Speaker 1:
Hi everyone. My name’s Christopher Bruce. I’m a divorce lawyer with the Bruce Law Firm in South Florida, and today I have the pleasure of being joined by Deborah Beriro. She is a therapist in the Palm Beach Gardens area. And today we’re talking about a topic that I think is really important, sometimes misunderstood, and that’s codependency, more specifically how to avoid harmful codependent behaviors in relationships. So I think it’s going to be a really interesting, useful topic. We’re going to debunk maybe a few myths. And before we really get into it, Deborah, maybe just tell a little bit about your background and experience and how you came to be doing this type of stuff.
Speaker 2:
I have been wanting to be a therapist since I was about nine years old, but then life took its many turns, and I actually had my own recovery journey to go through. And once I felt strong enough or felt recovered, if you will, I went back and got my master’s about 10 years ago and became a therapist. And I started in the addiction field because in South Florida, that’s really where you get most of your training. And then after five years of doing inpatient residential treatment, I moved into private practice because I recognized that a lot of the… It’s fine to be sober, it’s great to be sober. But even though there’s a lot of healing in becoming sober, the reasons for why these people drank or did drugs or were codependents, et cetera, those are all the deep wounds that don’t get addressed in recovery, like AA, et cetera. So I decided that I wanted to help people move past early recovery and into a really fulfilling life.
Speaker 1:
Well, that is an amazing story, and I think you have the same ultimate goal as I do and my lawyers do, and that’s trying to just get people to a better place, being happier. So it’s really cool to talk to somebody with a similar purpose. So codependency, there is a lot of talk about it. What is it? What is it really? So what does it actually mean? From somebody who has a degree in this stuff, what does it mean to be codependent?
Speaker 2:
The word codependent is a little bit psycho-babble, coming out of literature, different therapists and different psychologists that have written books. The term actually was coined by Al-Anon, which is the sister to Alcoholics Anonymous. So it used to be that the men would go to their meeting at Bill Wilson’s house, and then the women would sit around the kitchen and have coffee. And then eventually they all recognized that they had a lot of similar traits. And so they founded Al-Anon. So Al-Anon is the first one that starts addressing these traits, and I think it was in the forties.
Now we know something a little further than that. And what it really is is part of an attachment disorder, which we’ll talk more about. And it’s called enmeshment, actually. But to simplify, what it really is is people that are people-pleasers, they don’t have boundaries. They’re scared to say no, they’re scared to say how they feel, they lack identity, they’re fearful or have a hard time standing up for themselves. They’re over carrying, they have a primary concern of either fitting in, being accepted, being loved. They say sorry a lot. Not always, but a lot of them are sorry, “Sorry, sorry” for existing, essentially. And then they become not only people-pleasers, but people-carers, which then causes burnout, resentments because people aren’t returning the favor of what you did, et cetera.
Mostly when they come into my office, one of the first things they’ll tell me is that they love making people happy. Big smile. “This is who I am. This is my identity. I’m a helper. I love people… Helping people.” And that’s actually not the case. However, enmeshed people have a lot of positive qualities.
Speaker 1:
I would imagine.
Speaker 2:
So-
Speaker 1:
I’m hearing part of what you’re saying, and some of it kind of-
Speaker 2:
There’s not… Right, there’s-
Speaker 1:
[inaudible 00:05:08] people- .
Speaker 2:
Doesn’t sound-
Speaker 1:
… yeah.
Speaker 2:
… so terrible. Right. So they do a lot of service. They’re very loving, they compromise. They are listeners. They’re very concerned with fairness, they’re peacemakers. The problem is that they lose their identities.
