You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Swell AI Transcript: 104. Solo Episode FINAL.mp3
SPEAKER_00: There's no such thing as a person born in the wrong body. This is all a social contagion. Yes, there might be endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment that are feeding into it. Maybe there is somewhat of a biological basis for people feeling like some aspect of the gender dysphoria, as we call it, but mostly it's a social contagion and a corporate construct meant to sort of con and dupe people into succumbing to big pharma. That's my view on things anyway. You must be some kind of therapist. All right, I'm trying something different today. This is going to be a shorter episode. It's going to be a monologue, which if you've ever heard me talk about this before, I do not like doing monologues. I feel like I ramble. I much prefer having someone to speak with. But that being said, I have some things to share. If you're new to my podcast, this is not going to be an episode that's very representative of what I normally talk about or the style. So I'd recommend checking out some other episodes first. However, this episode is for you if you're interested in the services that I offer or the choices that I've made as a therapist, consultant, and podcast host and what has informed those decisions. Whether you're thinking about consulting with me, whether you're a therapist who's considered making changes in your career, this might be for you. I hope you can bear with me considering that I'm much more accustomed to doing the interview format and less accustomed to this one. But today I'm going to be talking about what I've been up to, some personal decisions I've made regarding my career, why I'm only working part time, why I have stopped doing therapy for the time being, why I started offering consulting, why I'm now only doing consulting and not therapy, and who comes to me for consulting and what I help them with. First of all, why I am only working part time. Some of you might be aware that I have had some significant health challenges for about as long as I've been doing this podcast. It was around the time that I launched this podcast in May of 2022 that I was discovering I had long haul COVID, but I was pretty committed to finishing what I'd started. So I didn't let that slow me down. Although in retrospect, maybe it should have. However, it wasn't until my second COVID infection in January 2024 that I realized I needed to take my health really seriously, put it first and foremost. And I started recognizing how much my own stress response was contributing to my chronic illness and sort of what a vicious cycle I was trapped in and how all the stress that comes with publicity with, you know, me being somebody who I didn't grow up in the Hollywood industry or anything like that. I had no experience of fame whatsoever until a couple of years ago. So navigating that was stressful. The threats against my license, which I discussed in episode 11, have been stressful. And there's been a number of other things, getting involved in culture wars and all of that. And long story short, looking back, if I'd recognized how severely my health would be impacted by my stress levels, I think I could have made some decisions differently. So since I got my second COVID infection and had a relapse of symptoms, lost some of the progress that I earned in sort of a hard-earned way, although not necessarily the most the wisest way, I realized that I had to put my health first and make some more significant lifestyle changes. This includes more time for rest, more time for lifestyle practices I'm doing to tend to my nervous system, protocols I'm following, time for medical appointments, all that kind of stuff, as well as managing the way that the nature of my career impacts my stress. So this leads into why I stopped doing therapy. It's not that therapy per se is the most stressful aspect of my work. In some ways, it's the most rewarding. But I had to make a difficult decision based on the fact that I do a number of things. I do this podcast and consulting and a lot of networking and community involvement online, not so much community involvement in person, which is something I would like to change in my ideal world. and therapy. And when I thought about how I have to scale things back, the reason I chose therapy as the thing to scale back, well, there's a few reasons. One is that I take very seriously the responsibility of being a mental health provider. And this is going to be very understandable to any of my colleagues who are listening, but this might not be something that you've thought of if you yourself are not a therapist or not married or are very closely involved with one, which is that when you are a mental health provider, anytime you take on a patient, no matter what that person's presenting problem is or how they might come across when you first meet them, you really never know if you are going to find yourself in a position of responsibility towards that person during a crisis. And that crisis could involve suicidal ideation or behavior, self-harm, danger, you know, your person, your patient being in a domestic violence situation or any number of other situations, as well as, you know, someone could be doing well and then a tragedy strikes, like a loss of someone important to them, especially a tragic loss. These are things that can always come up. There's never a single situation that a therapist could get involved with with a patient where there's a guarantee that you would not find yourself in a position of responsibility to someone who's going through a crisis or tragedy of some sort. And I want to be honest about, you know, for one thing, the impact that that has on the self of the therapist. It's something I've managed pretty well and compartmentalized pretty well over the years, but it's not to say that it doesn't have any impact. And then looking at the responsibility of the mental health provider and the need for them to be available in case someone needs more intensive attention. And when I think about where I'm at in my health process, I