Things You Learn in Therapy
Things You Learn in Therapy
Ep117: Navigating Trauma and Emotions: Insights and Tools for Emotional Resilience with Megan MacCutcheon
Embark on a transformative journey through the intricacies of trauma and emotions with me, Dr. Beth Trammell, and the insightful maternal mental health therapist Megan MacCutcheon. Discover how the seemingly insignificant Lego blocks of everyday experiences can stack up to shape your mental landscape, affecting anxiety, depression, and self-esteem. Megan introduces us to EMDR therapy, a powerful tool to process these cumulative experiences, offering a fresh perspective on emotional resilience.
In a society that often demands we sideline our emotions, we unpack the complexity of experiencing joy alongside anger or disappointment, particularly in poignant moments like childbirth. Drawing inspiration from the animated film "Inside Out," we explore how recognizing and processing each emotion individually can lead to better emotional clarity. We also discuss the concept of internal family systems, which helps in addressing various emotional facets separately, and the vital importance of listening to our body's signals as indicators of our emotional state.
Therapy is a journey of curiosity and non-judgment, and with the Empowered Motherhood course, Megan aims to provide mothers with the tools to regulate their nervous systems and manage emotions effectively. The episode ventures into confronting one's inner critic and utilizing mindfulness techniques while reflecting on the challenges and triumphs of engaging with a broader audience through social media. Join us in this insightful exploration of emotional health, armed with understanding and empathy—let's navigate this path together.
This podcast is meant to be a resource for the general public, as well as fellow therapists/psychologists. It is NOT meant to replace the meaningful work of individual or family therapy. Please seek professional help in your area if you are struggling. #breakthestigma #makewordsmatter #thingsyoulearnintherapy #thingsyoulearnintherapypodcast
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health concerns, please contact 988 or seek a treatment provider in your area.
To learn more about Megan, her resources, and courses or to contact her, visit: https://www.meganmaccutcheon.com/
Feel free to share your thoughts at www.makewordsmatterforgood.com or email me at Beth@makewordsmatterforgood.com
If you are a therapist or psychologist and want to be a guest on the show, please complete this form to apply: https://forms.gle/ooy8QirpgL2JSLhP6
www.bethtrammell.com
Hello listener, welcome back.
Speaker 1:I'm your host, dr Beth Tramau, and this is Things you Learn in Therapy. I am a psychologist and a professor of psychology at Indiana University East, where I am also the master's in mental health counseling program director, and I love to make words matter for good. I love to talk with people about how they can do that in their own homes and their relationships, and I love to talk about real life things and struggle about how that's hard sometimes, and so I am thrilled to get to be able to do this work, so thrilled to get to talk with my guest today. She is back to come onto the show again, and I'm just so grateful for all the time that I get to spend with amazing guests like Megan, who's coming back, and we are going to talk about something that I know happens to all of us but that I don't think we talk about enough, and so I'm thrilled to have this real conversation with my guest, megan McCutcheon. And so, megan, thanks for coming back. Could you introduce yourself and tell us one fun thing about you?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, thank you so much for having me back on. I always love chatting with you. I know we could always talk for hours and hours. Yeah, so introduction I am Megan McCutcheon. I'm a maternal mental health therapist. I specialize in working with women during pregnancy, postpartum and beyond, and I have a therapy practice in Northern Virginia. That's my niche. I'm already starting to think of some of the things we're going to talk about and realize a lot of my examples aren't just that population, but that's sort of my specialty. I also love helping people process trauma and use EMDR and yeah, I'll leave it at that for now and we can jump right in. There's going to be so many. One fun thing about me Okay, I'll do that as my fun thing. I do. I love using EMDR. I use that a lot to process trauma. I think we all have trauma in some aspects of our life, and so that's been a really important part of my work and you have actually a fun way.
Speaker 1:I mean, I don't know if it's exactly fun, but you have a really kind of interesting visual way that you talk about trauma. Do you want to start with that?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, we'll dive right in. So people can't see me, I'm sure, but I have. I'm holding in my hand these little Lego models and one of them is actually a Duplo. So those are the bigger size Legos for like toddlers. And then the other one is a bunch of tiny little Legos that are all stacked up together and if you see them side by side, the big Duplo in comparison to the stack of Legos are roughly the same size.
