Welcome to she persisted I'm your host Sadie Saxton a 19 year
old from the Bay Area studying psychology at the University of
Pennsylvania. She persisted is the Teen Mental
Health podcast made for teenagers by a team in each
episode. I'll bring you authentic
accessible and relatable conversations about every aspect
of mental Wellness. You can expect evidence-based,
Tina, proof resources, coping skills, including lots of DBT,
insights and education. In each piece of content, you
consume, she persisted It offers you a safe space to feel
validated and understood in your struggle while encouraging you
to take ownership of your journey and build your life
worth living. So let's dive in this week on
she persisted I think that not trusting yourself can coincide
with a void ends. If you are avoiding situations,
if you are avoiding interactions for avoiding public speaking,
literally whatever it is something that you are avoiding.
You'll kind of have that thought of I can't do this.
Like I don't trust myself to do this.
I can't handle it. There's that lack of trust.
You can do it. So, the more that you push
yourself outside of your comfort zone, the more that you expose
yourself to the thing that's making you anxious, the more you
will trust yourself to handle that situation in.
The more you'll trust yourself to handle any new situation or
challenge. Hello.
Hello, and welcome to. She persisted.
If you're new here, my name is Sadie.
I'm a sophomore at University of Pennsylvania, studying
psychology, I started to persisted after a
year-and-a-half of intensive treatment and I wanted to create
the resource. I wish I had when I was
struggling as a team with depression and anxiety.
See, all of the things we're doing a rapid fire Q&A today.
I have two tests in an essay this week so things are busy.
We're on a time crunch. We're going to do some rapid
fire mental, health questions. And that's the plan question 1.
How do I cope with other people's willfulness like a lack
of desire to use their skills. So the term willfulness is
something in DBT that kind of becomes a catch-all for when you
are not willing to be effective, when you are having like
personal resistance to something, so it kind of becomes
a catch-all for when you are not willing to use your When you
don't want to be effective, when you're feeling some personal
resistance to doing something, if you're like I don't want to
go there, I'm anxious. I'm not I'm not going to see
that person. I'm not going to talk to them,
that's being willful your there's that avoidance there.
It's a really amazing term in a really amazing way to flag when
something is getting in the way and when you probably should
push yourself to do a little bit of exposure therapy, what I do
when I come across someone that has skills and decides not to
use them. Which Full disclaimer is me
often? Like I think we We all have
skills that we could be using and especially with my siblings,
when I'm interact with my family.
Sometimes you just choose to be willful.
Is the most effective? No.
But it happens, we're human. But what do you do?
When someone else has the skills, they're choosing not to
do them. I feel like a really great
example of this. Sorry, younger siblings going to
put you on. Blast is my younger brother when
he's like, I don't want to do something and you're bothering
me. So I'm going to annoy you as
much as possible and they're like, taking something in your
ear, the going above and beyond to get on your nerves.
That's a perfect example of when you would have to be like this
person could choose to be more effective and yet they are
blatantly not. So what do you do in that
situation? The first I think is totally
flagging that and doing radical acceptance and being very aware
of that being like, this person is choosing to not be as
effective as they could be when it comes down to it.
This isn't in our personal interaction.
So we are using inner personal Effectiveness skills.
And the foundation of interpersonal, Effectiveness is
deciding what your objective is. Do you want to protect yourself?
Spect, do you want to get your objective met?
Do you want to improve the relationship if someone is
getting on your nerves and they are being unskillful, you will
likely either want to get your objective met or protect your
self-respect. And I feel like in most cases it
will, honestly be protecting yourself respect because if it's
not a two-way street, and if both people aren't attempting to
come to the middle, to have a compromise to both work on this
issue, my goal would be to leave.
The situation saying, I did everything I could I was a
skillful as possible. Ball is in their Court, there's
nothing more. I can do that would probably be
what I would want to do and to me, that is defined as
self-respect. So I would think of the moment
and say, my objective, maybe you're asking them to do
something, you're asking them to do a favor, they're objecting,
they're being rude about it, they're giving you attitude.
How are you going to respond when they are being willful?
You're going to do to your man. You're going to say this is the
situation, this is what I would like to happen.
This is how it's going to benefit you.
I know this is a big cast excetera, Etc.