think my availability is hard to predict. It's just in a state where I have to be honest that although I'm cautiously optimistic and I won't stop doing things to try to help myself get better, I just can't tell you how I'm going to be feeling a week or a month or even a year from now. And that means I might have to cancel on people. I just might not be that available. And it doesn't feel responsible. to be a mental health provider, knowing that someone could be suicidal or could be, you know, losing a loved one and that I could be their therapist in that situation just doesn't feel responsible. And then, of course, there's the impact on me and the fact that looking back over the last almost 11 years now that I've been working in the field, there has not been a month of my life that has gone by And at times, there's not been even a week. But for sure, I can say for 10 years, there hasn't been a month of my life that's gone by that somewhere in the back of my mind, there hasn't been a concern about someone I know being at risk of suicide. And that's putting it mildly. Of course, this changes depending on the nature of the work I'm doing at any given time. But over time, I think these things do wear on a person. And what I've discovered with my chronic illness is that I really need to look out for my emotional well-being and my heart and not take my own heart for granted. I've had cardiac symptoms with my physical heart in my chest, and I think there is a connection to my emotional heart and that I've been needing to take some of the pressure off of myself. So I ultimately decided that the best thing for my patients as well as for me was to remove myself from that position of responsibility as a mental health provider for the time being until my health is more stable and predictable and until I feel like my capacity has increased so that I can take on that responsibility of having a new patient. Again, you know, even if a patient seems really stable up front, you really just never know. And I want to make sure that if I take on that responsibility, I'm prepared to be there for someone through thick and thin. Now, why start offering consulting now? I've been doing consulting since before I made the recent decision to pause my therapy practice. The way I got into consulting is that a couple of years ago when I started to become known to a greater audience than, you know, whatever few hundred people I just happened to know in my life, I started getting flooded with inquiries from ROGD parents. If you're new to this podcast, ROGD stands for Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, a term coined in 2018 by Dr. Lisa Lippman. And it's the issue that I specialize in. It's the issue I've come to specialize in through the interest that I've taken in it over the last few years. And I just started getting hearing from all these desperate patients, excuse me, parents, desperate parents, wanting me to help their kids. And I was turning them away because I was not licensed to provide therapy in their state. And then after the attacks on my license, I started turning people away, even if they were in my state, because I didn't want to, you know, now that I was known as a public figure, I felt that any any youth who were indoctrinated into gender ideology were also conditioned to believe that people like me, who at that point were highly Googleable, were their enemies, which is sad because it's people like me who are advocating for everyone to be looking out for what is in the long-term best interest of the health and well-being of these young people. But I was like, well, I certainly can't be a provider to these youth because they could just Google me and decide that they're outraged. about how so-called transphobic I am, right? So basically I was turning people away at the same time as I was learning so much about this issue and integrating it with everything I knew about psychology from the years I'd spent counseling, including counseling a number of, you know, trans and other identifying people. And then at some point, it just dawned on me that I could offer consultation, that I would, you know, be clear about the limitations of my scope of practice, that if I'm talking to a parent in a different state, I'm not operating as their therapist, but I'm saying, I do happen to know some things about this issue. Would you like to talk to me about it? And they didn't care that it wasn't called therapy. And in many cases, that was preferable for people. So I developed a protocol. I developed intake documents and both a written informed consent process and a verbal informed consent process. Not that informed consent is needed for coaching and consulting because it's an unregulated practice, but I just thought it was best practices, especially being that I do have that license as a marriage and family therapist to really distinguish what we're doing, why it's different from therapy that I'm not diagnosing or treating a mental health condition. This is not a mental health service. It's not a health care service. It's not billable to insurance. I'm not the person you contact in a crisis. I want to make sure that if you are at risk of crisis, you have proper mental health support. And therapy is a place that you go to work through your own personal issues. Consulting is much more straightforward. There are a lot of times that in the role as a therapist, I would hold up a mirror, reflect, be hesitant to give my opinion, or inquire as to why my opinion matters to someone if it does. Whereas with consulting, it's like, no, you're here to pick my brain because I know something about a situation that's relevant to you. And we can just talk about it. We skip past the relational psychodynamic side of things, even though as a therapist, I'm very relational psychodynamic. I don't do that so much in consulting. So I offered consulting because it felt like there were people who wanted my expertise. And especially the more I started blogging at the time, and obviously more recently, podcasting, people just wanted to talk to me about how to understand and help the people that they worried