140. Q+A: Trusting Yourself, Willfulness, Advocating for Your Needs, & Building Healthy Relationships

Mar 22

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In today's solo episode, I am answering a bunch of your questions! I share my tips on how to advocate for your needs with others, why we sometimes look for unhealthy attention and how to avoid this behavior, how to cope when someone needs space from you, how to build trust with yourself, what to talk about in therapy sessions, and how to navigate a loved one's willfulness.

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+ She Persisted Ep. 139

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About She Persisted (formerly Nevertheless, She Persisted)

After a year and a half of intensive treatment for severe depression and anxiety, 18-year-old Sadie recounts her journey by interviewing family members, professionals, and fellow teens to offer self-improvement tips, DBT education, and personal experiences. She Persisted is the reminder that someone else has been there too and your inspiration to live your life worth living.

a note: this is an automated transcription so please ignore any accidental misspellings!

Sadie: [00:00:00] Welcome to She Persisted. I'm your host, Sadie Sutton, a 19 year old from the Bay Area studying psychology at the University of Penn. She Persisted is the Teen Mental Health Podcast made for teenagers by a teen. In each episode, I'll bring you authentic, accessible, and relatable conversations about every aspect of mental wellness.

You can expect evidence-based, teen approved resources, coping skills, including lots of D B T insights and education in. Each piece of content you consume, she persisted, Offers you a safe space to feel validated and understood in your struggle, while encouraging you to take ownership of your journey and build your life worth living.

So let's dive in this week on She persisted.

I think that not trusting yourself can coincide with avoidance. If you are avoiding situations, if you are avoiding interactions, if you're avoiding public speaking, literally whatever it is, something that you are avoiding, you'll kind of have that thought of, I can't do this.

Like I don't trust myself to do this. I can't handle it. There's that lack of trust that you can do [00:01:00] it. So the more that you push yourself outside of your comfort zone, the more that you expose yourself to that thing that's making you anxious, the more you will trust your. To handle that situation and the more you'll trust yourself to handle any new situation or challenge Hello? Hello, and welcome to She Persisted. If you're new here. My name is Sadie. I'm a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania studying psychology. I started to persisted after a year and a half of intensive treatment, and I wanted to create the resource I wish I had when I was struggling as a team with depression and anxiety and all of the things.

We are doing a rapid fire q and a today. I have two tests in an essay this week. So things are busy. We're on a time crunch, so we're gonna do some rapid fire mental health questions and that's the. Question? One, how do I cope with other people's willfulness? Like a lack of desire to use their skills? So the term willfulness is something in D B T that kind of becomes a catch all for when you are not willing to be effective. When you are having like personal resistance to something, so it kind of becomes a catchall for when you are not willing to use your skill, when you [00:02:00] don't wanna be effective, when you're feeling some personal resistance to doing something. If you're like, I don't wanna go there, I'm anxious, I'm not, I'm not gonna see that person. I'm not gonna talk to them. That's being willful. You're, there's that avoidance there.

It's a really amazing term and a really amazing way to flag when something is getting in the way and when you probably should push yourself to do a little bit of exposure therapy. What I do when I come across someone that has skills and decides not to use them, which full disclaimer is me often, like I think we all have skills that we could be using, and especially with my siblings when I'm interacting with my family, sometimes you just choose to be willful is the most effective.

No, but it happens. We're human. But what do you do when someone else has the skills? They're choosing you not to do them? I feel like a really great example of this, sorry, younger siblings gonna put you on blast, is my younger brother when he's like, I don't wanna do something and you're bothering me, so I'm going to annoy you as much as possible.

And they're like saying something in your ear. They're going above and beyond to get on your nerves. [00:03:00] That's the perfect example of when you would have to be like this person. Could choose to be more effective, and yet they are blatantly not. So what do you do in that situation? The first, I think, is totally flagging that and doing radical acceptance and being very aware of that, being like, this person is choosing to not be as effective as they could be.

When it comes down to it. This isn't interpersonal interaction. So we are using interpersonal effectiveness skills and the foundation of interpersonal effectiveness is deciding what your objective is. Do you wanna protect yourself, respect? Do you wanna get your objective met?

Do you want to improve the relationship? If someone is getting on your nerves and they're being unskillful, you likely either want to get your objective med. Protect your self-respect. And I feel like in most cases it will honestly be protecting your self-respect because if it's not a two-way street, and if both people aren't attempting to come to the middle to have a compromise to both work on this issue,

my goal would be to leave the situation saying, I did everything I could. I was as skillful as possible. The [00:04:00] ball is in their court. There's nothing more I can do. That would probably be what I would wanna do. And to me, that is defined as self-respect. So I would think in the moment and say, my objective, maybe you're asking them to do something.

