Psychotherapist Nica Selvaggio on LGBTQIA Mental Health

An Interview with Psychotherapist Nica Selvaggio

Dominica (Nica) Selvaggio, LMHC is psychotherapist at Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC. Nica has experience working with clients on a wide variety of issues, including anxiety disorders, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual orientation and gender identity, acculturation and systemic oppression related to race and gender, trauma and PTSD, mood disorders, personality disorders, self-harm, relational issues, and attachment struggles.

Jennifer Smith: Hi, thanks for joining us today for this installment of the Seattle Psychiatrists Interview Series. I'm Dr. Jennifer Smith, Research Director at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. We're a Seattle-based psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy practice specializing in anxiety disorders. I'd like to welcome with us today, Dominica Selvaggio, who is one of the psychotherapists at our practice. Nica has worked as a therapist for roughly a decade in the Seattle area and works with adults and adolescents aged 13 and older. Before we get started today, can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Nica Selvaggio: Yes, and thank you so much for the introduction, Jen. I'm really excited to be here talking with you today. That's always such a broad question. I never know where to start, but I guess that is the place to start that from a very young age, I was diagnosed with ADHD, and so my inability to pick where to start is a reflection of what I deal with in my brain. I love being a neurodivergent therapist because it brings a sense of understanding and compassion for folks who struggle with this sort of tangential thinking or not knowing where to start, that I find really, really helpful and I just get a lot of joy out of it.

So all that to say, I'm your local ADHD therapist. I'm originally born and raised in Chicago, the Midwest, and I've been in the Pacific Northwest for most of my adult life. I did spend three years living in Hawaii, and that was a really life-changing experience. And ultimately, I came back to the Seattle area because this land really has my heart.

Jennifer Smith: Wow.

Nica Selvaggio: I always describe myself as someone who's incredibly creative and just a lover of nature.

Jennifer Smith: That's great. And so you moved to the Seattle area from Hawaii. So what would be your favorite parts of the Seattle area, or just Washington as a whole?

Nica Selvaggio: It's the land, it's the mountains, it's the water, the plant life, all of it. I always say because of growing up in the Midwest that I was raised in corn and concrete. So when I moved to the Pacific Northwest and saw these huge mountains for the first time, even after a decade of being here, I'm still in awe. Yeah, I just really, really love the landscape.

Jennifer Smith: That's great. What is it that got you interested in being a therapist?

Nica Selvaggio: Big question. There's this storyline of The Wounded Healer that I think a lot of us are familiar with, that archetype of someone who has gone through their own experiences of pain and suffering, have tended to them, and then turned that compassionate attention outwards towards others who are struggling with similar wounds. My story as a therapist is not so different from that. I became interested in working in mental health out of necessity of caring for my own mental health throughout my life.

I'm a former foster care survivor and an adult adoptee, and so I had exposure from a very young age to some of the suffering in the world and in my own world and experience. So walking that path has really led me to wanting to provide a hand to hold for other folks on their own paths.

Jennifer Smith: Wow, that's really fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. What areas or disorders do you specialize in, besides ADHD?

Nica Selvaggio: Well, I got my start working in the clinical world specializing in eating disorders. So the bulk of my career was spent working in high acuity treatment centers, inpatient level residential, partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient, and working with folks who struggle with things like anorexia, binge-eating disorder, bulimia, ARFID, avoidant restrictive food intake disorder, which is often accompanied with neurodivergence. And when you work with eating disorders, you work with everything.

So people often think of eating disorders as being about literally food and body, and while those are absolutely components of a person's experience with an eating disorder, it's a symptom for an underlying issue. And often what underpins eating disorders is trauma, depression, anxiety, huge contributing factor, and other ways that the brain is sensitive. So for example, someone on the autism spectrum might really struggle with their sensory experience with food, be labeled with having an eating disorder, when really, it's something that's going on in a sensory way for them. It's not accompanied by cognitions and things like that.

So that's the bulk of my experience and I could talk about that forever. But because I'm an ADHD person, I have a million interests and my path has diverged many a time from that foundation of working with eating disorders. So through that work, I found my way into the somatic world in treating trauma because trauma is a huge underpin of most folks with eating disorders. And I got my foot into somatic experiencing, which is working with folks more so through the visceral felt-sense experience of trauma held in their bodies and helping them to let go of it rather than talking the story to death, which can be re-traumatizing for folks at times. Absolutely has some value in reclaiming our narrative and making meaning. However, I found working in the body to be a lot gentler.

Through that world, I found my way into psychedelic assisted therapy. I did a fellowship last summer in Jamaica, working with mushroom assisted therapy, and I've done a couple of trainings in San Francisco for ketamine assisted therapy. So that is a world I'm very interested in. And then gender and sexuality. So I'm non-binary. My pronouns are she/they, and working with trans folks, working with gender sexuality came out of working with eating disorders as well because those populations tend to struggle with eating disorders, body dysmorphia, those sorts of things at a much higher rate than the general population.

Jennifer Smith: Wow.

Nica Selvaggio: And then from there, add in interest in couples work, sex therapy. So a little bit all over the place, but a really strong foundation underneath all of it.

Jennifer Smith: Wow, that's fantastic. And basically that means you can help a lot of different people, which is really great. Your online bio notes that you've been trained in several evidence-based approaches. Can you let our audience know what those are?

Nica Selvaggio: Yeah, and I'm noticing in myself through this interview, I'm talking very fast and not breathing very much because I'm oriented to my own body. I'm going to take a moment and just take a deep breath before I answer you.

Jennifer Smith: Yeah, absolutely.

Nica Selvaggio: Thanks. And if anything-

Jennifer Smith: Oh, I was just just saying-

Nica Selvaggio: Yeah, go ahead Jen.

Jennifer Smith: That's great for our audience to see too. You need a moment, take a moment. There's nothing wrong with that, and I think we could probably all do that at times and we just don't, unfortunately. And then we feel awful.

Nica Selvaggio: Well, we're not really given permission to in our culture and our systems that we operate in.

Jennifer Smith: Yeah, which is unfortunate.

Nica Selvaggio: Yeah. Which ties into that question a little bit about what evidence-based therapies I work with. Most of them I learned when working in treatment settings. So in a lot of eating disorder treatment centers, the foundation of the treatments are evidence-based therapies such as dialectical behavior therapy, DBT, which was developed by Marsha Linehan, and that was a therapy originally developed to treat folks who struggle with extreme emotional dysregulation who are feeling suicidal or are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. So these extreme swings of mood and inability to regulate.

Off of that came... And that approach is really good for folks who are... The temperament under controlled. So under UC versus OC, under controlled versus over controlled, so more impulsive behaviors, you're going to see things more expressive. You might be able to tell I'm more on the UC side. DBT is great for that. And then on the other side, you've got OC, over control. Those folks are going to have higher levels of generally OCD type thinking, more restricted, flat affect, much more wanting to control their outer experience because their internal world feels so chaotic that it reflects on the outside. In those folks, you're going to see things more like anorexia, restricting behaviors, much more flat affect.

RO-DBT, radically open DBT came out of DBT to help over control folks. So those are two different therapies, even though they have the same name in them, but essentially they're both skills-based therapies that are laid on the foundation of mindfulness and some of our Eastern inspired practices. So as well as another evidence-based therapy that's used a lot in treatment centers, ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy by Stephen Hayes. But these therapies are really trying to bridge the worlds of that grounded mindfulness foundation with concrete skills that people can use to actively change the behaviors that are causing them distress in their lives.

I love a lot of those therapies so much because they work, they can really shift things quickly. I often use those in conjunction with therapies that maybe don't have as much of a robust research base because they haven't had the time or the funding or whatever it is, such as somatic experiencing and more experiential therapies. I went a little bit all over the place.

Jennifer Smith: Thanks. And what about your treatment approach? What's that like?

Nica Selvaggio: Yeah, so I was trained in a clinical mental health counseling master's program and the foundation of my training and program was person-centered humanistic therapy. So for folks who don't know what that means, my foundation of who I am as a clinician, as a counselor is very much through the egalitarian lens of I am not an expert in your life. You are the expert in your life and I'm coming here to join human to human to witness and perhaps equip you with skills that you need in order to change the things that you're wanting to change.

That said, that's the foundation I weave in depending on what a person needs after collaborating with them on what sort of therapy they're interested in working with, all different kinds of approaches. So again, the somatic work is a huge part of my work, bringing in the body. I also do a lot of parts work, internal family systems, and for folks not familiar with that, that involves accessing the different parts of ourselves that are often in conflict. Everyone has different aspects of self that they might connect with at different times. The part of me that's doing this interview with today is my manager part, right? I'm going to present my best self today, but maybe my inner child part is like, "This is scary. I don't like talking in front of people that I can't see." That's an example of parts work.