Speaker 1:
And that’s, I think, what we’re going to focus on in a little bit. And I have my own suspicions just from my law practice. We see many similarities with people who exhibit certain behaviors. And I do believe we’re all special snowflakes and a little bit different. But are there any commonalities between, for lack of a better term, what contributes to somebody having codependent characteristics in adulthood?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it all starts in childhood. And generally speaking, the word trauma gets thrown around a lot. And most people think of the word trauma in childhood as getting beaten, extreme behaviors. Same with the word neglect. Neglect, at least for me, it makes me think of the little kids in the cages that are… you know? But those are physical things. There’s emotional trauma, emotional neglect, et cetera. So when we grow up in homes that aren’t necessarily abusive, however, there is a lack of emotional needs being met. So it could be as simple as a parent having cancer. Right?
And the other parent is very busy… Or another one of the siblings having cancer. It doesn’t necessarily mean abuse in the traditional sense. However, there are trauma experiences. And so it comes from a study in ’99 from Kaiser Permanente called the ACE Study, which is a seminal study in its time. Adverse childhood experiences is what ACE stands for because they wanted to get away from the word trauma, because if your parent has cancer and survives and is fine, that’s not a traumatic event, but that’s an adverse experience in your life.
So we have to be… We use the word trauma, but it’s not the traditional idea of getting beaten, et cetera, right?
Speaker 1:
That makes sense.
Speaker 2:
So neglect, for example, emotional neglect, we’ll go back to the parent with cancer. If you’re sad about something that’s going on at school and your mother is so busy with your father who’s really, really ill that day, and you’re upset about something, and you go to mom and you say, “Mom, I’m so upset at something that happened in school,” and your mom blows you off because she’s a human and she’s got a whole bunch of… The child doesn’t interpret that as mommy’s busy. The child interprets that, because they’re very self-centered as a survival skill, the child interprets that as something’s wrong with me. I must need too much. I’m not lovable, blah, blah, blah. So there’s different interpretations that the child makes. And usually the child… Because the child can’t blame the parent. If the child blames the parent, then if you really follow that thought all the way through, we are completely dependent on our caregivers. If our caregivers are wrong, broken, abusive, then we will probably die. And our brains won’t really let us go there. So we turn it in on ourselves, by the form of shame.
So we shame ourselves, and it’s a way of turning blame into tolerable. It starts with, for example, a child that protests, a child that talks back, a child that says no. Those things are unacceptable in homes of that kind of dysfunction. And so no becomes a bad word, standing up for yourself becomes a bad word, asking for your needs to be met is a definite no-no. So you essentially collapse in on yourself. You learn not to be assertive. You develop a strategy essentially to try to get your needs met. So if mom is taking care of dad, and you know mom is really thirsty, so you go get her a glass of water, and mom says, “Thank you so much, sweetheart, you’re such a good…” Bingo. Now I know how to get mom to pay attention to me and to love me, so I become servile. Right?
And so that then translates to adulthood of a person that negates themselves, lacks assertiveness, is fearful of saying no. The other thing that’s important to note is that alcoholism, substance use disorder, and narcissism are very similar in what they look like, in how they present in the world.
So oftentimes, if we would have someone come in with a substance use disorder, I wouldn’t be able to say that they were narcissists until they were at least three to six months sober. Because an alcoholic looks like a narcissist, but is not. So what the opposite side of the coin, if you have a narcissist or a alcoholic or a substance use or blah, blah, blah, if this is that side, then the opposite side is codependency. So they fit in together. So very often, a co-dependent will marry a narcissist or a co-dependent will marry an alcoholic. Back to Al-Anon, AA, all these women sitting in the kitchen recognizing that they had the same responses.
But also it should be noted that we’ve all heard of fight/flight/freeze response, which are trauma responses from childhood experiences which we then, it’s like a strategy we learn to use, whether we’re a fighter or we run away or whatever. Everyone talks about fight/flight/freeze, but nobody talks about fawn.
Fawn is codependency.
Speaker 1:
Really?
