grow and feel all the things and there's no living your way or binary wave ending this so I guess I'm not gonna and there'll be more to share but I am just integrating and figuring it out and that's one of the reasons this podcast is here so as I figured out and I evolved and grow on this journey I can share it as a perspective to have and reference when navigating your own experience I wish I had that and that's why I am doing this so if you leave these episodes and the story with anything I hope that you have just learned from me what not to do and I'm joking but not really I hope that you have learned to listen to your gut and the red flags are showing up for you even and especially if you're in a power dynamic with a mental health professional and you're coming from mental health issues it does not invalidate your feelings to have mental health issues you still have feelings you still have instincts or gut feelings and even if you do find out that they are all rooted in pathology even if it is paranoid even if you can't trust your gut which I really don't know that I can because sometimes it's right and sometimes it's not even so it's worth listening to and considering and rather than just completely writing it off that's something I wish people would know and would allow themselves to have more grace around and you won't get it perfectly and you don't need to just listen and give it space also I think this is me not necessary to say but I will anyway get evidence-based treatment do your research and do your research from specialized organizations and practitioners not people who just claim to know things and treat everything there are specialized resources to learn from on the internet in this beautiful time of information of accessibility listen to them listen to the people who actually treat these conditions who have success treating these conditions listen to people who have the conditions and what they've experienced and allow yourself to pivot
and get the help you need if you're not getting it from the person. And I know it's really hard interpersonally to have to navigate leaving providers and getting new ones, but you come first. And if they are an ethical and sound person, they will understand. They have feelings, but they will understand. And if they don't treat you ethically and allow you to have agency and openness and ask questions in your treatment, red flag. And please advocate for yourself. And if anything, I hope you've learned how important it is to be in your own corner and advocate for yourself. And speak up for what's coming up for you. If something doesn't feel right, if something feels unaddressed, it's always better to over-share and over-assess than under-assess. I think that's such an important thing because I used to feel so judgmental of myself for needing to talk too much about myself and over-analysed and feel like I'm just causing more problems. Turns out I was right about a lot of it. Also, if you are in the space of diagnoses and psychiatric treatments and whatnot, please know that comorbidities matter. It's not just having one thing and another thing. Sometimes it interacts like OCD and PTSD and other conditions too. So do your research and look into the different interactions and look for if you need a specialized provider who needs to address both in a unique way because that could make such a difference in your treatment. And I can't promise you that by taking the story and taking these words of advice that you will be free of misdiagnosis and mistreatment still, but at the very least it can empower you to build your own muscle of learning and trusting and pivoting and doing what you need to do. And above all of it, on top of all the tangible lessons I could impart to you from my really long history of experience, I just wish that you leave here feeling empowered to be open and honest about your experience in your story. And I know I say that in every episode, but like obviously the point with mental health especially. This is allowed to be said and heard. And had I been able to be open and honest with the extent of what I was going through with people, I could have been met with not only just so much more compassion and community. And I could have gotten so many less years of isolation and suffering and all the medical things that came from not being able to access proper support and understanding. But you can accept yourself more and allow yourself to be and so much shame is bread and isolation and not sharing ourselves and being honest. And that's the point of this podcast for the millionth time. So I just hope that I can be someone who helps you feel more safe to at the very least be honest with yourself and acknowledge it within yourself. And hopefully with other people in your life, your practitioners, your loved ones, your family members, whoever you feel safe within call to me, if I'm the only person that comes up for you, I'd love to be that person for you. Your valid and worthy. And if nothing else, I just want you to know you're not alone. So thank you so much for being here and witnessing and hearing all of this, taking it all from me, all of my tangents and the full spectrum of my experiences and my honesty. And I really hope that you feel like you can too in your own life. So I can't wait to see you for more episodes next week answering the biggest question that y'all have asked me for this podcast and for my time talking to people in general publicly. It's going to be a juicy one. If you know you know and I can't wait to share it with you. So if you want to keep up with the podcast and keep showing up with me in this space, please subscribe to the show wherever you listen to your podcasts. And please leave a five star rating and review if you can on any platform that you listen because that is the way that we can really create this community and show people it is safe to be here and to grow with us. So please support the show if you can with a rating and review, subscribing and sharing these episodes and this podcast with anyone who you feel could use this space for their own experiences and growth and their own healing and everything that we do here. We learn, explore, we grow, we ask questions and we hold each other in compassion, curiosity and love. So thank you so much for being here and I will see you next week with the next episode of the chat with Booma sending you so much loving care here a week and we'll talk so soon.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The host shares part three of her mental health journey, focusing on an abusive therapist relationship that began in 202
The therapist dismissed her OCD and PTSD, claiming she only needed trauma resolution, and sessions devolved into the therapist discussing her own life.
The host struggled with self-doubt, pathologizing her own red flags, and continued in this unethical dynamic for seven months.
She started EMDR therapy with a second therapist after discovering its potential for PTSD, but feared telling therapist one.
Therapist one provided inaccurate information to therapist two (e.g., denying dissociation), revealing her incompetence.
The host’s functionality improved due to addressing physical health issues (e.g., thyroid, autoimmune conditions) and psychedelic exploration, not the abusive therapy.
Summary:
In part three of her mental health journey, the host recounts her experience with an abusive therapist starting in 2020. Believing she only had PTSD, the therapist dismissed her OCD and turned sessions into self-focused conversations, avoiding the host’s needs. Despite feeling something was wrong, the host invalidated her own instincts, attributing them to her mental health issues.
She began EMDR therapy with a second therapist after learning about its effectiveness for PTSD, but feared telling therapist one. , denying she dissociates), highlighting her incompetence. The host’s improvement during this period stemmed from addressing physical health issues like thyroid dysfunction and autoimmune conditions, as well as psychedelic exploration, rather than the unethical therapy.
She emphasizes the power dynamics in medical relationships that make patients doubt their own red flags. The episode concludes with reflections on lessons learned and the importance of seeking proper care, empowering listeners to trust their own knowing. She notes that her functionality improved from multiple factors, not the therapy itself, and shares this to help others avoid similar harmful dynamics.
FAQs
The podcast brings together Uma’s roles as a neuroscientist, researcher, mental health peer specialist, advocate, and survivor to have honest conversations about neuroscience, psychology, mental health, lived experience, advocacy, and psychedelics.
Uma was seeing a therapist who focused on uncovering trauma for her PTSD, but sessions became about the therapist’s life, not her treatment. The therapist dismissed her OCD and gaslit her into believing she didn’t need therapy, while charging her insurance.
After watching a TV show highlight EMDR therapy for PTSD, Uma researched it and found an EMDR therapist who seemed effective. She wanted to try it for her deep-seated PTSD symptoms.
The first therapist was dismissive and petulant, saying it was weird for Uma to seek another therapy and that she should have told her instead. She reluctantly agreed to talk to the EMDR therapist.
The EMDR therapist found that Uma dissociates often, even though the first therapist claimed there was no dissociation at all, highlighting how little the first therapist actually knew about Uma’s condition.
Her physical health improved from addressing thyroid and autoimmune issues, she became more aware of her psychological patterns, and psychedelic exploration provided insight and awareness.
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