You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Swell AI Transcript: 165. Deb Fillman.mp3
Deb Fillman:
And these constraints can result in these poorly executed programs that don't even meet the needs of the students who really would need them. And now it's becoming a political football. They're going to cut the mental health programs. What do we do? Oh, no, we're going to have to raise taxes some more to pay for them. And we're not talking about the right issue, which is, do they work? Are they necessary or should we do away with them? Is there a better way to help students who need help rather than generalizing it across the whole population? And then when you factor in that they're blurring the lines for teachers, so the teachers now have all these responsibilities to minister to the needs and shuffle kids in and out of the, you're going to therapy now. Oh, we were right in the middle of our lesson, but okay, bye. And now what do I do about this kid missing half the lesson? because they had to go to group. This is turning teachers into sort of adjunct counselors, assessors of mental health, observers of mental health. This is a lot to ask of a teacher who's got their hands full just trying to make sure the kids can read, write, and do math. It's just leading to more burnout on the side of the teachers too. You must be some kind of therapist.

Stephanie Winn: Today, I have the pleasure of welcoming back to the show Deb Fillman. She is the host and founder of The Reason We Learn, a YouTube channel and Substack publication dedicated to exposing what's happening in education and empowering parents to think clearly, ask better questions, and take charge of their children's learning. Deb has previously appeared on my podcast way back on episode number 36, Is American Education Broken? with Deb Fillman. And I also appeared on The Reason We Learn two years ago in an episode titled, Are We Pathologizing Childhood and Adolescence? So I'm glad to have Deb and her expertise on education back on the show today. We're going to talk about mental health services in schools. Sounds like a good thing. Might not be all it's cracked up to be. And I'm also going to give her an opportunity to pitch some resources that might be valuable for parents looking for education alternatives. So, Deb, welcome. Great to have you back here.

Deb Fillman: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. And I appreciate the opportunity to pitch the resource of the new tutoring center that I started with some other tutors. It's called Kajito Learning Center. And we help students in grades three through 12 go beyond the standard curriculum with live, small group online courses and private tutoring. We focus on subjects like writing, logic and literature, things that actually build critical thinking and communication skills, not just box checking or busy work. And everything we do is customizable, agenda free and designed to challenge kids in the best way. For those parents or caregivers who are looking for more meaningful learning for their children, especially over the summer, please check us out at CogitoLearningCenter.com where we've got some great summer courses available right now for registration.

Stephanie Winn: That's great. And I'll include that in the show notes. And I think you said your resources are both for families who are entirely homeschooling, but also for families who just want to kind of supplement their kids' education. That's correct.

Deb Fillman: So we can be very flexible for those who want things after school or on weekends. This is designed to be a true enrichment center, so however your child is being educated currently, we want to make sure you can go beyond the standard curriculum if you feel like that would be beneficial for your child.

Stephanie Winn: Awesome. Well, I'm glad to make that resource available to our audience, so we'll definitely include that in the show notes. And, you know, if there's more you want to say about Kajito throughout the show today, I'm sure you'll go ahead and let us know how those resources help. But what I'm really excited to dive into out of all the different areas of expertise that you have, there's overlap between our interests when it comes to the intersection of education and mental health. And I want to sort of frame this discussion by saying my first internship, actually my pre-internship internship if you will, my practicum while I was in grad school was a placement in an elementary school. I wouldn't have chosen it, it actually wasn't my top pick, but you don't always get your top pick in those situations. And so it's been interesting mentally preparing to talk to you about this issue, thinking about what my mindset was about those services back then as a baby therapist. Wondering how much my own view on these issues has changed and wondering how much the services have changed and sort of the whole ethos and culture around mental health services in schools. So my background is the mental health side, yours is the education side. And I know we're both very skeptical of what's going on in institutionalized education and mental health today. So where should we begin?

Deb Fillman: Well, I think it might be helpful to go back to, I'm not sure what year that was, but let's say we were to go back to just 10 years ago, as an example. We were in the thick of talking about whether we were over-diagnosing ADHD. So the big discussion then was, are we pathologizing behavior in general in schools? We weren't calling it mental health. We were calling it behavior. So if a student wouldn't sit still, was talking out of turn, et cetera, they were often being referred. and more often than ever before in history, being diagnosed with something that was sort of new for a lot of people, ADHD. Not that it was literally new, just the prevalence of the diagnosis. And of course, that was defended by saying, well, we're looking for it now. We're simply identifying it now. It was always there, but now we're identifying it. And I think justifiably, a lot of people, including people in your profession, were skeptical. Is it really happening with this child, or is this child simply developing normally for them as an individual? So in other words, we forget sometimes with the standardization that is school, that there's no such thing as a standard kid. Children develop quite normally, but on radically different paths. And so if one is more comfortable sitting still in a classroom for longer periods of time than another, that doesn't mean they're not broken than the other one is. And so there was discussion about whether we were pathologizing behavior. And one of the reasons there was so much concern is the diagnosis tended to come with a prescription for drugs. And again, justifiably, a lot of parents were concerned. Should I really be drugging my child? Then there were schools who were saying, you need to or we're going to have a problem. And there was pressure brought to bear. And I think there was enough pushback that there was a little bit of a lull. So in other words, people said, OK, let's stop doing that. Stop overdiagnosing the ADHD. And then what I noticed as an observer of education is that didn't last very long. And what seemed to quickly replace it was like a new label. So rather than saying we're screening for ADHD or behavioral issues, there were also diagnoses of ODD, which is very controversial. Some people don't even think it exists.

Stephanie Winn: And that's oppositional, just for listeners who don't know, oppositional defiant disorder.

Deb Fillman: Right. And it's quite controversial. And I think it became more popular because educators were using it, not because therapists were using it. If a student, again, behaved in a way that was contra the needs of the classroom or the school, they could be branded oppositionally defiant when in fact maybe they just shouldn't have been in that school or maybe they had some other issue going on. And that might get missed. A lot of dyslexia got missed. and labeled as a behavior problem. So the saddest part of all of this is that they weren't necessarily listening to the students. It was, let's find what the broken piece is and fix it, very often with a drug, instead of trying to get to the bottom of, why is the student acting out? This student. They were looking at the behaviors and saying, the behaviors don't align with standardized behaviors. That's wrong. And so then, again, you might think it's a good development. They said, ah, we need to listen to the students more. Maybe there's a mental health issue. But again, maybe it's not a mental health issue. Maybe their behavior is reflecting some kind of communication need. that they want to communicate something to us. They don't necessarily have the vocabulary, depending on their age. Maybe they don't have the emotional maturity. Maybe they don't have the trust level in the teacher or the other adults in the school or the other kids. And now that's being labeled very often as some kind of an anxiety disorder or some other kind of mental health problem. And what I am noticing is that schools are increasingly going on fishing expeditions looking for labels. looking for something to put on the behavior rather than new ways to listen to the students. And it's hard to discern because let's say, well, we're screening. That sounds like listening, doesn't it? Screening, we're going to ask questions and we'll have the students fill out questionnaires. So it seems like you're listening. But think about how people write questionnaires and how easy it is to tilt or slant a questionnaire to get desired answers. or to, you know, even accidentally infuse agenda into a questionnaire or a screening tool. And now that a lot of the screening tools are being made by third parties, corporations, people who stand to make a lot of money if school systems adopt these tools. It's even more concerning that we might be dealing with some agendas that are not necessarily about truly listening to individual children and giving them what they need, and more about getting the program into the school, or at least getting the administrators and the school districts to be able to say, we're doing something about this problem. And, you know, it is pretty common that crisis is used to sell surveillance. Whether you're talking about terrorism, the war on terrorism, and now we need more surveillance and there's a crisis, or we have a mental health crisis, we need these screenings. We need this level of surveillance universally across all the students. When we use words like crisis, people get scared. And when people are scared, they don't always think critically about what the proposed solution is. So that's what I'm seeing happening in school right now, is you have kernels of truth about, let's say, post-COVID anxiety levels in children, social challenges that they maybe missed out on social interaction, and so they might feel a little bit of social anxiety. Maybe they became more reliant on screens, so they're not doing all that well in person. You get the gist. So there are kernels of truth that there might be some challenges, but That does not necessarily mean that the solution of universal screening, universal programs aimed at mental health placed in the school, which is supposed to be a place where students are learning academic subjects and so forth, is the proper solution. So that's where my concern is. I think we have potentially a real problem, but we are using maybe a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito. And I don't mean to minimize problems of mental health in individuals. I just think that to say that it's across millions of students is probably overstating it.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, you've raised several important points. And in a moment, I'm going to want to get into what is actually happening in schools. You know, if we if we had a camera and could see what services look like and how they're structured, because that's something I actually don't fully understand. I don't know how different it is now than 13 years ago was when I had that particular practicum placement. So I don't know how much it's changed in terms of what those services are looking like, how they're structured. But one thing you're talking about is surveillance and these screening tools. Now, I don't know if, you know, does the kid get referred to someone on campus, off campus, if some sort of flag goes off with the screening tools. But one thing I've heard you raise, it's a very salient point, I've heard you make it, I think I've made similar points, are that, first of all, school's not an appropriate setting to get into areas of vulnerability because many kids need to be able to compartmentalize in order to flourish in school, both intellectually and emotionally. Even if these are kids who do struggle with some kind of emotional problems, having cognitively challenging tasks can be a welcome relief. And focusing excessively on monitoring one's mental health can actually be a detriment to mental health. And this might sound counterintuitive, but it's based on what we know about the brain. We know that depression and anxiety, which can be lumped under the broad category of neuroticism, generally correlates with a mental state of being excessively ruminative or self-focused. And so when you're learning something outside of yourself, you're not thinking about yourself, you're thinking about the world, you're thinking about subject matter. So that's just one reason that having that boundary and that compartmentalization can be good for students' mental health and where I worry about the boundaries here. There's also the boundaries of what is the role of a teacher? What is the role of an administrator? What is the role of a parent or a therapist? And I can tell you as someone who has spent most of my career as a therapist in settings where people were free to come to me during their free time that I have a lot of ethical considerations when it comes to therapy being mixed up with things that are required of a person. I think it's very important to be clear if therapy is like court mandated or something because of let's say a crime. Now that has its own kind of unique set of rules. But outside of there being some kind of legal requirement that someone seek mental health services, I think that consent is super important when a person's being emotionally vulnerable. Revealing their inner world, their thoughts, their history to another human being needs to take place within a structured environment where There's guarantee of confidentiality and free will. So everything being kind of mixed up and these lines being blurred about a place of learning and a place where your peers are and where your teacher who you want to get good grades is there, that being mixed up with some quasi-therapeutic language or activities just has, you know, it feels very anti-therapeutic to be honest to me. So those are just like a few of the alarm bells that start to go off for me when you start describing these things. And I want to give you an opportunity to respond before I ask you to clarify exactly what services are actually taking place.