Speaker 2:
So there’s actually four Fs. Like I said, everyone talks about the three, but there’s actually the fourth, which is codependency. So the bottom line is that they forget to bring themselves into the picture. They lose their identity. To give you a very simple example, if I invite you to a party that you know cannot go to because you have other plans, saying no to me, “I’m so sorry, I can’t go to your party,” is really hard for a co-dependent. They’ll make a sort of excuse to try to figure out how not to upset you.
I don’t want to reject them inviting me to the party because if I reject the party, then that means they’re going to maybe think that I’m rejecting them. Then they’re not going to like me, and then they’ll never invite me to a party again, and then I’ll never have friends. So I’m not going to say no. I’m like, “Oh, I’m busy, but I’ll try to stop by.” And then what happens is, you’re expecting me at the party. I never intended to go. Now you really are upset, which was what I was trying to avoid to begin with.
Speaker 1:
I did my best to prepare you for the interview. And this wasn’t on the list of questions, but I figure you might know the answer. How do the people with the codependent traits end up marrying the narcissists or the alcoholic-type people with some degree of regularity? And I would agree with you ’cause we look at a lot of our relationships; when we identify somebody that has narcissistic traits, usually their spouse, our client falls into basically the person you just described. And they’re wonderful people. It’s-
Speaker 2:
Wonderful people.
Speaker 1:
… a joy to represent and help. But how does the yin and yang attraction thing end up happening?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it’s really interesting.
Speaker 1:
You know?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it’s really interesting. Well, generally speaking, and obviously this is a very general statement, but co-dependents grow up in homes with narcissists or alcoholics or some sort of compulsive disorder. So again, they learn these traits in early childhood. And the question is, am I lovable for who I am, just being me? And in a narcissistic home, no, you’re not. You’re lovable because you bring me something, you bring something to the table. So this is a little deeper and complicated, but in a subconscious way, we all have this problem to fix. So the childhood problem was I’m not lovable, and so now I’m going to try to fix the problem. So we pick people, this is the joke where you marry your parents, you marry your mother or father.
We pick people that look, even though we don’t see it, we definitely do not see it. It’s usually decades later that you go, “Oh my God, there it is.” But we marry people that have the same characteristics as our parents because we’re trying to figure out the problem of being loved. So this time, if I’m really nice, if I’m make their life easy, if I support them in becoming rock stars or whatever, then I will be loved the way. But the problem is that it’s the wrong version of love because you’re negating yourself in order to be accepted.
And then the narcissist needs a constant ego boost, right? The narcissist is like an empty bucket with a hole at the bottom of it that can never be filled. And the co-dependent has no problem saying yes to everything, “Oh, you’re wonderful,” because there’s fear that if I upset the narcissist, then I won’t be loved. And so it’s a coping strategy co-dependents, or fawn types really, correctly called, fawn types will negate themselves in order to find love, get acceptance from the narcissist. Meanwhile, the narcissist is, it’s fabulous for them because they have someone that’s stroking their ego.
Speaker 1:
So if we throw a couple of decades on this issue, maybe think of somebody married 20 years on, 30 years, how do these codependent type behaviors show up in those relationships, and what issues do they cause for the person that’s exhibiting these behaviors?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it’s a good question. It shows up in so many different ways. The biggest way really is what I notice is when I have co-dependent types come into my office, if you ask them a lot of questions about who they are, they don’t know very well. It reminds me of, I don’t know if you remember the movie when Harry met Sally and the diner scene, but it’s a different diner scene. The diner scene where she doesn’t know how she likes her eggs because, depending on the boyfriend, she either had them sunnyside up or scrambled or whatever. And so she’s at a restaurant, and now she’s single and she doesn’t know what… That’s a very simplified version of it, but they don’t… First, they lose themselves, and they become naggers.
So let’s say that this person is married to an alcoholic. They will look, for example, the alcoholic is drunk; the co-dependent knows that the alcoholic is drunk. The alcoholic is denying that they’re drunk. So the co-dependent will go and look for bottles and will search the house for bottles to prove that they’re not crazy. “See, the vodka bottle was here yesterday, and now it’s here.” And so they become really obsessed with the other person. And again, the biggest problem is a complete loss of identity, a loss of boundaries. And there’s a lot of talk of self-esteem. It’s not so much of a loss of self-esteem, it’s a loss of self-worth.