Who else? Again, super interested in growing more in the psychedelic assisted therapy world. It's really profound powerful work that can really jump start a person's journey, but not to be used without caution and a lot of discernment and support. Yeah, it's just different for everyone.

Jennifer Smith: That's fantastic. I'd like to go back and talk about one of the areas that you can help clients with, and that's regarding their sexual orientation and gender identity. And I was reading on The Trevor Project’s website that they offer 24/7 free, secure access to counselors for young people who are LGBTQ. In a nationwide survey that 41% of LGBTQ people age 13 to 24, so the younger range, seriously considered committing suicide in the past year.

So clearly something's going on here that's severely impacting this population's mental health. So I just have a few questions regarding this, that maybe you can shed some light on.

One is, what types of issues does someone usually struggle with regarding their sexual orientation or gender identity?

Nica Selvaggio: Yeah, I love this question. Thank you for asking this. And first I want to name... I always experience a lot of heaviness in my body when tapping into the sense of powerlessness or hopelessness that comes in for a person to feel like the best option is to end their life, that they've exhausted all of the avenues and this is the best way to escape the pain that they're experiencing when that becomes the option in their brain. This is for so many different reasons and ties to what a lot of folks in the LGBTQIA+ community struggle with, which I want to differentiate that struggling to know what your sexual identity is or your gender identity is, is not in and of itself a pathology or an issue that someone's struggling with.

What people are struggling with is how the systems in the world, how our culture, how our families, how our religions, how all of these things reflect our worthiness of access to resources, safety, the right to use the bathroom in the public. Our daily lived experiences of oppression are the issues that we struggle with, not the fact that we are part of the rainbow community.

So that being said, because of operating or living in a system that... And I can give so many examples of it's February 1st and how many anti-trans legislation bills have been pushed forward this month in January alone? The visceral, physiological, emotional, spiritual, psychological response to being faced with that. Those issues can look like suicidality, that can look like depression, that can look like anxiety, that can look like a nervous system that's chronically stuck in fight, flight or freeze because they're in survival mode because the world is reflecting to them that they're not safe.

Things more classically associated with folks in the LGBTQIA community are things around identity formation. How do I know who I am? How do I put a word or a label to who I am? Do I even want to do that? Is there even a necessity for me to come out and name myself as such? Where do I fit in and belong in this LGBTQ community? How do I move through the world in the straight world? A lot of identity formation issues in that. And again, that's not an issue of pathology in and of itself. Culture's response to that question is the issue.

Substance use is often higher. Again, this is a way of coping with all the things that I've named and eating disorders and body dysmorphia tend to be much higher incidences in the trans and LGBTQ community.

Jennifer Smith: Wow. And eating disorders too, they're often highly correlated with suicidality, correct?

Nica Selvaggio: Yes, yes. Can be. Not all, but yeah, they tend to be.

Jennifer Smith: Wow. Another question I had is often when you're doing paperwork now for a medical provider or surveys, they ask about someone's preferred pronouns. And can you talk a little bit about that, preferred pronouns and how can that affect someone's mental health? Why do they matter? Why do pronouns matter?

Nica Selvaggio: Yeah. Yeah. And I love how you changed the sentence at the end. Why do pronouns matter? Because even the language of preferred can insinuate that it's someone's choice in terms of... Okay, how can I put this? If you knew that the sky was blue and someone came up to you and was like, "You're nuts. The sky is not blue. I see yellow, and you are bad and wrong for thinking that the sky is blue. How could you?” Take it a step further: “You're going to a bad place because you think this sky is blue."

And then I said to you, “Well, you just prefer it to be blue.” Is that a preference or is that just what you see? So a person's preferred pronouns implies that it's an actual preference, when in reality, it's just their lived experience. And so when someone is vulnerable enough to even name their pronouns, even if we don't understand, even if we think the sky is yellow, the reason it's important is because it indicates a level of belief that that person understands and knows themselves better than we could possibly know, their internal experience.

Jennifer Smith: Right.

Nica Selvaggio: It indicates respect for their beingness, and it creates a level of safety for that person who may have moved through many different systems in their life where it was not accepted or not safe for them to use the pronouns that fit for them.

Jennifer Smith: That's fantastic. Thank you. One anecdote that I wanted to share is that in our practice, we were trying to decide internally, "Should we all put our pronouns in our signature block?" And I'd say one-third were gung ho for, "Yes, we should." One-third didn't care. And there were other people who didn't want to, and one of the members of our team said, "Maybe we shouldn't do this, because if a person isn't comfortable saying what their pronouns are, we're forcing them to either disclose their pronouns or force them to put stereotypical pronouns that you would think that they should be.” And for me, that was really eye-opening.

So for that reason, I went on the bandwagon of I'm not putting pronouns. That way, if someone else didn't want to, they didn't feel like they had to as well.

So I thought that was really interesting, that pronouns can really mean so much to a person and just... Yeah. So thank you for explaining that, that it really does matter.

Nica Selvaggio: Yeah, absolutely. And I love, thank you to that person who brought that point up because that's always what I like to... Oftentimes when we're trying to show up as allies in support of a community that we're not part of, it's easy to misstep and to do things out of good heart and good intention, but ultimately can contribute further to harm. And the pronouns in the bio or in your email signatures requirement is one of those ways where it's like, "Oh, we're trying to help normalize it for everyone." But again, you don't know who you're requiring to out themselves or to live falsely.

Jennifer Smith: Right. That's fantastic. And that's why part of the reason that we do this series is to help educate people and just explain things. Thank you.

Nica Selvaggio: Yeah, thank you.

Jennifer Smith: Yeah. So what can you say to people who simply might not have any understanding or have confusion about what we've just been talking about and just don't understand the distress that some people might have about identity or orientation or pronouns? Why is it a big deal?

Nica Selvaggio: Yeah. I always come back to why do we need to understand? I don't even understand myself. Why do I need to understand another person's experience for their experience to be legitimate and valid for them? I don't. In fact, it's often impossible to try. I can do my best, but I can't ever fully step into another person's experience. And so we don't actually require understanding. We require respect and compassion, just to be believed. Right? And you can compare this across many different experiences of identity. I will never know what it's like to walk through the world, say, as an Arabic man, I don't know what that is.

Jennifer Smith: Right.

Nica Selvaggio: It's not for me to try to understand. It's for me to listen and believe and provide respect. So first throwing away that word understanding, we don't need to understand. What I would say is have you... I would invite folks who really just don't get what the big deal is about to reflect on if there's ever been something in their own life that was really important to them, that they really cared a lot about, but that was dismissed or diminished, or they were told that they were foolish or crazy even for caring about that thing.

And we can do this together too, but just to take a moment and really call to mind that feeling, that memory and see what happens inside. So I notice immediately I start to contract, I start to constrict, and I start to want to feel small and to hide myself. Other folks might have a different experience. Maybe they feel angry, they want to fight back. There's no wrong response here. Just notice how do you feel when you're invalidated, misunderstood, and told that you're wrong to care about the things that you care about? Generally not pleasant.

So when we show up in that way, we're often perpetuating more of the same for people around us. If we've experienced that, then we're going to put that out on others too. Like, "Well, I had to conform. I had to shut down this part of myself, so how dare you not do that?" Right? We face a lot of anger from folks oftentimes as a result of that. Yeah. And what would the world be like if we had more spaciousness for those pauses to actually feel into, what am I reacting to in my not understanding? Am I being reminded of a time that I didn't feel understood? How can I show up in a more compassionate way?

Jennifer Smith: That's great. Thank you. Our final question, which I'm a little bummed to say because I thought this has been great. Do you have any words of advice or anything else that you'd like to say to our listeners today?

Nica Selvaggio: Be gentle with yourself. Working as a clinician, as a counselor, as a therapist, through some of these major world and global events that we've been experiencing collectively over the past decade, something I've noticed in the broader populations is that levels of fear are very high. Anxiety is very high, which makes sense. And levels of burnout, feeling like we just cannot continue on are very high. Levels of trauma and secondary trauma are very high.

In the midst of all of that, I want to invite all of us to both stand in the center of honoring and witnessing our sacred human struggles together, and also find those spaces in which things feel a little bit lighter, or we can expand more and access things like rest and pleasure and resilience, and that both of those things need to coexist in order to show up in a more whole way. So gentle, gentle, gentle, gentle. Show up when you can. Rest when you can.

Jennifer Smith: That's fantastic. Thank you so much, Nica, for finding time to speak with us today.

Nica Selvaggio: Thank you for having me.

Jennifer Smith: And for our listeners, if anybody is interested in scheduling an in-person or telehealth appointment with Nica, you can do so and self-schedule at seattleanxiety.com. Thanks again and have a great day.

Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.

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Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.

