Thank You, Sponsors!
Season 5 of the How We Can Heal Podcast is sponsored by SimplePractice. If you want to simplify the business side of your work, I highly recommend Simple Practice!
Right now they’re offering a special 7-day free trial with 70% off your first 4 months for How We Can Heal listeners. Go to https://www.simplepractice.com/howwecanheal to take advantage of this offer today!
---
This episode is also sponsored by the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD). The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation is an international, non-profit, professional association organized to develop and promote comprehensive, clinically effective and empirically based resources and responses to trauma and dissociation and to address its relevance to other theoretical constructs.
To learn more and become a member, visit: https://www.isst-d.org/
Visit https://cfas.isst-d.org/ to access educational offerings for both professionals and non-professionals
Episode Overview
Trauma leaves invisible wounds that shape our relationships, survival strategies, and capacity for connection. In this profound conversation with Dr. Robert Mueller, we journey through the complex landscape of trauma therapy, examining both the protective role of avoidance and the human yearning to be truly seen and understood.
Dr. Muller shares his deeply personal connection to trauma work as a child of Holocaust survivors, revealing how his parents' experiences during childhood shaped not only their parenting but also his professional path. With remarkable candor, he articulates how his own anxieties around control and uncertainty continue to influence his clinical work, offering a refreshing glimpse into the very human experience of being a trauma therapist.
At the heart of our discussion lies a compassionate exploration of avoidance in trauma recovery. Dr. Muller introduces the concept of "trauma fragments" – those subtle disclosures that slip through otherwise protective defenses, signaling a readiness to process painful experiences. He offers practical insights for therapists navigating the delicate balance between honoring defenses and gently challenging them, emphasizing curiosity over confrontation as the pathway forward.
Perhaps most powerfully, Dr. Muller challenges the cultural pressure many trauma survivors face to forgive their perpetrators. He reframes forgiveness not as a virtuous endpoint but as a fluid process that may ebb and flow throughout one's healing journey. This perspective liberates survivors from the burden of toxic positivity, honoring the complexity of their experiences without demanding premature resolution.
Whether you're a therapist seeking to deepen your trauma-informed practice or someone on your own healing journey, this conversation offers a roadmap grounded in compassion, patience, and profound respect for the wisdom of our protective responses. As Dr. Muller reminds us, healing comes not from bypassing difficult emotions but from creating contexts where they can be safely felt, understood, and integrated into our life stories.
Learn more about Dr. Muller's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Robert-T.-Muller/author/B0033AFO5A
Chapters
Introduction to Dr. Robert Mueller
Holocaust Trauma and Family History
Understanding Avoidance in Trauma Therapy
Working with Trauma Fragments
Navigating Client Defenses with Curiosity
Humor as Defense and Therapeutic Timing
The Complexity of Forgiveness
Finding Hope in Impermanence
Full Transcript
Lisa Danylchuk: 1:36
Thank you. Therapist, psychiatrist or allied health professional in private or group practice. Their easy-to-use online system can help you simplify your business so you can focus your energy on caring for clients. About seven years ago, I made the switch from logging everything on paper I know so old school to their online practice management software and I'm telling you I will never go back. Everything is organized now and it's easy to schedule, share files and provide super bills to clients. I only wish I'd made the change sooner. If you're just starting out or want to simplify the business side of your clinical work, I highly recommend Simple Practice. Right now they're offering a seven-day free trial with 70% off. Your first four months. Go to simplepracticecom. Forward, slash how we can heal, or use the link in my show notes to take advantage of this offer.Lisa Danylchuk: 2:33
Today I want to give a big shout out and extend a huge thank you to the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, the ISSTD, for sponsoring this episode. If you've been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, you've heard me talk about ISSTD and the incredible researchers, clinicians and advocates I've met during my time as a member and a volunteer there. The ISSTD has been delving into the science and best practice of treating trauma and dissociation for over 40 years now, and they have a rich catalog of educational offerings for both professionals and non-professionals on their website that's cfasisst-dorg. If you're a mental health professional, I highly recommend you consider becoming a member of ISSTD. I'd love to see you during the live educational offerings and at the annual conference in Portland, oregon in March of 2026. Visit ISST-Dorg to learn more.Lisa Danylchuk: 3:39
If you love this podcast, I bet you would love the Yoga for Trauma online training program. This eight-week certification is for anyone who wants to learn how yoga philosophy and practice can help respond to the impact trauma has on our bodies and brains. When you join the program, you'll learn the theory and best practices for incorporating somatic skills into your healing work. Students often come into the program knowing that yoga can be helpful for stress management, but unsure about how to apply the practice to specific aspects of trauma recovery. This program breaks it all down and leaves you feeling clear about your choices as you support folks navigating post-traumatic stress, whether you're managing a program, working one-on-one with clients or leading therapeutic groups. Of course, the experience is good for you too. With eight modules and eight yoga classes, you'll get a taste of how it feels to practice yoga in a resource-building, trauma-responsive manner.Lisa Danylchuk: 4:40
Head on over to howwecanhealcom/ Y4T. That's the letter Y, the number four and the letter T to apply to join the program today. Mention the podcast in your application for a special bonus. One more time, nice and slow. howwecanhealcom/ The website is howwecanhealcom Y4 T. If you're feeling called to join us, I would love to welcome you and support you through the program.Lisa Danylchuk: 5:11
Welcome back to the how we Can Heal podcast. Today, our guest is Dr Robert T Muller. Dr Muller completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, was on faculty at the University of Massachusetts and is currently a professor at York University in Toronto. He's a fellow and member of several scientific societies and is the 2024 recipient of the Pierre Genet Award for his scholarship on trauma. His most recent book, trauma and the Struggle to Open Up, earned the 2019 Written Media Award for the year's best written work on trauma, and his award-winning bestseller Trauma and the Avoidant Client has been translated widely. His online magazine, the Trauma and Mental Health Report, has over 100,000 readers annually. He's lead investigator on several multi-site programs to treat interpersonal trauma and he lectures internationally. With over 30 years in the field, he's still a practicing clinician in Toronto.Lisa Danylchuk: 6:06
Today we dive into the role of attachment and avoidance in trauma therapy and discuss the very real challenges clinicians and clients face on the path of healing. We talk about forgiveness, toxic positivity and how his parents' experiences in the Holocaust relate to the work he does today. I think you'll enjoy this honest, nuanced conversation as much as I did, so please join me in welcoming Dr Robert Muller to the show. Dr Robert Muller, great to have you on the how we Can Heal podcast. Thanks for being here today.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 6:40
Fantastic, I'm really glad to be here too.Lisa Danylchuk: 6:44