Speaker 1:
Really?
Speaker 2:
Or a lack… Maybe there was not self-worth to begin with when they got into that relationship. Specifically with narcissists, what they do is they love bomb you first. So for a co-dependent, it’s like, “Wow, yeah! Finally somebody sees me and loves me for who I am.” And then the narcissist turns, and you go right into that, how do I get them to love me? So the biggest problem that co-dependents have is a lack of boundaries, a lack of a sense of self. They usually are burnt out ’cause they’re taking care of everybody else. They practice no self-care. They think that their self-care is taking care of others.
Speaker 1:
I see.
Speaker 2:
All right? So “I love helping people. That’s what I do.” When you ask them, “What do you practice self-care?” “Oh, I volunteer at six different places and…”
Speaker 1:
So if somebody’s listening to this and they’re like, “Hmm, maybe this is me, or I have some signs of this,” what advice do you have? And I imagine it’s not just a boom, push it easy button but what’s your best tips for having them minimize this type of behavior in their relationships?
Speaker 2:
The problem, like I said, is boundaries. A lot of people think that boundaries is me saying to you, “Hey Bruce, I don’t like it when you speak to me that way.” Okay? That’s actually not a boundary. A lot of people think that that’s a boundary because I’m making a statement of how I would like for you to treat me. The boundary is in how I keep the boundary. So co-dependents make the mistake a lot. So first we’ll talk about setting a boundary, and then they’ll blame the other person who hasn’t kept the boundary. “Well, I told them not to, blah, blah, blah.” Right? The issue is that it’s up to the co-dependent to keep the boundary. And this is the hardest part for a co-dependent. To give you an example, if I say, “Hey, Bruce, please…” excuse me, “Chris, please don’t speak to me that way,” and then you go and do it 30 seconds later, my job, with good boundaries, is to say, “”I’m sorry. I’m no longer going to tolerate this and get up and leave.
I don’t allow it to happen. Right? So again, people think that a boundary is me telling you how I want you to treat me, when in fact, that’s just a statement. That’s just me letting you know. A boundary is me doing something about it. So boundaries are really hard because, for a co- dependent to say, “I’m removing myself myself from your acceptance, your love, your tolerance, to protect me,” is the antithesis of how they became enmeshed to begin with, which was, “How do I make you happy so I can be accepted, loved?”
So it’s doing the opposite of what you’re doing, but it’s really, really hard because there is a major threat that started when you were a child. So if you said no to your parents and they got mad, then as a child it was extremely threatening. “They won’t love me. They’ll kick me out of the house. I’ll never be able to sleep warmly again or have food.” And so that level of threat in the nervous system, it stores in the nervous system; then someone violates my boundary and I don’t know how to do anything about it because I was never taught in childhood.
Speaker 1:
Wow. So I’m just thinking as a professional, me trying to be in your shoes when you’re working with somebody that might have these codependent or codependency-type traits or just the personality, it really sounds like you possibly might have to work with them to undo a system of beliefs that’s been ingrained in them since they were little girls and little boys.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Yep, that is in fact what I do. The first part to it is psychoeducation, a little bit of what we’re doing now, because there’s all this shame involved and lack of self-worth involved. And when people finally find out, “Oh, this is actually an adaptive coping skill that I learned. I was very smart as a child. Oh, I know-
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I-
Speaker 2:
… mom loves me, right?
Speaker 1:
Exactly.