You're asking them to do you a favor. They're objecting, they're being rude about it. They're giving you attitude. , how are you going to respond when they are being willful? You're gonna do a tear, man. You're gonna say, this is the situation. This is what I would like to happen. This is how it's gonna benefit you.

I know this is a gast, et cetera, et cetera. And then you are going to accept that you did everything you could to be effective and that. if they choose not to do it, that's not a reflection of you. And a lot of self-validation around that, that I did what I could. I tried to be effective. I used my skills.

And this is not a reflection of me. It's a reflection of them. And I think the only way that this could potentially go negatively, well, there are multiple ways, but one big way this could potentially be negative is if you see them being ineffective and then decide to turn that [00:05:00] around and have that be a reflection of your own skills usage.

So they're being willful. And you say, I could have been more skillful. I could have done more. I could have done better. Which, yes, we always can do better, but you tried your best. And so the self-validation around that and understanding that the ball was in their court and they didn't recipro. That was not even rapid fire, but that would be my answer.

Self-validation, protect your self-respect. Get clear on what your objective is, and really radically accept that the ball's in their court. , next question. How do I communicate my needs to others? This is tough. I struggle with this and I notice I'm struggling with it when I expect things from other people and I get irritated when they don't do what I want, when I've never communicated what those needs are, I think the best way to go about it is to really plan, really take some time to be intentional, okay, what are my needs?

, and we can think about that from a couple of perspectives. The first one that comes to mind is your police skills. So you have physical needs. Do you have to eat a certain time? Are you feeling hangry? Have you gotten enough sleep? , do you need to exercise every day so that you can [00:06:00] maintain your mental health?

Are you sick? Do you need to take time off work and protect that need? , another need that comes to mind if, if you are more introverted and your social battery has run out, that would be a need that you would need to communicate.

If you are not getting your needs met from a validation perspective, you're not feeling heard, you're not feeling seen, you might need to communicate that need. And so I would get very clear, you're gonna have to do some mindfulness. You're gonna see how am I feeling in this relationship? , where does it feel like I am not getting enough and I'm feeling resentful towards this other person?

I feel like resent is a very good telltale sign that a need isn't getting met. Then you really have to take accountability and be like, this is on me.

I'm resentful to this other person, but it's a reflection of myself. Either you haven't communicated the need or it's a need. You need to meet yourself and you just have to communicate to the other person so you can go off and get that need met. Like if you need space, if you need time. But oftentimes you haven't communicated that.

So it's on you. It's not on them. They, they shouldn't have known. They can't know. And so you have to recognize that. And then I would do [00:07:00] a Dear man, which is what you do when you have an objective and your objective is to communicate that need. And when you're doing a Deer Man, you want the other person to be able to respond by saying yes or no. So maybe your question is like, does that make sense?

Is it okay if I take some time to myself? , is it okay if I go on a walk? Would you be open to trying to be more intentional about listening to me something. . So the first thing you do is describe the situation. What are the facts? What are the objective things going on? We're going to express the emotion.

I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling overwhelmed. , I'm not feeling heard. That's not really great though because you really wanna stick to the emotion words. But you can also say those kind of like experiences that can't be objectively measured, Assert, we're gonna ask our question, can I go to walk?

Can I have space? Would you be more open to trying to be more, , receptive to what I'm saying, whatever it is. Then you're going to do a little bit of reinforcement. So what is in it for them? Like, are you going to be able to be more present in the relationship? Are you open to meeting their needs? , will you be able to support them more with whatever they're going through?

Let them know what's in it for. , then you're going to be mindful, you're going [00:08:00] to appear confident. And then if needed, you're gonna negotiate it and come to a compromise. So that's a dear man, that's what I would do to advocate for your needs. , and yeah,

next one is, how can you cope with other people needing space from you and be cool about that? This is really tough. , and I would say that something I internally say in the back of my head that whenever I'm getting into like an argument with a sibling or there's a conflict going on, or I wanna say something, Is that in the back of your head, you should have the reminder that it's always going to be more effective.

It's going to be a more successful conversation if you both take time away from the situation and then go back to it. And I. on many occasions given the urge to get in the last word or say what I want to to be said. But when you're doing that, you're acting from an emotional perspective.

You're not being rational, you're not being effective. And yes, sometimes it does feel good to give into those emotional needs and like say that judgmental comment or whatever it is, but you just have to kind of weigh the pros and cons. Like, do I really wanna be effective? Do I really have an outcome here that's important to me?