Post-Doctoral Fellow Kristy Cuthbert on Panic Disorder & Agoraphobia

An Interview with Post-Doctoral Fellow Kristy Cuthbert

Kristy Cuthbert, Ph.D. is an Administrative and Clinical Fellow at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders in Boston. She specializes in CBT and DBT for anxiety and related disorders, such as phobias.

Tori Steffen:  Hi everybody. Thank you for joining us today for this installment of the Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series. I'm Tori Steffen, research intern at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. We're a Seattle-based psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy practice specializing in anxiety disorders.

I'd like to welcome with us today post-doctoral fellow Kristy Cuthbert. Dr. Cuthbert is an Administrative and Clinical Fellow at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders in Boston. Dr. Cuthbert specializes in CBT and DBT for anxiety and related disorders. She's also worked with individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder. Her research focuses on alternative spectrum models of psychopathology and on treatment implementation in clinical settings. She has specialized training in working with veterans and has focused much of her clinical work on women's mental health and providing access to care for low-income populations. So before we get started today, Dr. Cuthbert, could you let us know a little bit more about yourself and what made you interested in studying, treating panic disorder and agoraphobia?

Kristy Cuthbert:  Sure. So thanks for the introduction. So I think my interest came about simply because I did my graduate training at Boston University, that's the home of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. And they offer cognitive behavioral therapies for anxiety and related disorders of a fairly wide range as well as mood disorders. However, I found it to be both challenging and rewarding to work with individuals who have diagnoses of panic disorder and, or a agoraphobia. Because entering into that first exposure I think, and I can talk more about what that is and what that entails in a moment, but entering into that first exposure, I think people have a lot of fear. And then once they face that fear, it just kind of unlocks this ability to do more and more. And it's really great to see people succeed and to feel empowered at the end of the process.

Tori Steffen:  Yeah. And that must be really fulfilling work to do, to be able to help people and see the success rate.

Kristy Cuthbert:  Yeah.

Tori Steffen:  That's awesome. Well, getting down to the basics around our topic, can you explain for the audience what panic disorder and or agoraphobia are and how common they tend to be?

Kristy Cuthbert:  Sure. So I think this can be kind of complicated if you're not super familiar with all of this terminology, because there are panic attacks and then there's panic disorder and then there's a agoraphobia. And so the answer can be complicated. I'll say that panic disorder is specifically related to two or more panic attacks that meet a certain set of symptoms that we ask people about and that these attacks occur out of the blue. And that's a critical distinction. So some people will report having a panic attack in the middle of the night, and it just feels really surprising and sudden.

And then for agoraphobia, people taking this a step further feel fearful about going out in public because of those panic symptoms or fear that those panic symptoms will come up. Or this can also be related to other fears about embarrassing symptoms like having an upset stomach or having to urgently go to the restroom or having trouble escaping for whatever reason from very busy and crowded places. So in addition to the two disorders, panic disorder and agoraphobia, you can also have panic attacks, which can be related to any number of other anxiety disorders. So if you have a specific phobia and you're afraid of bees, you can have a panic attack if you see a bee. And so that would be specified as a part of the phobia. The key there being, that panic attack is triggered by the bee. Whereas in panic disorder, those attacks come on very suddenly and are not related to, "Oh, well I saw a bee." Right?

Tori Steffen:  Okay. That makes great sense. Thanks for making that distinction for us.

Kristy Cuthbert:  Yeah. And in terms of how common they tend to be, I'll say that the 12 month prevalence rate in the DSM-5-TR for that is 2 to 3%. And for agoraphobia, it's 1 to 1.7% as the 12 month prevalence. So panic disorder is not entirely uncommon, neither is agoraphobia. So it's not uncommon to see those. And that doesn't even include panic attacks, the ones that can occur with other anxiety disorders.

Tori Steffen:  Right. Have you seen any, or in the literature, are there any known causes for agoraphobia or panic disorder?

Kristy Cuthbert:  So I think in terms of causes, this can be wide-ranging. For both disorders, they tend to co-occur at very high rates. So one theory is, so for example, to think about panic disorder, panic disorder and agoraphobia can be preceded by anxiety disorders. So perhaps you start with social anxiety. And when you have social anxiety, you might have a panic attack or panic symptoms. And then you start to really focus on those symptoms and develop fear and anxiety about having those symptoms. So then you're more likely to have those symptoms come on unexpectedly or to have more fears about going out in public or in crowded spaces where you then might have those symptoms.

So sometimes it's just a matter of experiencing some of those discomforts and really keying into those physical cues. Because it's kind of like when you get an itch on your head. This always happens when I'm getting a haircut. So I want to scratch it, but I'm getting a haircut. And so because I can't, I focus on it and it feels more and more intense. So for whatever reason, a person might start to notice those physical sensations and then that feeling like, "How do I control this?" And not being able to fully control it can kind of start that cycle of panic and then lead to agoraphobia as well.

Tori Steffen:  Okay. Yeah, that makes good sense as in how it could potentially lead to agoraphobia. So thank you for breaking that down.

Kristy Cuthbert:  Sure.

Tori Steffen:  And as far as treating agoraphobia and panic disorder, what are some of the common treatments for the two?

Kristy Cuthbert:  Yeah, so I'll say the gold standard treatments for panic disorder and agoraphobia are exposure based therapies. And cognitive behavioral therapy more generally. So you can talk about what it means to have a racing heart, and from a cognitive perspective, you might think of other situations where you had a racing heart like when you were working out, and then it was okay. You might think about what it means to feel panic. It means, “I'm out of control.” And you might look for evidence that doesn't support that you're out of control.

For the most part though, we do focus on exposures. And for panic disorder, one of the key types of exposures that we do is called an interoceptive exposure. So these are exposures where we kind of mimic the symptoms of a panic attack. So if one of your main symptoms is hyperventilating, we have you breathe through a coffee stirrer to actually simulate that and to sit with that. I've had patients wear heavy coats and heaters to simulate warmth and sweating, and maybe we will run in place for a couple of minutes to get the heart racing to really try to bring on the simulated symptoms of a panic attack and then to sit with that discomfort until it passes.

Because another thing we know about panic disorder and agoraphobia is that people often have safeties or safety behaviors. So they might carry medications around in their pocket. They might do certain things like bringing friends along with them when they travel so that they don't feel discomfort. So we also ask that, say we're sitting with those panic symptoms, we ask people not to engage in those behaviors. So we're not going to keep an empty bottle of benzodiazepines. We're not going to... We're going to leave that at home, we're not going to take off the coat and crank up the fan to try to combat the symptoms. We're just going to say, what if we leave them alone? And we try not to react to them. And to learn that by not reacting to them, it kind dismantles that false alarm telling you that there's danger.

So for agoraphobia, taking that a step further, we also do what we call situational exposures. So if you're afraid of public transportation, because it gets really crowded here in Boston and because you want to make sure you can escape, whether because you have panic symptoms or for some other reason, we get on the train. We get on the train when it's busy, we ride the train, we resist that urge to escape, we watch for other safety behaviors. Like again, carrying a medication. We may start by doing an exposure together. And then the person I'm working with might start to ride the train or take the bus on their own.

And of course, in more severe cases, this is trying to get them out of the house. So we might start by having them go to a grocery store that's a mile away. And then when they get into the grocery store, making sure they're not using any safeties to try to distract from the discomfort. The idea is that if we face the discomfort, then we'll see that it passes on its own without us having to react and that breaks up that cycle of behavior, and eventually that fear starts to become extinct.

Tori Steffen:  Okay. So the goal is to reduce the fear that one would get?

Kristy Cuthbert:  Right. And another goal is to learn safety. To be able to say, "I'm in a grocery store and I noticed that I'm having these panic sensations. I noticed the urge to want to escape, and I know that this is a safe place. As far as the world is safe, this is a safe place. And I know that what I'm experiencing is not necessarily a medical emergency. I've had these symptoms before. I recognize them as panic. I'm going to trust what I have learned about these symptoms, which is that I am safe if I just let them pass." So that learning safety is also an important part of it.

Tori Steffen:  Okay. Okay. Well, great. And I know we spoke a little bit about how panic disorder and agoraphobia can co-occur pretty frequently. Is it likely for agoraphobia to be comorbid with any other mental health issues as well?

Kristy Cuthbert:  Sure. So I talked a little bit about potential precursors. We also see a lot of comorbidity and different disorders that might occur in addition to, or once someone has started to have panic symptoms or agoraphobia. Depending on the severity of agoraphobia, it can be incredibly isolating if people don't go out often, if they have a lot of restrictions about where they can go that they feel safe. So a lot of people with agoraphobia will often have a diagnosis of major depressive disorder and substance use disorders. Because benzodiazepines are often prescribed. And depending on the severity of panic, benzodiazepines can be misused and can be addicted. People also drink or use other substances to try to take the edge off of that anxiety, either when they're feeling panic or if they have to leave the house or go into an uncomfortable situation if they have agoraphobia. So those are two of the particularly important comorbidities that we know of.