Speaker 2:
It’s brilliant. The problem is, at age seven, it works; at age 50 or 30, it no longer works. So first I do a lot of psychoeducation, which takes away a lot of the shame. Then we go look for the core wound. What is the wound? Is the wound that you don’t feel accepted, that you’re not lovable, that whatever message you think you received? And then we start working through that wound while at the same time going into the daily. So let’s say you and I meet weekly. You’ll tell me something that happened this week, and then we’ll break it down, literally thought by thought, and identify, “Aha, here’s where you lost yourself, and how do we regain yourself? What could you have said differently to make you feel powerful instead of walking away collapsed or in shame?”
So assertiveness, but proper assertiveness, being able to stand into who you are, what your needs are, et cetera, that’s where the healing is. The healing is in saying, “There’s nothing wrong with me. I deserve to be loved. I deserve to be respected. I deserve to be treated with kindness for the simple fact that I’m living on this earth and I’m a human being.” In fact, even animals, even dog, our pets, are deserving of love, kindness, and respect. The codependents don’t think that they are.
Speaker 1:
You’ve talked about starting to develop tools to establish a sense of self-worth, setting boundaries, real boundaries, not just statements. Any other main strategies that somebody that might have these codependent traits might try to implement in their relationships just to avoid situations that are ultimately destructive to them?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. It depends if you’re doing it with a therapist or not, but there’s a lot that happens with self-talk. We haven’t talked at all about the brain or the nervous system, but if we’re talking about the brain, what we’re talking about is neural pathways. So these pathways that have been built over many decades that say that if I want to make you happy, I will defer to you. So in therapy or psychoeducation reading… I’ll give later in a minute, I’ll give some community support groups that people can attend for those that don’t want to go to therapy or can’t go to therapy. Within that scope, you learn different strategies. One of the big strategies that works for people with what we’re actually talking about is developmental childhood trauma or CPTSD complex PTSD, because it’s a long length, those people, the way that they can start figuring it out is through self-talk.
“I am important. I deserve to be heard. It’s okay for me not to be loved by everyone. It’s okay for me not to be accepted by everyone.” So there’s a lot of self-talk. There has to be some sort of validation or connection to another person. And I don’t mean to imply, because this is the downfall of the codependent, is that “Well, get into another relationship and that will heal you.” A lot of codependents do that, and they just repeat the pattern and go in back into a shame, death spiral, et cetera. I’m talking about friendships. I’m talking about people that validate your experiences, people that you feel connected to, people that are not threatening. So sometimes relationships are threatening, are they going to leave me? Are they not going to leave me? What do I need to do? Blah, blah, blah, whereas a friendship, hopefully you feel validated and connected to the person. Just having someone go, “Wow, I’m sorry that happened to you” or validate your experience, actually, there is a tremendous amount of healing in that.
Speaker 1:
That’s interesting. And I guess on the scope-
Speaker 2:
Did I-
Speaker 1:
… of friends-
Speaker 2:
… answer your question, or did I got into a-
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, definitely. And it leads me to something else. I’ve been amazed, and my wife also. We do a lot of the initial meetings with people that they come to the firm, especially Ashley now. And oftentimes the people that are in the worst relationships, sometimes they come with a friend. And that makes me think maybe some of those friends are watching this. And for people out there that have a friend going, they think, okay, this episode is about Susie or whatever, do you have any tips for them and maybe broaching the topic of some of this stuff to help their friend be happier just in life or in their relationship even?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, here’s the issue that I think I have, and that is that the word codependent gets thrown around so much that then you tell someone, “Oh, you’re a co-dependent,” and it’s almost like an insult, when in fact we just discussed, it’s a brilliant coping strategy.
Speaker 1:
Yeah-
Speaker 2:
[inaudible 00:29:12]. .
Speaker 1:
… people exist to make other people happy. I mean, it’s-
Speaker 2:
Yeah. It’s a great way to survive childhood when that’s what you need. The best way to support a friend that is going through that is what I said before. There has to be a lot of support, a lot of “I see you,” a lot of “You deserve better. You’re deserving of more than this.” But strong encouragement into some sort of therapy or some sort of community support. And I’ll go ahead and name those. I discussed Al-Anon already. And Al-Anon is not just for those that are… It used to be if you’re married to an alcoholic. It could be any reason to go to Al-Anon. It doesn’t necessarily have to be alcoholics.