Speaker 2:And the way that I use this to talk about trauma with clients is imagine the Duplo is like the big trauma, like something that we would all obviously label as trauma losing your house in a natural disaster, rape, getting violently attacked, things like that. But then the other model here, the tinier Legos that are all stacked up. Imagine that those are things that most of us may not even label as trauma. But these little micro distressing experiences that happen in our lives and there are things like when you're a child, a parent not showing up to your soccer game and you feeling sad about that, um, maybe being called a name, things like that, getting different labels. So all of these like tiny little micro things.
Speaker 2:What can happen over time is that we don't necessarily look at them, at trauma as trauma, but when they all build up, they sort of equal in our bodies, in our emotional, mental experiences. We are traumatized, and so I think I love bringing that to light for people, because a lot of times I'm working with people and they're experiencing anxiety or depression or having self-esteem issues and they can't really figure out why they feel guilty for it, because they're like, well, nothing really that bad happened to me, or they're comparing themselves to people who do have the big trauma. So I like to give people this invitation to look at okay, well, can you admit that there's probably a lot of like teeny little things that happened in your life that may have led you to where you are now?
Speaker 1:I mean, I love anything that's visual because I think that there are a lot of people that can see that, because a lot of our internal experiences you can't see, right, I mean all of our internal experiences you can't see, not a lot of them, all of them. But I love this visual and this reminder that, hey, yeah, so you might, necessarily you might not see this as a big traumatic thing, but over time, the culmination of all of these small things or small feelings or small events then build up to something that our body experiences in a really big way.
Speaker 2:And you just said something really interesting that made me think it's our interpretation of these experiences. It's something about, like we can't see what happens internally, so like let's use that example of a parent not showing up to a kid's soccer game and you know, it's how we interpret it. If the kid interprets that as oh, my parent doesn't love me, rather than being able to say they would have loved to have been here, but an emergency came up at work and that's why they weren't here. When we start making those interpretations and make it mean something about us, like we're not good enough, we're not lovable, that's when those experiences really start to impact us. Nobody can see that on the outside.
Speaker 1:Oh, and I love that you said this and it also made me think of two things. One that I hear from people who are like, well, it's just one soccer game, it's not that big of a deal, and that might be true. For a lot of kids that might be true Parents missing soccer games it may not be a big deal and a lot of people who experience trauma don't go on to have PTSD. They may be not having a whole lot of negative side effects to that. But there are some folks that something small like that is either the start of or kind of the last straw of their experience. That leads to this. I must be like an identity-based kind of side effect, negative side effect.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I think that's so true. And when we're unpacking these experiences, if we're just looking at one tiny thing, if we're just looking at one of these little Lego blocks, it's so easy to dismiss it and be like, oh, that wasn't a big deal. But it's that combination, like you said, that one last straw.
Speaker 1:That then becomes the bigger picture.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's tough because people don't walk into therapy knowing oh hey, I got to talk about this time 30 years ago when X, y and Z happened. It sometimes takes a lot of work to actually get there and start putting all these pieces together.
Speaker 1:I'm so glad you said that because I think you know my goal in kind of doing this podcast and I think the people that I talk to come on. I think it's their goal too is to like demystify the process of therapy a little bit, and so I love that you said that like people think, coming into therapy, oh I need to talk about a certain thing, or I have to operate a certain way, or I have to do a certain thing. Sometimes the real power of therapy and the art of a good therapist is being able to help the client pull all the pieces together. And so I often kind of remind clients like it's your job just to be open to the process and to like share some of the pieces and even some of your perception of those pieces, and then we can start to pull kind of all the pieces together to make this kind of picture of what's going on or what's happening a little bit clearer. For you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's also really good advice for anybody getting into therapy is to be open. Be open, because you might not think that that one little thing that we start talking about has a big impact, but just being open to huh. Maybe this is a piece of the puzzle of why I am experiencing whatever I am experiencing at this stage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and again, like you just said, like it's at this stage, at this moment in time, right and therapy may be about digging into your 20-year-old past, or it may be about you know what happened last week or this morning. Right Could be any number of those things. So Just being open to whatever comes, that's right, whatever path we have to those things so open to whatever comes, that's right.