Deb Fillman: Well, I mean, everything you you named are you covered it really from the environment being one that has an air of authority. So the student feels. Justifiably, again, they must. that they aren't being asked to consent to this surveillance. And when I get into how they do it, you'll understand why. But even so, the pressure of being in an environment where you're supposed, first of all, you have to be there. We have compulsory attendance. You need all kinds of excuses to be absent from school. And then you don't really, as a student, especially younger students, not high school students, middle school and below, you don't feel like you can say no. It's just not a thing that's done in school. So the child is not being asked to consent. And often the mental health supports or the wellness, mental wellness kind of activities that go on happen within the classroom amongst your peers. Add to that this thing called restorative justice, which I've talked about in some of my shows where they sort of therapize the discipline system. So if somebody has been bullying you or you've had a run-in in the hall and a little, you know, tussle with somebody, and sometimes even if it got violent, rather than disciplining the perpetrator or perpetrators both, if they feel like they're both equally culpable, they'll have to sit down with each other and have a conversation and share with each other how they feel. So you may be forced to sit with your bully. and listen to how your bully feels, or vice versa, you know, be like forced to engage with someone that you'd rather avoid, like the plague, which in and of itself can be sort of traumatizing, but they're acting like, no, this is all about supporting the mental health of all these children. So your concern about boundaries and just in terms of the location, where the therapy or even the screening is taking place, the counseling is taking place, and the fact that it, doesn't have the air of being voluntary, or even the reality of being voluntary, and then that there are these tasks they have to do, these cognitively challenging tasks, that they may have to do either immediately before or immediately after getting mired in their feels, and You're absolutely right. They don't have that chance to distance or compartmentalize. And the irony is for those students who have the most challenging situations, say a home life that's an absolute train wreck and they're anxious all the time, school could be a haven in theory. if they did not have to think or talk about that at all, if they needed that sort of support, if they could do it, as you said, after hours, some other place with a therapist that they've chosen, that they feel comfortable with outside the building, so they can keep a sense of distance and make sure they feel in control of that relationship. And school just simply doesn't offer that as an environment. Now, as far as how it's done, For the smallest kids, it can be as simple as a deck of post-it notes when you walk into the classroom, and the student either writes, if they can write yet, they write how they feel, or a bunch of post-its are already up with feelings on them, feelings written down. And there's a chart. And the first thing the child might do is come in and put how they feel that day on the feelings chart. with their name, without their name, that's up to them. But, you know, everybody sees what people are putting up. So it's not private. And then the idea is that they justify it by saying, well, now the teacher knows how the students are individually feeling and we can, you know, can respond to how that child is feeling that day. Imagine if you came into work and the first thing you had to do was publicly display how you feel inside to everyone around you. Even if you were going to lie about it, it's still that pressure of now I have to think about do I want to tell the truth? Do I want to lie? Why would I want to lie? It's a lot of pressure to put on a small child when they're about to learn. The justification used is the children can't learn unless they are in a good headspace, then they feel good. That is false. That is just false. There's no research that supports that. In fact, as you pointed out, the opposite may be true. It may impede their learning if they're focusing so much on, you know, their feelings. And if they haven't had that space and distance time, let's say on the bus getting to school or on the ride to school or whatever, just go, all right, I'm getting mentally prepared to not feel the things. So getting them back into that place, it can be problematic. Now that's for the smallest kids. And we start getting, and sometimes the teacher will fill out a survey observing the class. So there are questionnaires by different companies. And the teachers are not necessarily trained as you are in observing people's behavior through that therapeutic lens. So they're giving their assessment based on what they see in the classroom and answering these questions written for the teacher, but think about what they might be projecting into the student's behavior. especially if the behaviors are nonverbal. So there's a lot of room for projection. There's a lot of room for the teacher's own bias. And then that's gonna be recorded and attached to that student and follow them around for years. Then maybe the next teacher gets it and so on. Now, all students, this is a big controversy, all students entering public school right now start off at tier one. If you're familiar with the tiers of counseling supports, Tier one is we survey, we check out how you're doing. It used to be we don't do that unless there's a reason to do it, sort of probable cause. You know, something looks amiss. We've observed over weeks or months that something is, you know, the child seems distressed. We will now move them to tier one and do sort of an intake kind of a thing. We'll assess what's going on or maybe bring in the counselor or the social worker to do that. Now they're treating all children as needing this assessment universally. And so, you know, it's like saying antibiotics work great on someone with an infection. Let's give everybody prophylactic antibiotics. You just, you wouldn't do that. So, I mean, it's not a perfect analogy, but there you go. And so they'll assess, and it's amazing what you can dig up when you're looking for it. And so then they find whoever they find, and those students may get referred to sort of tier two level supports. Now maybe they go to the counselor. This is still happening within the building. This is still happening in the school. And the parent is supposed to be notified tier two and above. Is it always happening? Not so much. So they're supposed to notify, but they don't necessarily need to get permission. If the parent explicitly says you may not, then they can't. But if they go to a meeting with a counselor a few times before reaching the parent, before getting the parent to say no, they can go ahead and do what they want to do based on their in loco parentis status. And it takes the parent explicitly saying you may not to stop it. And that can be challenging because now you have to count on your child coming home and telling you that this is happening, or a teacher or somebody else well-meaning at the school saying this is happening. And it doesn't always happen. It's supposed to, but there's not really a restriction saying they must. So now you're counting on the ethics of the people handling this. High-profile situations have been where students have been interpreted to be behaving in non-gender conforming ways and taken into the counselor and then, okay, we won't tell your parents or they were saying we're not going to tell the parents even if the child didn't ask. And next thing you know, the child, we don't know, did the child initiate? Did the counselor initiate? It's hard to know which came first, the chicken or the egg in terms of this gender confusion. So these are the kinds of things that can happen right there in the school and the counselors within the school have a different code of ethics than people outside the school. I shouldn't say code of ethics, the ethical standards they're held to are different. The ethical standards you're held to as a practitioner outside the school are much higher. much higher. Within the school, the informed consent stuff is, because of the in loco parentis status of the school and the qualified immunity of everybody within the school, the standards are not as strict. So that's what parents are very concerned about. That coupled with the new sort of public-private partnerships of these giant corporations that have mental health programs and surveys and data collection and aggregation programs, people are starting to get worried that this is becoming sort of a cash cow to diagnose and medicalize and, you know, the the mental health of millions and millions of American children, you know, using the claim that they can't learn unless they're perfectly mentally well all the time. which is just false. It's just not true. There are children who manage to learn in war-torn regions where they have constant anxiety, like very real danger, 24 hours a day, and they're still managing to learn. I'm not saying it's ideal, and they probably would learn better without that level of anxiety, but this idea that they can't, that you're just incapable, is false.

Stephanie Winn: And it can cause anxiety to feel like you are under a microscope and have to have this awareness of this abstract internal state. I mean, some of what you're talking about is developmentally inappropriate, even setting aside all the other ways that it's inappropriate, because Learning to regulate emotions early in childhood doesn't necessarily have to do with abstract feeling words so much as recognizing when you're hungry or tired or jealous of a toy or, you know, I mean, kids need to be taught basic awareness of their bodies. And I think that's where a lot of it could begin and end. So let's kind of recap. So level one is now the standard, or tier one, every American public school student is automatically at tier one, which means they're subjected to these screenings. And so the screenings are like on a computer where they have to fill out some questions or… The younger they are, the more likely it is to be done by a teacher or a professional who either works for the company that runs the screening or some kind of a

Deb Fillman: quasi mental health professional. Could be a school counselor, could be a social worker, could just be a district administrator. But they'll run the screening sometimes with just observing the children and sort of taking notes. And those questions can be things like, you know, makes eye contact, you know, shares with other, you know, like these kinds of questions that don't necessarily speak to mental health half the time. They speak to, you know, has friends in the class. You know, I mean, the kids are different. It's not a sign that you have a mental health issue if you're very shy. If you don't have a lot of friends in class, that could be your temperament. That could be a host of things that you'd have to know so much more about the individual. But to observe does not have friends in class, checkmark. If that's going to then be interpreted or run through a filter that comes out the other end that says anxiety may be indicated, social anxiety, or you know, high fear levels or something, who knows how they do it. I haven't seen the output on the other side. I've simply seen questions, but the questions are bizarre. Other questions might be about their parents, right? How many times your parents fight at home? This is when they're asking the children themselves, which usually starts, you know, fifth, sixth grade and above, where the students are able to fill these things out. Now, again, some parents have found out about these and said, I opt out. I do not want my child participating in this. And in some states, they recognize and respect that more than others. Many times I've heard from parents have contacted me and said, I signed the opt-out. I was adamant about it. And my child came home and told me they were forced to fill this out anyway, that they didn't have a choice. Then the parent goes in and says, how dare you? Oopsie, we made a mistake. So there seems to be some kind of incentive to get as many of these filled out as possible, even if you have to, you know, oopsie, we made a mistake. We didn't see your opt out. You know that. I mean, why make parents opt out? They should make them opt in. Do you want this would be a better question. Not, you know, you have to tell us if you don't. And they'll send something home in an email saying, we're going to do this. And unless you opt out, it's happening. So if the parent misses it, that's going to happen no matter what.

