Healing is a Journey, Not a Destination

Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually help you discover and then live your why. You see, we believe that knowing your why, that driving force behind every decision you make and every action you take, is the essential first step to really knowing yourself. It allows you to move forward faster and have a bigger impact. If you're already if you're already a fan of the show, then you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we introduce you to somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. This show will be more powerful for you if you've already discovered your why. If you still need to do that, head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. It'll only take you about five minutes. Now let's meet today's guest.

Today we're going to be talking about the why of challenge. Now if this is your why, then you live outside the box. You do not believe in the norm or following rules or drawing inside the lines. It is far more natural for you to rebel against the stereotypical or classical way of doing things. You aggressively seek unique ways of approaching the world and finding solutions that no one else has considered. You like to create and innovate, especially in game changing ways. You have eccentric friends and eclectic tastes and a large variety of both. You may have diverse interests with little in common with each other. As an entrepreneur, you prefer to create a new market versus serving an existing market. You love to be different, think differently and challenge virtually anyone or anything that is too rote or conventional. People with your why often accomplish amazing feats. When you say you want to change the world, you actually mean it. Pushing the envelope comes natural to you. Now today I've got a great guest for you. Her name is Dr. Margaret Rutherford. Now she is a clinical psychologist and she has practiced for 26 years in Fayetteville, Arkansas, earning the 2009 Arkansas Private Practitioner of the Year Award for her volunteer work at a local free health clinic. She began blogging and podcasting in 2012 to de stigmatize mental illness and educate the public about therapy and treatment with her compassionate and common sense style. Her work can be found at Huffington Post, Psychology Today, Psychology Central, the Mighty, the Gottman Blog, and others. She hosts a weekly podcast, the Self work podcast with Dr. Margaret Rutherford and her new book, Perfectly Hidden Depression. How to Break Free from the Perfectionism that masks your Depression is published by New Harbinger and available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and your local bookstore. Margaret, welcome to the podcast.

Well, that's a mouthful.

Yes, it was a mouthful. I was stumbling myself. So take us through. How did you get into becoming a psychologist? Take us back in your life. Maybe give us the couple minute version of where you started and how you decided to get on this path that you're on.

Sure. Well, actually, I was a professional singer in my 20s. I sang jingles, studio TV advertisements, you know, radio advertisements, and I made a decent living at that. I wasn't probably the premier people, but I was definitely one. One lady said to me one time, you make, you'll, you'll learn, you'll earn a living if you make the premier people sound good. So that's what I tried to do, but I really didn't like the lifestyle so much, Gary. It was a tough lifestyle to live and it wasn't really bringing out the best in my personality. So I heard about this thing called music therapy and I'd been in a lot of therapy, so I knew that. I really admired the process.

So I plopped all the money I had down in the world to SMU and I ended getting a music therapy certificate or degree. Really. It's a degree for sure. But my last internship was in a psych hospital and I thought, oh, I saw these psychologists at work and I thought, no, no, no, no, this is what I want to do. But I had not been a psych major in college. I'd been a French major of all things. And so, yeah, very helpful. So I.

So I went to take psychology courses and tried to do well in them and by darn, I got in a program or two and I think they took me out of a sense of curiosity. Here was this singer who I actually had. Right. The night after the interview, I had a big band gig at a hotel and. And they wanted me to stay and I said no, I got to go front a. Front a band. And they were like, what in the world? So anyway, I think that was my. Mainly how I got in, but I'm darn glad I did because I've absolutely loved being a therapist.

And so you got out and got into private practice right away, or how did that work?

No, I was in private practice in Dallas for a very short period of time and then my husband got a job here in Northwest Arkansas, so we moved and I was just telling the story. In fact, I hadn't told it forever and I, I interviewed several places. When I got here, I interviewed three different places and I got all three jobs. They were they were all part time jobs. I was driving all over the place and started my little private practice at the same time. And lo and behold, you know, 27 years later, I'm still here. And so I, I loved this area. I, it was way far behind Dallas as far as acceptability of seeking treatment and seeking therapy. So I've tried real hard to address that. And, and also to, when I started the blog and then ultimately the podcast, it was really to try to present to people what, what's the therapist sound like, what, what, what do they think like? So that perhaps people could listen to that podcast and think, well, now this might be very helpful. And I think one of the things that means the most to me is when somebody writes in and says, you know, I'd never considered therapy before, but after hearing self work I, I think I want to try it out. So I'm very pleased about that.

So you want people to think differently about what psychology can do for them?