And if yes, how am I gonna get that [00:09:00] met? And it's probably about returning to the conversation. So with that in the back of your mind, knowing that even though you wanna talk about it now, at the end of the day for everyone, it's going to be more effective if you've revisit it knowing that that's the most effective path forward.

I would implement a bit of the stop scale. So you are going to freeze. You're gonna leave the situation, you're not gonna put any thought into it like you're physically and mentally going to freeze, and then you're gonna get yourself to go through that pros and cons list of staying. Talking about this, , or revisiting it later, but you need to kind of break up that emotional cycle.

You need to break up those thoughts going through your head. You need to break up the back and forth. And to do that, you really need to implement the stop skills. So you're freezing mentally and physically, you're observing the situation, and then you're doing your pros and cons in deciding how it's best to proceed.

And then once you hopefully come to the decision that you're gonna revisit it later, I would do some distraction. You really initially need to get out of that emotion mind headspace, and then it will be really easy to [00:10:00] see, okay, like we can talk about this tomorrow, and the world is not going to fall apart.

We can talk about this the day after and things will continue, and this will not impact my daily functioning. So you really just need to get outta that first, like 15 to 20 minutes. You're still angry, you're still annoyed, you're still upset, you're still feeling insecure, whatever it is. And so watch a TV show, talk to another friend.

, Take a shower, exercise, do anything to distract yourself for that first 15 to 20 minutes, and then your thoughts will start to shift to what you know is, most aligned in being effective and being willing to use your skills.

Another question that I got is, how can I build trust with myself and learn to trust myself? And this is a really interesting question, and when I got this, I was like, I don't know if I wanna answer this because I have an interesting perspective and hot take, if you will, about self-trust. I really am not a fan of those TOS and Instagram reels where they're all singing.

You need to make promises with yourself. Stop [00:11:00] breaking promises to yourself. No wonder your self-esteem is struggling. You're constantly breaking promises and. I'm sure you've seen them listen to last week's episode with Brit Frank. We talk about this and why this is not the case. We talk about what to do when you're feeling stuck, and I think one thing that people do when they're feeling stuck is they jump into making a promise and then they break it.

She talks about using systems rather than setting that like promise amazing conversation. Go listen. , but the reason I think I feel some resistance towards the idea of keeping promises with yourself is the number of thoughts I have in a day is insane. I don't know if this is just from an anxiety perspective or if all brains work this way, but the number of commitments or ideas or things I would like to do is obscene.

There's no way that any human person could keep that level of commitments and promises and intentions to themselves. And so the idea that every single time. Promise something to yourself, or you make a commitment or you have an intention that if you're not following through with that, you're disobeying your own trust, that you're hurting your relationship with yourself.

I don't really like that [00:12:00] because it doesn't feel like it fully encapsulates the relationship of how we pursue goals and what makes us feel good in our self-esteem and how we speak to ourselves. I don't think it's that simple. . So rather than thinking of self-trust from a perspective of what commitments am I keeping, what promises am I making to myself, because it's not that simple.

We are interacting with ourselves 24 7. It's not like we're having one conversation and saying, I promise I'll go to the gym two times this week. Let's check in next week. Like you're with yourself all the time, so we can't just do that. So rather than focusing it from like a promise and something I'm saying to my self perspective, I find self-trust from other places.

And when I do think about like, do I trust myself, I do, I feel really confident in my ability to handle situations and in my ability to think through things. I, I trust myself to navigate challenges, to pursue new projects, et cetera. Like to me, I do trust myself. I feel good being with myself. I feel okay. [00:13:00] I feel happy. I feel safe being , with myself. And that's what feels like self-trust. And there are a couple of things that I think have led to that. one is your ability to use your skills.

It's a really daunting and overwhelming and paralyzing experience to know that you are experiencing emotions and thoughts and urges that you cannot control. You don't feel like you have these skillset to be able to cope with what your brain is doing to you. That's the most intense and terrifying thing.

It's the definition of not trusting yourself to handle a situation and not having trust in your ability to navigate something and what led to me having self-trust in the early days of residential and in the early days of treatment when I was suicidally depressed and anxious and all of those things, was having skills that worked and knowing that if I implemented the skill, it would lower the intensity of my emotions. My thoughts would fade away. I would no longer be so physically distressed. The moment would pass, and that I was having an impact on [00:14:00] that emotional experience. It wasn't just like life was running, its chorus and I didn't know when this emotion was gonna let up.

I knew that the skills I was using was impacting the emotion. when it comes to that. If you're at the early stages, you have no distrust in your ability to cope. I would lean on distress tolerance because we know that distress tolerances are highly effective, and that's why we lean on those specific skills to tolerate distress because it's when our emotions are at their highest intensity possible.