By the way, there’s Alateen, which is for teenagers that are raised in dysfunctional or alcoholic homes. So they learn the same type of strategies. That’s one. Then there’s CoDA, which is Co-Dependents Anonymous, similar to Al-Anon. There is… Oh, there’s ACOA. This one is called Adult Children of Alcoholics, and then parentheses and Dysfunctional Families, because not everybody was raised-
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
… in alcoholic home. I have clients, for example, whose father was dying of cancer for six years. That has made them all codependent because they have to take care of dad, take care of mom, et cetera.
So the cool thing about ACOA, Adult Children of Alcoholics, is, whereas Al-Anon and CoDA is really focused on codependency, ACOA is actually on all four of the four types. So fight, fright, freeze, fawn. Because codependents are not codependents or fawns all the time. Sometimes they become freezers, sometimes they’re flights. And ACOA is a newer program, if you will. And it uses something called IFS Theory, which is Internal Family Systems. You’ve heard of the inner child?
Speaker 1:
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:
So the inner child work, that happens a lot in ACOA, where we talk about the kid that’s stuck in their parents’ home that’s fearful of saying no ’cause he might get hit or he might get insulted. So friends helping codependent friends, I would say, is just being there.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
And not turning codependent themselves. You know?
Speaker 1:
I think that’s great advice and those resources. I learned a couple more, so made my afternoon-
Speaker 2:
Yeah, ACOA is the one now because it’s the newest, and it’s using… Now research is really showing that Internal Family Systems, IFS, is a really good treatment modality for Complex PTSD, which is what we’re actually talking about. So ACOA is great for that. And then there’s a ton… As I said, psychoeducation is super important because for the longest time we shame ourselves. First, we shame ourselves as children because we’re not lovable because our parents can’t meet our needs. And then we shame ourselves because “Oh my God, I’m always helping others,” or whatever it is. So the first thing we do is psychoeducation: why are you doing that?
And when the answer becomes apparent, then the shame can kind of dissipate, because like I’ve said, it’s a brilliant coping skill. It just becomes maladaptive once we go into adult relationships and we servile or disappear in our relationship as adults. So there’s some great books out there. There’s a ton out there.
I’ll just shoot them off really, off the top of my head. There’s Facing Codependence, Codependent No More. Then there’s books that are really on complex trauma. So Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. The Drama of the Gifted Child is a really good one about codependency. The Body Keeps The Score is more scientific as to what’s going on in the brain and in the nervous system, but it’s brilliant. And then Oprah recently came out with a book that she wrote in conjunction with a doctor whose name I think is Bruce Perry, and it’s called What Happened To You? And actually the title is fabulous because instead of “What’s wrong with you?” it’s “What happened to you that these are the strategies that you’re using in adulthood?” So psychoeducation, I think, is super important. I spend a lot of time on that.
Speaker 1:
And when it comes to the therapy… I guess I’ll take a step back. In our law practice, when we have somebody come to us and they’re married to somebody that’s just, whether they’re a true narcissist or not, they have the qualities that we know professionally are going to make the divorce typically a difficult one when you throw in money or other pressure points. When we identify a client that might have a lot of the qualities of the person we’re talking about here, usually what we tell them is, “Look, unless there’s a real imminent legal reason to do something with the divorce soon,” which almost always there never is, we tell them, “Look, you really need to find a really good therapist, maybe a coach, probably a therapist, really, ’cause a lot of this stuff’s more deep-rooted and educate yourself on this stuff. Probably do it six months to a year so that you can be on a better foundation for moving on, or the divorce might not go as well as it could.”
But I think a lot of people, they hear that advice, they listen to it, but some of them, they just really don’t know what a therapist like you does for people like them. So what do you do?