I do. I, you know, it's kind of funny, Gary, because nobody in my family ever went to therapy, but I remember in my early 20s, so that would have been in, well, let's see, early 20s, would have been in the latter part of the 70s. I went into therapy myself because I was dragging around a bunch of stuff from my childhood that just, I could tell it was getting in my way. Had a wonderful experience.

Which is several therapists along the way in my 20s because my 20s were pretty darn chaotic frankly, and they helped me see the way. And then I, but so many people just think of it as weakness or that they don't want anybody to know. And I, you know, one of the things I often say is you go to a dentist because you can't fix your own teeth. You go to.

You go to a tax accountant because you're confused about how to do your taxes. Mental health practitioners are simply people who've spent hours and hours and hours studying and listening to people. And they have their own wisdom, perhaps, but they also have the wisdom of all those people they've seen. And so I've often said I feel like a conduit between people I've seen in the past and people I'm seeing now because I can pass on what other people have very.

Learned in a very, very difficult way. And so I like to kind of think of it as a consultation where you don't lose your power. In fact, if anything, you gain another perspective and that helps you make stronger, clearer decisions.

I love that. And so you started self work that was in 2012.

No, that was in 2016. I started blogging in 2012. And then I, by that time I was, I had written the book. I was writing the book. And we were, we were trying to get the.

You know, publications, you know, trying to get publicity people or whatever, publishing houses. Thank you. It's. It's Friday morning. Trying to get publishing houses interested. And they said, well, you know what? Nobody knows who you are. You know, you're not in la, you're not on a university faculty, you're not in New York, you're in Arkansas. So how in the world. And I had a few thousand people on Facebook and Instagram and all that stuff. But. But I'm also too old to do anything, Gary, that I don't really enjoy doing. And so I listened to podcasts. I thought, I'll be back in front of a microphone. I love using my voice. And so I thought, okay, I'll do this. Well, I'm almost at 1.9 million downloads, so. Yeah, almost. Really, it's amazing and I love doing it. I hear from people from all over the world and it's, it's very meaningful to me. So that is, is something that, that I got the chance to do and the opportunity to do it. I'm just so pleased and very honored that so many people listen.

So what do you talk about on your podcast?

Self work, Everything.

There's some areas of psychology I don't know very well. Learning disabilities I don't know very well. I'm not a kdac. I'm not an alcohol and substance abuse counselor, so I may touch on it, but it's not my expertise. So what I try to do is really bring up things that either relationship issues or facets of self improvement or self growth, self work, so to speak, that are sort of how tos for people. I'm a very. As a therapist myself, I'm very direct. I'm not exactly solution oriented because certainly I see people for as long as they need to be seen. But I also believe that you don't get hope from insight. Insight is wonderful. You get hope from behavior change. And so when you see yourself acting, thinking, saying things that mean a lot to you and that you realize are not because you've had some insight or some understanding, and all of a sudden you're acting differently. And I think that's where your hope comes from. So that's what I really stress, if anything, from, you know, the imposter syndrome, to the phenomenon of gaslighting, to how to respond to a partner who has an affair, how you heal, to some parenting stuff. Not too much to mostly just what are you trying to confront in yourself and how do you do it?

Yeah, what I'm wondering if there are. Now that you've been doing it for 27 years, do you see common themes? Do you see the same thing playing out over and over when you sit down with somebody?

Are there just a certain number of actual problems, but they manifest in different ways? Have you categorized anything like that?

I've done a lot of trauma work in my lifetime. It's amazing to me, Gary, how many people will say to you, oh, I don't have any trauma in my life. You know, I. In fact, the book is written for people who count their blessings so much that they forget that even blessings have their underbelly. So I work a lot with people recognizing whatever level of pain they had in their past or they have in their present because it's so frequently denied or discounted, laughed away.

And, you know, the strategies we come up with in childhood.

Keep us safe in childhood. If you have an alcoholic parent and you grew up raising your siblings then and they didn't, they weren't there for you, you learned, well, you know what? If it's not there, I don't need it. But if you take that adult, that childhood strategy into your adulthood, then the problem becomes that strategy doesn't work for you anymore. In fact, it can be quite devious and self destructive. So it's about figuring out what kept me safe, what kept me sane in my childhood, and do I still want to use those rules? Do I still want to create a life that's based on that strategy? Or how do I need to change that strategy?

So what is the goal of therapy? Because what I. Is there such a thing as a perfect life?

No, absolutely not.

Who hasn't experienced trauma?

No, there. There's the trauma. People will say there's big T and little T, meaning big traumas are like tornadoes ripping through your house or you being raped or you sexually abused or something like that. I mean, that's obviously big T, but there's a lot of little. You moved a lot.

You had a learning disability, you were bullied, you were.