Stephanie Winn: It seems to me like the common denominator with all the questions that you've mentioned so far is that they're identifying students who might be particularly vulnerable. I'm not hearing any of these as indicators that a student has a mental health problem requiring treatment, necessarily. But that is what they have in common, right? If your parents are fighting at home, if you don't have many friends at school, if you're not great at approaching teachers to advocate for yourself, you know, what do all these things have in common? You might be vulnerable. And that's where it starts to feel predatory, exploitative.

Deb Fillman: Right. It used to be when I was first teaching, we're talking back in the early 90s, none of this existed. And we were taught in my teaching program to be really good observers of individual students. to, it would take longer, certainly, you'd have to watch them and you'd have to, you know, tune into them every day and ask them questions. But if you suspected that a child was vulnerable in a way that they might need help, you would then escalate that to somebody, you know, within the school who might be able to help. But actually, in many cases, you'd go to the parent first. because the parent knows best, that was, we were talking, the parent knows the child better than you ever could. There could be something like their cat just died and they're having a really hard time getting over it. You would never know that. So you might be accidentally referring somebody for counseling who's just grieving the loss of a pet, the loss of a loved one, that they aren't necessarily talking about it at school. And that happened to me a couple of times where I would, check in with the parent and say, hi, you know, I've noticed that your child has seemed a little down and I just want to make sure that there's nothing that I could do, you know, to help. If there's anything I can do, I want to help. If not, I'll, you know, I'll butt out. But I wanted you to know to have the perspective I have being in the classroom with your child all day, this is what I'm seeing for what it's worth. Now the parent can do whatever the parent wants to do or say thank you for letting me know I wasn't aware or yes, actually it would really be meaningful if you could help my child work through, you know, help them find a book about losing a pet. Who knows, right? And that the reason I brought up loss of a pet is that happened to one of my students. Now, if you were just observing this child, you would have thought something hard. I mean, it was it is horrible to lose a pet, but she had a really hard time getting over it, like maybe harder than average, let's say, because it took, you know, a few weeks that she was really down and not engaging with stuff. But that's what it was. That's what it was. She was just grieving and really struggling with the whole finality of her pet's life. And that is a serious thing, but does it require… You know, therapy, I'm not sure. You'd be a better judge of that than I am. But all it took was a call to her parents, and then we worked together and tried to cheer her up and such. So I just would worry about these questionnaires and even some of these observational write-ups, sending kids off for some kind of treatment. And something that I didn't mention, but I thought of it when you were speaking, is on the one hand, you have the potential for the child to become sort of more anxious, more neurotic, et cetera. But the flip side of that are the children who can become, I don't know how to put this, but get a sense of self-importance and a sense of, you know, ooh, this is a way to get attention. This is a really cool way to have a certain kind of clout or social credit. in this environment, if I have a thing that makes me sort of invulnerable, my vulnerability, my label makes it so you can't bully me, you can't say mean things to me, you can't expect a lot from me in terms of my work product. And what I'm seeing is kind of both sides of that. I'm seeing some kids become terribly anxious and even Worst-case suicidal because they're so ruminative as you put out pointed out they can't get out of their own head and that's very dangerous and then the other side I'm seeing some really frightening levels of you know Almost narcissistic like behavior of how you know, you can't say this to me. You can't do that. You can't you You know, lots of rules for how other children behave because of my mental illness. They're wearing it like a badge. I've had my own children be on the receiving end of that sort of thing, where one of my children was pulled into a school counselor's office on behalf of another child. This is when she was 10 years old at a local charter school and they said which are public schools But public charter and it what happened was this little boy was following my daughter around Like a second pair of underwear. I think I've told you this story Yeah, and she was super frustrated, but she was trying to be nice and polite and saying please go away. Please leave me alone, whatever Well, he wouldn't and then next thing she knows she's being pulled in without my knowledge without my consent to a meeting with the counselor with the boy in the room and He had asked for her to be, the child had asked for my daughter to be pulled in because it was so hurtful that she was excluding him from her friend group. And the counselor was actually pulling my daughter in to say, can't you find it in your heart to be his friend? Now, think about this. This little girl is asserting herself and saying, I'm sorry, I want my personal space. Please leave me and my other friends alone and, you know, go away. And as a parent, I would be, you know, especially if she was as polite as she could be. I'm proud of that. I want my daughters to set boundaries and say, I want this relationship. I don't want this relationship. I think most parents of any child want that. And instead, she's being told, you know, you're being mean. because you're not being friends with this little boy. And she got in the car that day, and I've never, my generally happy, bubbly little kid was irate. I'm never going back to the school. I hate it there. This is crazy, mom, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I had to call the school because I wanted to make sure she wasn't exaggerating. You know, sometimes kids say something. So I said, can you clarify some things for me and make sure I'm understanding correctly what happened? And they told me what happened, and I said, OK, wow, like she told the truth, 100 percent. Oh, yes, we absolutely did do this. And this is why we we care about everybody here. And we're inclusive and everybody belongs and we don't have best friends here. And I'm like, you know, like you are absolutely violating my child's personal boundaries. And I just laid down the law. I said, you will never, ever do something like this to my child again, ever. And this counselor was so taken aback, like Well, and that told me, that was kind of my first sign, and this is seven years ago, that was my first sign that something was deeply wrong with how we talk about, you know, all these issues as far as, you know, his mental health is suffering is what she said. His feelings are hurt. So that's what I meant by it can give them a sense of power I call it cry-bullying, actually, over others, because they're now tapped in. Kids are smart. They catch on pretty quick, like, oh, that's how this works over here. If I have a problem, there's lots of attention and focus on me. And there are those students who will eat that up.

Stephanie Winn: Are you a therapist in need of continuing education that's not over-the-top woke? Check out my colleague Lisa Mustard's pod courses. All of her podcourses are approved by the National Board for Certified Counselors. Right now, Lisa is offering my listeners an incredible deal. Get all 27 podcourses for only $44. That could meet almost all of your continuing education needs for the year. visit lisamustard.com slash podcourses and use code SOMETHERAPIST to take $5 off of her $49 podcourse bundle. Again, use code SOMETHERAPIST at lisamustard.com slash podcourses. I'll include that link and coupon in the show notes for your convenience. Alright, now back to the show. I want to talk about the consequences of all this. But first, in the name of inclusivity and anti-bullying, we've gone way too far. You know, I was bullied in elementary school, and that looked like fearing for my physical safety. That looked like being called slurs. That looked like being trapped in a bathroom stall with girls pounding on the door, making me feel like they were going to bust the door down while I was on the toilet. and having lotion poured on top of my head, okay? That was actual bullying. And I think it's pretty clear-cut what counts as name-calling and what counts as threats of violence and acts of violence. And all of this that you're talking about, this dramatic overreach, is done in the name of inclusivity and so-called anti-bullying. But it goes so far. And I'm looking at the developmental consequences. What happens when you provide these kind of perverse incentives? So for one, if a kid can hide behind these things, then they're not learning other ways of actually defending themselves when they need some assertiveness skills. They're learning something passive aggressive and manipulative. They're learning to appeal to people's emotions in a way that's disingenuous and to hide their true motives and potential behind that mask of vulnerability, of pseudo vulnerability. So they're not learning to advocate for themselves if they're using this in a protective way. They're not learning to handle rejection in the case of kids like that little boy who needed to take no for an answer. And then, you know, there's this idea that rejection is a redirection. They're not learning another way. OK, that didn't work. That approach has left me feeling humiliated, excluded and friendless. Maybe I need to learn how to be Funny or charismatic or generous or you know? Something likable and so so what happens when we create these perverse incentives as early as elementary school I'm just worried about how people's personalities will develop because there aren't those kind of natural barriers and guidelines in place that kind of force people to grow grow a pair and grow a personality and

Deb Fillman: That's right. That's exactly right. And I think one of the negative consequences of, you know, sort of over pathologizing normal emotions like, you know, disappointment and, you know, whatever you feel when you're rejected, that kind of hurt and making that into now this person has anxiety or now this person has a mental health problem. First of all, we've completely perverted the term anxiety. You know, any any random, you know, fear or nervousness now is title is labeled anxiety. We're making life itself anxiety inducing for for these kids. And. Too often, they are medicalizing it and prescribing drugs. So they're not only not learning a different way to manage their emotions, which would be developmentally appropriate, as you pointed out. We're not born knowing how to do that. We learn how to do that. So that's gonna be stunted. They won't get the practice. And now we're telling them, here's a pill. So that can become a lifelong crutch. So when are they going to grow up? When will they grow the pair? When is it going to happen? Or are they going to be a young adult or even a middle-aged person who can't get by without whatever it is that they're taking or possibly something stronger? Because real life is going to get a lot more anxiety-inducing than school. So I am genuinely concerned about what happens to this particular generation who are now, you know, tier one in kindergarten and getting, you know, let's gaze at your navel some more all the way through when they graduate or go to college and real life hits them up, you know, what happens? I mean, we joke around about it on the internet. We see, you know, TikToks of people losing it over something small or whatever, but it's really not a joke. Even if half of those are fakes, there obviously is an audience for that, or people wouldn't be doing it. They wouldn't be making those things. Just as there's an audience for all the Instagram, you know, like, you deserve this, and if you feel this, it's just all of that psycho stuff. And I really think it's damaging. I think it is creating a fearful, lonely, you know, hypersensitive generation of people who, or conversely, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, abusive people. And, you know, anybody in the middle is probably like, what's going on? And there are always people who are just kind of well-adjusted in spite of everything. And they probably feel like, what is going on? There's kind of two different flavors of dysfunction. And I think we're making it worse. I'm not saying those things didn't naturally occur without this. Of course they did. But I think we're mass-producing personality disorders and mass-producing a level of anxiety that's artificial. It's not organic. And it certainly will be much worse if times get harder. Let's say the economy got worse or something really bad happened. What are these people going to do? How will they cope? We're not developing real resilience. and yet we're selling these mental health programs saying this will make our student body more resilient. I don't see it. The way it's being implemented, I don't see it. First of all, I'm not sure if you've heard of Dr. Lucy Foulkes. She's a psychologist at University of Oxford. So she's been doing some research arguing that universal mental health lessons like mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy or DBT even, they're doing DBT, delivered to entire classrooms, which is basically what they've been doing, not only fail to produce significant improvements in student mental health, but they worsen symptoms. So if a child had cognitive distortion, as an example, now 10 children have it. we're sort of like mass-producing cognitive distortion. That which does not kill you makes you weaker kind of idea. The rumination you talked about, we're encouraging it across a broader range of students. So the pro-social behaviors they claim to want to encourage are not only not appearing, but we're seeing more antisocial behaviors, strained relationships, you know, the you hurt my feel, this microaggression, that kind of stuff. This this is a slight and that seems to be at least correlated. highly with the universal mindfulness and DBT slash CBT kind of lessons aimed at entire classes all at the same time. There just isn't a one-size-fits-all approach to therapy. And one of the things I do worry about is that those students who genuinely need help, somebody who needs to come to a person like you, for real, might not because they have a bad experience in the school setting or because their parents have no trust anymore for the entire profession of therapy, mental health, et cetera, because of a bad experience in school or because of this feeling of invasion of their privacy, lack of informed consent. The idea, just like some people say, all the teachers are bad and they're, you know, they might think, well, therapy is just bankrupt and there's no point in taking my child to therapy because I've had bad experiences. We saw this with the medical profession after COVID. So I have a very real concern for those students who genuinely need support and they do exist outside of the school setting because too many are getting like a hackneyed version of pseudo therapy inside of school.