about were involved in the trans cult. So that's the background of consulting. Now, since then, I have launched my website StephanieWynn.com. This podcast has had a website for a while now, SomeTherapist.com, but that's really about the podcast and my bigger work. It's not actually about therapy. It's Some Therapist as in, you know, it's my social media handle. It's sort of a play on the title of the podcast, You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist. But I got rid of my therapy website, which was previously Real Talk Therapy PDX, and just put everything that I do at stephaniewyn.com. So there's a link to my podcast from there. There's information about consulting. There's information about therapy. If you look on that site right now, it'll say I'm not doing therapy right now. And you can book a meeting there. So this is something to be aware of. If you've ever thought about picking my brain or you know someone who would benefit from talking to me, you can go to my website, stephaniewyn.com, learning more about consulting. And I've had different meeting options right now. I have it set up so that there are a variety of options. This might be subject to change in the future, but if you go to my website, stephaniewin.com, try to book a meeting as it currently stands, you'll be taken to a calendly scheduling page that allows a free 15 minute discovery call. I've turned those off at times that I was getting way too many of them. But things have slowed down. The New York Times article released in February was kind of crazy and it was like right after my COVID infection and I was getting like 10 a week. Those are back currently, the 15-minute discovery calls for free. And then there's 30, 50, and 80-minute consulting visits that you can book for a fee if you're ready to dive in. Sometimes people will try to book a free 15-minute discovery call, and they want to use that time to share a lot of personal information. And it's just really like we don't have time for that. So if you feel confident that I am someone whose brain you want to pick, I would say definitely go ahead and book a longer meeting. You can just pay for it right there through Calendly. And then if you become an ongoing coaching or consulting client, then I do have a portal where I send you forms and have you officially set up with appointment reminders and all that kind of stuff. it's pretty easy to do the onboarding process for me right now. I don't require a lot up front for those who feel like they want to talk to me. Whether you're a long time or first time listener of the podcast, Odds are you're just as concerned as I am about the gender ideology crisis that's affecting today's youth. What you may not be as aware of is another insidious practice occurring in med school classrooms, practitioners' offices, and hospitals alike. The discriminatory practices that focus on race instead of qualifications of healthcare providers. These universities, associations, and sometimes even states are breaking federal laws in their racially discriminatory practices. And one group is holding them accountable. Do no harm. DoNoHarm's membership-based organization is fighting so that patients get the best quality service and so that today's med students succeed as tomorrow's medical providers. If you're a medical provider, I encourage you to join DoNoHarm today. Learn more and sign up at donoharmmedicine.org slash sometherapist. That's donoharmmedicine.org slash sometherapist. So on that note, I thought I'd let you know who comes to me for consulting. The number one category of people who come to me for consulting are ROGD parents. Parents of youth anywhere between ages 10 to 30. You know, I feel off the top of my head like it's a pretty even mix between minors who are still in the home versus kids who are away at college. And there's a variety of situations ranging from youth coming from really stable, loving homes where there's a lot of support and resources to situations where there's a background of trauma, disruption, divorce, alienation, and other factors that make the situation more fraught. I've worked with people from all cultures, almost all major religions, different political persuasions. I've worked with parents ranging from, oh, yeah, I believe true trans people exist. It's just not my child to people who are, you know, more aligned with my views on the matter, which is that there's no such thing as a person born in the wrong body. This is all a social contagion. Yes, there might be endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment that are feeding into it. Maybe there is somewhat of a biological basis for people feeling like some aspect of the gender dysphoria, as we call it, but mostly it's a social contagion. and a corporate construct meant to sort of con and dupe people into succumbing to big pharma. That's my view on things anyway. And I work with plenty of people who share that view, but I'm also open to helping people who have different views. I've been asked, it's funny, like people come to these meetings and they're like, this isn't some kind of religious thing for you, or this is a political thing. And it's like, no, I'm pretty middle of the road and very open-minded when it comes to matters of spirituality. So the main thing, main type of person that I work with is the ROGD parent. I've also had other relatives and loved ones of people who've been affected by the gender craze, such as adult siblings. I would be happy to work with trans widows. And then secondarily, I get a lot of inquiries. I would say the second most common type of inquiry I get is from someone who is working on self-expression. And so oftentimes these are people who have had a shift in their worldview or philosophy, especially with regard to the matters that I talk about on this podcast, and they're not sort of out to their community. I've definitely worked with a lot of people in the LGB community, or I guess it would be more accurate to say the sort of queer community. I don't personally use that term, but that's a term that a lot of people use, people who You know, let's say they're lesbian or