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 to this week's episode of she persisted. If you enjoyed, make sure to share with a friend or family
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