Permission to Ask

The wilder the world, the more we need to attend to ourselves.

It’s video time!

If you need inspiration for what you TOTALLY HAVE PERMISSION TO ASK, check out last month’s Q&A here for what others brought to the table:

REPLAY!

And know that whatever you need support on, no matter how weirdly specific to you it is—it’s not. I dare you to make it unapplicable to anyone else ;)

And I dare you to claim your shit—no “oh, it’s not a big deal” and no “I’ll just have to figure this out on my own.” You do not and we do not. Millions of us privately wondering “what’s wrong with me, why can’t I hack it?” ain’t the revolution, my love.

This is community care. We name what we need; we aim to help. We have to save the world and the first step is getting over and through our own mess so we can face the world’s. That process is sacred.

And if you’d like to play along IN PERSON: this Friday is our next live Zoom hang! It landed on the first of August instead of the end of July but WHAT IS TIME Y’ALL.

Friday, August 1st 10am PT // 1pm ET // 6p BT—can’t wait! Been traveling all of July and have so many thoughts!

For paying members of the community, you’ll get your Zoom link Friday morning.

For the rest of you, consider if this is the hug you need, and the nudge too. My friend

Darby Saxbe

is a brilliant research psychologist at USC and she wrote this week that “if you unpack the common mechanisms underlying different therapy approaches, from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) to old-school psychodynamic treatments, you get a few big themes” the first three of which are below… and are exactly what our meetup on Friday is for:

Connection and belonging. We call this the “therapeutic alliance” in a clinical context, but it’s really just the experience of feeling heard and seen by another human.

Finding meaning and purpose. This entails making sense out of the world and your place in it. In narrative therapies, you might think of this in terms of the story you tell about your life. Does the story make sense? Did you learn from difficult experiences? Finding meaning means connecting with core values and aligning them with goals and actions.

Agency and activation. When people are unhappy or fearful, they retreat and isolate. Many therapies seek to get people out into the world, maximizing their potential for rewarding experiences. In treating anxiety, we call this exposure – building tolerance to difficult situations. In depression, we call it behavioral activation – encouraging clients to get out of bed and do hard things. We want to cultivate an internal locus of control, the power to steer our own lives.

Shall we drum up that power?

First thing’s first: take a moment, close your eyes and ground yourself (or get up and wiggle it out and remember you have hips) and ask yourself “where am I having trouble showing up? What do I wish I could just frickin’ solve already?”

And then tell me.

Email back or comment below. Get heard and seen.

~Samara