Speaker 2:Whatever we have to go down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, okay, I love that.
Speaker 1:So you know, one of the things that we had kind of talked about before we started recording and as we were pondering what we might chat about today, is this idea, you know, especially in the therapy room, but also part of the things that we try to help clients understand is this issue of oh everything, emotion.
Speaker 1:Right, I was going to start saying like that you can experience emotion, more than one emotion at one time, which I think is a part of what we're trying to teach people, and that's something that might be hard to learn just on its own, but really it's. It may be even more foundational than just that I had shared before we started recording that I do workshops and training and I work with a lot of different people in kind of group settings, and one of the things I do a lot is like a one-word check-in right when I ask how they're feeling right now. I usually give them a feelings list or a feelings wheel so they can have kind of a list of options to talk about how they feel, and I find that that helps a little bit. But sometimes people, and maybe even myself, if I think about particular scenarios where I'm like, how am I actually feeling?
Speaker 1:Like how am I actually feeling? Let's just start digging into this work of understanding our emotional selves. Where do you start, Megan? How do we start helping people understand this?
Speaker 2:Good question. I think we have to start with finding out where they're starting at, because I think there's so many people that come into our offices and have no experience with identifying emotions. You know, it's not something that they were taught. I mean, how are any of us really even taught these things? We learn about emotions by what we witness, what we model. Some of us are lucky enough to have parents that talk to us about emotions and that help give us names for emotions and help us learn how to process different emotions, but for a lot of people, that's not how they're starting off. So I think there needs to be some very basic education.
Speaker 2:You mentioned before we were recording the feelings wheel, which people can Google and find that, but the feelings wheel is just, you know, the circle that tells all these different emotions that can happen and, um, I think, like when we're kids, we're sometimes we're we're taught off, we're taught emotions like, okay, happy or sad, sad or mad, um, and so we learn, just like, these very basic emotions and we kind of learn that they're opposites, um, and and that I think that sends the impression that we can only feel one emotion at a time and that's just so not true when you look at the feelings wheel I don't know how many are on there, but there's tons of words in there, there's tons of different emotions, and so this idea that how many of those things are we familiar with?
Speaker 2:One of the exercises that I've done with clients before is just have a list of seven different basic emotions, like joy, sadness, fear, guilt. I can't think off the top of my head of all of them, but having people go through and identify their experience with each of those emotions when did you feel this in the last week? When have you felt it in your lifetime? How is this emotion generally handled in your family or in your current relationships? And it's really interesting, because it's so varied how people respond to and are able to engage in that activity, where some people they've got an answer for every emotion and other people are like I don't know if I've ever experienced it.
Speaker 1:I don't even know what that is.
Speaker 2:Even knowing exactly yes, so. I just put on a tangent, but no. I love this exercise.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then they talk about how, like, what are their experiences with these? You know with frankly these words yes, yes, so where do we go with? It Right that then they are associating with some sort of experience, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so finding out like what are people's experiences with emotions and people, being open to exploring that and then being able to, just you know, learn more and recognize that we're all starting out at different places with our like emotional capacity and our ability to communicate them and talk about them?
Speaker 1:You know the interesting thing.
Speaker 1:So if folks were to search up the feelings wheel, they'll see that there are kind of the basic emotions that Megan you were just talking about in the center, and then the words get more complex or more sophisticated as you expand out of the circle.
