The Mental Health Questions Everyone’s Googling—Answered Honestly By A Therapist

On this episode of I’m Fun Now, host Sazan Hendrix brings therapist and author Barbara Hill into the “playground” to tackle the questions listeners are actually asking when life feels complicated and growth feels messy. 

Hill talks about why AI can’t replace real therapy, how overstimulation pulls you out of your body, and why joy can feel weirdly unsafe. She also gets practical about finding the right therapist and setting boundaries that don’t blow up relationships, plus what to do when triggers hit and your nervous system takes the wheel.

Below are the highlights from the episode, adapted from I’m Fun Now

What’s your view on ChatGPT as a therapist?

“I think the built-in limitation with ChatGPT operating as a therapist is that it’s mostly going to validate without challenging. So I think that’s like the first initial limitation that comes to mind if people are using that as the primary source of insight or perspective for their lives, is that it’s going to lead with validation, but it’s not always, of course, going to accompany that validation with challenge or deeper questions that could maybe get to the heart of what’s going on.”

When life feels loud, what’s the simplest way to come back into your body and feel safe again?

“The first thing that comes to mind is just how overstimulating our world is. I mean, from devices to just the society and the world that we live in, we’re constantly being stimulated. And then if we think about not just the external stimulation, but the internal stimulation, that inner critic that might be really loud or the rumination that might be really loud…so it makes sense that life would feel loud…When things are loud, whether internally or externally, it does take us out of our body. And that’s when we go to distract or numb or self-medicate because sometimes to be in our body when it’s loud is really overwhelming…

…Our breath is one of the greatest gifts that we have. Breathing helps us get back into our bodies and just breathing intentionally, because for any of us, when we’ve been overwhelmed or overstimulated, one of the first things that changes is our breath. It gets fast and it gets shallow…So when we start changing our breathing patterns and we breathe intentionally, deeply, slowly, mindfully, that helps to bring us back into our body in a way that creates safety.”

Why do adults feel guilty for joy and how do we unlearn that?

‘I feel like there’s so many reasons why that happens. And in some ways, it almost feels like a natural evolution of becoming an adult. There’s this built-in idea that joy is juvenile and it’s childish, and I love this distinction between childlike and childish. You know, like childish could have a negative connotation, but childlike is playfulness, joy, wonder, awe, and somewhere along the line as adults we’re sold this lie that those things are childish, and they’re juvenile, and they’re things to outgrow rather than things to cultivate. I think joy is also incredibly vulnerable…

…A quick story I can tell of Brené Brown…she tells this story about how she’s in the car with her family and they’re on a road trip, and they’re having this beautiful, joyous family moment. They’re laughing and everybody’s enjoying each other. And then right in that moment, her mind flashes to something she saw on the news that was incredibly traumatic. And as she gets immersed in this flashback, so to speak, she yells at her husband to stop the car, but the car was already parked. But she was so lifted out of her body, out of that moment, in a moment of joy. The way that she unpacks that is that joy is the most vulnerable emotion we can feel because it asks us to be unarmored and unguarded. In order to enjoy something, we can’t simultaneously be living in survival mode. So in that moment of joy, her brain brought her to something painful, almost as a form of protecting herself from the vulnerability of joy.”

Where do you even start to find a therapist when the process can be overwhelming?

“I would encourage you to maybe go to your community. I would imagine that maybe some of the close people in your life, I would hope, maybe have a therapist or know somebody who knows a therapist…And if your community isn’t one that supports seeking out mental health, there are some websites, I mean you could go to Psychology Today and you can put in a ton of filters that will help to weed out therapists that might not be a good fit for you and then you just have a call with some of them and see if they feel like a good fit, and to come with questions…

…And then sometimes it’s just getting in the room with them and seeing how it feels. [How] does this feel like relationally? Because the relationship between a therapist and a client is exactly that. It’s a relationship and it needs to feel like a good fit. And after the first couple of sessions, you’re probably going to have a good sense if this is somebody who could meet you where you are.”