Tori Steffen:  Okay, that's good to know. And have you worked with any other phobias out there, any that you can name for us?

Kristy Cuthbert:  Yes. So we also treat specific phobias at the clinic. So I've worked with phobias of vomiting and specific phobias of animals like dogs, blood, injury, and injection phobias, insect phobias, snake phobias. I don't particularly work with snake phobias, but we do treat those at the clinic. And spider phobias. So yeah, a pretty wide range of specific phobias.

Tori Steffen:  Yeah, there's definitely a lot out there.

Kristy Cuthbert:  Yeah.

Tori Steffen:  So yeah, that's very interesting. And how might somebody with a specific phobia typically present? Kind of what's their common experience, I guess?

Kristy Cuthbert:  So I would say that from the cognitive behavioral model, we look at everything from this model of our thoughts and our feelings influence our behaviors. So most of the time what we see is a pattern of, and I'll use a dog phobia as an example. Sometimes it comes from having had a negative experience when they were younger. Sometimes it doesn't. It might be that their parents didn't have dogs, didn't like dogs. It might just be that they never had them around so they're just an unknown entity. They can develop for a wide range of reasons.

What tends to happen to maintain it though is... Say I'm going to work, it's important for me to get to work on time, and at around eight o'clock when I'm supposed to be walking through the door every morning, there is a medium-sized dog across the street from me right there next to the door of my office. That thought, feeling and behavior pattern might go something like this. I feel physical sensations, I feel a little bit sweaty, my hands are shaking a little bit. I feel maybe some flip-flops in my stomach, like I'm nervous. And I know that's because I see this dog. So then I think, "That dog might bite me, I'm in danger. I need to get away." And then that leads to the behavior. I don't cross the street. If the dog crosses the street towards me, I walk the other way. I avoid or try to escape the situation.

So what that does though is that says, "Yes, it really is a dangerous situation because you had to get out of it." So it reinforces the fear. So that pattern is something that we see that sort of seeing the object, feeling uncomfortable, labeling it as dangerous and trying to avoid or escape, that's a pretty common pattern.

Tori Steffen:  Okay. And that fits so well with the cognitive behavioral therapy outlook. So that's really cool.

Kristy Cuthbert:  Exactly. Yep.

Tori Steffen:  And have you seen that any phobias are more common than others, in general?

Kristy Cuthbert:  You know, it's really tough to say. I know that we do treat a lot of blood, injury, and injection phobias. Having blood drawn, getting medical procedures. I don't know at our particular clinic if those are any more common. And I don't know the prevalence literature off the top of my head. I would say that we do see that a lot, probably because if I am scared of a snake, for example, that's really not impairing my day-to-day life because I don't have to regularly interact with them. Now, if I were a keeper at the zoo and it was my job to take care of the reptiles, then I might come in and say, "I have a snake phobia." Or if I was an avid hiker and I stopped going hiking and kind of lost this thing that I loved, that might warrant treatment for a phobia. Blood, injury, and injection phobias or phobias around medical procedures, these are things that most people need to have done at some point. So we will see those people come in to have those treated.

Tori Steffen:  Okay. Yeah, that's an interesting one. For the blood phobia, is it mainly seeing blood and having a fearful reaction to an open wound, is the common experience?

Kristy Cuthbert:  So this can be wide-ranging. For some people it is. For others, there's very specifically a fear of having blood drawn, that fear of passing out if they have blood drawn. Some people do have that experience. So that I would say is a little bit of a unique treatment because we often will teach them a technique of tensing and relaxing muscles to make sure the blood is flowing. It increases the blood pressure and can prevent passing out while having blood drawn. So that's something that people can learn and do.

And the rest of it is very, very similar to exposure for panic or agoraphobia. And that we say, "What is it that you're afraid of?" "Well, I'm afraid of having my blood drawn."` So we start wherever a person is ready to start. So it might be, "Watch this video of someone having their blood drawn. Let's go into our medical lab and I'll have you put on the tourniquet and we'll prepare and you can sit with that anxiety." Which is often anticipatory. We also have specific phobias of driving. So for those, we'll start with one stretch of road. And then we talk about trying to see how is that similar to other stretches of road that I might be afraid of? "If I can do this, can I do this highway as well?"

So it's sort of a buildup to eventually having your blood drawn, eventually taking the highway you're most afraid of.

Tori Steffen:  Right. Okay. Yeah, that definitely makes sense with gauging where they might be ready to start and starting there. So can all phobias be treated with exposure therapy?

Kristy Cuthbert:  So I would say for the most part, there's always something we can do in terms of an exposure. You can be pretty creative, like I said. You can find anything in this day and age on YouTube. There are YouTube videos of just dash cams of people driving on highways. That's an exposure for driving phobia, right? If it's a scenario that you don't often find yourself in, like interviewing for a job with a person in authority. We have what we call confederates come in. It might be our clinic director, it might be one of our professors who's cleared to work in the clinic. But we have them come in, they're doing the interview so that someone starts to get that experience.

And if the situation is one that you can't really recreate, like, "I'm scared of getting the flu and being sick," then we'll do an imaginable exposure. So that's where people write out a script of what is that scenario that you're afraid of? Write it out in as much detail as you can, engage all five senses about what you notice about the situation, and then sit with the discomfort and challenge any sorts of judgments that might be in your write up. So I think it is very versatile. Exposure therapy, I think, is the standard treatment for most phobias. Yes.

Tori Steffen:  Right. And how effective would you say that exposure therapy is in treating a wide range of phobias?

Kristy Cuthbert:  Yeah, so you can really generalize this concept. And there are trans diagnostic approaches like the unified protocol that treat a wide range of anxiety and mood disorders based on these same concepts. So much like we avoid driving or avoid dogs, we can sometimes avoid uncomfortable emotions. So sometimes exposure is exposure to an uncomfortable emotion and being able to tolerate that emotion. Sometimes if we're feeling depressed and we don't want to be up and active, the exposure is being active. Depression tends to make us feel like we don't get a lot of pleasure out of activities. The problem then is that we stop doing the activities that might make us happy.

So taking that same approach, it's entering into those situations and saying, "I might not cure my depression today by going for a walk, but if I do this every day it's going to be really hard to hang on to that inertia and that heaviness that can come with depression." Likewise, interoceptive exposures, the ones where you simulate the physical symptoms of panic, you can do that with depression. The heaviness of depression, for example. There are ankle weights and arm weights that you can put on to kind of simulate heaviness. So it really does touch on a wide range of anxiety and mood disorders.

Tori Steffen:  Wow, that's really interesting. Yeah, I'd never heard the examples for depression as well, so that's great to know that it can also help with that. Well, awesome. Well, while treatment options are best and ideally done under the guidance of the licensed mental health professional, are there any things that individuals can do on their own to potentially reduce the symptoms of panic or agoraphobia?

Kristy Cuthbert:  So I would say a starting point is to be willing to say, "What is my panic look like?" I think one of the scary things about panic is your body is physically reacting. And so it's really hard to know is this a medical emergency? Because it feels so uncomfortable. Obviously you're having a physical reaction. It's hard to know. I would say that over time, panic attacks though, you can get to know them. And you can say, “I know what this is,” and to approach it with a familiarity, which I think can prevent the urge to, for example, Google your symptoms or to say, "Should I go to the ER to get this checked out?" If you start to understand what your panic is, that's a first step. Of course. I always give the caveat, make sure you're aware of what your physical conditions really are so you do know what to look out for. And also really balance that with saying, "I also know what my panic feels like and it feels like this."

And I would say the other thing is to think about the story you tell yourself. So I say this a lot with patients, and this really gets at the cognitive piece. So two things about the story you tell yourself. First of all, if you're telling yourself that, "Yes, I'm scared of having my blood drawn and I did it today, but I was scared the whole time." Well that kind of discounts this big achievement, you did something that was important to do. And it also can create a bunch of fear around it. It's almost like the expectation is that I should be able to have my blood drawn with no fear or you know what, I should be able to drive over a really high bridge with no anxiety. That is a really high expectation. And I would say that sometimes I drive over bridges and I'm like, "Wow, this is a really high bridge."Or I have a pretty healthy level of anxiety in busy traffic, because you're watching a lot and you're vigilant.

So don't see anxiety as a thing you want to eradicate. Just kind of learn to get more comfortable with it and learn when it's kind of out of proportion to what you think you're experiencing and give yourself credit for victories that you do achieve. If you get across a bridge because you have somewhere to go, pat yourself on the back for that if you're afraid of driving across a bridge. And the other thing is to picture going into it. What do you tell yourself about that bridge? “I'm going to drive over this bridge, I'm going to lose control and drive the car off the bridge.” And then ask yourself, “What is making me think this? What evidence do I have for it?” Sometimes the one thing that gets in the way is the story that we tell ourselves. Even before an exposure, if you're telling yourself that story, it's going to amp up the fear. And part of the fear is going to come anyway. And the story we tell ourselves can make that fear feel stronger.