Speaker 1:And I think it to what you're saying, because we don't get a lot of experience even at the basic emotions, right, I think we talk about anger, I think, as kind of a culture we are kind of trained to be like here's anger or here's happiness, right? I love that you were talking about this sort of dichotomy of like you're either this or you're that and you can't be both and you can't be more than one, and they live on opposite sides of the spectrum, which really, I think, while it simplifies things for maybe our young kids, it also is doing a real disservice to the actual lived experience of emotion. I mean, it makes it seem like it's such a simplistic process it's either yes or no, on or off, Right, and our emotions are so much more than that. They're a range and they're experienced differently in different parts of our body and for different people, and it's so much more complex than just this or that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and exactly. And as we, you know, get older and process birth trauma, and that's such a great example of when you can have multiple emotions, because someone who comes in who's had a traumatic birth, they're afraid to feel upset, they're afraid to feel angry, they're afraid to feel defeated, because they're like, well, I'm supposed to be happy that I have this like perfectly healthy, you know, newborn baby, and you can be both of those things. You can be over the moon, you could be joyous, but you can also be disappointed in how things went, even just finding out you're pregnant. You know excitement and also fear. It's another example of when you can have these two emotions that were sometimes taught are opposites, but being opposite doesn't mean they can't be held in the same moment.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is uncomfortable for so many people, right? I mean, we're already like. I don't understand how a person can do that. You know like I'm picturing the listener even now to be like okay. So like, on a logical standpoint. It's hard for me to get my head around that. But okay, I trust you as an expert that that might be true, but I don't. What am I supposed to do with that? I think that that's at the heart of a lot of the struggle, for emotional, you know, sophistication in a lot of ways is that so often we're like okay, so then, what, like? What do I do then, instead of just allowing the space to just be what it is? We're ready to just be like okay, and now what? So what am I supposed to do if I feel guilt and sadness and happiness all at once, like? What am I supposed to do with that?
Speaker 2:I'm laughing as you're saying that because, um, inside out 2 just out. I don't know if you saw it, but it's a great representation of there are all these different distinctive parts, and so we need to acknowledge and address each individual part. And if your listeners are familiar with internal family systems or parts work I'm not an expert by any means in that therapy model, but I love this concept of like parts work we can deal with different parts. There's a part of you that's angry, let's talk about it, let's process it, let's deal with that. And then let's also give space to and address and deal with the part of you that's sad and the part of you that's happy. So we can take each of these individual emotions, just like Inside Out has characters for and and process through each one.
Speaker 1:I well, I also really love Inside Out too. I loved Inside Out one. I think the creators just really do a really good job of depicting like the real, like kind of reality of what emotions are in kind of a fun way. That's, I think, pretty educational, but yeah. So I love like being able to just sort of hold space right, like be curious about what these emotions are and try not to just sort of wish them away or not just, you know, shove them away. The one part that I especially loved is the part where they like were stuffed into a bottle. Like all the emotions were stuffed into a bottle. I thought it was so clever and so real that they were like no, we're just going to shove them all in there.
Speaker 1:We're not going to think about them, we're going to put them into the dark secret, you know, cave or whatever. Let's go back to something that actually happened with me today in a workshop that I was leading and as I was going around and I had a participant say I just don't know, I don't know how I feel. So, as you think about some of the work that you've done, how can you even start at that level with folks who are kind of vulnerably admitting like I don't know how to do this, I don't even know how to like recognize how I'm feeling, much less find a word for?
Speaker 2:it. Yeah, yeah, that's when I love to tap into the somatic part and go to the body. You know, the body keeps the score the idea that our emotions, our feelings, our experiences, everything's stored in and lives in our body. And sometimes people don't have the language to identify it, but sometimes they can notice where they feel it in their body, so they're like I don't know how I feel. Well, what are you experiencing sitting here? Do you notice the tightness in your chest? Do you notice fidgeting with your hands? Do you notice this feeling of I want to get up and run out of the room because this is so uncomfortable and I don't want to try and unpack what I feel? So I think that can be another sort of entry point for people who maybe have less language around emotion or aren't as familiar with identifying the motion. Notice what's going on physically, because our emotions do come out physically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that, and I think the other thing that you're modeling by doing that is for the person who maybe doesn't have quite as much practice in communicating about their emotions is that you're suggesting that you're going to feel something in your body, right Like your body is going to experience something, and so I think it's a weird way to describe this phenomenon, because it's like you actually feel a feeling, and sometimes I think people think feelings people think feelings, but it's hard for them to feel feelings, and so there's two layers to it.
Speaker 2:There's like a feeling that we can't even describe in the feeling that's in the body. A feeling, yes, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then maybe even there is this you know, I think about the like, those real intellectual folks who, they think a lot of feelings. So it's like, well, I think I'm feeling anxious, okay, not quite sure, right, right, exactly. And then it's like, well, I think this is this, or I think they do a lot of thinking, feeling, and so it can be a lot of.