How do you set boundaries without feeling like you’re disappointing everyone?

“I think the reality is that you most likely, especially in the beginning, will feel like you are disappointing other people. I think whenever we set boundaries, especially when we are not accustomed to setting boundaries, there is going to be a whole lot of tension internally. We are going to feel guilty. We’re going to feel like we’ve disappointed somebody, and you know what? If the people in our lives are not used to us setting boundaries, they will feel disappointed and you will feel it from them…

…To expect and let it be okay that you’re going to feel tension and the people in your world are going to feel some sort of tension when you start setting healthier boundaries in your relationships, because you really are rearranging the dynamic itself…At the heart of setting boundaries is for the preservation of that relationship. The reality is that if we don’t set boundaries, healthy ones, then we run the risk of that relationship breaking down and we lose the integrity or the quality of that relationship or we lose this altogether. So at the heart of setting a healthy boundary is not to cut someone off or eliminate them from your life. It’s actually because you value the relationship and you value it being a healthy one, that you’re willing to take the risk of being uncomfortable and you’re building a tolerance for other people’s discomfort with your boundaries.”

Feeling ‘behind’ in life, what would you say to someone stuck in that season?

“My heart goes out to the person who’s feeling that way, because I would imagine all of us at different times in our life have felt that way…That’s a really hard feeling to have…Sometimes when we’re standing still, it feels like we are being left behind or we are behind. But there’s a lot of really valuable things that are taking place in our lives in those seasons. They just don’t, they might not look like other people’s and they might not look like other seasons in your life will…Where is the value here that maybe you haven’t seen, the value in something deeper that is happening inside of you…It’s winter, everything is dormant at face value…but internally there is a lot of activity. There’s a lot that’s happening. Ask yourself how is what is happening preparing me truly for a spring season?..Seasons change all the time. That’s what nature at least teaches us.”

What do you do when you get triggered and your brain starts sprinting toward panic?

“What’s happening when we are ‘triggered,’ is that there is an activation of our nervous system, that we’re either going into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn…fawn is like a people pleasing response…When we’re triggered, meaning like there’s some stimulation that’s come our way that has activated our nervous system…And so I would say that there’s kind of, I guess it’s a twofold response. One, it’s recognizing that there is a very real nervous system response happening for you. There’s going to be certain things that you need in that moment to care for your nervous system, to help down regulate your nervous system response, to help calm you, ground you, get you back in your body. So that’s breathing, that’s walking, that’s calling a friend, that’s journaling…And then outside of a trigger, outside of the heat of the moment, it’s practicing things and having routines to help support your nervous system so that the triggers are less and you’re regulating more often…

…There’s so many different things that we do on a daily basis that really matter for the health and vitality of our nervous system, so that when you get triggered, you’ll be able to navigate that moment differently because your system has been well supported prior to that moment.”

How do you move forward when you’ve failed before and feel stuck in that mindset?

“There’s so much narration that’s going on behind the scenes…coming up against the, ‘I failed in the past, like I’m never going to be able to be successful at this,’ mindset. And it’s those self-defeating, limiting beliefs that all of us experience, especially when we’re trying something again that we feel like we’ve ‘failed’ at in the past. I think first is taking a step back and getting curious about how you’re narrating this. Ask ‘What’s a different way that I could narrate this moment”…it’s really changing your belief system…

…And I think also having what we would call a recovery mindset, which is success, can be defined in our world in very binary ways. It’s like you succeed or you fail. It’s very black or white. But success also looks like trying, falling on your face, but getting back up and continuing. Success also looks like trying something and being halfway through and pivoting and doing something different. I think it’s also adding some nuance and expanding our idea of what success actually looks like because there is a process to something succeeding.”

To hear all of Barbara Hill’s insights, listen to I’m Fun Now wherever you get your podcasts.

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