Tell Me About Your Mother

In this episode, Evan shares his experience with a virtual family client. Evan, Eli, and Melissa reflect upon how the family system creates unwanted feelings and responses from all involved and that common lack of emotional trust in families. Please join us as we navigate interpersonal communication by also contemplating:

• Inviting families to go beyond the "presenting problem"
• Families passing the anxiety “hot potato”
• Parents enabling adult children vs. parenting
• Random tear bombs!
• You don’t have to understand it to treat it
• Scapegoating
• Countertransference can be used tactfully 
• Mother’s anxiety suggesting hidden rage 
• Smother mothers
• Members of family being responsibly irresponsible to maintain relationship cohesion

• When therapists meet themselves in session
• Counter transference implications 
• Can defiance be a form of play?
• Conceptualizing child behavior as a mode of communication 
• Eli compares school expulsion as a railroad car on prison pipeline
• What is a "Fawning" trauma response? 
• How do secure attachments grieve romantic losses?
• Evan's grippy sock vacation 

In this episode Evan Miller welcomes guests! Daniel Rhodes has a wide range of professional experience ranging from Counselor, Clinical Director, and now a Utilization Review Specialist. Evan and Daniel have been in long-term recovery together for over a decade and in this episode they explore their experiences and relational perspectives. 

• Cocaine vs. Surfing
• The magic bullet of fun in recovery
• Evan's house arrest experience 
• When emphasis on accountability becomes trauma reenactment

• Intellectual Scaffolding …prepare for processing emotion
• “in-the-now” or “numb”…is client re-experiencing & processing events or casually reciting their story?
• What is client trying to do for me; convince me, win my validation?
• Client story as “photo negative” . . . needs hidden in darkness and highlighting others’ wishes & wants
• Intellectual & emotional hoarding . . . hoarded worthless (possibly harmful) beliefs, ‘values,’ relationships
• “Emotional hostage” . . . people pleasing is attempt to control\
• Growing up in alcoholic homes can produce emotional tofu (absorbing emotions of others)
• Client over-estimates responsibility for feelings of others, inflated self-worth
• Mental masturbation & MUSTurbation (it ‘must’ be)
• Clients can be the most well, most mature, most emotionally intellegent cast member in their story

Book: “Why People Die by Suicide”, By Thomas Joyner
Internet Resource: SuicideForum.com

Evan, Melissa, and Eli explore how assuming a clients' needs may negatively impact their growth within therapy. Topics also explored regard: 

• Mental health professionals are underpaid 
• How private practice marketing draws clients that a culturally similar 
• Community-based planning compared to counseling agendas 
• Presenting problem, adaptations, and what skill is needed to combat
• Getting caught in trauma dramas 
• When might reflection of sadness be maladaptive 
• Tracking language in session 
• Even Hitler threw great parties 
• Open chair photo and mirror technique how to mitigate client performance energy 
• Shame recycling
• What the hell is sycophantic?
• How the adaptive becomes maladaptive 
• Framing client scripts as code and OS
• Internal vs external locus of control
• Effective strategies to invite client to gain sense of internal locus of control

Using their usual style of humorous narrative, Melissa, Evan, and Eli extemporaneously delve into their professional experience with parallel process as clinical supervisors.  What is parallel process?  Briefly, parallel process is rooted in the psychoanalytic concepts of transference and countertransference where supervisees inadvertently recreate the issues, thoughts, and feelings they experience with clients within the supervisor-supervisee relationship (transference).  Further, parallel process exists when supervisors respond to the supervisee in the same way the supervisee responds to the client (countertransference).  In this manner, the supervisory relationship reenacts, or is parallel with, the client-counselor relationship.  Evan, Eli, and Melissa explore how to recognize and address parallel process, especially within community mental health agencies.  Further, we discuss:

