Ask Kati Anything ep.126 | Your mental health podcast, with Kati Morton, LMFT

Synopsis:

In this week’s episode Kati discusses why we can feel emotions in our body but not recognize them in our mind. She also talks about how to be our real selves when in therapy, what unconditional positive regard is, and how much self-disclosure we should expect from our therapist. She digs into passive suicidality and how to tell our therapist about it, and whether or not she thinks it’s part of having an eating disorder. She explains why we may act childlike in therapy and why it may be hard to let ourselves be happy. Finally, she shares her biggest learning in her own therapy, and what we can do to stop our ED from turning into a different one.

AUDIENCE QUESTIONS

1. Why is it that my body reacts in a way as if I am feeling a certain emotion, but my brain doesn’t necessarily “feel” the emotion? My body will physically react as if there is a certain emotion, but I don’t really “feel” the emotion...

2. How do I allow myself to “be real” in therapy? Whenever I walk in, I have a hard time sharing how I'm feeling and I immediately forget what has been on my mind / what has happened that week. I also constantly think I am making up my problems, am being too dramatic, or her other patients...

3. Just thought it would be a different experience to ask you a question about yourself as you always kindly offer so much help and advice to us. My question is I know you've mentioned before about you accessing therapy yourself in the past. I wondered what you have learnt most about yourself from therapy?

4. I have questions about passive suicidality. I believe that’s what this is called but not fully sure and what really do you do to deal with it? I was at a point a long time ago that I was done and ready to leave but ended up finding out I was pregnant and from that point forward it wasn’t an option...

5. Why can't I allow myself to be happy? I want to enjoy life, but enjoying it feels wrong? It's not necessarily that I feel like I don't deserve to be happy, but I just can't let myself live the life I want to live, and I constantly sabotage my happiness.

6. I hope you’re doing well and I hope that my question makes sense. I have been going to therapy for about 5 months now and have finally slowly managed to be able to get to a point where I can feel more relaxed and able to begin to process my traumas (CSA, emotional neglect, Physical abuse to name a few) without...

7. Is it normal to feel more child-like in therapy? And do therapists encourage this? I don't see my therapist as a caregiver (I'm still not 100% comfortable with my therapist yet) but each time I'm in therapy, I feel myself kind of "switch". And I stop functioning as an adult. Instead I watch myself do...

8. My question is how much self-disclosure from a therapist is normal? My therapist talks sometimes in detail sometimes not about her own life in just about every session, she's talked about her trauma's, abusive people in her life she cut out and about stuff that's stressing her out like...

9. How can one best ensure that while recovering from one ED, one doesn’t slip into another? (Example from Anorexia to BED or bulimia) (COMMENT: And could you talk about being at a higher normal weight or being overweight in the context of EDs? I feel like it is not often talked about and getting the diagnosis kind of triggered me because I thought that I was not ill enough to...

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