Speaker 2:I think I'm supposed to feel this way. Yes, like well I I'm supposed to feel this way.
Speaker 1:Yes, like well, I'm supposed to feel sad or I'm supposed to feel excited. I mean, I find I'm sure you do too in the work you do. It's like I'm supposed to be happy or I'm supposed to feel positive things, but in fact, I don't feel positive in the same way that I have felt positive in the past. Yes, and so that really messes with us. Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:I think anytime we put like a should or a have to, or supposed to, feeling you know a sign that this is what it's supposed to be.
Speaker 2:it gets really tricky and it sort of clouds it. It doesn't allow us to do the like acknowledging part to it. We get wrapped up in the sort of rabbit hole of it doesn't allow us to do the to the like acknowledging part to it. We get wrapped up in the sort of rabbit hole of what should I be feeling? Grief is one that's coming up for me. It's sort of sort of you were just talking about positivity and I went to the opposite of like sort of grief. But I think you know, in grief work there's a lot of like I should be feeling sad, I should feel you know X, y and Z, but it's, it's such a complicated like grief in and of itself. I always like, wonder, like is grief an emotion? It's more of a process of lots of different emotions that we bounce all around through, and that's one where I think people get trapped up in like shouldn't I feel this way?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I mean, grief is so complicated, I mean, and our ideas of what grief is supposed to be are that widely varied? Yes, I think we all have this idea of like well, this is what grief looks like. It looks like you're crying and you're sad and you miss the person who died. It's like that might be what grief is for you, but it might also feel like worthlessness and guilt because you lost a job.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's like you bring up a really good point there.
Speaker 2:I was thinking, as you were saying, like the person you know, associating grief with a person who died. So many people think like grief has to look or an emotion has to be tied to a certain event, but, like you just said, like grief is about so many other things, it could be an emotion tied to you know, I'm sad because, you know, I lost a job or I moved, or for me, working with moms, I am never going to have like the life I had before where I could just like pick up and go on a whim. And I think that's another important thing in our work with clients is to help people understand that emotions can be tied to all kinds of different things and there's not like a specific prescription for this is the emotion that you feel with this event, this is the emotion you feel with this experience. It can be so different and so varied and again, just like that whole soup of all the different emotions I love you calling it a soup Wrapped in a bottle, right, exactly.
Speaker 1:It's so funny that you call it a soup, but it's all within us and comes out at these different moments and I think about. Not only is it like happiness for me looks different than happiness for you, but also happiness now that I'm a mother of four may be different than happiness as I experienced it as a single woman, perhaps.
Speaker 2:Yeah, happiness is tricky too. As you're saying this, I'm thinking of conversations I've had with several different clients I feel like happiness is such a hard thing to define, and when people are experiencing depression or aren't feeling the way they'd like to feel in their life, it's this question of like, how do I become happy? Does happiness exist? Is it possible for people to never feel happy? And I don't know if the answer to that really. I just feel like emotions are so complicated, even the emotions that we might not think of as the complicated ones.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean just today I was having the same conversation with the group that I was doing this workshop with that. I teach a whole course on the science of happiness at the university.
Speaker 2:Oh okay, oh good, yeah, Teach me. Oh well, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean I tell the students at the beginning of the course that this course is not meant to make you happier. It's supposed to teach you the science of happiness. But maybe in trying some of the things that science tells us, you might feel happier. But the goal is not that. But one of the things I talk about in one of the lectures is how we perceive happiness as kind of a measure of success. But one small way that we tend to evaluate our level of happiness is on whether or not we have a good day or a bad day.
Speaker 1:And I said today and I kind of say this in a lecture when I talk about it that I think it's kind of dangerous for us to use such like dichotomous, concrete labels on like did I have a good day or a bad day? Or the same thing, for example, like for a child who goes to school, and then we ask the teacher well, was it a good day or a bad day? Or the same thing, for example, like for a child who goes to school, and then we ask the teacher well, was it a good day or a bad day? I just think our perception of what a good day is very skewed, based on so many things. I don't know how many things have to go right quote right in quotation marks before I call it a good day, or how many bad things could maybe happen in a day before I would still call it a good day. I mean, you know, as I'm saying this out loud.
