Rachel’s Room🛋️Signs Therapy Is Working

Hi, Cadre crew. Oh, no, I have a hiccup or a burp. One of the two. Happy Wednesday. I, um. It is hot as the eighties in my apartment right now. I, like, have all of my. All my shades drawn. I just opened one so you could see me with actual light. But my apartment just gets so freaking hot. Even though it's, like, not as hot outside as it is in here, in my apartment gets real hot. So I'm just gonna give folks a few minutes to come into the live, and then I'm gonna talk a little bit today about how to know if therapy's working or some signs that.

And I, you know, I like to sort of say, like, therapy is helping. You're working. You're the one doing the work, so. Hi, Anila. Happy you're here. Good to see you. Happy Wednesday. Today we're going to talk a little bit about some ways to know if therapy's working or signs healing is happening. I think oftentimes it can feel like it's hard to sort of set these sort of tangibles around. Is therapy working? Because it's. So much of it is emotional, mental, and we can't track progress as seamlessly as we might with other things in our life.

There's nothing necessarily data we can collect to say, oh, yeah, look like I've been going to therapy for x amount of time, and these are the changes, this is the progression. So sometimes it's nice to have some tangibles around, some things that we can check in on and ask ourselves so that we can notice our growth and acknowledge it, because I think it's really important for us to celebrate ourselves when we're working really hard at something, especially when it's our mental health. So. Good afternoon, Jules.

How are you? Good to see you. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna share a couple things that I. That I know for me are some signs that therapy is working. And again, exactly, Anila, it's very subjective. No one path, especially because everyone, is working on something different in therapy. Right? So what I'm working on, you might not be working on, what you're working on, the next person might not be working on. And we all have different starting points and different histories and paths and goals. So one thing that I feel like is universally a way for us to kind of see how is therapy working is.

And this requires life happening, unfortunately. But when life happens, right, when something is stressful or we lose something or there's a big change in our life, this is a really good opportunity for us. To see how we've grown, we can ask ourselves, how am I handling this situation differently? Not better, just differently than I might have handled it x amount of time ago. Right? So let's say you're going through a breakup, and you might be experiencing grief, sadness, confusion, anxiety, anger.

These are all normal, common experiences when we end a relationship. And we can ask ourselves, instead of saying, like, oh, I'm still. Oh, great. Like, I'm still. This still makes me feel unlovable. It still causes me to feel insecure. I'm still. XYZ. XYZ, ask yourself how I. How am I handling this differently? So perhaps it's. It looks a little bit like instead of jumping to conclusions about what this means about me, I'm noticing that it's causing me to feel insecure, and I'm doing the things that I know help me.

When I feel insecure, it could be I ingested. Instead of isolating through this grief, I'm actually reaching out to people while I process it. Yes, I'm still feeling the grief. Yes, I still feel insecure. And the way I'm approaching those things that are coming up looks a little bit different. And that's a way that we can acknowledge and see in ourselves change and growth over time, is to experience an event that reflects an event we've experienced in the past and ask ourselves, how am I approaching this differently?

So another great way to kind of acknowledge or see how or where we've grown or if therapy is working are our thoughts, right? So the automatic thoughts we have about ourselves, about other people, and the stories we tell ourselves, right? So, thinking about, like, for example, when I think about my, you know, myself, maybe five years ago, when I was really struggling with depression and low self worth, the thoughts in my head were often, I'm worthless. This is never gonna get better. I'm a terrible person.

I had a lot of negative self talk. So I can ask myself, I can sit with myself today after I get off this live, and I can make a list, or I can. Or I can just talk to myself out loud and say, what. What are the thoughts that normally go through my head about myself? What thoughts am I? What's my self talk like? Is there as much self talk as there used to be? Right? And so we can ask ourselves, how has. How have the thoughts that we have on a daily basis shifted or changed? What does our self talk look like now versus maybe what it looked like before?

And again, this isn't going to be perfect. It doesn't mean I don't have thoughts sometimes about being not good enough or not being lovable. And the constant rumination around my worthlessness is not present anymore. So being able to acknowledge where I've come in terms of my self talk has shown me a lot of growth. Jules says, I realized my anxiety was getting better when I noticed my leg wasn't bouncing up and down all the time like it had before. That's incredible. Yes. So somatic clues as well, right?

So clues in our body. When I walk into a social situation, do I, do I physically feel the same now as I did in the past when walking into social situations or when I start sit down to have an interview, does my body physically do the same things as it once did? Right. So our bodies are a really good reflection of our emotional world because especially when we experience anxiety that manifests physically with, like, our heart racing, or like Jules is saying, like, legs bouncing or maybe hands fidgeting, we can also get a lot of stomach aches or upset, or like, an upset stomach or nausea.

These are oftentimes indicators of anxiety, and so noticing difference, differences in our physical body and how we physically feel in certain situations can also be a really great clue for how we've grown. So that's a really good point, Jules. I love that. Another great way to sort of think about growth is around boundaries, right? So if you've ever done any boundaries work, it can be a very sort of tricky, tricky thing to navigate when we do it for the first time. And so starting to sort of acknowledge, like, where in my life have I been doing a better job of setting boundaries, whether that's I'm not overworking myself, right?

So when my workday is done, my workday is done, or I'm not incessantly checking emails at 10:00 at night when I don't need to be, when I'm not expected to be checking emails. So asking ourselves, maybe in our work life balance, how we've put up some boundaries to protect ourselves, maybe we notice boundaries that we start to set with certain people in our lives, right? How have my relationships with people who in the past maybe took advantage of me or weren't a good fit for me? How have I been able to set boundaries in those scenarios to keep myself safe or have some self respect so we can start to acknowledge ways in which we've been setting boundaries?

This is a really good way for us to sort of see how therapy is working as well. I could go on and on and on. I might do more videos like this because I think it's really helpful for us to, to kind of get these barometers and create for our own selves a set of data around how am I progressing? And so that we can celebrate ourselves and celebrate our wins. So if you have any ideas, I would love to hear them in the comments. If you're watching this as a replay, I want to hear your wins as well. How you know that therapy is working or that healing is happening.

You're all doing so great and I'm so glad you're here. I will see you next week at my new time. m. pST on Wednesdays.