So you've written a few books that focus on trauma, attachment and avoidance. These are all topics I'd love to dig into today, but first I'd just love to get a sense of how you got into this work. How do we find ourselves as trauma therapists doing this work, and what's your story there?Dr. Robert T. Muller: 7:03
So there's a story that I told myself until my early 40s and then the story that kind of became more clear to me as my parents aged. Do you want both of those stories?Lisa Danylchuk: 7:16
Sure, you can give us the Cliff Notes version of the early version, and then we want the truth.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 7:28
We always want the truth. Yeah, the early version. I thought I had a cool dissertation supervisor who I loved and then got me into the field and got me interested for more intellectual reasons than anything else. That's the Cliff Notes version. It's not that interesting, but by the time I was already in my mid to late 30s and already in the field. As my parents started aging, I began to have more conversations with them about their childhoods and in fact, what I did now this is about 15 years ago, so in my mid 40s mid to late 40s is I interviewed both my parents, who were children during the Holocaust, and so the reason this is relevant to trauma is that they had a wealth of stories about what happened to them during the period of time that they were little kids in Hungary.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 8:18
Now they were Jewish and my father was 10 years old and my mother was seven and my father's father actually was murdered during the Holocaust. My mother's parents did not die, but my mother was separated from her family for about nine months. So both my parents. She was seven years old and she wasn't told the reason. She was just told okay, we need to hide you somewhere. They didn't really say why she was seven. They didn't want to scare her, but she couldn't understand. Why was she apart from her family? And then, once she was hidden by a woman who was Christian and not at risk for anything, my mom at that point in time realized after months that she had no idea where were her parents. This was terrifying for her. She felt completely abandoned until after the war when her dad came and picked her up. But honestly, there was almost a year there where she had no idea if she would ever see her parents again, why her parents weren't seeing her. What was going on? And then at some point she was told you're Jewish, someone could kill you. Seven-year-old kid worried that she was going to get killed.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 9:31
My father, his father, was killed, as I mentioned. His mother was taken away. She didn't end up dying, she ended up escaping, actually my father's mother. So quite an amazing story in its own right. So both my parents are trauma survivors, the long and the short of it, and both of them grew up not as avoidant trauma survivors. So my first book is Trauma and the Avoidant Client.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 9:55
And my parents were not that. My parents talked about the Holocaust absolutely and told a lot of stories, but they certainly were impacted, and they were impacted severely in many ways. I mean, my father, for example, didn't really know how to like. He was, you know, although he was 10 when his father was killed. Even the years leading up to that were very, very anxious years. So his father obviously, as you can imagine, didn't spend a lot of time playing with my dad. My dad really didn't know how to play with us. He really didn't have a sense of how to be a playful father. He could be funny but not playful, if you know what I mean. And so there was a way in which I never really understood why is my dad not more like other dads? Like it's so strange, he doesn't really seem like other dads.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 10:47
And I went through therapy in my mid-20s but this wasn't the main focus, or maybe I wasn't ready for it yet. I think is probably more what it is. And so then, by the time I was in my early to mid-40s, I became much more interested in my parents' story. Is I became much more interested in my parents' story? I mean, I knew about it already.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 11:04
I grew up with stories of the Holocaust, but it wasn't on my mind, it wasn't something that was as meaningful to me and I understood it in new ways at that point in time, especially once I interviewed them. I actually wrote a more recent. My parents wrote a memoir with me of their lives. I mean I put it together for them because their English wasn't very good, because English was the second language for them, so I sort of put it together for them, but it's their stories Anyway. So that's really my story. I mean, really I think it's being a child of Holocaust survivors, growing up with parents who lost their childhoods, who struggled with abandonment, who didn't understand, who struggled with trust and the impact that had on me. I think that's really primarily why I'm interested in the field of trauma loss, trauma, traumatic loss, all of that.Lisa Danylchuk: 12:00
But I think that's a fairly honest answer yeah, it sounds pretty real to me and I want to acknowledge the loss within your family and the harm done in your family, because that's a firsthand and very difficult education of all the layers of trauma and all the layers and ripples of impact it can have. Because you're talking about even for a young kid seven-year-old girl feeling and 10 years old, being taken from their family without knowing why, not knowing if their family's okay, feeling threat for their life, directly knowing what's going to happen. You're talking about people losing a sense of safety, people losing a sense of connection, people losing that daily interaction with family that humans need and loss right and actual death and loss and how that impacts families and how that impacts people and the fact that there's threat and real violence in it too. Right that it's not just happenstance. I know I've read your work and you talk about. I'm not focusing on natural disasters, I'm not focusing on these types of accidents.Lisa Danylchuk: 13:18
Your work is more responsive to this relational trauma and this harm done between people and within families and communities, and I even hear the impacts of we might call it neglect, but it's also of like needs not being possible to be met.Lisa Danylchuk: 13:34
When you talk about your dad not being able to play. It's like, okay, maybe that could translate as feeling a sense of neglect, but when you track it you're like, well, that makes sense. And like it's not like your dad's, like I'm not going to play with you, right, it's a very real loss that we can trace into the history and the story of the trauma and something that's just so important for, I think, all of us to remain aware of, because the older I get, the more I'm like that wasn't that long ago. Like when you're a teenager in high school. You're like whoa, 1970 was a long time ago, right, but then it's really not. And there are plenty of challenges in our world today that I think it's important that we're aware of why all these stories are important. So can you say the name of the memoir? I wasn't aware of that.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 14:17
Oh, the memoir is called From Hungary to Canada. The memoirs of Lewis and Eva Muller.Lisa Danylchuk: 14:23
Interesting that and I'm sure many listeners will be too, and thank you for your honest answer and that evolution that comes with.Lisa Danylchuk: 14:30
Well, here's what I thought and then here's what I learned about myself in time.Lisa Danylchuk: 14:35
I think that you talk a lot in your writing about avoidance and the potential protection of avoidance, but even in between the lines there, sometimes, like you just said, we're just not ready or we're kind of putting the pieces together as we go Like, oh, I'm just interested in that for some reason. Oh, that's the reason, right, we're sort of digging deeper into ourselves, into our own history, and I'm aware, as you're talking too, of the evolution of our understanding of trauma and the timing of that. As you're growing up and as you're learning these things about your family, hearing these stories, going to school, studying and I don't know that even 20, 30 years ago we were talking about intergenerational trauma or we were talking in the way that we are today. I think there's even more that we'll continue to dig into. So I'm curious for you when you look at your work with individuals, how has some of the personal awareness that's come over time impacted the work that you do with clients or as a teacher, as an author?Dr. Robert T. Muller: 15:35