Tori Steffen:  Right. That makes a lot of sense, and that's great advice for just kind of starting off and getting introspective about what's really going on. Well, Dr. Cuthbert, do you have any final words of advice or anything else that you'd like to share with the listeners today?

Kristy Cuthbert:  Not that I can think of. I think other than to say above and beyond the things that people can do on their own, it's okay to ask for help, to see someone who specializes in different types of therapy. If you feel like you're afraid of something and you're not quite ready to do exposures, there are other types of therapy where you kind of explore the root causes or where you focus on approaches that have you live your life in spite of your fears. And eventually it might mean facing your fears. And it's all about looking at your values and living according to those values. If you feel like anything, any specific fear, panic symptoms or fear of certain situations, if you feel like that's getting in the way of living a life according to your values, it's okay to seek help from someone to help get you through it. Some of these treatments can be completed in as few as 12 to 16 sessions. So it is worth the investment and the time that it takes.

Tori Steffen:  Yeah, I would have to agree. That's great advice. So thanks so much for sharing that, and thanks for chatting today. It was really great speaking with you about this. And I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Kristy Cuthbert:  Thanks, you too.

Tori Steffen:  Thank you. And thank you everybody for joining.

Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.

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Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.

Therapist Kate Willman on ACT & Writing Therapy

An Interview with Therapist Kate Willman

Kate Willman, LMHCA, MA, HCA is a Psychotherapist at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. She specializes in the use of ACT and the utilization of writing therapy in her practice.

Amelia Worley:  Thanks for joining us today for this installment of the Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series. I'm Amelia Worley, a research intern at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. I'd like to welcome Kate Willman. Kate is an associate therapist here at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. She is also a founder of Ben's Friends, a community support group for restaurant employees seeking recovery from alcohol and drug addiction. Kate has worked on numerous research projects regarding psycholinguistics and providing therapy for those suffering from addiction, traumatic brain injury, emotional experiences related to death, and military populations. Before we get started, Kate, can you please tell our listeners a little about yourself?

Kate Willman:  Sure. Thank you so much for having me. And about myself, you said it, in terms of therapy. I am a native of Texas. I spent many years also in New York City and then moved to Seattle almost five years ago. And working in mental health is my second career, definitely my most happy and fulfilling career, but I spent a lot of years doing hospitality and it's also very fulfilling. I actually still do some work with my partner in restaurants. And there's a lot of crossover, actually. And I think that's an important part of, I guess, why I'm here and who I am, in that I've always been interested in people's stories and always been interested in serving people.

Of course in hospitality, it's a very literal serving and in therapy it's a little bit different, but that's definitely a core part of me is like this continuing interaction with others, usually in some form of service to others. And not in a completely altruistic way either. Right? I get a lot out of that. I get a lot out of being in those really intimate situations with people and learning what they need and hopefully being able to help them get that. I also have two cats and two dogs, so I'm a very happy animal mama. I love animals. I have always loved animals. That's a big part of who I am too. And then, I live in Seattle with my partner and taking it one day at a time.

Amelia Worley:  What is it that got you interested in becoming a therapist?

Kate Willman:  Yeah. Like I said, I was always involved in one way or another, serving others. And the thing that got me very first interested in it was being a volunteer, they call it peer-to-peer counseling, and this was on the East Coast when I was living there several years ago. I guess, another giant part of me and this goes into Ben's Friends, is that I identify as a person in long-term recovery from drugs and alcohol. And I spent the better part of a decade, really not in the service of others, definitely in the service of myself. And that set of addictions really took over my life. And at 25, I found myself really, actually very close to death, and there's a lot of other stuff to that story.

And after that, I got sober January 30th of 2013. Part of my recovery and part of my success in recovery was speaking with other addicts and working with other addicts at various points in their recovery. So, this peer-to-peer counseling thing was happening in detoxes and hospitals, rehab centers out in New York, New Jersey. And I had done it at this one hospital, pretty regularly, weekly, basically, for a couple of years. I knew the nurses and the social workers and stuff who worked there and they were like, "You know Kate, this is a job. You are a volunteer, but you could really do this. It's a real thing."

And at that time, my career in hospitality was actually at its peak. I was working in really great, four-star, New York City restaurants. I had become a maitre d', which was my goal. And so, I was at an interesting crossroads too, of like, "Oh, shit, can I make a new career?" I had never even considered that. Getting sober and just living had been the really cool thing that had happened. And so, I sat with that for a while and decided to try my hand at school. I had gone to school when I was 18 and studied hospitality management.

So, I was 27 and just, "Oh, can I even do college? I don't know." And I decided to try community college. I took some psychology classes and I just fell in love, and it was such a great turning point for me to go back to school. I went to community college, then I went to a four year, got that degree in psychology. And at the beginning I was like, lots of addicts do this, "I'll just be a substance use counselor. I'll just go to school and get this certificate for substance use counseling." And no, the more psych classes I took, the more counseling professionals to whom I was exposed, the more I wanted to do more and more and more, and the more my interests really grew in this realm. So, I ended up moving to Seattle in 2017 and had tried on a couple different programs, local and national, and ended up doing Northwestern's online master's degree. I was really impressed with that program and that it was available online.

I am an advocate of telehealth. And even before COVID, I was very much an advocate of that because of the accessibility it allows for people. So, in terms of me becoming a counselor, taking those courses online and being able to say, "Hey, online is where we should be putting energy for counseling and for counseling education." That was really important to me too. The program was three years, as of course, you and everyone else knows, then COVID happens and everything happened online anyway.

So, now I find myself really, really full circle, able to be a counselor, be an advocate for folks in that substance use realm, the same way that I was nine-and-a-half years ago needing that counseling, needing that guidance. And a lot of other different folks that I get to see and really use my experience, not just as a counselor and someone who's educated in this way, but as a person who was really in many, many low places over the years, and who's experienced a lot of life transitions along the way. And in counseling, this is when a lot of people will come in, is for these life changes. And when things become different is when we find ourselves needing help. That was a lot of roundabout answer, but that's how I got here.

Amelia Worley:  What areas or disorders do you specialize in? I know you talked a little bit about the substance use.

Kate Willman:  Yeah, I definitely feel super at home with folks who are struggling in substance use, substance abuse, and then even to generalize it even more and zoom out even more, a lot of the discussions today are just about relationships to substances, alcohol, even lots of behavioral addictions, right? Shopping, gambling, sex, pornography, internet use. There are a lot of behavioral addictions that we consider as well. And again, having been absolutely enslaved by my addictions for many years, I feel really at home helping folks in those arenas.

I also developed a very clear interest and, hopefully one day specialty, in grief counseling. And I found that a lot of my experiences personally and then with these addicts and self-described alcoholics that I was working with over the years, a lot of people were dealing with various versions of grief. And some of them, it was like, "Oh yeah, I had this near-death experience." Or like me, I was so addicted, I almost died. Or, I have a couple suicide attempts, right? There's a lot of people who have considered suicide and who have really thought about suicide. And how does that affect a life? And we can use a lot of grief counseling in that area.

And then I mentioned, life transitions. A lot of grief being applicable in divorces or just changes, breakups, changing a job, losing a job. COVID was just a gigantic paradigm of lots of different layers and kinds of grief for people. So, I really find myself diving into more and more of the grief world, and all of the different applications of that. Certainly, within death, dying, bereavement. I volunteered in hospice for a while here in Seattle, too, for about a year, and really wanted to be in that world of death and how that affects us, the living.

And anyway, I could go on about that forever. I really like grief counseling and lots of different applications. And then, my time at SAS has really directly introduced me to the populations of folks who are aligning with symptoms of OCD, of ADHD, of these really specified types of anxiety, trichotillomania, excoriation, which is hair pulling and skin picking and stuff. And so, really, really niche, specified presentations of anxiety. These are things I was exposed to certainly in school and in my internships and some in my volunteer work for sure, but I've really gotten some great training and some great experience head on with these specific presentations as I've worked at SAS.

So, that's been a fun world to live into and to get exposure to doing exposure therapy and to just learning more about these struggles that folks go through in those areas and getting to see therapy, really nitty gritty therapy, and what real behavioral change can look like with a person. It's very, very exciting.

Amelia Worley:  Can you talk a little bit about your treatment approach?

Kate Willman:  Yeah. The easy, very general answer is that I'm eclectic. I think every grad student wants to believe that they're eclectic. And eclectic just meaning like, "Well, I'll do whatever the client needs, and I want to learn everything." And as we get more and more into the actual profession, it's quite impossible to be specialized in all of these approaches and get really good at them. It feels good to be good at something. Right?