Speaker 2:
Well, I’ve had a lot of clients, actually. I work with another law firm that sends me exactly the type of client. And it’s actually, they’re my favorite clients because they come to the first session, usually pretty broken, really not knowing who they are anymore, having been gaslighted and really emotionally abused to the point where they don’t know up from down. So I work really hard for several months on their self-worth. Once we get the self-worth just even bubbling a little bit, then they become assertive.
And then they’re actually able to help you, tell you what they want, and fight. Instead of collapsing, every time the narcissist files another motion, they fall apart again and they can’t even really tell you what they want to do. By the time I work with them, they’re assertive enough to say, “Oh, heck no. I’m not doing that. No, he can’t do that to me. I deserve more.” So I get them into not fighting, but into self-worth, into empowerment, into assertiveness, into “The power of my life, I get to make decisions as to what I want to do in my life instead of defaulting to somebody else.” So I empower them to then come to you and say, “No, I won’t do this. Yes, I will do this. No, I won’t do that.”
Speaker 1:
Sounds like pretty useful to me, which is, I guess, why we recommend it. But yeah, thanks for demystifying that ’cause I think there’s still… It’s changing, but there’s just a little bit of stigma as to what therapy is. People think that maybe there’s something wrong with them. And I tell them, so does my wife, “Look, sometimes we’re calling it therapy, but it’s really teaching you skills for dealing with yourself and situations. It’s not getting treated for having something wrong, it’s just speeding up a process of really you making things better for yourself.” So I’m glad you elaborated on that. And for those that are listening to this, and they’re thinking, huh, this is me, and I like this Deborah, she seems to know what she’s talking about, that’s how I feel right here, we’ll put the information up and have it on the show notes page. But maybe talk for a minute about how people can get in touch with you, where to find you and all that fun stuff.
Speaker 2:
I have a website, and it is wisemind.org, because actually, if you take the emotional mind, this is a DBT skill; if you take the emotional mind and the rational mind and you put them together, then you’re the whole person. You’re taking care of your inner world while taking care of the outside world. So wisemind.org. They can reach me through my email address, obviously. Also, sorry, it’s Deborah, D-E-B-O-R-A-H, L as in Larry, M as in Mary, H as in Harry, C as in Charlie @gmail.com. So Deborahlmhc.com. Yeah. Oh, and my phone number is (561) 707-8600. I do have an office that I work out of North Lake, but I also generally do a lot of telehealth. I have clients all over Florida. I have a big group in Jacksonville that I work with. So if you’re not in Palm Beach County, I’m still more than happy to help.
Speaker 1:
Well, that is perfect. And we’re, I guess, coming close to our time, so we’ll go in a minute, but do you have any other parting tips of advice for people that might be resonating with what you’re talking about here?
Speaker 2:
I really like the idea that you, or what you said about therapy having this stigma and we’re slowly coming out of it. A lot of people think, oh my God, I’m not crazy. I’m not going to go to therapy. I’m not crazy. So there is no crazy. There’s a saying: “We’re all just humans having a human experience.” And some of the things that we do, we have no concept of why we do what we do. So a lot of therapy isn’t about treating crazy, it’s about helping you figure out, oh, that’s why I [inaudible 00:40:38]. That’s why every time someone invites me to a party, I freak out and can’t say no. Ah, okay. I’m not crazy, I just have a hard time displeasing people. Right? So thank you for bringing that up because it is something that is not a problem, but a lot of people have this stigma. Off the top of my head, I don’t treat crazy. I treat strategies that don’t work anymore.
Speaker 1:
Well, Deborah, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this today. I think this has been pretty awesome. I think there’s a lot of helpful information here. And for those listening, take the time to look at the website that this is hosted on. We’ll have some of the information for Deborah, some of the resources she talked about. And thank you for being part of this, Deborah. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:
Thank you so much. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to do some of this psychoeducation, which I love to do, and taking the stigma out. So thank you for having me.
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