So it's things like ice dives, it's things like the tip skill. , Exercise distraction, asking for help. Those are our distress tolerance skills and we know that if we use them, they will work. You distract yourself from a thought. If you, , do an ice dive, your anxiety will go down. And so when you start to practice those skills and when you build up a track record of them working, you have trust that you can get through those situations.

Then once you've implemented those skills that have like 100% effectiveness, you then move to the skills that require a little bit more intention and execution. Things like radical acceptance, things like self-validation.

Your please skills, [00:15:00] things that require more effort on your part and more follow through. And again, it's not a promise, but you have a track record of saying, I have these things in my toolbox and if I choose to use them, they will work. And I have trust in my ability to execute the use of this skill.

Intermission in this question. I'm so bad at rapid fire. I just have really long answers to everything. So that was one of the biggest things for me, was building up trust in my ability to use my skills. and with time trusting that no matter what my emotions, my brain, my urges threw at me, I could handle them and weather the storm, that gave me a lot of trust.

The other piece of trust, I would say comes from a little bit of exposure therapy and putting yourself in uncomfortable situations. I think that not trusting yourself can coincide with avoidance. If you are avoiding situations, if you are avoiding interactions, if you're avoiding public speaking, literally whatever it is, something that you are avoiding, you'll kind of have that thought of, I can't do this.

Like I don't trust myself to do this. I can't handle it. There's that lack of trust that you can do it. [00:16:00] So the more that you push yourself outside of your comfort zone, the more that you expose yourself to that thing that's making you anxious, the more you will trust your. To handle that situation and the more you'll trust yourself to handle any new situation or challenge.

So again, we're kind of reframing this idea of like, I'm promising myself that I'll overcome my fear of public speaking, and I promise myself that I'll overcome social anxiety and I promise I don't be anxious in social situations. That's a really hard thing to follow through with, and I really don't like that way of thinking about it.

Instead, it's more. What can I do to stack the evidence in my favor and show myself that if I use the skills I know I have, I can get myself out of this. And like I said earlier, you're not gonna choose to use the skills a hundred percent of the time. We're we're willing and we're willful. But if you have the knowledge that I have the skills in my toolbox, and if I use them, they will work.

There's a lot of self-trust there, both in the ability to cope with things internally and externally.

This question is, how can I gain attention from others in a healthy way? [00:17:00] This is interesting, and I think I will more answer the flip side of it, which is like, why do we look for attention in unhealthy ways? And I think a lot of that for me, in my experience, whether it was with urges, with the way I was expressing my emotions, the way I was getting validation, , Things like self-harm, the way I was going about my relationship with my parents and therapy and all of these things that was not effective, , when I was really struggling.

But it, it wasn't so much for attention and for a look at me and I, I want attention on me. Attention was a vessel through which validation was achieved, and all I wanted was for someone to say, I see you're in pain. I hear that you're not okay, and I can't even imagine what you're going through. Because for me, 24 7 was struggling with my mental health and overwhelming urges and scary thoughts and no energy and feeling isolated in all of these really overwhelming experiences.

So all that I wanted was for someone. To acknowledge that and to validate me. We, we need validation. We want validation. It's a very core instinct and need, and [00:18:00] so when we're looking for attention, especially with regards to mental health, I think a lot of that coincides with the need for validation. And so if we can identify that,

I don't necessarily just want someone to like look at me or pay attention. I want someone to say that they hear what I'm going through, and they see I'm not okay and they want to support me. So how can I get that need met? And it might not be through attention. It might be through really carefully communicating that you're not okay and this is what you're going through.

And while the other person won't be able to solve it for you, you just would love if maybe they could be in your corner and maybe they could be in your support system and you could know that you can count on. Maybe it is going to therapy and having a safe space to talk about all of these things and get really intense validation and get the acknowledgement that things aren't okay and feel like you are getting support in working through them.

So with regards to attention in an unhealthy way, I think we need to identify what is the root cause and what is the need [00:19:00] there. Is it validation? Is it that you're not feeling like you're getting your needs met From an interpersonal perspective, you want more interaction.

You want more connection. ,

It's important to, I think, deconstruct the idea that what you're really looking for is attention and understand what the underlying need is, and then understand that like if you're going from point A to point C, maybe attention is point B, but that's not actually what the goal is.