That's a good question. It really cuts to the heart of counter-transference and what we bring as therapists to the situation. I mean, I'll be very honest, I'm quite an anxious person. I definitely struggle with my own anxieties and very often, you know, I find that my wish to control and my wish to manage situations comes up a lot in my work. Sometimes clients will think that I'm upset with them.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 16:10
So trauma clients, as many trauma therapists are aware, have learned to become kind of parent watchers and so too they're therapist watchers. They're careful. They're often not everybody, but a good number of them are very attentive to changes in your demeanor, changes in your emotional response, subtle changes in your interest in something versus something else, and it can be disconcerting and they can worry that they're wasting your time, that they're no longer interesting, that they're being too needy. These are all anxieties, that kind of predisposition based on their trauma history, their tendency to be anxious about whether or not they're wasting my time or their problems are big enough or warrant my precious time, that kind of thing. Sometimes they'll misconstrue something that's going on for me as me being upset with them, no longer being interested in them, thinking that they're saying something silly, et cetera, et cetera. And really, when, most of the time that happens, I'm just responding to some internal stimuli and they will project onto me some kind of worry that I'm somehow, that I have some sort of negative feeling toward them and it may be more something like oh, oh, I'm worried about this person, or oh, I'm worried, are they going to be okay, or I'm worried about something, and there's oh, I'm going to let them go and are they going to be safe, and there's a kind of a you know stuff going through my own head of some kind of anxiety.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 18:01
But it has to do with letting them go and not having control over their situation and being able to let go of. For me, let go of that control and say, okay, they're an adult in their adult life and they're going to make the choices they make. And some of those choices would not be the choices I would make and may very well be problematic. And I can't control it, I can't do anything to necessarily fix it. Obviously, in time, with good therapy, people do learn, come to a place where they make better choices or they make choices that are healthier or better for them personally.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 18:37
But it can take a. It can. In that meantime there can be all kinds of standing on the sidelines as they're doing things that I think it's not a good idea and I'm stressed out about it and I'm responding to my own lack of control rather than judging them or thinking that they're a bad person or anything like that. So I sometimes find that my anxieties and those kind of facts and I can trace that absolutely back to my parents I mean, yeah, my parents were super control freaks. I mean like a hundred percent.Lisa Danylchuk: 19:13
Which also understandable given their context right.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 19:16
A hundred percent understandable, and yet it was very annoying to me as a kid and impactful, yeah it has.Lisa Danylchuk: 19:22
Oh, I can have compassion for that. I see where it came from.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 19:24
It's still happening, right, it's still happening, it's yeah, exactly um 100, so but yeah and so that that then sometimes comes out in my, in my work absolutely and I think many therapists would also connect with.Lisa Danylchuk: 19:40
Maybe it's in different circumstances, but it makes me think of when you have a client who's self-harming or suicidal or in an abusive relationship and I know you share case studies about this in your work too where maybe they're coming in for therapy once a week and they're going back home and being harmed and outside of mandatory reporting being harmed and outside of mandatory reporting. There's nothing we can do if someone's in that place. So that can feel very difficult, even if we're taking off the layer of feeling like oh, my parents showed up this way and I feel like I really want to have control. I think most health professionals mental health professionals want to have a positive impact, want that to be fast, right, it can take so much time and I've worked with people in harmful relationships for years and years and years and it's challenging to say okay, you know, I'll see you next time and I hope you're okay.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 20:40
Exactly this, particularly with domestic violence and or with cases where there's a partner who is not necessarily living with the person but comes by and then has some kind of interaction with the children, or a child If there's a little kid in the situation, it's really unbelievably stressful, and especially if it's not a mandatory reporting situation. So it's not. It's not like you like. Sometimes some of these things are reportable, of course, but some things aren't, and you know this is just really a bad situation. There's no mandatory report that I need to do or should do. I have to protect confidentiality in this particular case, and yet this is not optimal. This is not a good situation for this child, for this person, and it's very stressful.Lisa Danylchuk: 21:30
And I think you're a parent as well.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 21:32
Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, and a grandparent.Lisa Danylchuk: 21:35
Yeah.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 21:36
Yeah, so my, my granddaughter turned one a couple months ago and her mom is 31. So I can't believe I actually have a 31-year-old. That feels really weird, but I do yeah, yeah.Lisa Danylchuk: 21:52
And when you talk about parenting and transference and countertransference, and two boys.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 21:57
So my daughter is 31. Don't want to forget that.Lisa Danylchuk: 21:59
You have to acknowledge I have to.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 22:01
I have twin sons who are 29,. Twin boys Wow yeah both of whom are studying to be clinical psychologists. Look at that Apples landing close to the tree, yeah.Lisa Danylchuk: 22:14
I'm sorry I cut you off.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 22:15
You had a question.Lisa Danylchuk: 22:17
My question was just, or my comment was just. When you talk about countertransference and young kids or young childlike parts, even that can evoke even more. I think, if you are in the role in your personal life as a parent, because you know there can be some neurons and wires crossed around oh my God, if this were happening to my child, like what would I do and what would I need to do? So I just, of course, we're all wired differently and things will impact us in different ways. But I just want to acknowledge that piece of it too, that when we're working with that vulnerability of youth and there's limitations to how much we can do from a legal sense or an even ethical sense, it can be really hard to let go right, to not have control.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 23:04
Yeah, for sure, and there are definitely. I used to do a lot more. I'm trained both in adult and child therapy and most of my trauma work, especially my books, are really with working with adult populations. But back in the day, when my kids were younger, I used to do a lot more child therapy. I did some play therapy. I still do family therapy and I still work sometimes with adolescents. But, boy, when my kids were younger, there were a number of situations. Sometimes you know the sort of struggle with feeling, sometimes even just guilt. You know, here I am doing play therapy with this kid and my. My kids are in daycare right now.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 23:47