So, I think there's a few that I come back to over and over again. Number one is ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy. This is such a beautiful iteration of cognitive behavioral therapy. It's so flexible, its main goal is flexibility, not for nothing, but it's so flexible in terms of its application, what presentations we find it helpful for people when we engage in ACT. And so, I really like that. It's nonlinear. It's not really focused on symptom reduction, right? It's focused on a meaningful life. The word acceptance is in the name. And so, I find it really, really helpful for, again, a lot of different presentations, but even as therapy goes on for people and maybe their symptoms have reduced a little bit, to go a little bit further in finding how to live a meaningful life, despite what's going on with anything that's happening, any life change, any type of grief or whatever, any sort of internal experience. There is always, always, always this universal need for a meaningful life, and getting to explore that with people via the ACT method has been really, really cool.

And then, I pull from certainly an evolutionary approach. I really found it helpful in my own journey to look at comparative animal behavior, to look at the lives and the struggles of early humans, as we understand it at least. And see how these different parts of our brain, having evolved the way that they have, why do we have something like a fight or flight mechanism? Right? And why are there these ancient, ancient mechanisms in our brain that we just rely on so primally. And when we can identify those, even in our 21st century modern life, with this big old frontal lobe, being logical all the time, there's so much acceptance that can happen for people when they realize, hey, this anxiety that you're feeling over X, Y, Z, is not just because you're a bad person. It's not just because you are defective in some way. Actually, early humans or the animal brain really relies on this function to keep us safe. Anxiety in most of its forms is really there to keep us safe. And so, we find that with this evolutionary lens, there can be quite a bit of just normalizing, I guess, and a deeper understanding of self, that all of these things, they're causing us trouble, but they're really there to help us. And that shift in relationship to our anxiety, it can be so, so powerful. So, I love that one as well.

I definitely do some existential stuff, which is on the other end of the spectrum from any kind of CBT. But when we talk about meaning making and what is my purpose in life? There can be some fun, especially in the realm of grief, there can be some fun discoveries of self when we are looking through this existential lens for ourselves. And then in terms of techniques, CBT has a whole host of really cool techniques from ACT, from DBT, that I will employ as needed. And then I also really enjoy narrative therapy. There's a lot more even coming out now, narrative therapy-wise. Here's that frontal lobe again, we were talking about the other parts of the brain before, but we have a lot of research that's showing the power of narrative therapy in engaging and re-engaging that frontal lobe part, the decision-making part.

And when we are able to look at our lives and our struggles and our relationships, or our questions in that narrative form, we're employing and re-employing all of these tools that are already there for us. And it's really a discovery of self. I think that I say that a lot actually, but I guess to wrap up treatment approach, I'm very much an advocate of helping people see they already have everything they need to be successful, everything they need to even define what success is. Some people have never been given that chance. What is success? What does a meaningful life look like to me? And then how do I get it? It's not going to be, because I give it to them, it's not going to be because they picked the right self-help book or YouTube channel to watch. All of those things might be useful in self-discovery, but it's really a matter good counseling, in my opinion. The best approach in my opinion, is being willing to try on all these different things with a client, with a person, and watch them and assist them in discovering for themselves, what is most meaningful and what is best for them and their life experiences. And for that meaning, defining that meaning and then approaching that meaning for them. That is the best approach all of the time, no matter what.

Amelia Worley:  That's great. Would you mind sharing your experience in using writing as a treatment approach? What are the benefits of writing therapy?

Kate Willman:  Yeah. Yeah. So, you can tell how much I love it, because I was already talking about it. And again, humans, we know a lot or we think we know a lot, we know it as best as we understand it, other animals, while definitely really advanced in a lot of their communication, as far as we know other animals do not have this writing thing. Right? So, we can guess from that, that it is a purely human function, purely human mechanism that we are able to write.

And so, when we look at that spectrum of evolution, of mammalian evolutions specifically, we are again, hypothesizing that this ability to write and the benefits to write, from the evolutionary perspective, the theory is we don't do anything that isn't of benefit to us in some way. Right? So, there are these surface level benefits of writing, right? Okay. Well, now I'm living in a society with other humans and the writing will enable us to communicate in a different way, in the here and now. We also know that writing of course, allows us to communicate with generations past and future.

So, it's really, really cool that writing as a mechanism, really came out of evolution in that way. So, those might be the external benefits of the writing for us as a species, as organisms, but internally there's got to be usually a benefit too. And so now, over the last 20, 30 years especially, our brain scans have gotten so much more advanced. And when they've looked at these brain scans and they've learned more about that internal function of writing and looked at the frontal lobe, what they realized was in its most simplest form, and I hope I'm not minimizing in any way or being a reductionist in any way, but it's really just very simply, I have to think about something, right? If I want to write about my experience in COVID, let's say, if I write about that, I have to think about it, to come up with the words and the language, then I have to involve all these other mechanisms with my body and my brain to write it down.

And then, the third time is if I'm going to reread it. And we know that reading involves some other areas of the brain, but the point is there's at least three times, usually much more, but at least three times when I'm involving my brain to go and review this thing that I wrote. And it's just like hearing a story from somewhere else, that I might learn if I'm hearing that story three different times or 10 different times. And then I hear someone else tell that same story, 10 different times, of course, logic says I'm going to get some different things from those stories.

So, in the case of writing and in narrative therapy, what we try to do is employ those different inherent lenses and perspectives, but all within here and in that person's writing just for themselves. So, the therapist's role is to provide provoking questions sometimes, right? That if I just go and write my story in COVID, okay, I'm liable to learn a bunch of different things because of, like I said, the brain is automatically reviewing it. And that means that even the next day, I might be subconsciously thinking about it, even if I'm not actually reading it or rereading it. Right? So, that's happening.

And then, if the therapist is like, "Okay, Kate, you wrote your story of COVID, here's some provoking questions." That's going to cause me to, “ooh, now I have to use my critical thinking, which is also up there. And my problem solving mechanisms are all activated in that frontal lobe.” And so, you see the infinite nature of narrative therapy in engaging and activating all of these different parts of our brain to allow us to see things from a different perspective and thereby, gain things from those different perspectives that we couldn't do if we were just sitting here trying to think about, "Well, what was my COVID experience like?" We get that really cliche, "I'm stuck in my head about it. I'm stuck in my head about it."

There's definitely a magic to putting it on paper or putting it on a computer, just as there's a magic to putting it in the universe, telling it to somebody else like your therapist or your friend, but we are taking that to the next level, writing it, rereading it, having these provoking questions that we didn't really come up with on our own. Well, shit, that gives me a lot of more perspectives, a lot of more answers that might come, that I'm just unable to retrieve from my brain alone.

The last piece, and this is my ACT brain coming in, ACT cheerleader maybe, not my ACT brain. ACT has this component of cognitive diffusion, right? That it behooves most of us and we have evolved to be fused to our thoughts and our feelings. So, when we defuse, that's that act of, we are not our thoughts, we are the thinkers, right? And we know when thoughts are so troublesome and we're dealing with OCD or anxiety or grief or whatever, by getting away from them for a moment, we are able to look at them a little bit differently and guide a little bit more, how much we want to connect to those thoughts, if we want to believe them or not.

And narrative therapy, in most of its forms, will also inherently engage in that cognitive diffusion, that I'm putting it out from me, again, in that same way when I tell someone, but it's on steroids, right? This ability to defuse and defuse and defuse. And we know that we just have much more autonomy and agency over those troublesome thoughts, while accepting them as there, and then deciding where we want to go forward. Yeah. That's narrative therapy.

Amelia Worley:  Do you have any words of advice or anything you want to say to our listeners?

Kate Willman:  Willingness is the key. We talk a lot and thankfully there's a lot of stuff out on the internet now, that's so accessible for people, maybe on social media, on TikTok or Instagram, people are getting help in ways that they have never been able to before. And so, I would want to say that I used to go to an AA meeting in New York City and it had on the wall, "There's no wrong way to get sober." And that used to piss people off. That used to make people really mad, like, "Oh, of course there's a right way to get sober." And I apply that now to therapy. There's no wrong way to try to feel better.

And that's a hot take, it's an unpopular opinion, right? Are there bad therapies out there? Yes. Are there bad therapists out there? Unfortunately, there are. There are people who might be more harmful than helpful, but I think the hardest step for most people is being willing to ask for help. And for some person that might be, I'm just willing to follow some accounts on Instagram and try to get some engagement from these people. And maybe I need help, being willing to say to ourselves, "I need help. I can't do this alone anymore."

And so, what I would say to people is, any level of willingness, wherever you are at in your mental health journey, in your becoming a counselor journey, on whatever journey you identify with, the willingness to keep going, the willingness to show up, the willingness to ask for help, the willingness to say, "I need a break today. I can't go any further right now. I'm not sure what to do." The willingness to say, "I don't know." Oh my gosh, what courage that takes.