Yeah. And then you are going to accept
that. You did everything, you could to
be effective and that if they choose not to do it, that's not
a reflection of you. And a lot of self-validation
around that that I did, what I could, I try to be effective, I
used my skills and this is not a reflection of me, it's
reflection of them. And I think the only way that
this could potentially go negatively, well, there are
multiple ways, but one big way this could potentially be - is
if you see them being ineffective and then decide to
That around and have it be a reflection of your own skills
usage. So they're being willful and you
say I could have been more skillful I could have done more.
I could have done better with yes we always can do better but
you tried your best and so the self-validation around that and
understanding that the ball is in their court and they didn't
reciprocate. That was not even rapid fire.
But that would be my answer, self validation, protect
yourself, respect to get clear on what your objective is and
really radically except at the balls in their court.
Next question, how do I communicate my needs to others?
This is tough. I struggle with this and I
notice I'm struggling with it when I expect things from other
people and I get irritated when they don't do what I want.
When I've never communicated what those needs are.
I think the best way to go about it is to really plan, really
take some time to be intentional.
Okay, what are my needs? And we can think about that from
a couple of perspectives. The first one that comes to mind
is your place skills. You have physical needs.
Do you have to eat a certain time?
Are you feeling hungry? And you got enough sleep?
Do you need to exercise every day?
So You can maintain your mental health.
Are you sick? Do you need to take time off
work and protect that need another need that comes to mind.
If you are more introverted and your social battery has run out,
that would be a need that you would need to communicate.
If you are not getting your needs met from a validation
perspective, you're not feeling heard, you're not feeling seen,
you might need to communicate that need and so I would get
very clear. You're going to have to do some
mindfulness. You're going to see how am I
feeling in this relationship? Where does it feel?
Like I am not getting enough and I'm feeling resentful towards
this other person. I think resent.
Is a very good Telltale sign that I need isn't getting met
you then you really have to take accountability and be like, this
is on me. I'm resentful to this other
person, but it's a reflection of myself.
Either you haven't communicated the need or to need, you need to
meet yourself and you just have to communicate to the other
person so you can go off and get that need met.
Like if you need space if you need time but often times you
haven't communicated that. So it's on you, it's not on
them. They shouldn't have known, they
can't know. And so you have to recognize
that and I would do A dear man, which is what you do when you
have an objective and your objective is to communicate that
need. And when you're doing a dear and
you want the other person to be able to respond by saying yes or
no. So maybe your question is like,
does that make sense? Is it okay?
If I take some time to myself, is it okay?
If I go on walk, would you be open to trying to be more
intentional about listening to me?
Something like that. So the first thing you do is
describe the situation. What are the facts, where the
objective things going on? We're going to express the
emotion. I'm feeling sad.
I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm not feeling heard.
That's not really great though because you really want to stick
to the emotion words, but you can also say those kind of like
experiences that can't be objectively measured.
Assert, we're going to ask our question, can I go to walk and I
have space? Would you be more open to trying
to be more receptive to what I'm saying?
Whatever it is then you're going to do a little bit of
reinforcement. So, what is in it for them?
Like are you going to be able to be more present in the
relationship? Are you open to meeting their
needs? Will you be able to support them
or whatever? They're going through?
Let them know what's in it for them.
Then you're going to be mindful. And to appear confident and then
if needed you're going to negotiate and come to a
compromise, that's a dear man. That's what I would do to
advocate for your needs and yeah.
Next one is, how can you cope with other people needing space
from you? And be cool about that?
This is really tough and I would say that something.
I internal issei in the back of my head that whatever I'm
getting into like an argument, The Sibling, or there's a
conflict going on or I want to say something, is that in the
back of your head, you should have the reminder that it's
always going to be more effective.
It's going to be a more successful.
Cecil conversation if you both take time away from the
situation and then go back to it and I on many occasions given
the urge to get in the last word or say, what I want to to be
sad, but when you're doing that, you're acting from an emotional
perspective, you're not being rational, you're not being
effective and yes, sometimes it does feel good to give in to
those emotional needs and like, say that judgmental comment or
whatever it is. But you just have to kind of
weigh the pros and cons. Like, do I really want to be
effective to? I really have an outcome here.
That's important to me. And if yes, how am I going to
That mat and it's probably like returning to the conversation
later. So with that in the back of your
mind knowing that even though you want to talk about it now at
the end of the day for everyone, it's going to be more effective
if you revisit it knowing that that's the most effective path
forward. I would Implement a bit of the
stop scale. So you are going to freeze,
you're going to leave the situation.
You're not going to put any thought into it.
Like you're physically and mentally going to freeze.