It's sort of a feeling like I feel I felt a little guilty sometimes but for sure, especially when there are parenting issues and you're working with little kids and they're so vulnerable yeah.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 23:59
Especially when there's trauma. My students and I did a program a few years back looking at trauma therapy, so it was phase-based trauma therapy across Toronto. It was quite a large study. It was a multi-site study and we were looking at trauma therapy among kids from ages 7 to 12. And we found that therapists really struggled. You know the therapists in our. You know we had about 10 therapists on our team doing treatment at different sites.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 24:32
We found that they really struggled with the question of talking to children about their trauma. There was this fear, this anxiety will we re-traumatize them? And of course there are all kinds of techniques and there are all kinds of do's and don'ts for how you talk to children about their trauma and there are better and worse ways and there are ways that you know good experienced trauma therapists understand in terms of how to create the safety, the sense of safety in the relationship and then how to ask questions without leading children but giving space for them to give responses that they believe to be true and that come from an honest place in themselves. So there are better and worse techniques, of course, but by and large kids did not get re-traumatized by talking about their trauma. So as long as they had a good therapist who was experienced, who got training in trauma therapy.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 25:37
So I always say to folks you can't just do trauma therapy if you're a therapist who's never done trauma therapy. You need supervision. There are do's and don'ts. There are things that are, of course, are very similar about just plain old good psychotherapy, but then there are things that are definitely different and that you need to get to understand, because clients do react differently when they have a trauma history and kind of what's a typical kind of reaction is different than with clients who don't have trauma history. So you really do need to pay close attention and get the training.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 26:13
But if you have the training, if you have that training, then it doesn't actually traumatize children to talk about their trauma. In fact, children found it helpful. So in our study we published a number of articles in really good trauma journals child journals, trauma journals, psychotherapy journals across a number of different. Uniformly we found and we are not unique in this, by the way, we're not the only ones who found this Typically what researchers are finding even this is we are not unique in this, by the way, we're not the only ones who found this Typically what researchers are finding, even with kids, is that when people have a chance to talk about it, when kids have a chance to talk about it, they feel better. They feel understood, they feel they had a place. They feel like they're not weird or crazy. They feel like they're not, you know, the only person who ever felt this way in the history of the world. They feel that they're allowed to talk about it, that they deserve to talk about it. Lots of good things that come with it.Lisa Danylchuk: 27:10
And it fits right into a theme that comes up in a lot of interviews here around the avoidance side of just oh well, we can never talk about it across the board, right, not only internal avoidance, but the collective and social avoidance that can come and that there can be many layers to that. And then the flip side of it, which is like dive right in and get swallowed by the trauma and everyone's in the trauma and nobody knows which way is up. And I think when you talk about that skill in trauma therapy, we're aware of those ends of the spectrum and we're trying to thread a unique path for that individual, knowing their circumstances best we can. We're never going to know everything, but in a knowing the context of maybe what they've been through, of their family system, maybe their attachment style If we can know that I know you do the adult attachment interview with a lot of your clients just having a sense of the culture around them, all that stuff, and then being able to find an opening right when these painful experiences can, you know, just like, at a certain point a wound needs some air. You don't keep a bandage on forever. At a certain point we cover it, we tend to it, we put the right salves on it or whatever, and then we let it breathe and ideally, in the context of trauma, we're letting that breathe in a healthy, supportive, safe enough space, relational space, where then it can become integrated.Lisa Danylchuk: 28:35
So it's not this locked box of oh, we can't talk about that ever. Nobody ever asked me about it. It seems like it's taboo, it seems like something bad's going to happen if I revisit it, but it's also not spilling all over right. The trauma therapy can be the containment and the support that allows even really young people to work through what's happened or what's happening in their lives, and I think that is such an important point and it speaks to so many of the things you talk about in your work around attachment, right Around the protective role of avoidance, but also around the importance of the relationship and that responsiveness. I'm wondering if you could speak to a little bit of what we're talking. How and when do we know when to push forward, when to pull back? What are some of the things, maybe specific to attachment styles or some sort of guideposts or signals that you found in your work?Dr. Robert T. Muller: 29:47
And it's a really tough thing, kind of looking at how to navigate the two ends of the spectrum. On one hand, clients are carrying this horrible burden that is often a secret, that is painful, that has tormented them for many, many years, that they haven't really been able to talk to people about. On the other hand, it's worked to do that and opening up too quickly. Maybe they've tried talking to someone at some point in their life and very often have not been met with a great response. Either you know people trying to be nice and saying, oh yeah, well, everybody goes through. You know, listen, parents spank their kids, it's, I'm sure you're okay, that kind of thing. And then the person you know maybe it's with the best of intentions that people are trying to normalize it or make the person feel like they're not weird or it's not a big deal, but ends up happening is that the person just feels crazy. It's like okay, yeah, well, if it's normal, why do I feel like I'm awful, like why do I feel like I'm a terrible person? And so it's. You know they avoid talking about it as a way of coping, but it's this horrible burden that they want to share. So how do you navigate that and I do have in the book. I talk a little bit about those clients who want to like, rush into oversharing and then those other clients who avoid, never want to talk about, and how to navigate between those two, those two poles, and I've got a number of techniques for how to how to really look at that. But I will say as a general principle that one of the things to look for as a therapist so if you're working with trauma clients is to bear in mind the idea that clients, even clients who avoid and hold on to their pain, it's not like they have these walls that are impermeable. The walls that they put up are diffuse, the walls that they put up are leaky, and so things come out at various points of time in their lives. Things come out during times of physical illness, death of a family member, developmental changes you know, points of growth and points of challenge and crisis and high stress, especially attachment stress, relationship stress. These can lead people to have difficulty, kind of keeping those defenses fully intact and those defenses leak. And especially when you start therapy and you have a kind, empathic person in front of you and you've been holding this, carrying this bloody burden around, that's a heavy, it's a secret, it's awful, and you've got this nice person in front of you. You know there's a sort of a yearning.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 32:41
