- Hey everybody, happy Tuesday and since it's Tuesday
that means that I'm on Tumblr so if any of you follow
me on Tumblr, Kati Morton and you ask me questions
using the hashtag KatiFAQ I've found 'em and I've already
been chatting with many of you on there
but today I have three questions as well as a journal
topic from Waiting On the World to Change Forever so
thank you for that.
And let's get goin'.
These are very interesting questions
and they're all over the board.
I tried to make sure there's something for everybody.
Okay, first question.
"Hey Kati, should I confront my parents about
the emotional abuse they put on me in childhood?
I'm 20 now and I don't live with them but
I still rely on them for financial aid.
I am not very close with them but we are civil
and we get along.
I want to discuss this with them because I still go home
for the holidays and have to interact with them but I don't
want this conversation to worsen our relationship."
Now I wanted to talk about this because of what I talked
about yesterday and my Monday video, if you haven't watched
it yet it's about forgiveness and acceptance.
And part of what I sense in this question,
and this I may be completely wrong,
but obviously this isn't someone
in my office where we can actually chat it out,
it's just me reading a question,
figuring out how I'm interpreting it,
and then answering to the best of my ability.
So, the way that I interpret this question is that the
person really needs to express how upset this makes them.
They really want to confront their parents in
the hopes of potentially getting an I'm so sorry,
we're dickheads, or a you know, let's work on this together,
or if I go back and change the clock,
any kind of thing like that.
And I'm gonna reference what I talked about yesterday
in that forgiveness doesn't mean that we aren't angry,
they're not, they don't have to be
things that happen separately.
They can happen together, we can forgive
and we can still be angry and that's okay,
and I think part of what's driving,
and what drives many of our needs to confront people,
is anger and hurt, and I think it's fine to confront
your parents or your family or your friends or whoever,
if our goal doesn't rely on their response,
if our goal is based on our need to express how we feel,
our need to reach out and let them know how we feel
and that's it, if that's okay,
then I say go ahead and talk to them.
But the times that my clients end up confronting people when
they're actually looking for an exact response or a certain
type of response from the person is when it ends up making
things worse for them because then it's almost like we're
re-injuring ourselves and the way I talked about yesterday,
how if we keep thinking about these painful experiences over
and over we're almost re-injuring
ourselves every time we do that,
and so when it comes to confrontation
I think it's totally healthy and fine,
as long as we're doing it for ourselves
and it's not in any way focused
on what their response may be.
I hope that makes sense,
I know it's kind of difficult sometimes for me
to convey how I feel really shortly in a video,
but that's why I would consider what you're wanting
to get out of it and then go forward from there, okay?
Question number two, "Hey, Kati, what do normal or healthy
people think about when their mind
wanders into unconscious thought?
What is there if healthy people
aren't consumed with weight, calories, et cetera?
Like when you have time to think and just be
and your mind wanders, what do you think about?
What do healthy people think?
I saw this type of thing in a quote and it hit me so hard,
just wondering if you have any tips
for your clients of thinking normal?"
Now, I thought this was a good thing to bring up because
it's something that many of us who are in recovery
or working on recovery don't always notice,
and I find when my clients are struggling or maybe they
should reach out for more help or we should get them into
group or I should see them twice a week or whatever.
This is one of the first things you can notice,
is that when your mind wanders,
it goes straight to your eating disorders, your self-harm,
your negative body image voice, your depression,
your anxiety voice, whatever kind of
thoughts are going on in your head,
it happens most when your mind wanders
because we're not controlling the thought, right?
And that's why I have you do a lot of, you know,
healthy voice to unhealthy voice conversations,
so that we notice it and we correct it.
What do normal people think about?
It depends on the day.
For me, when my mind wanders lately,
it's been in like work stuff, 'cause this is really busy
and my practice is really busy,
I have a lot of stuff going in all sorts of directions,
and so my mind wanders to stuff like that,
or Christmas and Thanksgiving 'cause I love the holidays
and I get really excited and I'm like
"Oh, I'm gonna make eggnog and I've never done
that before it's gonna be so cool."