And then you're going to get yourself to go through that.
Pros and cons list of staying talking about this or revisiting
it later, but you need to kind of break up that emotional
cycle. You need to break up those
thoughts, going through your head, you need to break up the
back and forth. And to do that, you really need
to implement this top skills, you're freezing, mentally and
physically. You're observing the situation,
and then you're doing your pros, and cons, and deciding how it's
best to proceed. And then, once you hopefully
come to the decision that you're going to revisit it later, I
would do some distraction, you really initially need to get out
of that emotion mind, headspace, and then it will be really easy.
See. Okay, like we can talk about
this tomorrow in the world is not going to fall apart.
We can talk about this the day after and things will continue
in this will not impact my daily functioning.
So you really just need to get out of that first, like 15 to 20
minutes or you're still angry. You're still annoyed, you're
still upset, you're still feeling insecure, whatever it
is. So watch a TV show, talk to
another friend, take a shower exercise, do anything to
distract yourself, and that first 15 to 20 minutes.
And then your thoughts will start to shift to what you know
is Most aligned and being effective, and being willing to
use your skills. Another question that I got is
how can I build trust with myself and learn to trust
myself. And this is a really interesting
question, and when I got this, I was like I don't wanna answer
this because I have an interesting perspective and hot
take if you will about self-trust.
I really am not a fan of those Tik toks and Instagram reals,
where they're all saying you need to make promises with
yourself. Stop breaking promises to
yourself. No wonder your self-esteem is
struggling or constantly breaking promises and I'm sure
you've seen them. Listen to last week's episode
with Bert Frank, we talked about this and why this is not the
case. We talk about what to do when
you're feeling stuck. And I think one thing that
people do when they're feeling stock because they jump into
making a promise and then they break it, she talks about using
systems rather than setting that like promised amazing
conversation. Go listen but the reason I think
I feel some resistance towards the idea of keeping promises
with yourself is the number of thoughts.
I have In a day is insane. I don't know if this is just
from an anxiety perspective or fall brains work this way but
the number of commitments or ideas or things I would like to
do is obscene. There's no way that any human
person could keep that level of commitments and promises and
intentions to themselves. And so, the idea that every
single time you promised something to yourself, or you
make a commitment, or you have an intention.
That if you're not following through with that, you're
disobeying your own trust that you're hurting your relationship
with yourself. I don't really like that because
Is it doesn't feel like it fully encapsulated the relationship of
how we pursue goals and what makes us feel good in our
self-esteem and how we speak to ourselves.
I don't think it's that simple. So rather than thinking of
self-trust from a perspective of what commitments am I keeping
what promises am I making to myself?
Because it's not that simple. We are interacting with
ourselves 24/7. It's not like we're having one
conversation and saying I promise.
I'll go to the gym two times this week.
Let's check in next week like With yourself all the time.
So we can't just do that. So, rather than focusing it
from, like, a promise. And something, I'm saying to
myself perspective, I find self-trust from other places.
And when I do think about, like, do I trust myself, I do, I feel
really confident in my ability to handle situations and in my
ability to think through things, I trust myself to navigate
challenges to pursue new projects, Etc.
Like to me, I do trust myself. I feel good being with myself, I
feel, I feel happy. I feel safe being with myself
and that's what feels like self-trust and there are a
couple things that I think have led to that one.
Is your ability to use your skills.
It's a really daunting and overwhelming, and paralyzing
experience to know that you are experiencing emotions, and
thoughts, and urges. That you cannot control.
You don't feel like you have the skill set to be able to cope
with what your brain is doing to you.
That's the most intense and terrifying thing.
It's the definition. Mission of not trusting yourself
to handle the situation and not having trust in your ability to
navigate something. And what led to me, having
self-trust in the early days of residential and in the early
days of treatment, when I was susur, Lee, depressed, and
anxious. And all of those things was
having skills that worked and knowing that if I implemented
the skill, it would lower, the intensity of my emotions.
My thoughts would fade away. I would no longer be.
So physically distressed the moment would pass and that I was
having an impact. On that emotional experience.
It wasn't just like life was running its course and I didn't
know when this emotion was going to let up.
I knew that the skills I was using, was impacting the
emotion. So when it comes to that, if
you're at the early stages, you have knows trust in your ability
to cope. I would lean on distress
tolerance because we know that distress tolerance is our highly
effective and that's why we lean on those specific skills to
tolerate distress because it's when our emotions are at their
highest intensity possible. So it's things like ice Dives,
it seems like the tip scale exercise.