John Bowlby talked about the avoidant individual's yearning underneath the surface to want to share, to want to be seen, to want to be known, to want to be empathized with, and so people will drop trauma fragments along the way. So that's a term that's used in the literature is trauma fragments, and trauma fragments are those little bits of trauma-related messages that people are not even conscious of that they're saying, but they're there if you listen for them. So the person might act as if everything's okay, but they'll say little things along the way that sound like, hmm, everything doesn't really sound so okay, as maybe this person thinks it does, and there are some examples in the book. But if you think about the individual who might be the jokester, the person who you know oh, it was just a joke, I was just kidding, but you know the old adage there's truth in jest If you're listening carefully. This person just joked around about how funny it is that.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 33:48
You know, in the seventies, parents used to always beat their kids. You know we would. We were all screaming and we were all. You know it was crazy, but you know, yeah, parents today they're all helicopter parents. Ha ha, ha, ha ha. So funny. You don't have to. You just have to scratch a tiny little bit below the surface to see it's not so funny. There's pain under that, and so that's an example.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 34:09
Now that's maybe a little more of an obvious example, but if you listen to your clients and you're sort of open to the idea that avoidant individuals actually have leaky defenses, then you can really pretty quickly see those, especially if you ask about and you're curious about, attachment related issues. So questions like you know, did anybody ever know what was your relationship with your grandparents like when they passed away? How did your family deal with that? And the person tells you a story. Oh, yeah, you know, grandma, she was fantastic, but yeah, funerals aren't a place for a little kid. So, no, I wasn't allowed to go to the funeral. And then that doesn't quite add up. This person loved their grandparent wasn't allowed to go to the funeral. What's going on here? You know, you start to things don't add up and you begin to get a sense that there are these trauma fragments underneath. You know, richard Schwartz would call the manager parts and all you have to. If you're trained in IFS, absolutely, you're trained to listen for the presence of parts other than just the way the person leads, with maybe their protectors or managers, but rather they have these more vulnerable parts in the background. Let's say so. You're listening for that, also listening for ambivalence, because you know, like I said, there's a yearning, 's a yearning. All people ultimately want to be understood, want to be, especially people who come to therapy. They're coming because things aren't working so well. And so the clients they're saying to you directly things are not working. You know, whatever way I was dealing with things by drinking or by porn addiction or by you name it one thing or the other it's not working for me anymore and my life isn't going so smoothly as it once was. My workaholism, whatever it is that I was using to deal with my life it ain't working so good anymore, so I need help. And so that kind of person already is coming from a place of a certain amount of vulnerability. And so that kind of person already is coming from a place of a certain amount of vulnerability, even if they're a defensive person, even if they are saying, well, I don't need any help, well, they're in your office. So in part they're saying I don't need any help, but in part they're saying I do need help, maybe not verbally saying it, but their presence there and their willingness to pay you is saying they need help. So something's going on here. And so, noticing the ambivalence, noticing the mixed messages, noticing that part of them that, despite the part that says pushes you away, that there's a part that's saying help me, I need to be understood, and listening for messages there that that person's giving, maybe a little unbeknownst to them, and being curious about them. Not pointing them out in an embarrassed way, not saying, oh well, you're saying this, but you're saying this, I think you really do want help. No, that's too obvious. That's something Dr Phil would do. No, it doesn't work in real life, but listening carefully to subtle messages and being curious. Again a curiosity being curious about Now. You mentioned that funerals were no place for little kids. Kyle, is that something you think now or is that something that you thought as a kid? And Kyle says oh well, that was something my parents told me, okay. And now that you're an adult and you have kids of your own, do you agree, disagree, how do you feel about that? And so I mean, I don't know how Kyle will respond to that, but you're being curious about this thing. That sounds like it's actually a source of pain and vulnerability. And then you're seeing where they go. How much anxiety can the client bear? You for a bit, they may then put up a wall and say, no, we're changing the subject here. And okay, they changed the subject. That's okay, we can get back to that. But you pay attention to it, you notice it, you pay attention to that ambivalence, you pay attention to those trauma fragments and you might be able to find a thematically similar moment to come back to that in a later session, or maybe even later that same session. So that's the kind of thing you do. There's a bit of an art or a craft to it, but that's kind of how I work with folks who are coming in with that kind of avoidant presentation, despite actually, you know, as a therapist, oh, this person's the permeability of defenses.Lisa Danylchuk: 38:25
Those can go hand in hand. Something else you highlight in your book is and you just talked about humor when people deflect something painful with humor but also enactments, and I'm thinking about the blur between those two when maybe a client says something and makes a joke of something very painful, and there's a moment for you sitting with them and this could even happen between friends, right when your friend says something oh, that time where you know somebody tried to punch me in the face or I got hurt or somebody tried to kill me, ha ha ha. It's like that's actually really serious. And the moment of almost decision or reaction time of how do you respond to that, do you? Ha ha ha. Yeah, and you give the example in your book of a case where someone says oh, my mom tried to abort me, right? Ha ha ha. That's a big piece of potentially painful information.Lisa Danylchuk: 39:25
And what does someone do in the presence of that laughter? Are you pulled into laughing along, are you? Do you see, right?Lisa Danylchuk: 39:35
There's these moments where even something as subtle or challenging as staying connected to your experience of what's happening or of processing all the information that's coming at you from another human being, this person's laughing, but they're saying something really painful, like how do I feel? Do I think it's funny? Do I not think it's funny? Am I connected in myself to how painful that is? Can I respond to them and go ooh, ouch, or do I just laugh and five minutes, five seconds later go wait, I don't think that's actually funny. There's just these moments where I think this happens all the time.Lisa Danylchuk: 40:12
I mean, I see people coping with humor publicly, even, you know, like a host on a show or right, just making light of really hard things, and I think we need humor a hundred percent and it's a way to cope and it's a way to share information. That's still sort of protected, right, someone just learned something about you. But there's also a way that in in groups or in culture, we can, we can go into avoidance together, right, we can do this sort of dance, this enactment of like oh, you don't want to go there, so I'm not going to go there, ha ha, ha, moving on, and I think there's an opportunity for healing in that. And there's no one right map for it, right, it's not like don't ever laugh with, always bring up the pain, like no, that's not what I'm saying, but there's something so interesting in that permeability and that vulnerability that comes up in the dance that we can do around it, and even the way that it's held in larger awareness and culture right way that it's held in larger awareness and culture.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 41:15
