(calming classical music)
- Hey, everyone.
Welcome back.
So, today's video, we're gonna get pretty deep.
We're talking about therapy.
I can honestly say
that therapy has radically changed my life for the better
and I wanted to share with you guys
all the things that I learned throughout my sessions.
But before we get into that,
I want to thank today's sponsor, BetterHelp.
This couldn't have been a better partnership
because I wholeheartedly believe
that therapy can benefit anyone.
So many of us suffer
from things that interfere with our happiness,
whether it's negative coping mechanisms
that you picked up along the way in your past,
but all of this can lead to mental roadblocks
from our goals.
But I do believe that therapy
can help you get closer to who you're meant to be.
BetterHelp assesses your needs
and matches you
with your very own licensed professional therapist.
You can start communicating with them within 48 hours.
They have over 15,000 counselors in their network
and they've got a broad range of what they specialize in,
so, you'll definitely find one that's the right fit for you.
They also make it really easy and free
to change up counselors if needed.
Right now, you can get 10% off your first month
using my link, betterhelp.com/jenn.
That's better H-E-L-P.
You can join over 1 million people
who are taking charge of their mental health
with the help of an experienced professional.
I will leave that link in the description box,
so, please pop that open.
So, therapy was something that I knew
I wanted to address at some point in my life
because I've always had a hard time regulating my emotions
and how I handle stress,
but I was looking at it through a lens of like,
"Ugh, I should probably do this,
"but I'm just gonna put it off."
So, I pushed it off all the way up
until the beginning of 2017.
So, I was 26 at the time
and I had just gotten engaged to Ben.
Getting engaged was really serious for me
because I was like,
"Okay, I'm gonna spend the rest of my life with this person,
"I should probably get my shit together
"and figure myself out."
So, fast forward to now,
I've officially been going to therapy for four years,
which is nuts to say out loud,
but basically, I went through three different therapists
before finding the right one for me.
I actually did a whole video explaining this process,
which I'll leave up in the cards.
But regardless, throughout my journey
of finding the right therapist,
each session that I did, I found extremely beneficial.
So, don't get discouraged.
So, the main thing that happened was
I was able to get to know myself at a deeper level,
like a level that I didn't even know was possible.
I've always been pretty introspective
and I've always wondered why I am the way I am,
but therapy really accelerated this process
because this was a space for me to really explore
and examine what's going on in here.
So, I see life kind of like your own tailored adventure
and you're gonna have an easier
and smoother time navigating through it all
when you know yourself better.
And one exercise that my therapist had me do
was to take the Enneagram Test,
and I know personality tests can feel quite gimmicky,
there's so many out there,
but I swear to God the Enneagram Test
is the one that I resonated the most with.
So, I took the test and I ended up getting a type three,
which is the achiever.
So, type threes are extremely ambitious, competent,
they've got a jam-packed schedule,
they're always chasing the next achievement.
We are also very concerned about what people think of us
and we can suffer from workaholism, being competitive,
basically putting all of our self-worth
into the tasks that we do.
It really helped me understand the way my mind works.
Now, obviously, this is not supposed to be
the manuscript of your life,
not everything is like set in stone because of this test.
This is just supposed to be like a good starting point
for you to reflect on who you think you are
and how you analyze and process the events
that are happening to you.
So, the second thing that happened was I was able to unearth
all these key moments of my childhood
and see how they affected me.
So, basically throughout my sessions,
I was able to kind of quilt this timeline
of all of these events
that shaped me to be the person that I am today.
So, for some context,
there are four of us in my immediate family.
It's me, my mom, dad, and my older brother,
and my parents were literally always working.
So, since elementary school,
my brother and I were always home alone
all the way up until 6:00 p.m..
And there were definitely pros and cons to this.
Obviously, it was awesome
that James and I just got to do
whatever we wanted to do at home.
It was mostly just like vegging out and watching TV,
but as I got older, it would just be surfing the web,
I would go on Myspace,
I would drive out to LA with my friends,
take pictures and then put them on Myspace.
It was really cool that my parents didn't have the chance
to be helicopter parents and like breathe down our back.
We really had the space
to figure out who we were and what excited us.
But on the flip side, I feel like a big con
was that my parents weren't really available for us.
I never got picked up from school.
My parents never came to any function
that I was participating in.
I was never the best student, either,
from middle school all the way up to high school.
My grades were just painfully average,
straight Bs, a couple of Cs, I even got a W once.
I just felt like I was constantly disappointing them,
and so, I had a lot to prove.
And so, I feel like a lot of what drives my success
is to show them that I'm not a fuck up
and that I'm not a disappointment.
And it's crazy,
like that happened to me such a long time ago,
but I still have to catch myself being like,
"You know what, it's okay.
"You are worthy just the way you are."
Through therapy, I was also able to identify
the characteristics that I learned from my mom and my dad.
I'm gonna start off with the bad traits first
so then we can end it on a positive note.
I got a lot of my fear and my sadness from my mom.
Growing up, she never wanted to do anything new.
She hated driving on the freeway,
she was afraid of even speaking in English,
she suffered a lot of trauma
from when she was physically assaulted
when someone robbed her store,
and she dealt so much of her sadness just by sleeping.
And I remember when I was a kid,
for Mother's Day, I actually got her a pillow
because she had spent so much of her time sleeping.
It wasn't until I was maybe 22 or 23
that me and my mom had a talk about her depression.
I think, for a long time,
not even she knew that she suffered from it
because mental health is not really spoken about
in the Korean community, especially at that time.
With my dad, I definitely got his temper.
He was a huge hothead growing up.
And yeah, we would always be fighting, screaming,
throwing shit at each other.