Distraction asking for help, those are distress tolerance.
In skills. And we know that, if we use
them, they will work you distract yourself from a
thought. If you do a nice dive, your
anxiety will go down. And so, when you start to
practice those skills, and when you build up a track record of
them working, you have trust, you can get through those
situations. Then once you've implemented
those skills that have like 100 percent Effectiveness, you then
move to the skills that require a little bit more intention and
execution. Things like, radical acceptance,
things like self, validation your please skills.
Things that require more effort on your part and more follow
through. And again it's not a promise.
But you have a track record of saying, I have these things in
my toolbox and if I choose to use them, they will work and I
have trust in my ability to execute the use of this skill.
Intermission in this question, I'm so bad at rapid-fire.
I just have really long answers to everything.
So that was one of the biggest things for me was building up,
trust in my ability to use my skills and with time trusting
that, no matter what my emotions my brain.
My urges throughout me, I could handle them and weather, the
storm that gave me a lot of trust the other piece of trust,
I would say, comes from a little bit of exposure therapy and
putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, I
think that not trusting yourself can coincide with avoidance.
If you are avoiding situations, if you are avoiding interactions
for in voiding public speaking, literally, whatever it is
something that you are avoiding. You'll kind of have that thought
of I can't do this. Like I don't trust myself to do
this. I can't handle it.
There's that lack of trust that you can do.
The more that you push yourself outside of your comfort zone,
the more that you expose yourself to the thing that's
making you anxious, the more you will trust yourself to handle
that situation in. The more you'll trust yourself
to handle any new situation or challenge.
So again, we're kind of reframing.
This idea of like I'm promising myself that I'll overcome my
fear of public speaking and I promised myself that will
overcome social anxiety and I promise I don't be anxious and
social situations. That's a really hard thing to
follow through with and I really don't like that way of thinking
about it. Instead it's more.
What can I do to stack the evidence in my favor and show
myself that if I use the skills I know I have I can get myself
out of this and like I said earlier, you're not going to
choose to use the skills 100% of the time where were willing and
we're willful, but if you have the knowledge that I have the
skills in my toolbox and if I use them, they will work.
There's a lot of self-trust, they're both in the ability to
cope with things internally and externally.
This question is, how can I gain attention from others in a
healthy way? This is interesting and I think
I will more answer the flip side of it, which is, like, why do we
look for attention in unhealthy ways?
And I think a lot of that for me in my experience, whether it was
with urges, the way I was expressing my emotions.
The way I was getting validation things, like self harm, the way
I was going about my relationship with my parents and
therapy and all of these things that was not effective when I
was really struggling, but it wasn't so much for attention.
And for look at me and I want attention on me.
Attention was a vessel through which validation was achieved.
And all I wanted was for someone to say, I see you're in pain.
I hear that you're not. Okay.
And I can't even imagine what you're going through, because
for me, 24/7 was struggling with my mental health and
overwhelming, urges and scary thoughts, and no energy, and
feeling isolated and all of these really overwhelming
experiences. So all that I wanted was for
someone else to acknowledge that and to validate me we need
validation, we want validation. It's a fiery core Instinct and
need So when we're looking for attention, especially with
regards to mental health, I think a lot of that, it
coincides with the need for validation and so if we can
identify that, I don't necessarily just want someone to
like look at me or pay attention.
I want someone to say, they hear what I'm going through and they
see I'm not okay, and they want to support me.
So how can I get that need Matt, and it might not be her
attention. It might be through really
carefully communicating that you're not, okay?
And this is what you're going through and while the other
person won't be able to solve it for you.
You just would love if maybe they could be in your corner and
maybe they could be in your support system.
And you could know that you can count on them.
Maybe it is going to therapy and having a safe space to talk
about all of these things and get really intense validation
and get the acknowledgement that things aren't okay and feel like
you are getting support and working through them.
So with regards to attention in an unhealthy way, I think we
need to identify what is the root cause and what is it?
Need there is it validation is it that you're not feeling like
you're getting your needs met from an interpersonal
perspective? You want more interaction?
You want more connection? It's important to I think
deconstruct, the idea that what you're really looking for is
attention and understand what the underlying need is and then
understand that like if you're going from point A to point C
maybe attention is point B, but that's not actually what the
goal is and I think that can take away kind of some of the
negative connotation around wanting Attention or needing
attention. But then you can really now that
you know what your actual goal is which is validation or more
time with friends and family members, more time, when you're
just talking about what you're going through.