Right, yeah, I totally agree, and it's challenging in a given situation because I think that simply saying go for the underlying emotion come hell or high water, well, no, that's not necessarily the elegant thing to do. There is such a thing as timing in therapy. There is such a thing, and it's important having the relationship build in a certain way. There's also navigating what's called the real relationship, which is the everyday, normal way in which you act with somebody, with you being a therapist and having the therapist role. And you know the client comes in and says to you and even though you were working on something very, very difficult that's unrelated for many, many weeks, you know, let's say, you're a CBT therapist. The person comes in and says I found out this week, my grandma just died. The normal thing to do is to, you know, not say, well, let's stop and set an agenda for today's session. No, the normal thing to do is to say, oh, I'm so sorry, you know. Like, how are you doing? You know, just a normal response. Sometimes we just need to be normal people and respond very naturally.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 42:28
But it's tricky with clients who are very avoidant and they use humor as a defense, you could get drawn into doing that all the time. And so how do you navigate a shift from simply being a regular everyday person toward they're not paying you just to be an everyday, regular person. They're actually coming to sessions because they need something different, they need you to be different and they need you to challenge them. And so how do you do that, and do it artfully, in a way that doesn't throw them, you know, for a loop, because you've challenged their defenses more than they can handle, but then also does challenge them so that they're able to make change in therapy. Therapy has to be about, ultimately, about something different Growth, development, change in symptoms, whatever it is.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 43:18
Different modalities have different theories of change, but ultimately, all therapy is about some kind of change, even if that change is accepting things as they are and in a way that you can live with. That's also a change. So, yeah, navigating that stuff, I call in both my books well, both my therapy books Trauma and the Avoidant Client and Trauma and the Struggle to Open Up, and both of them I refer to that idea as mutual avoidance, where the therapist counter-transference gets triggered. The parts in the therapist that are avoidant connect to parts in the client and you may spend long periods of time tap dancing around something, afraid to talk about it because it's too scary, and the cost of that is that you communicate to the client this trauma of yours. It's bigger than the both of us.Lisa Danylchuk: 44:13
Yeah.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 44:14
I can't handle your trauma and ultimately therapy will fail, the client will leave. The client will feel that the therapist can't, even if the therapist is sort of intending at some point to get to it. But the dawdling around that may push the client away, because the client ultimately, as Bowlby said, wants to be understood, which means if they have a trauma history it does need to be seen, it does need to be addressed, it needs to be taken seriously and worked through somehow.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 44:48
So it's very tricky and finding a way to kind of walk that tightrope and build safety and ask about the trauma history as you work through and build that safety.Lisa Danylchuk: 45:01
Yeah. It just makes me think of this client who you know, worked with for years and so many layers to their experience and trauma history, and who actively disclosed trauma to me while saying I can't say anything else about this, don't ask me anything more, but I want to just allude to something and you're going to understand what I'm saying, but I don't want to ever talk about it like in one long sentence and I'm just like okay.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 45:29
Yeah, I've gotten that too Right.Lisa Danylchuk: 45:31
Yeah, like we, we don't want to just be in avoidance or collude in that and never get there. And when someone's putting up a hand and or giving us a really strong signal that they're not ready, like okay. And then going back to what we talked about earlier in terms of control or in terms of wanting progress, in terms of knowing that, oh, at some point addressing this is going to be so healing for you. But when folks aren't feeling resourced enough and we're noticing that too, right, like okay, yeah, maybe this is too much to unpack right now. It's just so much to continue to hold right, it's so much awareness to continue to hold.Lisa Danylchuk: 46:04
Like okay, now I know even more about your trauma history. You just added a piece that I didn't even know for 10 years and, okay, that fits and that makes sense. I'm honored that you share it with me and you're also telling me don't ever bring up that. I told you that essentially, like okay, can I take a breath? Do therapists get to get a bathroom break in the middle of a session? I just need to collect myself before I come back in here.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 46:33
Right, right, I, I. I find that when conceptualizing those kind of mixed messages, which that's, that's a classic, it's a great example, it's, it's, it's real. I mean, it sounds almost like something you'd see in a movie, but I can say absolutely that exact thing has been said to me. Yes, several times I've had supervisees who say the same thing. So, yeah, that's a real example, that is a thing that people do. Yes, I find that it's helpful to use the perspective of parts of self. Especially when you get mixed messages like that, parts of self can come up very quickly and I'm not necessarily saying that this person has multiple personality disorder or anything like that. In regular everyday folks you, me, everybody we all have different ways of us being us. We all have different parts to our personalities, us being us. We all have different parts to our personalities. Some might call it personas. Jung called it a persona, Richard Schwartz calls it parts, other therapists Ego states.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 47:40
Ego states, self states. Different people have different language for it and that's all fine, but the idea being that we have different, very sometimes ambivalently held, very powerfully ambivalently held feelings, desires, impulses, and it's really helpful to unpack the part of the person that very much feels that they don't want to ever talk about it and the part of that person who felt they had to tell you that because they didn't have to tell you that, because they didn't have to tell you that. And I may not necessarily, in that session, say anything, but I would certainly come back to it. So the kind of person who says something like that, I might say okay, message loud and clear in that particular session, because I feel like in that moment that you're describing it, the person is testing the waters a little bit. If I tell you this, will you push me? Will I feel safe? And I think it probably makes sense to say I'm not going to push you, let's keep it safe for the moment. I get it and kind of okay, yeah, I'll respect your boundaries. I don't know if the next session, but I wouldn't let 12 sessions pass. I would at some point, especially when it's thematically relevant, to do so, especially if the person drops another little trauma message.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 48:59