Stephanie Winn: I'd like to understand those tier two and beyond, I guess, students, what types of services are being referred to on and off campus. It sure seems like it's becoming increasingly normal to have a couple of social workers on every single campus. Yes.

Deb Fillman: That's right. So tier two is designed to address the needs of students who've been identified specifically as experiencing mild to moderate mental health symptoms or at risk for a given problem or concern. And they would get, let's say, short-term individual and or family therapy sessions. Again, if it's happening in school, it's sort of like identified at school, they will very often try as hard as they can to keep it in-house or at least refer the parents to somebody that they want them to go to. you can go somewhere else, but the pressure is on the parents, and then they have to sort of refer back, they have to report back, because the student has been identified under the government's umbrella, and you try to take that private, and it's very challenging, because if things don't improve on the school's timetable, or if they are still saying something's wrong, you then feel like you're under scrutiny. It's not that you can't go privately, but there is now pressure to keep the school in the loop of what you're doing privately, because they identified it.

Stephanie Winn: I know you're not done answering this, and I want to hear the rest of the answer, but I have to say what it reminds me of is being stopped by a police officer. And I don't know if people listening to this have had this conversation. But it's important to know your rights. If a police officer stops you, you need to ask, am I being detained? Am I free to go? Am I under arrest? You know, there are questions that you deserve the answers to. And if a police officer wants to stop you as you're walking down the street, not committing any crimes, and they want to have a chat about something, you have no obligation to have that conversation unless that police officer tells you that you're being detained and what for or you're being charged with a crime or they have a search warrant or something like that. Right. And so any murkiness around not knowing your rights or understanding the boundaries or having clear communication in that department can lead people to some very anxiety-provoking situations when you haven't even gotten to step one, am I in trouble here? Or am I a free American citizen who's not doing anything wrong and is, you know, this is my life, right? And it feels that way in the school system. It's like, wait, hold on. Am I being detained? Am I under arrest? Am I being charged with a crime? Am I free to, like, this whole sense that, like, you have to go to therapy now is like, What did I do?

Deb Fillman: And the thing is, under this MTSS system, multi-tiered system of support is what it's called. MTSS is the acronym. The tier two targeted supports, as they describe them, are often in group settings. Now, you and I both know that group is not appropriate for everyone. There it takes a very specific kind of therapist and even person receiving therapy to do well in group. And the group composition makes all the difference as well. So like there, there's so much that is challenging about group settings when it comes to any kind of therapy or support, mental health support. And yet we're going to have this inside the building. inside the school, and we're gonna have small group counseling focused on sort of, let's say, social skills, anxiety, anger management. These are the kind of things that they call tier two supports. They'll have check-in and check-out programs, so regular check-ins with a trusted adult. They call it a trusted adult. Did the child say that was their trusted adult? Did the parents say that? No. They will pick from one of these people. And then that person monitors their progress. according to whom? Like who decides what progress looks like, right? And we're now talking also about government schools here. So like who's deciding what progress looks like? There are behavioral contracts for tier two agreements that outline specific behaviors and consequences. And then there's parent-teacher collaboration where they have increased communication and collaboration between school staff and families. As I said before, that sounds nice until you realize that you may not want that relationship. You may not want that collaboration. You may want to go privately outside the building and you've got people wanting to check in, but how's it going? Once your child gets that label of tier two by the school that follows them for the next 70 years, literally, it's in their permanent record. And by permanent, I mean their whole life. It goes all the way to the federal government and sits in a file someplace that when you were 10 years old, you were identified as this. So this is not insignificant, this kind of a label once it gets slapped on your kid. They're provided by school counselors, social workers, or psychologists within the school, these tier two supports. Tier three, so if you're already going tier two, tier three, now we have students with significant, what they call significant mental health needs or severe behavioral challenges. They get one-on-one sessions with a mental health professional, again, inside the school. Family therapy, involving the student's family to address issues that impact the student's well-being, again, according to the school and their hired psychologist, not the one you chose, the one they chose. There's crisis intervention. Immediate support for students in crisis includes assessment, referral to community resources if needed. And then wraparound services is my favorite. Comprehensive, individualized plans that involve multiple services and supports, often coordinated by a team of professionals. If you think you can say no to this, you are delusional. You will now be possibly labeled with abuse or neglect because you don't want your child receiving these school-recommended wraparound services. And then we also have specialized things like self-contained classrooms or alternative education settings if they decide that your child is not capable of being in the mainstream classroom and if you're not capable of pulling them out and hiring a lawyer to justify pulling them out. Because again, you try to withdraw your child after this level of diagnosis. you're definitely in the hot seat. What are you trying to hide? So yeah, they're again provided typically by a team of school-based mental health professionals. And this is where it's so murky because all of these people work for the government in the public school setting. It is very difficult to believe that you're going to get unbiased, child-focused attention, individualized attention, when the incentives are, as you put it, perverse. You're not the customer or the patient.

Stephanie Winn: I keep going back to this feeling of, am I in trouble? And, you know, I, so one of, this is actually connects to some of the concepts that I teach in my course. So my program ROGD Repair is, as anyone who's ever listened to this podcast in the last few months knows, it is for concerned parents of trans identified adolescents and young adults oftentimes in low leverage situations where all you have is your communication and your understanding of the psychology of this cult and how it affects your child's development. And in that course, I cover a lot of related concepts relevant to just parenting adolescents in general, including things like boundaries and consequences. And I think boundaries are really important for adolescents because they need to know what walls are immovable and what is up for negotiation. And it also needs to be clear and differentiated because your adolescents are in a time of pushing their parents away and finding their autonomy. You need to be clear about whether a given boundary or rule is for your sake or their sake or the sake of the people around you. So if you can't do something because of your own limitation, it's important that that be communicated so that your child doesn't hear it as you telling them what they can do. But if it's about what they can and cannot do for their own safety, then you need to be clear about that reason for that as well. Those are very distinct categories. So, you know, these are all the things I think about and talk about, right? And so another skill that I teach when I'm working with people is How to communicate to a child that they have choices and options for how to go about meeting your expectation. So you might have an expectation, a boundary that has to do with your own well-being, such as Let's say the cleanliness of their room because it's your house. Their room is in your house, and maybe they have certain choices about how to decorate and organize their room, but it needs to meet a minimum standard of cleanliness because you don't want to do permanent damage to the carpets in the form of wet towels creating mildew or something like that, right? So you can have a rule of boundary, an expectation that needs to be met, But then your child, especially as an adolescent, needs to know that they do have some options for how to go about meeting that expectation. And they are free to suggest and negotiate with you some options, right? So it could be that your boundary is, we don't leave wet things on the floor because that creates mildew in the carpet. That could be the boundary, right? Now you have options. You can hang your towel on a hook. You can hang your towel on a rod. You can put your towel in the laundry basket as long as it's off the floor. These are right. So and where a lot of parents get into power struggles with adolescents is when they think that their particular way of meeting an expectation has to be the way and they don't give their kids the opportunity to test out their autonomy and their problem solving skills. So what does all this have to do with what you're talking about? Well, again, it's am I in trouble? Have I broken a rule? Have I failed to meet an expectation? Is there something you guys need from me that is causing you to send me through all these hoops that I have to jump through? And if there is something that you need from me to do differently, like, okay, maybe I'm shouting in the classroom and it's interrupting other students' learning. Okay, you need me to stop shouting. Well, then therapy and group and all these things can potentially be options for how to solve the problem, right? So it could be that, hey, we need you to stop interrupting the lesson by making loud noises. Now, you have options. If you feel out of control of this behavior, if you don't know why you're doing this, then we can send you to a therapist who will run some tests and try to figure out if they can understand why you are shouting in the middle of class. If, on the other hand, There's a part of you that knows why you're shouting, and it's not that you have Tourette's or something. It's that, you know, you want attention or you're feeling testy or whatever, you know. Then, you know, maybe there's a part of you that has the self-discipline to just stop doing this, and then we don't have to. Or do you have any other ideas? Do you, the child, student, have any other ideas for how we can meet this expectation that you stop interrupting the lesson? So that would be like an example of communicating. Here's the problem. Here's the boundary that needs to be respected or the expectation that needs to be met. And now from there, We can explore choices and options and negotiate so that everyone's needs can be met. I feel like that's a lot emotionally cleaner. And that is exactly what I'm not hearing in these schools where, OK, there's this vague sense that I've done something wrong, that I'm not meeting people's expectations, which itself is anxiety provoking, right? Like I'm a problem. Okay, but I don't know exactly what I need to change what I need to start doing or stop doing or when the goal is completed or when the expectation is met. And so now I'm having to go through all of these things. And I can either go through it unwillingly, or I can adopt this illness identity and be like, well, I guess I'm the kid with the I'm the neurodivergent kid now, and that's a label. And oh, I could kind of wear it like a badge. And oh, look, people are nicer to me when I, OK, and maybe this isn't so bad. Well, now I'm on my path towards developing a personality disorder because I'm overly identified with being disabled as an identity. And now I'm going to get in my own way of developing the skills I need to succeed in life.