gay and a lot of their friends are trans. Maybe they were trans when they were married to a trans person or they have some kind of background of being very involved in the so-called LGBTQ umbrella. And they're figuring out, you know, let's say as a lesbian, how to come forward and express themselves or as a gay person or as the, you know, again, someone who has some sort of community relationship with trans or non-binary identified people. and they're thinking about, how do I find my voice? Or similarly therapists, I do have therapists, counselors, other people in the mental health profession coming to me looking for support with the process of finding their voice, sort of deciding what their own personal coming out process looks like, coming out as gender critical, for example. Now, that's not the only type of expression that people come to me for help with, because I generally have, I would say throughout my time as a therapist and just my general interest and personality, I love to be a support for people when it comes to finding their voice and their expression. So it's not always about these particular issues. But that being said, that is sort of the main thing that people come to me about. And then from there, matters of meaning, purpose, and life direction are often connected with expression. If you are having difficulty expressing yourself, then you might have a hard time knowing what you think. So there can be a barrier for people who feel like they're walking on eggshells in their communities or even in their marriages. There can be a barrier to discovering what do I think, what do I want, what really matters to me, what direction am I going? So that kind of stuff, which, you know, can have some overlap with existential psychotherapy, but I'm doing it more on a consulting basis. But I would say the main thing I do is about communication and expression. So that's where I do a lot of sort of communication skills coaching. And then I do a lot of education for people who need to understand the landscape of the gender crisis better. So that's a bit about who comes to me for consulting. I will say, to be honest, it's really tricky making financial decisions in my position right now. Because there's a part of me that wants to sort of lean in and trust. I've achieved some great things in life by trusting intuition, not always knowing how things are going to pan out, but just taking one step at a time. And my intuition has certainly told me that I need more rest and that I have a certain number of hours per day that I'm able to spend in meetings talking to people and that if I go past that limit, I will pay for it. So, you know, there's part of me that's trying to trust that if I honor that, everything will work out and my life will find sort of a balance and a rhythm. On the other hand, it's like taking this leap, this blind leap of faith into the unknown is scary. And a part of me is going, wow, did I, Did I make a big mistake by making this change? I've just undermined my financial security just, you know, leaning into 100% being a self-employed consultant and not doing therapy, not having, you know, insurance patients on my caseload and things like that. So, you know, certainly if you're a therapist who's thinking about making similar choices. I don't think that I have it all figured out or that I'm really in a position to advise you on what would work for you because this is a new experiment for me. I'm hoping and trusting that these steps will ultimately lead to my health rebalancing and that there will be a natural progression of discovering when I'm ready to work more and if things sort of balancing themselves out. I've definitely had phases in my career where things did seem to naturally balance themselves out. Like, for example, I've had days that I wake up really not feeling well and thinking, how am I going to get through the day? And then all my clients cancel that day. It's like, OK. And for each of them, it was something completely unrelated to anything that could have had to do with how I felt. It was like, kid had an accident or whatever. And of course, I'm not grateful when kids have accidents, but they're usually pretty minor ones, right? the type of interruption that I'm talking about. So that's a little bit about what I'm up to. And just to be completely transparent, part of why I'm putting it forth on this podcast is to say, hey, if you have thought about consulting with me, now's a good time. I have cleared my schedule in some ways. I do feel badly for the fact that I had to let go of my therapy patients, and I know there's an argument to be made like, hey, Stephanie, why did you drop the most vulnerable people in need when you could have done the opposite? You could have kept your therapy patients and dropped your consulting clients. Therapy patients are the ones that are in need. But it's because, as I was saying earlier, of my health instability that I think it's better for those patients to have someone more reliable. I feel more responsible when I'm saying I can't take on the responsibility. Someone else should take on the responsibility of working with really vulnerable patients who need that consistency. And it's actually in my intake documents and all over my website and everything. I think it's even on my Calendly scheduling link. that, hey, I have a health condition. I might need to cancel or reschedule. I have my cancellation policy. I will waive the late cancellation fee one time per party for other people because life happens and that sort of stuff happens to me too. With consulting, I might need to let someone know that I need to take our session by phone so that I can lay down. And I'm also really particular about the hours that I work. And so that I think is everything that I wanted to say today. I'm not used to doing episodes this short, just like I'm not used to doing monologues, but actually there are so many podcasts in the world that are 20 to 30 minutes. It's the length of the average car ride. So I think I'm just going to wrap it up here. Thank you for following along with me on this journey. If you have any