So, willingness is the key to, so, so, so much in terms of success, in terms of meaning, in terms of contentedness and serenity. So, if you're feeling stuck and you can identify that, the next question might be, "What am I willing to do? How far am I willing to go?" And then, "Who or what am I willing to ask help from?" And just to love yourself, that's really one of the hardest parts too, huh? So, if you can find place for some love in your heart for yourself, I always recommend that too. No matter what.

Amelia Worley:  That's great. Well, thank you so much. It was really great interviewing you today.

Kate Willman:  Yeah. Thank you, Amelia.

Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.

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Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.

Therapist and SAS ED Blake Thompson on Psychotherapy

An Interview with Therapist Blake Thompson

Blake Thompson, LMHC, MA is a Psychotherapist and Executive Director of Seattle Anxiety Specialists. He is a clinical supervisor and also provides both individual and group psychotherapy.

Nicole Izquierdo:  Hi, everyone. Thanks, Blake, for joining us today for this installment of the Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series. This is a special one, it's called Meet the Team. I'm Nicole Izquierdo, I'm a research intern at Seattle Anxiety Specialists.

So Blake here, he is the practice's executive director. He serves as a clinical supervisor and he also provides individual and group psychotherapy. The first question for today is telling our listeners a little bit about yourself.

Blake Thompson:  Hey, thanks, Nicole. Yeah, that was a good introduction. Oh man, what to say about me? Well, I am married and I have a one-year-old daughter that keeps me up at night, but whom I love very much. I love reading. I find people really complicated and fascinating. A big part of what draws me to therapy still and to the field is that the more I learn, I feel like the more questions I still have. I feel like I haven't gotten bored yet. I still feel confused, so staying curious.

Nicole Izquierdo:  That's good. Let's start off with, what is it that got you interested in becoming a therapist?

Blake Thompson:  That's a good question. Well, one of my big inspirations for becoming a therapist was a comedy movie. I don't know if you've seen “I Heart Huckabees”. No? Yeah, older Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Jude Law film. Great movie, very funny, but yeah, I think that put the idea in my head. I had been to therapy when I was younger and I think that experience really shaped me. Being a client, I think, was really impactful. But yeah I'd been really interested in philosophy in school and I don't think I ever really considered, you know, psychology. I think I took one psychology class in all of college. I was really not interested in psychology. The idea that I would do something professionally that was related to a subject that I just wasn't really interested in wasn't super appealing to me at the time, but as I went to graduate school in philosophy, more and more of the stuff that I was interested in philosophy started to bleed over into psychology and I got more and more interested.

In philosophy, a lot of what we're doing is conceptual analysis. We're thinking about not minds and brains, but the stuff that are the constituents of thoughts. We're really focused on ideas like justice and the good life and truth and causation and all of these ideas that are really central to the thoughts that we think on a day-to-day basis. I just got more and more interested in the machinery that realizes that and more and more aware of thinking processes as processes, and not just as like, you know, and less and less focused on abstract.

By the end of grad school, I think I was starting to think about a jump into psychology, away from philosophy. I was talking with people about just what there was in that professional space, and the idea of becoming a therapist hadn't yet coalesced, but I think talking with folks about what therapy was like as a profession, what was interesting in it, how it was different than other forms of healthcare, yeah that was definitely, those conversations really helped shape that direction.

While I was in grad school, I really didn't like teaching very much. That was not something that I found super rewarding, but I loved tutoring, doing one-on-one work with students. I think really reflecting on that process and how much more I liked tutoring than I liked teaching helped also solidify for me that I would like doing therapy, because it looks a lot like tutoring in a lot of ways.

Nicole Izquierdo:  With that extensive background in philosophy, how would you say it has impacted your therapy style and the way that you go about counseling?

Blake Thompson:  Yeah, cool. That's a good question. I think so much of what we do as therapists is we reframe things for clients. Clients come in with, something's happened, there's an event, a situation, or even just themselves presenting in a certain way, the various processes that make up our lives, and they've got a particular perspective on it. That perspective is part of what explains the way they feel, the way they're acting. We help clients to see different ways of looking at their lives, of looking at the situations that they're navigating. That helps them develop the psychological flexibility, helps them develop this ability to look at things from different perspectives and to free up the way they feel and free up the way they act to become less rigid, less stuck.

A lot of what philosophy is, is conceptualizing and re-conceptualizing things. It isn’t so much, it's not an empirical discipline, it's a discipline where we're thinking about, okay, well, what's a different way of looking at this, what's the right way of looking at something? It might not be contesting facts, it might be, it's often a question of what's the right frame to put on something.

So yeah, in terms of what philosophy looks like, there are a lot of similarities. It's less often a matter of what are the right facts and more often a matter of what's the right way to conceptualize a particular thing. So too for therapy, it's often not a matter of what are the right facts, like this person is just dead wrong about something, it's more a matter of like are they applying the right conceptual scheme to it?

Nicole Izquierdo:  Thank you. Are there any areas or disorders or age groups that you specialize in?

Blake Thompson:  I pretty much only work with adults, rarely see adolescents and I don't work at all with children. I don't work with couples. Yeah, I pretty much just work with adults. I work with a pretty broad range of people, but I really enjoy working with folks who've got cluster C personality disorders, like avoidant personality disorder, dependent personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD).

I really enjoy working with folks who've got high functioning or low support needs, autism adults that are like, especially folks who struggle with deficit in theory of mind, which is really pretty common for folks who've got high functioning autism. They might not necessarily lack social skills, which I think is often how that gets conceptualized, oftentimes they lack awareness of how social interactions work and how other people think. One thing that I find really rewarding about working with those folks is that a big part of the work is explaining how other minds work to them and working with them to help them see that. That project is, for me, really rewarding. It becomes a really interesting, like theoretical discussion about how to make sense of other people and how to understand interactions with them and how to navigate those interactions. Yeah, it ends up looking a lot like philosophy tutoring.

Nicole Izquierdo:  I know you've touched on this a little bit, but would you mind describing how your treatment approach is, to make it simplified for the viewers? Is it solution-focused, do you help them manage stress with CBT techniques, or do you have other ways to go about it?

Blake Thompson:  Yeah. I'm somebody who thinks that the different approaches to therapy are all valuable, for the most part. Maybe not all of them are valuable, there's certain things, like primal scream therapy, that maybe deserve to end up in the dust bin. But among the well-regarded extent approaches to therapy, those pretty much all have a place in my mind. First, second, third wave CBT I think is great, and that stuff is especially great for what used to be called axis one conditions: major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia, OCD.

I use exposure therapy, I use ACT, rely on DBT principles. You know, sort of like broad, everything that fits within that broad CBT umbrella I think is super valuable, all of these insights from behavioral psychology and cognitive psychology. That stuff, in some ways it can be really solution-focused, it can be really focused on symptoms, but yeah, at the end of the day, it's evidence-based and often it doesn't take a million years to see some positive impact in someone's life.

There are other people who come into therapy who have more characterological, what used to be called axis two, issues, like maybe they're struggling with narcissism or entitlement, maybe it's like they find it impossible to stand up for themselves, they're constantly subjugating their needs, maybe they're perfectionists or workaholics struggling with unrelenting standards, chronic sense of defectiveness that they can't shake, behaving in ways that kind of perplex them, like they find certain behaviors necessary or are driven to do certain things that in retrospect they can't really make sense of but in the moment feel like they have to do them.

A lot of that stuff is the stuff that when it's more intense, we would call it a personality disorder, but most people struggle with some of this stuff to some extent. We used to frame this stuff as just neuroticism. Neuroticism has taken on a technical meaning in personality psychology, but it's the kind of stuff that would make you a really great sitcom character. Depression doesn't really make you an interesting sitcom character, but an inability to stand up for yourself makes you a great sitcom character. Narcissism, entitlement, particularness, perfectionism, workaholism, all of these things make someone an interesting character. Yeah, I find working with these folks really endearing.

I think psychodynamic therapy is a really, really helpful approach for this kind of stuff. I think even the CBT world has really acknowledged this, that the best way to help folks deal with this stuff really is a more autobiographical approach to therapy, it's an approach to therapy that is focused on looking back and reprocessing the unmet emotional needs that were the foundation for these behaviors, that were the foundation for these, what at the time were adaptations, but are no longer adaptive.

There are still other reasons that people come to therapy. Sometimes it's not that somebody has a mental health disorder, it might be that they just have a lot of environmental stressors. There isn't something wrong with them, there's something wrong with their environment. If you're the director of an environmental nonprofit and the head of the EPA is cutting all of the funding to protect the wetlands or something, you're scrambling to figure out what to do, you're sweating bullets, something that you really care about is under threat, you might lose your job, whatever, therapy could be helpful for you, but probably it might not look like CBT and it might not look like psychodynamic therapy.