Deb Fillman: Right. And when you add to this the fact that we don't have, especially in the public system, unlimited resources. You know, I'm an abolitionist, so I would like to think we don't have these taxpayer funded things at all, because I think we would do better if everything were private and voluntarily chosen and so on, because the incentives would shift. and the individual would end up being, you know, the client or the customer. But as it is, it doesn't work that way. And so you say, we're going to do this, you know, across the board, MTSS thing, everyone's going to be assessed. So you have the parents are like, no, I don't want this. And then you have the parents say, I want this every day, all the time. And they can't even do a good job of even like distributing it equally at a low level, right? So the implementation ends up being not so great because you've got the budget for all the people. You're going to have to keep that going. When does it end? When are they done? When is the tier two student finished? are they ever finished with treatment? Is the tier three student ever finished with treatment? Are they going to see this through all the way for however many years they're in school? If they get labeled tier three and fifth grade, I mean, that's still quite a few years that you have to make sure those supports are there for them. If they identify with needing this and their parents identify that they need this, and then something happens, a budget cut, or people wake up and realize this is actually quite harmful to most of the students, good luck explaining it to that student and their parents. So you're providing a thing that's not free. It seems free, but it isn't. It's very costly. And it's very difficult to deliver at a high level of quality consistently to thousands of people in a district. People come and go. Therapists get tired. They retire. They don't want to do it anymore. Who knows, whatever. And these constraints can result in these poorly executed programs that don't even meet the needs of the students who really would need them. And so this is, and now it's becoming a political football. They're gonna cut the mental health programs. What do we do? Oh no, we're gonna have to raise taxes some more to pay for them. And we're not talking about the right issue, which is, do they work? Are they necessary? Or are they perhaps, should we do away with them? Is there a better way to help students who need help rather than generalizing it across the whole population? And then when you factor in that they're blurring the lines for teachers, So the teachers now have all these responsibilities to minister to the needs and shuffle kids in and out of the you're going to therapy now. We were right in the middle of our lesson, but OK, bye. And now what do I do about this kid missing half the lesson because they had to go to group or whatever? This is turning. teachers into sort of, you know, like adjunct counselors, assess, you know, assessors of mental health, observers of mental health, administrators of, you know, programs like you go here, you go there. This is a lot to ask of a teacher who's got their hands full just trying to make sure the kids can read, write and do math or any one of those at one time. So it's it's just leading to more burnout on the side of the teachers, too.

Stephanie Winn: I feel inspired to share about the program that I was a part of. So as I said, it was not my top pick. I was scrambling to find a practicum placement during that phase of my grad school experience. And this local elementary school district had an option. It was run by a semi-retired licensed clinical social worker with many years in the field. She was probably close to 70. And I don't know why she did this. I don't know if she hadn't saved enough for retirement and she needed to earn some extra money or if she really felt compelled to just keep giving back. But she didn't seem like she wanted to be there, to be honest. She really didn't seem like she wanted to be there. And I don't know that this really paid. And I don't know how it was funded. I guess it was funded by the school district. You know, the practicum trainees, we weren't paid. We were the lowest of the low. You know, we were still in grad school. And for anyone who's familiar with how getting to become a licensed therapist works, you do practicum, and then after you graduate, then you keep doing internships with various types of supervision, and then you take an exam, and then you get licensed. I took this placement in this elementary school district. I was placed in a particular school. They had a room that was decent enough, an adequate space that I could, you know, have some stuff. And I, you know, if I had more money at the time, I think I would have invested in some play therapy tools, but I kind of had to work with what they had there. And there was this process of just kind of identifying, again, these kids who seemed like they were having some kind of problems in class and pulling them aside. And we were supposed to verify that it was okay with the parents, but there really wasn't great coordination with the parents. And here's the part I really want to shed a light on. The supervision was an absolute joke. So given that we were still in grad school, we were required both to have an independent supervisor that we chose and then also a supervisor associated with the site placement. So my personal supervisor was one of my instructors who I really looked up to, who was very skilled at child and family therapy. And so that was good. But my site supervisor situation was a mess because this older LCSW, who was in charge of the program, was supposed to assign every school-based therapist to a supervisor, and she assigned me to someone who was not qualified to provide supervision. And she basically took advantage of my naivete because I was, you know, this was my first placement. I was still in my 20s. And she had me seeing someone who was a lovely person, but what her job was, was she was a music therapist. And she was trained in Germany. and she had a business in California doing some kind of musical therapy thing not associated with any California-based therapy license. And so she had insight, I'm not saying she had no insight into child psychology, But she was not a licensed professional who was qualified to sign off on my supervision hours. So the person in charge of the program wanted me to get my supervision from this music therapist and then come have her, the head supervisor, sign off as if she had provided the supervision. And when I realized that this was incorrect, she was very annoyed with me. She made me feel like I was creating problems for her. And she guilt tripped me as she, like, went through the motions of doing her job, which was finding me another supervisor. She found me someone. I am trying to remember how this got resolved. There was she found me like one person either before or after that who I don't remember what the issue was, but like also older, also semi-retired, also made me wonder, like, what are you doing here? Because you don't seem to have a passion for the work. You seem really burned out. You seem like let me just zoom out and say, If you are working with grad students, you have to be patient. They are the newest that they will ever be to this. I was like, I was 20 something. I'm not going to sit here and say that I was as mature and gifted at this stuff then as I am now. Of course I wasn't. But I shouldn't have been made to feel that my newness and ignorance, wherever it was, was some kind of flaw that that where people getting impatient and exasperated with me for not knowing things was a reasonable response. It was like looking back, it made me feel so bad about myself, the way that this one person who met with me once or twice seemed to have no patience for where I was at in the learning process. And I'm thinking, why are you supervising brand new interns then if you don't have patients for people who were young and naive? And so the person in charge basically assigned me to one person who was in that position and then and I can't remember the order of events and then this music therapist and, you know, eventually, We resolved it because I was not about to cheat the system. I was not about to submit a falsified document. At the beginning of my career, when I'm just trying to build my credibility, I'm not going to be like, oh, here's something signed off on by the wrong person. No, I want to go through the process and have everything be very official and up to standards. And so eventually we resolved it, but this woman just seemed so annoyed with me for even wanting proper supervision. And so I look back and I'm like, wow, that was… That was a mess. And what if I wasn't smart enough or courageous enough to spot the error and advocate for better supervision? Like, how many things are this messy or worse going on around the country where you have young, naive, new trainee therapists with inadequate or improper supervision who are made to feel that their questions are stupid and so really aren't getting a good education at all.

