😣 Managing Therapist Reactions | 🛡️ Fighting Hopelessness | 💔 Navigating Attachment Styles

Managing Therapist Reactions, Fighting Hopelessness, and Navigating Attachment Styles

This week on Ask Kati Anything (ep. 224) licensed therapist Kati Morton talks about how therapists react when clients have breakthroughs, how we can fight hopelessness, and ways that we can more easily talk to a therapist of the opposite sex about sensitive topics. She then dives into why it can be hard for so many of us to feel and process emotions, how to deal with attachment in therapy, and why our attachment styles can vary so much.

1. Hi Kati, I'm interested to know when a client (who struggles to show emotions) starts to get upset, angry, emotional etc.. Do you internally but not visibly celebrate? A lot of people including myself hate seeing someone upset, although I'd never try to stop them expressing what they are feeling. 00:46

2. Hi Kati, How do you fight hopelessness when it feels like mental health has consumed your life. Even though I am not at the very bottom anymore, my psychiatrist told me there's a good chance I'll experience severe depression again and again (have had severe depression on a non-functional level in 2023 and 2014, but I'm improving with medication and back to work at my warehouse job). How do I feel like I am not doomed due to mental illness? 08:03

3. I see a therapist of the opposite gender and some topics are a little sensitive to talk about, any tips on getting started? 13:20

4. Hi Kati! After therapy sessions, I often struggle for days, unable to fully feel or let go of emotions. I intellectualize a lot, but I also have a constant feeling that there is something I’ve missed sharing. Why is it so hard for some of us to just feel and process emotions? Also, do therapists get frustrated when clients reach out outside of sessions but struggle to express themselves during sessions? 18:30

5. My question is about attachment problems starting from early life. I have this problem with my therapist that when he posts about his other clients who are similar age to me (he is a lot older than me) and how proud he is with them, I withdraw and leave. I think I'm so used to people leaving me for the “other” in any condition I have been in. Since I was a child my siblings preferred my cousins visiting us and my coping way was to live my life independently as they were ignoring me. 28:51

6. Hi Kati! I completed your attachment workshop, and it was extremely helpful! I have some relationships with people where I lean towards anxious attachment and others where I lean towards avoidant. More specifically, anyone who I feel is like a motherly figure, I get more anxiously attached, but with my family and friends I am avoidant. Would this still be considered disorganized attachment even though there isn’t necessarily “push and pull” within each relationship, and it’s more just operating in one extreme or the other depending on who it is? What would cause someone to have such different attachment tendencies in different relationships? 34:49

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