Speaker 2:it's like it's such a spectrum and it's such a it's going to be a different measure for everybody. This is like kind of like mind blowing, like I'm going to all these different places I'm thinking about you know you're really big on make words matter and I so agree. There's so much weight to different words. But also sometimes are the words in the labels a little bit damaging because, like you're just saying, we don't know how to define good versus bad day.
Speaker 1:And then if we are sort of like hanging our happiness on whether we're having good days or bad days, then we're probably never going to be happy. And you know, I think about a client that I had. This person was one of my very first clients and it was a 16 year old. She taught me so much as a young clinician that I mean she was certainly smarter than me. I don't know she was, I was probably six or seven years older than her, but, man, she was way smarter than me. And I remember her looking. I would ask her like, well, what makes you happy?
Speaker 1:A common question that a baby therapist might think is a good question, or maybe veteran therapists still ask this question. And she looked at me and she said happiness isn't even real. She's like it's just something that's made up. No one can ever actually be happy. I think in that moment I was thinking well, that might be depression talking. But I also remember. Obviously now this is 20 years later, I still remember this moment, thinking, well, there may be some truth to how does a person ever achieve? When does a person really feel happy? How do we know what that is?
Speaker 2:I'm thinking about her idea that nobody can ever be happy, and I'm curious was that a belief that served her well or not? Because I'm thinking about a particular client that I've worked with, where the idea of happiness is in comparison to everyone else. Everyone else is happy because they have X, Y or Z. So what about the belief that people can be happy and everyone else isn't? I'm just not.
Speaker 1:It's complicated. Oh, it's so interesting. And I think later in my work with her we know we had kind of talked about this, this idea of like state versus trait, kind of happiness. You know where it was like she would be able to sort of say, like I think I have happy moments. You know where I'm like, oh, yay, you know I'm having ice cream and I feel happy. Cream and I feel happy, but as a long-term emotion or as a long-term kind of state of being, she was like that's not really a thing, it's more just like it's an emotion you feel for 38 seconds and then it goes back to whatever regular is yes, but it's not just like a standard across your entire life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's interesting, right? So happiness is something that we've spent a little bit of time here talking about, as I'm thinking about that client and I did not have this conversation, but it brings up in me this thing that if I would have asked about sadness, would it have still been? I feel sad for a moment and then I come back to you know, quote regular, whatever that means. Yeah, or would sadness stick around a while? Yeah, or anger or whatever.
Speaker 2:fill in the blank, you know, I mean yeah and this is what therapy looks like everybody it's just exploring and trying to figure it out. I think sometimes people come into therapy thinking like we have all the answers and we're going to be like, okay, I am here, I'm going to teach you how to feel happier, I'm going to teach you you know how to not feel this way or to process this way, and we're going to help you. But like, at the end of the day, we're just as curious about all this as the client is and trying to figure it out as we go.
Speaker 1:I freaking love that. You said that. I just freaking love that so much because it's so true. We do have expertise in understanding different modalities of treatment right, and we can try to have leading questions and we can maybe conceptualize things on our side of the couch, but honestly, it really is just a process of exploring with a curious non-judgmental mindset that says let's talk about the things that have happened to you and how it has shaped who you are. That's good. Maybe that's where we should pause. It feels almost like a mic drop moment. You know you were like and this is therapy people, so good, okay, so okay. So you do a lot of work. You have a great website. You have some great social media stuff. Tell people how they can find you follow. You know more about the work you do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my main website is just my name, MeganMcHutchincom. You can find everything on there my therapy practice, some of the other things that I do. I have a course. I'll talk about that a minute here too, because I'm thinking, you know, there's it sort of feels like there's like two pieces to the process of therapy, as we're talking about it, Like one is like the deep dive and the exploring and like the unpacking all your stuff and then what do you do with it.
Speaker 2:And one thing that I am big on is I like to help clients learn tools, like tools to actually deal with like let's go here for a second Like, when you're experiencing a particular emotion, it can dysregulate your nervous system, and so a lot of the work that I do and in the course that I have online is called Empowered Motherhood course that I have online is called Empowered Motherhood is really geared towards like helping you to regulate your nervous system and to learn tools to manage the emotions. So I just kind of like rambled. But yeah, I'm having so many like these profound aha moments just talking with you here about this idea that, yes, we have to like unpack and talk about and then how do we actually have tools to cope with those emotions as we experience them, and that's something that I love teaching. Okay.