Deb Fillman: When you realize how the incentives work in these kind of systems, you know, you've mentioned a couple times sort of perverse incentives. It's easy to understand how good people get burnt out and, you know, despite their best efforts, get resentful or frustrated because they're juggling 17 different things. And it's not personal against you, but they're just like, oh, you know, this other thing I have to do. And they probably should exit stage left. And like, this is my cue to leave. But who knows if they're waiting for their pension or whatever they're, you know, they have to wait a certain many years to retire. So that creates its own perverse incentive. But also, In an environment where so much surveillance is going on and so much power over others is given to people in these roles, you can attract a higher than average percentage of people who simply like power. and who simply bristle at the idea that somebody would challenge them in any way. I know when I first started teaching, I encountered something very similar. I was already a teacher. I'd had my, you know, gotten my degree and I had my position, but I had a sort of a supervisory teacher for my first year and I was teaching first grade. And I was doing things I thought were right. And I had, I got pulled aside more times than I care to count and told that I was making other people look bad and or feel bad based on the things I was doing in my classroom, like using phonics. instead of just our whole word reading program. So I, way before sold a story, I was on the, didn't even know as a 24 year old, I was on the front lines of trying to teach reading the right way and being pulled aside and told you can't do this. And you're bothering us, stop doing it. And then I was trying to give extra support to a couple of my students who were profoundly gifted and needed more stimulation. So they decided they didn't wanna go to recess one day so they could go to the library with me and pick books. and I got chewed out for that too. So this was bizarre to me. The people who came after me were people who just seemed to almost get off on telling other people how to do their job because they could, simply because they could. And then if I challenged them, the level of resentment coming back at me was so outsized to any kind of normal emotional reaction that you could imagine. And that was my first hint, I didn't realize until many years later, that sometimes the environment in which you find yourself attracts people. to it because of how those incentives are set up. Again, not all, you'll always have, you know, your good teachers, your wonderful therapists, whatever. But there are enough of those incentives that you'll get a higher than average number. And that's what I'm seeing now in particular with all of these, you know, you'll have the good teachers don't want these responsibilities. Like, I just want to teach. The ones who went into teaching because now it's my turn to be the boss. And those people exist. They don't care. Throw it on them. Give me 25 different responsibilities. I will be terrible at all of them, but I have power galore. So they don't much care until somebody says, you're not really doing the thing. You're not doing it right. You're cutting corners. where you're coloring outside the lines. Now your chief challenges are a little fiefdom, perhaps. So I don't know her particular story, but I'm just throwing that out there as another possibility for why she seemed like she didn't want to be there. It may not be that. She may have wanted to be there and coast. She may have wanted to be there and enjoy whatever the trappings were of there, but not have to actually do the job to the level that it had to be done. And when you're dealing with the mental health of developing minds, little children, other people's children, the ethics of that kind of behavior and power trip are, I mean, we just can't, we can't allow that. I'm sorry. You know, it's bad enough to worry about, is someone teaching my child to read properly? But now when they're tinkering with their brains, with their emotions, with their personal boundaries, their sense of self. when they could potentially be predatory. And I wanted to share a story with you, if you wouldn't mind, that I read today that is a perfect example of how this can go wrong. And this is in a high school setting. A mother posted today on social media that she finally was able to get back her daughter's belongings from the college she attended after she committed suicide. But she had to go to probate court. She did all kinds of things to get her own daughter's belongings back. And in and amongst the belongings were high school letters of recommendation for her daughter to college. And usually those are sealed so parents don't get to see them. Nobody could see them, but her daughter's deceased. And she said, I'm very curious. what was in her letters of recommendation. At first, she thought, I'm going to read, you know, because her daughter was, you know, wonderful. I'm going to read these wonderful glowing recommendations is probably what she got into college. And instead, for the first time in her life as a parent of this child, every single one of the recommendation letters, she first discovered that her child was referred to by the opposite sex pronoun in every single letter and by a different name. This is the first the parent learned of it. And the letter that she posted, she did post the letter for all of us to read. And I just felt like this letter reads like it's so predatory. It's the child's name. I'll leave the person's name out of it. So so-and-so knows what it's like to live between two worlds. He walks the fine line between his desire for the independence his peers enjoy and the expectations of a parent not raised in the same culture. With value systems that don't always align, this person must navigate an additional layer to the challenges faced by other adolescents. Despite this, this person is his own person, one who is passionate about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and who cares deeply about each person's right to be treated with dignity and respect. And this goes on and on. where this is the weirdest recommendation letter I've ever read. This poor mother said, what gives a school counselor, someone who never visited our home, never saw how we lived, the right to make those assumptions, these were assumptions, and then send them to colleges behind our backs? Where is the accountability in a system that allows educators to tell deeply personal and one-sided stories about a family without having ever had a real conversation with the parents. This is not just a violation of trust. It's a failure of the entire system, one that claims to protect children while cutting their parents out of the most crucial conversations of their lives. That's an extreme example, obviously. And you work with your course. You work with parents who are facing some of these issues. This mother didn't have a chance. She was never given the opportunity to participate in any of these counseling sessions or anything that went on in this high school. And her daughter became a he without her ever knowing about it, and went off to college, and clearly any issues that there were were not resolved because this poor child ended her own life. And the mother never knew why, never had any idea what was going on. And I'm just getting tired of hearing stories like this, frankly, because the assumption too quickly is, well, the parents were rejecting, the parents were this. If they didn't even know, how could they reject? How could they say anything? And I always thought that one of the key components of therapy for an individual, especially a young person, a minor in particular, and this person was a minor when it started, is to bring the family unit together whenever possible to try to help that student or help that patient through helping the family. The idea that you're going to cut them away from the most important support system they'll ever have and treat them completely separately, that just seems unconscionable to me.

Stephanie Winn: That is such a sad story. And there are all kinds of reasons that these kids make up and that they get from their peers and media about why they consciously believe they don't want to talk to their parents about these things. And part of what I do in my course and my coaching with these parents is help them understand the unconscious reasons that the kids don't really wanna talk to their parents about these issues. So I sometimes depict this as sort of 10% of the iceberg is above the water. That's the part we can see, that's the conscience and, or excuse me, the conscious part. And there's 90% below the surface that we can't see. So consciously this kid might have a narrative of, oh, my family would, Reject me. My parents wouldn't accept me, right? But unconsciously, there can be fear that exposing this very shaky belief about themselves to someone as rooted in reality as, let's say, dad would make it evaporate. And then they'd be faced with all the vulnerability that they were using this thing to mask. So that's a really tragic story. And the kid never even hashed out that conflict with their parents consciously. And I think if they had, they could have really grown from it. And I too lament the fact that therapists have largely abandoned our duty to families. My license type is marriage and family therapist. Not all therapists have that license type. Some are LPCs, licensed professional counselors, licensed clinical social workers, doctors of psychology. We have different license types. But I think it's worth considering that At the time that I began pursuing my license, LMFT, licensed marriage and family therapist, was the most common type of license in California, at least. And if you look at the profession of marriage and family therapy, the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy was founded in the 1960s. And in the 60s, many more Americans were married and in families. And now everything's so atomized. People are having children unmarried. They're having fewer children. They're divorcing more. And there's so much emphasis on the individual. And I think you and I are both individualists very much in our spirit and our design. But I think one can be a radical individual. One can highly value freedom and autonomy. and still have a lot of respect for the institution of marriage, for the importance of family. And it's like, what has happened to the psychotherapy profession when we're dividing people more than uniting people, when we're not bringing people together with those they're having conflict with to hash it out? And that's where it should really be hashed out, right? Not with your daughter being forced to be friends with some Stinky little boy who keeps following her around and not taking no for an answer and who who will probably end up an incel You know like that's not the conflict that needs to be hashed out face to face. We don't need restorative justice in elementary and middle and high schools But we do need for these teens who are going to their frickin school counselors with savior complexes saying, oh, poor me, I'm an oppressed trans kid and my parents would kick me out if they knew and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We need those. Those counselors and social workers to have a degree of humility and not just take that story verbatim as the truth and of story. We need counselors to have humility and yes to focus on our duty to the family and to reconciling these conflicts and to exposing these false ideas to light of day through connecting with with the people who actually love you and hearing what they have to say.

Deb Fillman: It's unfortunate that a lot of people do think that, you know, trying to hold families together or respecting institutions like family, you know, parenting and so forth is somehow contradicts individual autonomy or individualism. I don't think so. I think that even an individual with lousy parents, and I am one, I had really, you know, at least my mother in particular. It was important for me to do everything I possibly could to explore avenues to having a relationship with my mother, having something resembling a healthy relationship with her or any kind of relationship that wasn't totally toxic. That simply cutting her out of my life was going to be the last resort. And thankfully, when I was going to therapy over the years to deal with that, I never encountered anybody who disagreed with that. It was always about, this is in your best interest. We're not worried about your mom, per se. where we wanna make sure that you don't have regrets someday, that you make a decision that is really best for you. And if that works out to be something that's good for your family, great, but it wasn't just, you know, cut her out of your life because she's, you know, toxic. And listen until I was absolutely sure. that that was the right thing to do, that was not recommended. And I feel like we've gone in the other direction now where parents are default cut out on the presumption that they're toxic or abusive or would be or could be or, you know, we're like gross generalizing some very bad parents across all parents. and then letting parents back in on a case by case basis. I think it's backwards. I think it's absolutely backwards. And like I said, even if the parent is pretty rotten, we have some safety nets for that. There are ways to identify that and protect children from the worst of that. Does it always work? No. But I think the number of people who end up cutting their parents or cutting their family completely out of their lives prematurely and then potentially struggling to find a way back, which can have other negative repercussions, is probably on the rise, like significantly on the rise. And I don't think that that's pro-individual. I really don't. Especially if you consider that people who are cut off, and one of the things that abusers do, and cults, is cut people off from those who love them and will reality check them, will gut check them, and tell them the truth even when it might not be a popular thing to say or a desired thing to hear. And cutting them off from that and saying, I'm your mom now, or we're your family now, or we're your trusted adult now, that can be predatory. And I think there's a pretty high risk of that going on where there's a giant pile of money that certainly isn't enough to give everybody what they truly need, but it's more than enough to pay for a lot of people that have jobs who maybe wouldn't have them otherwise. And then you have a captive audience of millions of children. The risk is too high.

Stephanie Winn: Many of you listening to this show are concerned about an adolescent or young adult you care about who's caught up in the gender insanity and therefore at risk of medical self-destruction. I developed ROGD Repair as a resource for parents just like you. It's a self-paced online course and community that will teach you the psychology concept and communication tools the families I've consulted with have found most helpful in understanding and getting through to their children, even when they're adults. Visit ROGDRepair.com to learn more about the program and use promo code SOMETHERAPIST2025 at checkout to take 50% off your first month. That's ROGDRepair.com. I see a lot of evidence that what you're saying is true. And as you were describing this kind of new norm that it's almost like the default position that parents are toxic. I was thinking about, you know, my own choices that I've made in relation to my very imperfect parent could say parents, but mostly parent. Um, and. my, you know, continued efforts to keep her in my life, even though it's hard. But that's where there's a lot of growth opportunity in that, right, as an adult, like figuring out how to deal with your imperfect parents. And I'm thinking about a family I know where the sibling of the trans-identified young person got married and didn't include the parents in the wedding. And not only that, but apparently explained to the parents that among their friend group, this was the norm, that everyone was getting married without their parents these days. And I remember thinking how incredibly humbling parenthood is going to be if and when these people have children or adopt.