Oh yeah, this was that thing that I said to you about. That I don't want to ever talk about, and I might like Judy, it's interesting, this is the second time you've told me about that thing that you don't ever want to talk about, and I believe absolutely that there is a really strong part of you that never wants to talk about it. And then I'm also hearing that there's something that's not sitting quite right for you either and that maybe in some kind of way I'm not sure how this would look. I'm not even sure if we're going to do this today or tomorrow, I'm not sure when, but I kind of wonder if at some point there is something that you kind of do need to talk about on that issue. I don't know. So I'm being very tentative there, but I find that people you know almost always will very quickly connect to that and and okay, well, I'll tell you, or something.Lisa Danylchuk: 49:58
Or come to the next session like let's go.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 50:01
It doesn't take that much. Very often it almost just takes almost me recognizing the reality there for them to then, and then I almost need to slow things down as well, because recognizing that simply telling at that point might feel like it's too much, because there's the part of them that wants to hold back. So, you know, helping the person and I do talk about this in trauma and the struggle to open up, how to help someone who comes in wanting to overshare, to slow the process down so that they don't end up feeling humiliated and ashamed, so that's a whole process as well, kind of again, you know, like so it doesn't feel like they're driving this car down the highway at 200 miles an hour kind of thing. Oh my God, I never intended to talk about this. And now you know and this is totally out of control now helping the person sort of slow it all down so that it feels like it's a process that you can pace with them. It's tricky.Lisa Danylchuk: 50:58
Yeah, it really is too, because I've absolutely experienced that where the slowing down feels invalidating and then you're like, okay, so I want to validate where you are. I don't want to call the fast pace, the spilling, wrong or bad. I also want and trying to explain all of that and what you're right in the moment, trying to make decisions on your feet, it can be a lot. So I'm really grateful for clinicians and people like you where we can reflect on these things and get consultation and just try to find the best path forward for each individual client, where we're holding space for those painful things that sometimes do take time but we don't want to collude in avoidance with and trying to find that artful, real way of relating to this person in a way that's supportive for them, in a way where you know it's not just spinning around the same thing again and again or it's not spilling over and then feeling embarrassed or shameful and it's also not ever being able to broach the big reason or thing that is really at the root of a lot of current life.Lisa Danylchuk: 52:06
Challenges. So it's quite an art right. Challenges so it's quite an art right. It does require a lot of awareness and attention and intention and curiosity right.Lisa Danylchuk: 52:17
Coming back to that as well, there is one other thing I wanted to ask you before we wrap, because you talk about forgiveness and forced forgiveness, the forced forgiveness that people sometimes feel pressure towards from other people in their communities. Do you see that as a larger cultural avoidance, as a larger cultural discomfort with the complexities of trauma or with the pain and the not being quote ready for forgiveness? Right, like wanting to move through to resolution because being in the impact of the harm done is too much, even for a bystander.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 52:58
Yeah, I do, I sure do. I think that. So my writing on forgiveness generally is related to the idea that some people especially I'm coming from a place of working with trauma survivors that many trauma survivors feel a pressure to forgive. Sometimes they feel it through friends and family, it through friends and family. You know, your husband died three years ago. I guess that's not a great example of forgiveness, that's kind of a let it go kind of example. But let's say your husband cheated on you three years ago and you've been separated for two years now. Can't you just forgive? Can't you just let it go? Can't you just that sort of thing?Dr. Robert T. Muller: 53:44
And you know it's not for me to tell someone whether they should or shouldn't forgive. That's a values issue that cuts to the question of what people feel is right and wrong and moral and ethical and all of that. And those are all personal choices. So it's never for me to tell someone whether they should or shouldn't. Never for me to tell someone whether they should or shouldn't. But what is important as a trauma therapist is when I find that people are responding to outside pressures and aren't able to give their own voice space. That's when it is actually a problem for them in their everyday life and they feel stupid and they feel angry and they don't understand what's wrong with them. What's wrong with me that I can't? Yet my friend Joanne, her husband, cheated on her only six months ago and she's gotten over it. What's wrong with me? That kind of social comparison you name it Friends, children, who are sick and tired of hearing you whine about something that happened to you a couple years ago, like why can't you just let it go already? And that kind of language, so the kind of toxic positivity language that is very common in our culture, which comes from a very important place historically. It comes ultimately from the positive thinking movement and that's not CBT. The positive thinking movement is really from the early 20th century. It's an old movement and some of it comes from Christian writers, but not exclusively. This isn't a dig against Christian writers. Some of it comes from popular writers of the early 20th century. It's got a number of different roots and it can be perceived or felt as helpful to some people and that's fine. If you connect with that and that works for you, great. That's not a criticism of what works for any one person, but I will say that for many trauma survivors. It's really, really problematic.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 55:47
So I work with people who have suffered at the hands of relationships that have been very damaging to them, and what I find they need is to be understood, to be heard, to be listened to and to have a chance for their pain to be worked through. And then, when they do that and they can find a place to grieve the losses, then some of them will forgive and some of them won't. And what I talk about in the book is the idea in trauma and the struggle to open up. I talk about the idea that forgiveness can be a process. You can forgive elements of what happened. You can decide to forgive and change your mind. You don't have to stick with it, and you can be curious about that. That's so interesting.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 56:34
In my 20s I forgave my uncle for what he did, but now I'm not feeling so forgiving. I'm wondering what's going on there, because forgiveness can be a process. That happens at different times in your development. It can be an up and down kind of thing. If you think of forgiveness as an emotion like anything else, you know there's a time and place for anger, there's a time and place for sadness, there's a time and place for happiness. There's a time and place for everything, right? Why can't it be the same for forgiveness? If we think of it as a process, maybe it's not technically an emotion, but a subjective experience, let's say, and a mix of perception and emotion. If we can think of it that way and the word has meaning to all of us we all know what it means. But if we think of it as a process rather than as a virtue, then it can give us space to use a developmental perspective and to say how does this go up and down in different ways in our lives?Dr. Robert T. Muller: 57:40