• Recognizing how counselors’ personal and professional development informs the supervisory process;
• The benefits of practicing in community mental health before working in private practice;
• Relationship between re-enactment and parallel process;
• Screening for phenomenology;
• Professional identity formation and the benefit of confrontation as professional development;
• How self-awareness of one’s feelings, personal issues, and the events that trigger them is essential in identifying transference and countertransference;
• Benefits of starting one’s career in community mental health;
• Relationship between self-reflection and effective leadership;
• Adult versus child selves in positions of leadership;

In this episode, Eli shares his experience with speaking to a Christian congregation about sexuality.  Evan, Eli, and Melissa reflect upon how psychotherapists can encourage couples to communicate their sexual desires by first accepting their own sexuality.  Please join us as we navigate interpersonal communication by also contemplating:

• How can we help others to understand their sexuality if we can’t communicate about our own?
• Privilege of heterosexuality;
• Trauma of non-acceptance;
• Society’s problems with sexuality and expressing desire;
• Relationship between emotional intimacy and communicating about sex;
• What is the “Waffle House Stare?”
• How emotional intimacy relates to the ability to communicate about other domains of our lives – parenting, finances, and priorities; and
• Fun Fact:  The Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed in 1974 making it illegal to discriminate against someone based upon gender, race, religion, or national origin when granting credit cards and loans.

Evan, Melissa, and Eli explore the way in which attachment styles impact peoples’ messages, perceived messages, and counselors’ countertransference. This conversation also generated discussions related to:

• Counselor’s response to a client with anxious/avoidant attachment style
• Importance of a counselor’s self-awareness
• When is “avoidant” a healthy, optimal response within a relationship?
• Wounded Bambies . . . how might family and/or partners sabotage a person’s recovery journey; a sick system doesn’t want to lose its scapegoat
• Is a conversation with another clinician a “consultation” or an incidence of “triangulation”
• See clients as elastic, ever changing lava

Evan, Melissa, and Eli explore the way in which attachment styles impact peoples’ messages, perceived messages, and counselors’ countertransference. This conversation also generated discussions related to:

• Career Counseling: benefits of personifying a job (helps identify abuse)
• Clinical Directors: being the log in a wood splitter
• Communication: how do people express needs & wishes, how effective are their messages
• Attachment Styles . . . what am I seeing, is client anxious/avoidant or adhering to cultural norms & core values regarding conflict
• Imagine seeing & comparing a client through the lenses of individual, couple, and family therapy; what are consistencies and variations in a person’s presentation
• Attend to client . . . not other players in a client’s story
• Substance Use/Abuse as a “shiny object” … what are we missing if we focus exclusively on substance use

Evan, Melissa, and Eli explore the ingrained familial contracts, the power of renegotiation, and seeking internal wellness. Evan explores the ways in which his dysfunctional family system has impacted his toxicity tolerance and his newly formed  self-gatekeeping. Speaking about the holiday season also generated discussions related to:

• Self-help language perceived as condescension in arguments
• Bodybuilding/body dysmorphia
• Is your roommate/spouse actually upset about the dishes?
• Who the hell standardized perfection?
• Skill-based therapy serving as groundwork for exploring a deeper therapeutic process
• Evan decides to read an apologetic email from his mother 
• Emotional adult mind vs. child mind
• Family of origin relational dynamics serving as the CPU for romantic and platonic relationships
• Internal wellness contrasted with familial dysfunction 
• Renegotiating familial contracts 
• Defining/Orienting Point A and Point B

Please join us weekly as Tell Me About Your Mother discusses topics relevant to pursuing excellence in psychotherapy.  Melissa Martin, Eli Branscombe, and Evan Miller are three licensed psychotherapists who have come together for peer supervision and in doing so, created Tell Me About Your Mother so that we may share our passion for psychotherapy with our fellow healers.

Melissa is excited to announce a partnership with Maude, a sexual health, modern intimacy company solely focused on sexual wellness for all people.  Check out getmaude.com and receive a discount at checkout with the promo code MELISSA5.

Tell Me About Your Mother is seeking sponsorship!  If you’d like to connect with us, please send an email to [email protected].