questions, please do not email me. Email is like the bane of my existence, even though I use Superhuman and it's great and it saves a lot of time and you can get a month free if you go to sometherapist.com slash superhuman. Superhuman makes me hate email a lot less. I can honestly tell you that. I would rather you schedule a discovery call if you'd like to talk to me. I'm, you know, I will if I get too many discovery calls again, I'll have to shut it down again or turn off the ability to, you know, schedule for free. But that being said, discovery calls are great for any questions you might have, whether you're thinking about working with me, you're looking for a referral, anything like that. I'd rather just meet you in real time and not have to do the email back and forth. It also helps me put a face to the name. And one more thing I did want to say about that. I said I was going to wrap up, but I had another thought, is that when I was in Hawaii in January, right before I got sick again, ironically, I was feeling the best I'd felt in two years in Hawaii, and then I got infected. But when I was there, I discovered one of my core values is synchronicity and serendipity. I think those are synonyms. That's actually been the case for a long time, but I never really articulated it before. My fiance was saying, well, how can that be a core value? It's not something you can control. It's not something you can personally strive to live up to in the same way that honesty or integrity or things like that are things that you can have more control and choice in the matter. And I think, well, yes and no. I do think that there are ways that we can live our lives to maximize for the chances of serendipity and synchronicity. And it has to do with our relationship with time, sort of being in the flow, trusting that inner guidance and syncing up with other people. To me, it helps me feel really on track. And I think we live in a world that is more asynchronous than ever. I mean, literally, I am recording this right now in a room by myself on a Wednesday afternoon, and you are listening to this at some other time. This is asynchronous communication. Texting, emailing, even sending video messages, which I do like. as well as podcasts and social media, it's all asynchronous communication. And I think that's another element, just like we talk about how it's text-based or it's two-dimensional or whatever, it's through a screen. But I think that asynchronicity is yet another feature of modern life that adds to the way that it makes us feel disconnected from ourselves, each other, and the natural world. I personally, as I mentioned recently in my conversation with Derek Jensen, I am nostalgic for a different era. And one of the things I'm nostalgic for about that era is that the rhythms of our lives were much more synced up. The rhythm of sunrise and sunset, the hours of the day, the seasons of the year, and the fact that if there was a birth or a death, a wedding or a funeral or a holiday, Everyone stopped what they were doing and did it together. Plus there was music and dancing and other rituals to synchronize people's bodies and minds and even heart rhythms in time and space. And I think that we need that as people. So all of that is to say that those are things that I long for, that I would like to be able to create more of in my life. I think they're conducive to health and harmony and to being alleviated from loneliness, which is an epidemic right now. And that's part of why I detest email. That's part of why I would rather you schedule a meeting if you want to talk to me than email or literally try to get in touch with me through any other text-based medium. If you have something to say about this podcast, by all means, please leave it in a YouTube comment. I would love that because those comments You know, they encourage other people to watch the videos and to engage with you. They increase my search engine optimization on YouTube. So please leave a YouTube comment. Please leave a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, your podcast platform of choice. And please engage my locals community if you'd be so kind as to join. But please don't try to email me or DM me or anything like this because it just makes my brain exhausted. And if you really feel like you want to talk to me, just visit my website, stephaniewyn.com. You can currently book a free 15 minute discovery call to ask your question or to talk about what it might look like to work together. Or if you need more time, you can just book the time right then and there. All right. Thank you so much for listening and supporting this show. Really appreciate all the attention that this has gotten, all the support, all the kind words that have come in. And all right, until next time. I hope you enjoyed this episode of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist podcast. To check out my book recommendations, articles, wellness products, guest episodes on other podcasts, consulting services, and lots more, visit sometherapist.com or follow me on Twitter or Instagram at sometherapist. If you'd like to go deeper, join my community at somekindoftherapist.locals.com. Members can dialogue with other listeners, post questions for upcoming podcast guests to respond to, or ask questions for me to respond to in exclusive members-only Q&A live streams. To learn more about the gender crisis, watch our film, No Way Back, the reality of gender-affirming care, at nowaybackfilm.com. Special thanks to my producers, Eric and Amber Beals at DifferentMix, and to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, Half Awake. If you appreciate this podcast and want more people to find it, kindly take a moment to rate, review, like, comment, and share on your platforms of choice. Of course, just because I am some therapist doesn't mean I'm your therapist. This podcast is not a substitute for medical advice. If you need help, ask your doctor or browse your local therapists online. And whatever you do next, please take care of yourself. Eat well, sleep well, move your body, get outside, and tell someone you love them. You're worth it.