Speaker 1:So this course that you have on your website tell us a little bit more like what could a person expect to get from that course?
Speaker 2:So it's mostly geared towards mothers.
Speaker 2:I actually anyone that's listening that isn't a mom and wants this stuff, email me Cause I have like an older version that's more general mom and wants this stuff, email me because I have like an older version that's more general.
Speaker 2:But what it is is it's teaching a lot of different tools and ideas of how do we embrace different strategies to cope with the different things we're experiencing, the different emotions. So just to give some examples, like I know you know, again the make words matter thing, one of the things I talk a lot about is this idea of how do we start managing our internal critic and how do we start learning to pay attention to the words that we are saying consciously or subconsciously to ourselves and shifting them in a way that can help us lean more towards happiness rather than guilt or whatever the case may be happiness rather than guilt, or, you know, whatever the case may be. And then just a lot of mindfulness tools teaching ways to grounds, ways to feel better, ways to cope when you know when the big emotions start coming up and you need to start feeling like back, okay, present in your body and not overwhelmed.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Okay, so they can find that on your website. That sounds incredible and I know that the last two episodes that when you were here, we're really focused on kind of the prenatal or perinatal like around childbirth timeframe.
Speaker 2:So I love that you're-. I can't even remember what we talked about, so I just remember like we always have so much to talk about, so I know. Yeah, so they can listen if they want to know more about that specifically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they can listen if they want to know more about that specifically. Yeah, so there's two other episodes where we're talking about those things around childbirth in particular and pregnancy and that sort of thing, but also social media.
Speaker 2:So how do people find you on social media? Yes, instagram, so on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok, which I'm trying to use more of it. I'm not as good at, but it's Maggie McC, maggie McCutcheon, pmhc. Pmhc is my perinatal mental health certification, so that's yeah, and that's what you can link to that all through my website too. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:I love what. I love that you're doing TikTok, I I tried to do TikTok for a hot minute and I it's hard to do all like all the social media.
Speaker 2:It's like a full-time job. So I find it a little overwhelming, but I try.
Speaker 1:I know I really do too. I think part of my overwhelm is that I think in my mind I'm going to do what they tell us we're supposed to do, like one post a day and one video a week or so, I don't know. There's this whole algorithm or something and I'm like ain't nobody got time for that. I'm trying to raise a family and have another job and this is just a fun thing I'm doing because I enjoy it and I believe in reaching people in creative ways, but it is a full-time job to try to be good content creators.
Speaker 2:It is. It's overwhelming sometimes, yeah.
Speaker 1:We should probably have a session about that. We should.
Speaker 2:We can speak to people about how hard it is juggling and balancing it all. It brings up the emotion of overwhelm, doesn't it?
Speaker 1:I can find it on the emotion, on the feelings wheel. I'll find it right now. I know exactly where it is Okay. Anyway, megan, I'm so grateful for you. I'll make sure that they can. I'll link to all of your website and social media stuff in the show notes for today. But I'm just grateful that you said yes to come and talk about these things, because I really do think the more that we can talk about these things and people can start to normalize these things, it will become easier and easier for people to have these conversations in their daily life. So thanks for being here.
Speaker 2:I hope we did a good job normalizing things. I feel a little bit like you know, I just rambled on about like I'm like I confused myself about emotions, but I think like the takeaway is just, you know, we all have so many different emotions and we have to be open to them and welcome. There's no prescription, there's no right way to feel at any moment and the benefit of therapy is just giving you a safe space to process and just like another visual here I'm imagining like a ball of yarn and it's really just starting to untangle it all and it's a process.
Speaker 1:I think your ramblings were spot on and I think, if we did make it more complicated, it is only the truth of the work of really digging into emotions. I mean, that's the reality of how one, how therapy works, but also just how emotions work, and they're just complicated. All right, listener. Thank you for being here. Megan, as always, I enjoy every second I get to be with you, and thanks for listening. Stay safe and stay well, y'all Ciao.