It might look more like supportive counseling, it might look more like Rogerian supportive counseling, where maybe the thing you need is not to explore your relationship with your parents, maybe the thing you need is not to identify cognitive distortions. Maybe you don't have any cognitive distortions, maybe the reason that you're so stressed out is that you're seeing things accurately, but you need to process that stress. You need some place, someone to be a sounding board and to help you think through what you could do that would be an adaptive coping response. That, I think, is a big part of the work too.

A lot of people come to therapy not because they've got generalized anxiety disorder, but maybe because they just found out that their spouse is cheating on them or their kid just died or they lost their job or they just graduated from college and they don't know what they want to do with their life. There are these reasons that people come to therapy that don't have anything to do with having a disorder. All of that stuff might be causing stress, but it's not anxiety in a clinical sense. CBT and psychodynamic therapy might not really be well-suited to addressing those issues. I think that, what's often called the third wave in psychology, like Rogerian therapy, I think is really, really well suited to working with folks who are navigating normal life stressors and do want support with that stuff.

Yeah, and again, I think they're even more like what's the right theoretical orientation. It depends on the person, there's going to be for couples, Gottman approaches, EFT approaches. I think existential therapy is really helpful for folks who struggling with questions about meaning and purpose and identity. Those are things that CBT might not be able to tap into very well, psychodynamic therapy might not be able to tap into very well, Rogerian therapy might not be able to tap into very well, but having a working understanding of some sort might provide you with a leg up as a therapist to help you tackle these questions.

Nicole Izquierdo:  Yeah, I like that. There's not a one-size-fits-all approach, every client is unique with unique needs and unique environments and pasts. I like that, thank you.

How would you describe therapy to someone who's not familiar with it at all, or who's hesitant to start treatment, especially with the stigma on mental health treatment? Like you just said, I feel like there's a big misconception that people go to therapy because they have a mental health diagnosis disorder, but some people just go, like you said, when there's overwhelming environmental stressors and they need help with coping mechanisms. How would you describe it or reframe it to encourage those people that are hesitant?

Blake Thompson:  Yeah. I think people are hesitant for different reasons, and I think getting clear on our own hesitancy can be really helpful. We're often afraid of things that we don't know and afraid of things that have been stigmatized. A lot of men don't go to therapy because they find it hard to get help from other people. I mean, there's the cliché about men not asking for directions, not asking for help at the store. I think there's an extension of that for a lot of men around therapy, that they shouldn't open up, they shouldn't be vulnerable, they shouldn't share things. A lot of that is culturally normed. If that's what someone's struggling with, I think recognizing that is really the first step.

But there are other reasons why people don't come to therapy. In terms of OCD, for example, sometimes people have horrible intrusive thoughts, thoughts of like murdering people, for example, thoughts of deviant sexual acts. They might worry that if someone, if their therapist were to hear this from them, they might think that they intend to kill someone or kill themselves or what have you, and so they don't go. Suicidal people might not go to therapy because they're worried about getting committed to inpatient, or people struggling with substance abuse might not want to go because they're ambivalent and don't really want to stop drinking or using whatever product they're using.

Often when people are struggling with the question of whether or not to go to therapy, there's some ambivalence within them. There's some part of them that wants to go and some part of them that is repelled by the idea. I think that it might be the right decision. I mean, I'm really open to the idea that therapy is not for everyone. Therapy is not this perfect cure-all that is going to save us from ourselves. It is really helpful. I became a therapist and I'm still a therapist because I really do believe that it is really, really helpful, and for some people really profoundly helpful.

But I think really what we can do, what we ought to do, is identify that ambivalence, try to articulate it. What is that, what is this tension? What's this part of me that, A, wants to go, why is that, and what's the part of me that's telling me not to go? What is that? Where is that coming from? There's a little microphone in my brain and who's at the microphone? Who's like issuing the instructions? This fear, is that being put into me by my culture, is that put into me by like my parents, is that my bully from my youth speaking to me? Trying to get some clarity on where did I get this idea from that I need to be afraid of this thing, why am I hesitant about this, just spending some time investigating that for ourselves, sitting with that ambivalence, trying to unpack it. I think that's really productive.

Nicole Izquierdo:  Thank you. You're also executive director at the practice. Can you tell me a little bit more about what this role entails?

Blake Thompson:  Yeah. As a mental healthcare practice, we've got a number of administrative functions that are just important on a yearly basis. We have to renew our malpractice insurance every year, we've got to renew our lease with our landlord, we've got to make sure that we've got working internet, we've got to make sure we've got tea and coffee for our clients, we've got to make sure that staff are getting paid on time. Basically, it's all of this kind of behind-the-scenes stuff.

Our office manager, Jonathan, he focuses on really the day-to-day administrative functions of the practice. He's answering the phone, he's sending faxes, he's scheduling people, he's dealing with billing issues and all that kind of stuff. I deal with the longer-term administrative stuff, so I'm talking to our lawyers, I'm talking to our insurance companies, I'm talking to our landlord, I'm making sure all our contracts are in order, making sure paperwork for our clients gets updated as it needs to be. It's not like the most glamorous stuff, but it's important. It's all stuff that allows our therapists to just focus on being therapists and not have to worry about all of those questions and concerns that come up when you're in solo practice. Part of the benefit of being in a group practice is that, for most of the clinicians, not me, but most of them, they get to just focus on being a therapist, which is really nice for them.

Nicole Izquierdo:  This question is steering into the more personal direction, but how has becoming a parent impacted the way you view the world or the way you interact with your clients? Because it's this whole new identity, parenthood, that you're grappling with. If you don't mind.

Blake Thompson:  No, no, that's great. It's definitely opened my eyes to what parenthood is like. Obviously, not what parenthood is like for everyone, I have my own experience of parenthood. But I think being a parent is a lot more difficult and a lot more rewarding, both, than I sort of imagined it would be. I think it really does change the way that I look at, the way I think about my clients who are parents. It's helped me understand their perspective a lot better. It's also helped inform the way I interact with clients who are struggling with the question of whether to have kids. It's given me a lot of perspective there. I think in both of those areas, it's really had a positive impact on my work.

I think the area where it's had a negative impact is I get a lot less sleep sometimes now and that has unintended consequences. I think even during this interview, I'm probably rambling more than I would normally, but I'm running on like four hours of sleep. It is what it is.

Nicole Izquierdo:  Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Again, another personal one, but where do you see yourself in five years?

Blake Thompson:  Oh, cool. Well, I'm really excited to continue to kind of grow SAS. I mean, I think that the one thing that we haven't done much of up to this point but that I'd like to see us do a lot more of is develop continuing education. I think that's an area that I'd like to have us devote more resources to, I think both in terms of providing good local, evidence-based therapy education, which is the thing that there's often not enough of, but also my particular background and my particular strengths as a therapist, I think having a background in philosophy, also having a background in psychology, I'm, I think, really well positioned to both provide existential therapy, but also to provide good instruction in it. I think over the next five years, I'm going to really work on developing curriculum so that I can provide really good continuing education in existential psychotherapy.

Nicole Izquierdo:  That's great. Last one, if you have any last words of advice for our listeners or anything else you'd like to add.

Blake Thompson:  Oh, well, if you watched, thanks for tuning in. The one thing that I'm really, I think, struck by, and that is, there are plenty of trainings in plenty of different kinds of psychotherapy, but one approach to therapy that I think doesn't get enough press time that I think is a really, really innovative and really, really helpful approach to therapy is ACT, A-C-T. I would encourage anyone who's a clinician or who's a client who's trying to figure out what else they can do to promote their own personal development, their own personal growth, either as a provider or as just a person in the world, I don't think ACT is everything, like I said before about approaches to psychotherapy, I don't think that any one approach can fully capture everything there is to being a person and address every sort of concern that we have, but I think ACT is uniquely helpful for how simple it is. I think it is remarkable how beneficial it is and how intuitive it is.

There's a great self-help book by Steven Hayes, who is one of the main developers of ACT, called “Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life.” There are millions of copies of this thing that have been printed, but I would encourage anyone who has any questions about how to apply therapeutic principles to their life, how to take the next steps. Sometimes therapy is too expensive, sometimes therapy is inaccessible, sometimes you feel like the therapists that you're finding aren't a good fit for you. There are really, really great therapeutic workbooks out there that are based on evidence-based psychology. This book by Steven Hayes, “Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life,” it's a phenomenal book and the ACT principles that it's based on are super, super helpful. I'd encourage anybody who's considering therapy, who's ambivalent about it, checking it out. Again, it might not be the thing for you, but it's about as close to a one-size-fit-all, helpful across the board approach to therapy that I've ever found. I really want to shout from the rooftops, everybody should know more about ACT than they probably already do.

Nicole Izquierdo:  Well, thank you so much for sharing that, and thank you so much for joining us, Blake. We really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us.

Blake Thompson:  Hey, thanks, Nicole.

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Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.