You don't have to make a decision that stands forever. You can be curious. You can be curious about what you're feeling and that I find is really helpful to clients, because then they oh okay, so you mean, I don't have to forgive my husband for the affair from three years ago and I say to them what do you feel toward your husband? Well, I feel this, I feel this, I feel this. Okay, those are your feelings. Let's see what happens with forgiveness. Be curious about it. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't Pay attention to it. If it comes to you over the next while that we're working together, interesting. If it doesn't. What does that say about you? What does that mean? Let's just be curious and be open to you, experiencing whatever you experience. That just opens the door for people and it relieves the burden and they're able to move forward in their lives.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 58:34
It's very helpful.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 58:36
So, that's how I work In terms of cultural connection, absolutely. There's so much pressure to forgive the ills and to not make a big deal out of it. It's interesting as a Canadian. The Indigenous population in Canada suffered from the Indigenous school system which was created by the church in the early 20th century, and many, many children indigenous children were taken from their families and put into school systems and actually many of them were killed. So that might seem like a bizarre. How could that even happen? But it absolutely did happen and there's all kinds of scandals that are now coming out about how horrible that was. They were mistreated physically and sexually, etc. Etc.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 59:27
So, without going into too much detail, canada is in the midst of a process of reconciliation, if you will, restorative justice, if you will. How to do that? How to talk about forgiveness, apology and forgiveness. So Canada is kind of in the middle of this and has been for several years. But that's just Canada. I'm speaking from the country that I happen to live in. We all have our crosses to bear and it's important that when a trauma has been done to a group of people, that it be acknowledged, taken seriously, that there be some kind of restorative justice if possible. So I think that it's a very important issue culturally globally.Lisa Danylchuk: 1:00:13
Absolutely. And when there's collective harm done and it's intergenerational and it's gone even a few generations down the line, people can say, well, I didn't do that, so why are you upset at me? It's like, well, can we back up and go? Well, why are they upset? Because it happens right, because someone was killed, because populations were slaughtered, like acknowledging that, rather than why are you mad at me? Well, you're mad and I'm the representation of the people who did that and that makes a lot of sense and I can have empathy for that.Lisa Danylchuk: 1:00:46
And yeah, it might be uncomfortable to not feel kumbaya connected, but we can't force that. You can't just say, oh well, let's get to the other side of this really harmful, horrible, awful thing that happened. Whether it's trauma therapists sitting with client, or it's trauma therapist sitting with client, or it's us collectively out in the community trying to have institutional courage or trying to practice resilience across generations. Still, there can be difficult and painful emotions that are a part of that process, and so I appreciate your naming Also the toxic positivity that can come into that common thing I still see people share the thought of you know I was holding onto this and so it was a poison within me and so I forgive so that I don't hold the poison and the other.Lisa Danylchuk: 1:01:37
You know, like I don't know if you've seen that type of messaging and I get that and again, kind of like the positivity, if you feel that and it's working for you and it's making you feel free and lighter and better in your life, okay. But if someone else is reading that as a message of, well, I need to forgive because there's poison in me. I mean that folds into this whole like cleanse yourself free of toxins thing. That can also come up. That's a little extreme. So I appreciate that acknowledgement as well.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 1:02:07
Yeah, yeah, it's also really in an age of disinformation, it's also really important. I'll just say one brief little thing and just say that you know, as a child of Holocaust survivors, how important it is for me personally to recognize the ills of the past and not to get into covering up the ills that are happening in the present to others who are suffering. So but I think, well, I'll just, I'll leave it at that and just, yeah, I'll just leave it at that.Lisa Danylchuk: 1:02:40
And for some reason, I just grabbed my arm and the thumbs up emoji showed up on the screen. I am in agreement, but that's not the way I meant to communicate it. Oh my God.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 1:02:48
I didn't see the thumbs up emoji. How do?Lisa Danylchuk: 1:02:50
I turn that off, zoom. Well, robert, I want to thank you for being here today, for sharing your personal history, everything, some of what you've learned along the way and shared through your books, everything some of what you've learned along the way and shared through your books, definitely share the links to those resources in the show notes. So people who want to read Trauma and the Avoidant Client or Trauma and the Struggle to Open Up, and can you say the name of the memoir one more time as well- it's From Hungary to Canada.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 1:03:18
The Memoirs of Lewis and Eva Muller, my parents.Lisa Danylchuk: 1:03:21
Yeah, and if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way?Dr. Robert T. Muller: 1:03:26
So you just Google Robert T Muller, m-u-l-l-e-r, and you'll get to a couple of my websites. I have my professor website at York University in Toronto. I also have my private practice website, and so there's contact me information there. My email address is there. It's all my contact information. I also have a Psychology Today blog that you can take a look at, and my information's there as well.Lisa Danylchuk: 1:03:52
Wonderful. Do you have time for one last question? Sure, I like to ask people what brings you hope.Dr. Robert T. Muller: 1:04:01
What brings you hope. It's tough in this day and age, eh, I mean yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I guess the biggest thing is those four words that can make you happy when you're sad, and sad when you're happy. This too shall pass, you know. I mean, when we're up, we're not always going to be up, we're going to go down again. So that's sobering. But when we're down, we're not always going to be down, we'll go up again. So this too shall pass one way or the other. And that's something that gives me hope and also, like I said, makes me happy when I'm sad and sad when I'm happy.Lisa Danylchuk: 1:04:40
Yeah, yeah, just noticing the impermanence of, of emotion and everything, everything, yep, my dogs agree. You can hear them barking. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for contributing so much of your wisdom here. Yeah, and I really appreciate it my pleasure.Lisa Danylchuk: 1:05:03
Thanks so much for listening. Don't forget to go to howwecanhealcom to sign up for email updates. You'll also find additional trainings, tons of helpful resources and the full transcript of each show. If you love the show, please leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. Review on Apple, Spotify, Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe, and keep sharing the shows you love the most with all your friends.Lisa Danylchuk: 1:05:34
Visit howwecanhealcom/ podcast to share your thoughts and ideas for the show. I love hearing from you. Before we wrap up for today, I want to be clear that this podcast isn't offering prescriptions. It's not advice, nor is it any kind of mental health treatment or diagnosis. Your decisions are in your hands and I encourage you to consult with any healthcare professionals you may need to support you through your unique path of healing. In addition, everyone's opinion here is their own. Guests share their thoughts, not that of the host or sponsors. I'd like to thank our guests today, everyone who helps support this podcast directly and indirectly. Alex, shout out to you for taking care of the babe and the fur babies while I record. Last but never least, I'd like to give a shout out to my big brother. Matt passed away in 2002. He wrote this music and it makes my heart so happy to share it with you here. Thank you.
Comments are closed