Happy Monday and welcome to your mental Health Mini.
This week's guests are Doctors Olivio and Dr. Seidler, and we
are talking about how to thrive in college with your social life
using DBT. I see a lot of college students
swing from paying attention to one thing they value and are
like, OK, I can only be hard working and do amazing
academically and like, I'm just going to have to sacrifice my
social life or I'm going to prioritize my social life and
just kind of accept that my academics aren't going to be,
you know? Too stellar.
And I think probably one of the main goals in college and when
I'm working with college students is how do we find a
balance between those two things?
And how could you recognize when your emotion mind is essentially
causing you to attend to one side and not pay attention to
both of them? And to reach for more of like a
synthesis or a balance where you really feel good about yourself,
that you actually are attending to your values around building
your community of friends at college and also doing what
you're supposed to be doing there, which is learning and
being a student. And I think in college as well,
I'm constantly describing the give fast skill.
OK, So what does that mean, right.
But in short, it's a relationship skill that you can
have or you try to pay attention to the balance between how much
you're giving to a friendship and how much you're holding fast
to who you are. And I think the college has a
ton of groupthink. You know, you could even think
about it's kind of reinforced or assumed that it should be that
way. Sorority life, your team on a
certain sports team, you know, and there's so many hidden
rules, right, that you kind of need to follow.
So one of the things that can be really helpful is to pay
attention to just in general. How much are you giving to
people and also how much are you able to hold true to what you
need? There are a lot of times where
people feel like, OK, I gotta stand up for myself when I'm
talking to this person other, you know, I'm in this friendship
and I'm just going to tell them what I think it's like, OK, so
you can have a gentle manner, right?
You can act interested in what the other person's saying.
You can validate what they're going through.
What we mean by that is can you understand the story of how they
got there? Doesn't mean you have to agree,
but there's a probably a reason that they got to where they're
at at this point in life too. So those are some things I'm
often trying to especially, I think people I'm talking to that
are advocates, they're passionate.
And you want to say absolutely, absolutely should do all those
things and there are ways to get people to hear you.
And you want to have a bit of a balance.
And then you have people who don't, you know, hate to say the
term doormat, but they really are letting people cross
boundaries that they shouldn't cross or they're not going to
that professor and asking for a different grade and just saying
yes to everything. And so the fast skill would be
much more about holding true to who you are as a person.
A lot of people think they have to be either or.
And I think, yes, if I was at like a store or something and
they told me something was $20 and then I go to ring it up and
they're like, it's actually 95. Maybe I'm going to use just fast
because that person who works there I don't need to maintain a
positive relationship with. But when we're thinking about
college and whether it's a professor, a friend, whoever it
is, we probably need to pay attention to both of those
skills. And I think people mistake
maintaining our self respect as being aggressive or abrasive.
In terms of assertiveness skills.
There's a way for you, here's a dialectic, to be gentle and
assertive at the same time. And there's a way to maintain a
relationship with someone and still draw a line in the sand.
And it's all about how you do that, right?
Can you validate their perspective?
Can you be gentle with your language, not attack them, etc.
I think college is also a time when friend groups can ebb and
flow or shift altogether. And that's really normal.
And so the given fast skill ultimately is about how to
maintain the relationships that you want and set boundaries in
or in the relationships that are no longer working for you.
But there are times when I'm talking to some people and
they'll kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You know, they'll say, like this friend again, sort of hurt my
feelings this one time or is not somebody who can do XY and Z for
me. And that's when I said, like,
let's pull out a little bit, zoom out and let's think about
friendship and that no one friend is going to be all things
to you. And that I have a friend who I
can trust, like with my life, literally, but she's not going
to pay me back the $10 she owes me.
I know for a fact that she's not, you know, but I can really
trust her in this one category and I can kind of adapt or move
around or accept that she's fallible just like I am in
another category. And since we started our
podcast, you'd be amazed how many people have been like, Oh
my gosh, my child who's a freshman is having such a hard
time. It is the most consistent thing
that we hear. So it's not necessarily advice,
but it's about saying this is what almost everyone is going
through. And it's the time of your life
when you're probably the most afraid to express it.
So there's a huge discrepancy there.
So you are not alone. I have a niece who is just the
most, well, you know, thriving person in the world and asked
her at some point, what would you say to people who, yeah,
maybe aren't struggling with mental health or have a hard
time or doing fine? What?
What's the thing that you'd want me to know as I'm working with
these people? And she said freshman year was
the loneliest time for me and every one of my friends.
This is not even someone who would have ostensibly said she's
struggled with mental health. Everybody is.
You're not alone.