So, our minds wander based around what we're
thinking about and what we're focused on,
and so you can change your thoughts.
That's the thing that's so great about being a human being,
is we can, once we gain the insight into what's
going on in our noggin all the time,
given we can't be 100 percent present in our brains
and then we're not actually paying attention
to what we're doing in our lives,
but when you have the time to notice what's going on,
we can talk back to that voice,
we can change the way our brain goes
and what it thinks about in the, you know,
spiral kind of that we see it going in,
we can change that and turn it around
and make it positive and make it a good thing.
If we notice we're, you know, focusing our negative
tension on other people we can change it to positive.
Like, "Hey, that girl looks good" and
"Hey, you know, she's really trying hard
and I'm glad that she's working here."
We can change the way our brain works
and that's what makes us so amazing and so, such survivors.
And so, normal people are all of us
and we can all make our brains not focus on negative things,
we can turn around to focus on positive.
So, if any of you are wondering how to do that
or what I'm even talking about,
check out my eating disorder workbook
or my self-harm workbook.
I have tasks in both of them, I think it's
the first task in both,
but correct me if I'm wrong.
Kind of the negative thinking logs where we log down what
we're thinking and we talk back to it,
and that can really change our world, okay?
Question number three, "Hey, Kati,
is gender dysphoria a mental illness? I know it's a very,
very real thing and that the dysphoria aspect
of it can be very hard for trans people to deal with,
but is it fair to say that the person has an illness
for feeling like a different gender
than the one that they were assigned at birth?"
I wanna talk about this because I am,
like I've talked about before,
I do have some new books that I've received
and workbooks and I'm trying to put
together kind of an LGBTQ workbook of my own,
and I wanna make sure I'm doing it justice,
and so this topic really spoke to me,
and I, obviously, looked into my DSM,
and gender dysphoria is a diagnosis.
However, in the description of how we even diagnose
and the descriptive characteristic,
the diagnostic features, are focused on the dysphoria.
That feeling of upsetness and anxiety and incongruence,
and like, you just aren't yourself,
what you know you are is not what you look
and is not the way that people address you,
and that dysphoria and disconnect
can be so incredibly uncomfortable
and difficult and frustrating,
and make people feel hopeless if they don't have
the options of surgery or,
what's the other one, like hormone treatments.
There are a bunch of different things
that we can do to change our gender,
but often that's not available to people
or they're younger or it's not an option financially,
there's a bunch of different reasons
why we can't make that happen,
and so people feel really frustrated and I mean,
imagine that feeling, and so yes it is in the DSM
and I'm looking here at the specifiers and all of the stuff,
but I think it's a focus on the dysphoria
and because that's so uncomfortable
they're labeling it as a mental illness.
And if any of you have feedback on this
or things you want me to talk about more let me know below,
I'm always open to what you guys are thinking
and what is important to you, okay?
Now, journal topic from Waiting On
the World to Change Forever,
thank you for this, it's really cool.
So, she says, "I was watching Super Soul Sunday on Oprah,
and I heard this quote 'We are not on
a journey like a train, a journey symbolizes
that we will one day reach a destination,
and the destination means the end, no more challenges.'
That's not true, we are sailing, we are sailboats
and we are hit by waves, some small and some big.
I think we shouldn't be afraid of those waves,
we should learn from them
and accept the beautiful imperfection that is life.
Stay strong guys."
I thought that was really cool
because it does say that like,
it makes sense that a journey is like we're in a train
and we're gonna reach our destination,
but life is ever changing,
and we're moving on to new things,
and we're trying different routes,
and we are sailing around and sometimes it'll be
really stormy and really rocky
and really difficult and like scary.
But, other times it'll be smooth sailing,
like off the coast of Bali or something.
So, I want you to think about what that means to you.
Are you in a rocky time and what does that mean?
And how can we maybe change our focus
or change our goals to get us towards that smooth sailing?
I love you all, I'll be on the website katimorton.com
tomorrow and I'll be on YouTube as well,
so ask your questions below today's video
and on the website, and I will see you then.
Have a good one, bye!