Deb Fillman: I mean, being estranged from a child is, and I'm speaking personally from experience, I have three, one of whom is estranged at the moment, in large part because of a combination of parental alienation, by the other parent and therapist alienation, where the other parent chose the therapist. and who knows what was said to the therapist. And the child was of a sufficient age, 16, that, and really any age above 13, you know, the parent doesn't get any window into what's going on at all in the therapy. And when I offered up history, having been the primary caregiver for the first 10 years of this person's life, and then also having had exclusive parenting access during a time period of hers where she was bullied, ended up with anorexia, lots of serious problems. I was the 100% 24-7 caregiver through that illness. I said, would you like some history? I have records, I have notes, I have my own testimony or whatever. No, no, I'm good. And I thought that very strange. Why would a therapist turn down another point of view? Doesn't mean she has to accept it. Doesn't mean she's gotta take it as, you know, the gospel truth. But she had one person's input, the person who hired her, and wanted nothing to do with me. And when I said, well, what is your modality? What modality do you use? Well, I use person-centered, she said, person-centered. I said, what does that mean? She said, well, whatever your daughter wants to talk about is what we'll talk about. And I said, oh, okay, well, I'm just curious how, what kind of goals do you set or how does that work? I don't have any, I don't do that. I said, okay. So I'm trying to be, I was very concerned about not going along with it because I was afraid if I said, well, I don't agree with this and you can't see my daughter, because I did have that legal authority to say, I put the kibosh on it, you can't. But I felt pressured, like if I do that, I make it accused of denying proper care. which could have negative implications for me. So, not to mention, I didn't want my daughter to be further angry with me, okay? So I said, okay. At this point, we weren't completely estranged. She just had decided to take a break from me. Remember, I was the person saying, you need to follow the Dr. George, you need to eat, you need to do the things. So, already the bad guy person. And this progressed from just some difficulties having conversations to full-blown no contact. Full-blown no contact. And next thing I heard was through my other two children that this child had said that that therapist had diagnosed me, having not had a conversation with me longer than five minutes, had diagnosed me to my child with borderline personality disorder. So we can have a chat about the ethics of that, aside from the fact that it's utterly ridiculous. And of course, that was backed up by the other parent, was saying, oh yes, so true. And so the no contact began, and it's been three years. And I'm now in a position where, you know, obviously no parent wants to stay that way forever. You know, that's your baby, right? But I will be honest. I am very leery. I, you know, I had to reach out a couple of, uh, months ago. Would you like to meet in a, you know, in a park with me? And I said, sure. You know, of course, when, where, I don't know. I'll let you know. Okay. not going to push it. Then I get a happy birthday and a happy Mother's Day, you know, just happy birthday, period, happy Mother's Day, period. Like that's, that's, you know, and I just left it at that. Again, I'm not going to push it. But then I heard from my other two, one of my other two, that she overheard again, the child who has now also changed her entire career path from what it was going to be to she wants to be a therapist now. And the conversation was, I'm really looking forward to seeing mom because I wanna see what kind of personality disorder she has. I wanna see what my therapist, I'm like, well, if you didn't know it before, you know, like in other words, you believed it, you lived with me all those years, you know, I wanna see, I'm gonna see what, so then I realized like this might be a setup. Some kind of like an ambush is what it was felt like. I didn't say anything and do it still to this day. I haven't done anything. But I'm in this weird place where I'm like, I want to have a relationship with my child, but I'm afraid. Because what that particular person did. Was so fundamentally changed, so fundamentally changed my own child. From the person I knew. that I don't know her anymore. Now she's 19, is an adult. I don't know what I'm facing. And you talk about humbling, it's incredibly humbling. You're sitting there like, I'm vulnerable. I don't know if I want to be that vulnerable, and yet how would I ever turn away my own child, right? It's a very weird feeling, and I genuinely believe that that individual therapist had a lot to do with it, because who does that? Who diagnoses a person in absentia to a child? that's just beyond my comprehension.

Stephanie Winn: First of all, I'm very sorry to hear that. And what it calls to mind is something that's been on my mind a lot lately, which is, what will I do if and when I go back to practicing therapy? Because for a while there, I was juggling multiple roles, right? So for the first seven, eight, nine, 10, I don't know, years of my career as a therapist, I was just a therapist, right? Now I'm a public figure. I have a blog. I have a podcast. I'm on YouTube and trans rights activists are trying to take my license away. And you know, all this stuff's going on right now. I'm in a film. Now I'm representing the film. Now I'm, you know, so my life changed so much in the last five years. And A year and some change ago, I made the decision to just do the coaching and consulting and stop doing the therapy, partly because of my health. And I had to choose. And I really wanted to focus on the work that was most unique to me, the work that only I can do. And then the course came out of that. It was through stopping therapy and only coaching that I had the bandwidth as my health improved to put the course together. So now I'm exclusively doing this parent coaching plus the podcast. So I have ROGD Repair, I have my coaching clients, and I have this podcast. And that's all I'm doing. I feel pretty self-actualized, to be honest. I feel like I'm doing the work that's meant for me. But I think about, if and when I go back to therapy, first of all, how do I navigate being a therapist and a public figure at the same time? Because that was really tricky, and I don't think I figured it out. But what would my policies be? And I hear a lot of rightful lamentation that there's not a lot of good child and family therapy out there right now. And I'm actually, I was trained by really good child and family therapy instructors, and I have some experience in family therapy. And I thought, you know, if I were to ever open my practice to children again, I think I would have a policy that I will only do this with the full consent of every important adult in that child's life. Because it's one thing to get consent from the legal guardian who has custody, who has the legal right to make medical decisions. And sometimes in cases of divorce, one parent has all of that and the other only has some physical custody, you know, visitation time. But then, you know, there's also remarriage and step parents, and I am a step parent myself. And I, I just think of how easy it can be to only hear one side of the story and get a very skewed picture. And I see this as I'm saying this as someone who is constantly only getting one side of the story and only getting a partial picture because of the work I do with parent coaching. Parents are coming to me about their kid. I never meet the kid. I'm just going off of what the parent says. I'm advising them on communication strategies accordingly. I'm helping them predict and anticipate how that child would respond to things. You know, but that child that's not there in the room, that's not my patient, and I'm not diagnosing them. Nobody's my patient. I'm like, I'm a communication coach. That's what we're doing. But I think like if I were to work with children, knowing what I know now, I would say it's actually not enough for me. to just operate under the consent of the parent with legal guardianship unless you can provide me with documentation such as a restraining order or a criminal charge against the other parent or a death certificate. Like I need, I'm thinking like I would need proof that the other parent either is not in this child's life at all or is a danger to the child. And without that proof, I would say, OK, then I want to meet mom and dad and stepmom or stepdad or whoever is important in this child's life, because I feel like that is the actual context. And I feel like there's such a lack of good family therapy right now. There's so much missing context.

Deb Fillman: And I mean, in our case, we had equal legal custody. So he needed my permission. He couldn't send her without my permission. That said, it's not an easy thing to deny permission, because even though you can, you have the legal and I did eventually fire this person. I did eventually say, you may no longer see my daughter. And once I pulled the plug, that was it, because both parents have to agree legally. However. the damage was done. And the only reason, even though I had my misgivings because this person didn't want any context from me when I had spent, you know, 90 percent of the physical time with this individual child and he had spent like, you know, 10 percent. I just said that just seems strange to me. Why wouldn't you want to talk to the custodial parent, the parent who had more custodial time that does? I mean, that didn't even compute. And Her answer was, well, she's 16 and she is currently choosing of her own accord to live with the other parent. Now, again, not taking into account that there may be some alienation, not taking into account the fact that it's not that uncommon for a child who is experiencing a problem like an eating disorder or whatever, when you are with the parent that has been holding you accountable, Right. And, you know, doing the things that are hard make your life not so simple. If you have the option to run away without running literally away, but you can run to like another parent's house. You might take it. That's what divorce adds in. It adds a level of complexity that there's now a runaway destination. And unless the parents are super amicable and really on the same page and being like, I'm sending you back to your moms, this is not okay. You don't get to do this. If there's any animus there, oh, come on, it's okay. Come on over here. Here's your own room. Here's your gaming computer. Here's this, here's that, and here's the other. teenagers, you know, not to besmirch all teenagers, but they're human. And if you're experiencing something really unpleasant and you don't like it and your life is hard and somebody's holding you accountable to do things you don't want to do and somebody gives you an out. It seems pretty, right. But if you're not allowed to give that context. So I like your idea. And the only suggestion I would add to that is that I like the idea of meeting the people that have not only are, but have been for a lengthy period of time at the parents, you know, like present. physically present in rooms with this person and getting kind of like the take of the different people, even on an individual basis. Like I would think I would be fine with you talking to my current husband privately without me talking to me, talking to him, talking to his wife, like all separately. Because then nobody's influencing the other person, like, oh, I don't want her to be mad at me if she hears what I say, right? And then you're getting, like, four different adults' kind of point of view. And you can start to hear patterns. I believe that. You would start to hear patterns. And then you, the professional, would probably—and I would trust this. I would submit to this. And I would value that input. You know, what patterns did you see? Maybe you're seeing something I don't see. Obviously, I want my kid to be well. I don't want to win. And that way you get a more well-rounded picture from different perspectives and you can say, OK, so here are some commonalities. Then when you work with the child, even if you're not going to communicate back to us what's said, because that would be a violation of her privacy. you would be better positioned to push back on things that don't align with those patterns. So, you know, again, if you see three out of four people say the same thing about a person, and they come into session, and they're saying like, oh, blah, blah, blah, right? You might be in a position to say, is that what it really was? Or do you feel like maybe that was your perception? Or how do you know that's what they meant? You know, you'd be better able to just kind of gently challenge some of their assessments of their situation. What I was hearing from the grapevine, because she would come home apparently and say, I love my therapist. This was the other red warning flag. I love my therapist. I look forward to talking. She's my only friend, like this kind of thing. I'm like, Giant red flag. I love your therapist. It's not supposed to be pleasant all the time. So this was, you know, this hearing that coming again for the other kids going, this is what she's saying, mom. And I was like, oh, my God, this sounds like groomy. This sounds like and then I stupid me. It took me until this point in time to go check the person's social media. I should have done that because all over the social media was evidence that this is a person who specializes in children of abuse. And you know, if you only have a hammer, everything's a nail. I got the distinct impression that that's her default position. Parents are, you know, kid leaves parent must be parents abusive. And she wasn't the first person. When I had to take my daughter multiple times to the hospital because of self-harming attempts and things, I was grilled. They would be like, what did you do? And I'm like, why do you assume I did anything? Teenagers have all kinds of inputs and stresses in their life. Why do you automatically assume I did something? Same thing with the eating disorder treatment. It's like, have you complained about your weight? Do you look in the mirror a lot? Do you do this? Do you go on diets? Time out. Why is this like open season on mom? You know, why are you assuming this? And so there seems to be a trend where if the child is having any kind of difficulty emotionally, it's immediately the parents must be at fault. Everything is environment. It's all nurture. It's all the parents. Couldn't be peers. I kept saying, well, you know, she's been bullied. Yes, but what are you doing? I'm like, but she's being bullied. Did you want to compute that she's being both like ruthlessly bullied in school? That might have something to do with it. So there is this thought that like parents equal abuse. And I don't know where it came from. I don't know the degree to which it's rooted in any kind of statistical reality. But having been on the receiving end of it, there's a piece of me, and that's why I said I'm concerned for you and people in your profession, because I have to fight it. I have to fight the cognitive bias against therapists. I have to actively tell myself, they're not all like this. Certainly there are wonderful professionals out there who genuinely want to help people, and I know some. I know you, I know Jake, I know a few other people in the profession who are genuinely good people. They certainly don't mean anyone harm. But when this is happening, it is. It's like people who have bad run-ins with doctors are afraid to go to the doctor. So this is something that's going on in our schools now. It's not just happening on, you know, mine was a private one-on-one basis. But imagine that kind of a scenario in a school setting, like with that mom that I read the letter from. Multiply that times thousands and thousands. How many therapists like the one that my daughter had do you need to have before you have a serious problem? And families destroyed.