Even in my childhood door, there were just fist marks
from when my dad was trying to like barge in
when I locked the door.
I mean, granted, I was kind of a nightmare as a teen,
but it was just the only way
we knew how to communicate with each other.
It was just anger upon anger,
and we never saw eye to eye on anything.
So, now I want to talk about the positive traits.
From my mom,
I definitely get her consistency and her diligence.
Like, she has this incredible talent
of working extremely fast efficiently.
She can just duck down and focus and get everything done.
It's so admirable.
I also love her consistency.
Like, she was always home at 6:00 PM on the dot
and she would just make dinner for us.
And having that daily structure in our family
helped out so much.
From my dad,
I definitely got his boldness and his creativity.
He loved music.
He was always playing his guitar, singing.
He was also the life of the party, constantly socializing.
There were so many parties at our house
where people would just be like karaoking and drinking.
So, yeah, that was another characteristic
that I picked up from him.
He also always had a camera in his hand.
He was recording us, taking pictures,
and I feel like I definitely learned
my I love of documenting from him.
Connecting the dots of my childhood
and seeing how that affected me,
along with understanding what characteristics
I got from my parents,
has given me a deeper sense of peace.
Because now I'm never wondering, like,
"Where's this behavior coming from?
"Why am I like this?"
Like, now when something happens,
it's easier for me to just kind of detach from it,
being like,
"Oh, you picked up this negative coping mechanism
"when you were a child,
"how about we try a more productive route?"
It's also helped me heal the relationship with my parents
because now instead of seeing them
as this like perfect parental figure that let me down,
I just see them as humans who tried their best,
and I love them for that.
So, now that I was able to make sense of my past,
I became more aware of the emotional addictions
that I was holding on to.
So, growing up, I was pretty emotionally volatile.
Like, there was no middle ground.
I was either euphoric, or I was down in the dumps,
or I was throwing shit.
Like, I didn't know this at the time,
but I was addicted to intensity and emotion.
And in fact, if things were just neutral and balanced,
my brain would be like,
"This isn't right, we've got to start some shit."
I think I just loved to feel something,
whether it was good or bad.
My brain just craved that drama
because that's what was familiar to it.
So, one of the emotions
that I was consciously addicted to was stress.
This was at its worst at 2017 to 2018.
And I would say like,
this was when I was technically the most successful
on paper.
Like, I had launched a clothing line,
I was constantly traveling, the numbers were ticking up.
I was like very booked and busy,
and at a glance, it just looked like I was killing it,
but I had never been more miserable in my life.
I saw stress as a badge of honor.
Stress is extremely dignified in our culture.
Like, if you're stressed, that means you're working hard,
it means you're self-sacrificing.
Stress became a metric of how productive I was doing.
I was getting all of my self worth
from ticking off the to-do list, from networking,
going to meetings, of uploading a video,
publishing a collection,
but I was not happy at all.
I was just addicted to that feeling of like,
"See, I'm busy and I'm stressed, am I worthy now?"
I think Yerkes-Dodson law describes this best.
It explains that stress and anxiety
are on a bell-shaped curve.
There's a certain amount of stress that is beneficial
because that's what gives you the momentum
to do the tasks that you need to do.
So, at the beginning of the curve, it's pretty low,
and then at the middle,
that's just like the perfect amount of stress
to get your performance up.
And then anything past that,
that's just the point of diminishing returns.
Anything past that point, you're just paralyzed,
it's unproductive.
And at the time, I was just always at that red line
because that's where I felt like I had to be.
As a type three on the Enneagram,
I tend to over-function when I'm stressed or anxious.
I guess it's good sometimes
because it makes me extremely action-oriented in a crisis,
but even after the fire's put out,
when I'm in this mode, I won't stop.
I will start nitpicking everything in my life
and I'll feel like the walls are just crumbling down on me.
So, yes, it's been a balance that I've had to figure out.
The last point I want to make
is that I learned what my three non-negotiables are
for having a good day.
Now, these are things that make me happy
and feel good and content.
Usually, if I've done these three things,
I usually have a good day and I'm in a good mood.
So, the first non-negotiable is if I've worked out.
Now, this doesn't need to be like a one hour lifting session
or like a crazy hit workout.
Like these days, I just do a simple 20 minute workout.
Sometimes I'll go on a walk.
Like, if I've just moved my body
or I've done some type of manual labor,
I can check that off.
So, my second non-negotiable is if I've meditated that day.
I would say that this habit took me
maybe like a year to develop.
And it's very, very subtle,
but it will change your life radically.
So, I started off with just everyday
doing 10-minute guided meditations,
I found that really simple and easy to do.
And then, now, I've graduated to 20-minute sessions,
where I'm just listening to like ambient spa music.
What I meditate, I almost envision myself kind of shedding.
Like I'm shedding my emotional thoughts,
I'm shedding just unnecessary bullshit.
It's time for me to just focus on my breath.
Then lastly, we have future self journaling.
Every morning,
I will answer these seven questions over here.
I actually got this concept from Dr. Nicole Lepera,
but I tweaked some of the questions and the format
just to serve my needs better.
But regardless, this really helps me
reframe the negative thought patterns in my mind
and replaces it with positive ones.
Usually, if I've had a wobbly day,
that means like something really crazy happened
or I didn't do my three non-negotiables.
All right, folks, that is a wrap for this video.
I have honestly learned so much
through my experience with therapy.
In fact, if you would like a part two,
please let me know in the comments down below.
Also, if you are currently in therapy
or have gone in the past,
I would love if you shared with me what you learned.
I really, really do love interacting with you guys
in the comment section.
Thank you guys so much for watching,
and I'll see you guys in the next one.
Bye.
(calming classical music)