Now that you know what your goal is?
You can actually aim to solve that.
So if you're like, I assumed to be getting attention all the
time to talk about what I'm going through and you realize,
well, I just really feel like I'm not able to voice what I'm
experiencing and I feel like when I'm talking things out, I'm
able to get more clarity on what's going on inside my head.
So you make a therapy appointment and then you are
able Able to again create that safe space for yourself to talk
about what you're going through. We're able to more effectively
Target the issue. Last question is, what are some
common things to talk about in therapy?
Struggling to figure out what to bring up in sessions.
This is a really great question. I don't know if I've talked
about this on the podcast yet, but I'm not actually in regular
therapy anymore as of this year, like the start of this school
year, I am no longer doing weekly therapy, which is insane
because at the beginning of my sophomore year of high school, I
was in a therapeutic boarding school and now my sophomore year
of college I'm not in therapy, but it's like almost four years
exactly, from, when I was at my lowest point, mental health,
wise and therapy, was such an amazing resource to have that
transition to deal with all the mental health challenges of
being at home and adopting skills.
But when I go home, we'll do a therapy session or so with my
therapist at home but I'm no longer doing consistently like
weekly sessions. But my Topics in therapy have
ranged from anything and Nothing you can ever imagine.
Like I bring in Tech talks to my therapist.
Like, did you see this segment on John Oliver?
I would say there are some reoccurring themes and I think
one is definitely family interactions and how can I be
more effective? How do I get my needs met here?
How do I advocate for this thing?
Like let's problem solve this. Let's get a really clear plan in
place of how I can have this conversation.
Or what are your thoughts on how this went down?
I would say another one is larger goals, I have for myself,
so I'm like I want to try and be more social or I want to get my
Bleep moron on track or I feel like I could be more effective
with my study schedule and then we're like how do we problem
solve those things? What plan can be put in place,
what are my immediate goals? I'm really big no matter what it
is that I'm bringing up leaving the session with one act and
step. I'm going to take and my goal
for that week and what I'm going to do and what I'm going to
implement for a long time, my therapy sessions looked like
going in. We would talk about, like, some
crisis or problem behavior, that occurred that weeks we'd be
like, all right, let's chain analysis.
That's What happened? What was this?
Huge suicidal ideation, or why did you call for skills coaching
or like what happened with the self Harmons today and our, this
unhealthy interaction and we would kind of work backwards and
see what happened and then the second half would be like me
trying to do family therapy in tears and mess arguing a whole
thing. So now, it's more kind of a
balance of like helped me skills wise.
And then these are my longer-term goals or things that
I'm thinking about, or things that I'd like to work through
what I think, say, like things. I'm thinking about there's
definitely certain themes of things that I might will go back
to so like different places where my mind is going and I'm
feeling more emotions. Tied to it arm ruminating more
and kind of talking about like okay is this effective?
It's not effective. It's kind of pulse this out.
Let's walk through this, what's going on here, but it's
important to kind of like differentiate like initially
therapy, was a lot of Crisis problem solving and what
happened this week? Let's recap that not really even
any time to go into these larger issues or problems solve for the
future. And now it's a lot more of that
which is like, these are my goals.
How can I work towards them? How can I be more effective?
But I feel like hearing a lot to him to my therapy sessions.
It's always good Tech talk. There's always lots of random
references. There's always a funny story and
that would kind of be some topics that I bring up pretty
frequently. But I would say like the very
requiring ones. I'm always talking about my
sleep schedule. I'm always talking about habits
things that I'm trying to increase.
Decrease, maybe I'm trying to get more movement and I'm trying
to watch less TV, things like that.
Yeah, behavior is increasing and decreasing is a big one.
Family relationships General goals, whether it's like, social
or school, or all of those kinds of things than places that my
thoughts are kind of like sticking a little bit more.
So I hope that was helpful. Kind of just died.
A catch-all, free-for-all little random ramble of an episode.
I hope you guys liked it. I'm so sorry.
If this was all over the place. Let me know what other Soul
episodes. You guys would want to listen
to. We're doing them every other
week and I have some fun ideas in the works.
But I always love hearing what you guys want me to talk about
in and give insight. Also submit questions, there's a
link on my website or DM me all the things.
I hope you have a great rest of your week and I'll see you next
Thursday. Thank you so much for listening
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thanks for supporting, keep persisting and I'll see you next
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