Stephanie Winn: Not many. Well, this has been a sobering… I'm sorry. No, it's I mean, it's just it's heartbreaking. And it makes me think back on, you know, my time as a therapist and what I might have gotten right and what I might have gotten wrong. And and, you know, we underestimate our power. I mean, I can't tell you how many times someone has told me something that I said that changed their life. And I couldn't even remember having said it like it wasn't even the thing that I remembered from that conversation. We've, uh, we're a mess. We've got a lot of, we've got a lot of work to do.

Deb Fillman: I like your idea though. I think you're on the right track when you say that, um, you want to be sure that everybody has, you know, buy-in and that you're getting, um, feedback or perspectives or whatever. You, you, I believe that when you're trained, you'll know what to take and what to take with a grain of salt and, you know, from everyone involved, from the parents, from the child. But having a fuller picture, I think, would only help you in understanding the situation and understanding how to help the patient. I don't know how you would do that blind. As you said, you're getting one side of the story.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, I don't know a lot of people who do family therapy, and that bothers me. I mean, even people who are LMFTs, licensed marriage and family therapists, you know, often choose only to see individuals. I personally, when I was doing therapy, really enjoyed working with couples. And I think there's such a need for more family therapy, more skilled family therapists. And I often find myself quite frustratingly, describing to my coaching clients what I think a good family therapist might do in their situation. But I can't be that person. And I sometimes have a hard time even finding that person for them. But I hope some of the therapists in the audience, because there are therapists listening, and I hope some will consider doing more family work. And if you're feeling insecure about your skills as a family therapist, we do have continuing education requirements that we have to meet. So maybe just spend some of your CEU hours getting a little bit more comfortable working in that department. And at some point I want to explain, you know, maybe, okay, I'm just going to throw this in here if anybody's still listening and anybody is actually a family therapist out there. Something that's been on my mind a lot lately is how a family therapist could work with a situation where there is a trans-identified kid. Because I actually think that working on the level of the family is much more ripe for intervention and opportunity than working with the individual because If that child, adolescent, or young adult goes to individual therapy, they're going to have a certain expectation shaped by the culture, their peers, and social media about what it is for someone to respect them. And if you aren't willing to see and treat them as the opposite sex or whatever they declare themselves to be, then right away, that's an adversarial relationship in their mind, you're not safe, and you don't respect their existence. So the expectations right off the bat, you know, are skewed so that when people ask me for a non-affirming therapist for their child, I'm like, well, Even if I know someone good, I'm not sure that this is going to work, because expectations, you know? But in family therapy, if your job is not to treat this one individual, but you're working with the whole family, and kiddos coming in saying, you need to call me this and that, and mom and dad are saying, you know, you're our daughter, you'll always be our daughter, now your role as a therapist has changed. Because you don't have an allegiance with just one member of the team. You don't have to say, OK, I'm going to call you this and that. You can say, well, I'm noticing I feel some tension here. I'm feeling torn and I'm wondering if I'm feeling what you guys are feeling, because right away I'm feeling this pressure and anxiety coming from kid where I find myself worried, oh, if I don't call this person what they're asking to be called, they're going to feel unsafe around me, and oh, I don't want that. But I'm also hearing, when it comes to safety, that mom and dad have some very real concerns about how my choice to call that child that thing would negatively impact their safety. So, wow, this is a conundrum. OK, now we're going somewhere. Now we're naming the double bind. We're bringing the cognitive dissonance to light. We're talking about the actual conflict in the family because your role is as family therapist, not as the child's therapist. I don't want to say, boom, problem solved, because that's just the beginning of the work. But I think it's a much more fruitful starting point, personally. And I wish that I knew. I mean, look, if you are a therapist who's like, yeah, I would totally do that type of family therapy, please leave a comment, shoot me an email, book a discovery call for when I'm back in August or something to let me know you exist so I can put you on my referral list.

Deb Fillman: Back to the original topic of just the mental health in schools. Even in my situation, I think a lot of this started in the school. What I mean by that is that the problems that my daughter was having were largely ignored by the school and or treated with group. Like, let's get everybody together. Let's, you know, And no, my daughter didn't want to talk to her bullies. No, she didn't want to do that. But that was the only option for any kind of resolution was not get them to stop doing what they're doing. It was, well, let's have a whole meeting and let's all discuss this. And it then becomes easier to understand why a teenager in that situation would choose to do something that would guarantee she'd be out of the school. If you do something to harm yourself and you need to go into a facility or you need, you know, you start. not eating and things like that, you're going to get attention. You're going to get the kind of attention that, you know, to like not be in the school at least, and he'll be removed from it. And I genuinely believe that had that not been the approach, that she wouldn't have chosen another solution because I still, you know, I could be wrong, but I still think that was a choice. She said as much during the course of her treatment, this was a choice. I decided to do this. I looked it up on the internet, how to do it. And this is what I did. How to be anorexic? Yep. Looked up how to do it. looked up what it would take. And once they get started, I think what a lot of kids don't realize is that once you get started, even if it was a conscious decision at first, now your body is leading the way. Now you have a kind of an addiction in a weird way. And then I think it became really hard to give up because that sense of control that she got was hard to give up because remember, in the school setting, there was no control. There was no help coming. There was, and I mean, it didn't matter how much I or her dad, you know, said, you got to do something. Nothing was being done. And I wanted to just say, come back home and homeschool. That's what she wanted. Her dad didn't agree, didn't know she's gotta stick it out, she's gotta go to school, and they're brutalizing her. Why would you want that? But this is why divorce can be a problem when kids get caught in the crosshairs. So it's unfortunate, and like I said, I personally don't know what else to do other than just wait. I'm not the kind of person to bang down people's doors. I think making sure you're always there is really important, you know, making that clear that you are open to conversation. But I think especially when you're talking about a 19 year old, I'm not going to. ring the phone off the hook, show up at the door, you know, and I just don't think that would be, I don't think that would be welcome or appropriate. Um, and so I just have to wait until, see what happens. And it's, uh, it's a, it's an uncomfortable thing to do, like I said, because you don't, you get more vulnerable as more time goes on. You, the parent, cause you, you just don't, you don't know who they are. I just wish that they hadn't started down this path in school. And going even back to 2016, so even before the other daughter had the little boy situation, this same daughter who had the bullying came home in 2016 after that election and said that they lowered the flag to half-mast and they had a crying room set up. This was for the elementary school, the elementary school. The teachers wore black to school and they set up a crying room for the students and they canceled all the morning classes and they held a big assembly and they said, if any of you are feeling sad and scared and anxious, you can meet, you can go to the crying room and you can go, you can get support.

Stephanie Winn: I'm sorry, in reaction to what?

Deb Fillman: Trump getting elected in 2016. Public charter school.

Stephanie Winn: That sounds a very powerful message, doesn't it?

Deb Fillman: Don't you think? So there you've got kids ranging from 6 to 11 who are having grown adults dressing in black like it's a funeral, crying, and saying, if you want to come cry with us. you can. And apparently kids did. And the same daughter came home mildly confused. What's going on? Am I supposed to be sad? Is something bad happening? Right. Am I supposed to be sad? There it is. There it is. Am I supposed to be sad? And that continued on. So in addition to the mental health programs in school, you've got teachers and curriculum and different things happening again. to differing rates at different districts. I don't want to make a blanket statement. This might or might not be happening at your school, but it was in ours, where you've got emotionally immature adults teaching subject matter through an emotional lens. So even if you were not doing surveys of how are you feeling about home, now it's like the polar ice caps are melting and the earth is, global warming is gonna end the earth in 12 years and all these things. And then we wonder why it's so easy to go, do you feel scared and sad? Oh, fill out this post-it note and stick it to the wall. And then fill out this questionnaire. After that kind of input, it's a rare kid with any sensitivity at all that isn't gonna feel a little nervous, right?

Stephanie Winn: Well, Deb, I'm noticing the time. I'm realizing we could talk all day. But I think we should wrap it up here. So tell us where people can find you.

Deb Fillman: So you can find me mostly on Substack lately. The reason we learned at substack.com or kajitolearningcenter.com is where I have my classes, private tutoring. I also offer free consultations for parents if you're not sure what you might want or need as far as enrichment for your children. Again, this is not just homeschooling parents. This could be public school parents. And even if you're thinking about alternatives, you're just not sure what to do, I guess a 30 minute free consultation, sign up and I can try to point you in the right direction. So those are the places to find me.

Stephanie Winn: That's great. And we'll include those links in the show notes. And just a reminder that we're airing this episode in June and your summer session for Cogito starts July 6th. So before thinking about it, they should check it out right away. All right, Deb, thanks so much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for listening to You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist. If you enjoyed this episode, kindly take a moment to rate, review, share, or comment on it using your platform of choice. And of course, please remember, podcasts are not therapy, and I'm not your therapist. Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for this awesome theme song, Half Awake, and to Pods by Nick for production. For help navigating the impact of the gender craze on your family, be sure to check out my program for parents, ROGD Repair. Any resource you heard mentioned on this show, plus how to get in touch with me, can all be found in the notes and links below. Rain or shine, I hope you will step outside to breathe the air today. In the words of Max Ehrman, with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.