And I think that can take away kind of some of the negative connotation around wanting attention or needing attention. , but then you can really, now that you know what your actual goal is, which is validation or more time with friends and family members, , , more time when you're just talking about what you're going through. Now that you know what your goal is, you can actually aim to solve that. So if you're like, I seem to be getting attention all the time to talk about what I'm going through, and you realize, well, I just really feel like I'm not able to voice what I'm experiencing and I feel like when I'm talking things out, I'm able to get more clarity on what's going on inside my head.

So you make a therapy appointment and then you are able to [00:20:00] again, create that safe space for yourself to talk about what you're going. , we're able to more effectively target the issue.

Last question is, what are some common things to talk about in therapy? Struggling to figure out what to bring up in sessions? This is a really great question. I don't know if I've talked about this on the podcast yet, but I'm not actually in regular therapy anymore.

As of this year, like the start of this school year, I am no longer doing weekly therapy, which is insane because at the beginning of my sophomore year of high school, I was in a therapeutic boarding school, and now my sophomore year of college, I'm not in therapy, but it's like almost four years exactly from when I was at my =lowest point.

Mental health wise. And therapy was such an amazing resource to have that transition to deal with all the mental health challenges of being at home and adapting skills. But when I'll go home, I'll do a therapy session or so with my therapist at home, but I'm no longer doing consistently like weekly sessions.

My topics in therapy have ranged from anything and everything you can ever [00:21:00] imagine. Like I bring in TOS to my therapist, . I'm like, did you see this segment on John Oliver? , I would say there are some reoccurring themes, and I think one is definitely family interactions and how can I be more effective?

How do I get my needs met here? How do I advocate for this thing? Like, let's problem solve this. Let's get a really clear plan in place of how I can have this conversation, or what are your thoughts on how this went? , I would say another one is larger goals I have for myself. , so I'm like, I want to try and.

Be more social, or I wanna get my sleep more on, on track, or I feel like I could be more effective with my study schedule. And then we're like, how do we problem solve those things? What plan can we put in place? What are my immediate goals? I'm really big no matter what it is that I'm bringing up on leaving the session with one action step I'm gonna take and my goal for that week and what I'm gonna do and what I'm gonna implement.

, for a long time, my therapy sessions looked like going in. We would talk about like some crisis or problem behavior that occurred that week. So we'd be like, all right, let's chain analysis this. What happened? [00:22:00] What was this? Huge suicidal ideation or why did you call for skills coaching? Or like what happened with the self-harm incident or this unhealthy interaction.

And we would kind of work backwards and see what happened. And then the second half would be like me trying to do family therapy in tears is a mess, arguing a whole thing. so now it's more kind of a balance of. Help me skills wise, and then these are my longer term goals or things that I'm thinking about or things that I'd like to work through.

When I think, say like things I'm thinking about, there's definitely certain themes of things that my mind will go back to. So like different places where my mind is going and I'm feeling more emotions tied to it, or I'm ruminating more and kind of talking about like, okay, is this effective? It's not effective. Let's kind of pulse this out. Let's walk through this. , what's going on here?

, but it's important to kinda like differentiate, like initially therapy was a lot of crisis problem solving and , what happened this week? Let's recap that. Not really even any time to go into these larger issues or problem solve for the future. And now it's a lot [00:23:00] more of that, which is like, these are my goals.

How can I work towards them? How can I be more effective? But I feel like I bring a lot to 'em, to my therapy sessions. There's always a good TikTok, there's always lots of random references. There's always a funny story. , and. That would kind of be some topics that I bring up pretty frequently. But I would say like the very recurring ones, I'm always talking about my sleep schedule.

I'm always talking about habits, , things that I'm trying to increase, decrease, maybe I'm trying to get more movement in, I'm trying to watch less tv, things like that. , yeah, behaviors, increasing and decreasing is a big one. Family relationships, , general goals, whether it's like social or school or all of those kinds of things.

Then places that my thoughts are kind of like sticking a little bit more. So I hope that was helpful. Kind of just a, a catchall free for all, little random ramble of an episode. I hope you guys like it. I'm so sorry if this was all over the place. let me know what other solo episodes you guys would want to listen to.

We are doing them every other week, and I have some fun ideas in the works, but I always love hearing what you guys want me to talk about and, and give insight on. So [00:24:00] submit questions. There's a link on my website or DM me all the things. I hope you have a great rest of your week and I'll see you next Thursday.

Sadie: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of she persisted. If you enjoyed, make sure to share with a friend or family member, it really helps out the podcast. And if you haven't already leave a review on apple podcasts or Spotify, you can also make sure to follow along at actually persisted podcast on both Instagram and Tik TOK, and check out all the bonus resources, content and information on my website.

She persisted podcast.com. Thanks for supporting. Keep persisting and I'll see you next week.

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