Gosh, I mean, I had a neurological disorder when I was born and I had. I was very different from the rest of the kids there for a while, so I had to be treated differently. So, you know, that's a little T for me. Didn't ruin my life, but it changed it. So I think that if people recognize that what therapy is actually in graduate school. I'll never forget one of the first classes we took. What is a therapist? A therapist is a change agent. Basically, you're given simple explanation. Someone walks in your office and they say, this is what I'm not appreciating in my life. I don't like it. I know I'm creating this or this is being done to me. And it's about how do I begin to look for what I have control over and then. And then change that behavior. Whether it's overeating, whether it's drinking too much, whether it's. Whether it's never talking about your feelings being closed off, whether it's not knowing how to make friends, whether it's having sexual dysfunction. I mean, there. I mean, there's so many problems that we all have that it's just about someone sitting in front of you and again pulling from their experience and then trying to help you find your own strengths so that you can address what's going on. Now, there's a type of therapy also that is sort of a. It's more in the relationship itself. For example, if you were. If you grew up in a home that was really devoid of any kind of intimacy or nurturing, then often the relationship you have with the therapist, it being very nourishing and nurturing, will sort of help you understand and heal from your own childhood. And then. But the point is, that doesn't just happen between the therapist and the client, of course, appropriately, but it also begins you. You begin to learn how to achieve that or gain that with other people. So a lot of times what. What you're trying to create in a therapeutic relationship, whether it's trust, whether it's revelation of pain, whether it's feeling claiming your own competence. A lot of people can't even claim their own strengths. But if you can do that in the therape relationship, then the goal is to take that outside of the therapeutic relationship and be able to find people that you can trust and that you can have more enriching, fulfilling relationships with. So therapy is a. Is a very complex. It's unlike any other relationship you'll have in your life because it's not about you taking care of the therapist or it shouldn't be. It's about the therapist being very attuned to you and what you need in the moment and where you're going and where you're telling her who you want to go.

Do you. So what then becomes the goal of therapy? Is there like an end game? Is there like a place we're trying to get to. You know, I think about. Let's just take business, for example. If. If your focus in business is all about not having problems, if all you focus on is the problem and not having problems, how do we fix this problem? How do we fix this problem? How do we fix this problem? The best you can hope for is no problems. Right. But if your goal becomes the vision and the future and where we're going, then your future looks a whole lot better than just no problems.

Sure.

So what is the goal of therapy?

Well, I think everyone's goal is a little different. I don't have a cookie cutter way of doing therapy. I mean, I don't have a set of criteria that you must meet that are my criteria to claim that your life is now healthy. Okay. So I would never. That's presumptuous of me. Now they are hiring me or asking me to help them.

Tune into what may be causing problems, and they don't know what's causing them. So, you know, I always believe in trying to. Just because you have a problem doesn't mean you don't have lots of strengths. And so you as a therapist and what the goal of therapy is, is to make sure that you're using the strengths that you have. And if you. If you don't have the coping skills you need, a therapist can actually teach you some skills and you can try them out. I give homework assignments all the time to people to say, okay, you know, you. You're shy and you find it difficult to talk with people. You don't look people in the eye. Then your assignment this week is to walk around the grocery store and, well, pre Covid. This was my assignment and to try to look people in the eye and say hello. That's all you have to do. Perfect strangers. And so. And then some. One person came back to me, and she goes, you know how many people avoid your glance when you glance up at the grocery store? It's hard to get people to. To. To. To look at you. So I think that a goal of therapy is simply. I mean, I ask people, what do you want this therapy to help you accomplish? And if they say, I'm too isolated, I need to learn how to be more. More comfortable with people, or I'm unhappy in my marriage, or.

I. I have this thing in my past that I've never told anybody and I don't even know if I want to, but I'm here. So it's. It's about creating safety. It's about creating a Space where people can share their most vulnerable parts of themselves. And you hold it, and you hold it carefully and then you help them begin to use their strengths to see what, now that they've done this thing, now that they've revealed themselves more clearly, then what do they want to do with that? How do they want to move forward? And that's not my decision to make. My decision is not to say I think you should get divorced or I think you should stay married or I think you should.

You should or ought to do whatever, unless I'm hearing really, really self destructive stuff. And if I'm hearing really self destructive stuff, I'll say, well, you know, I'm not sure this is rational on your part. And let's look at that, let's look at what, let's take this apart and see what's really in your best interest to think or feel and what may be destructive for you to do so. So it's a, it's a relationship that is different from any other relationship you'll have because it's only about you or it only should be about you. And it's about then the therapist getting out of the way after you've done some of your healing and encouraging you to go out into the world and be more the person that you know you want to be and you can be.

And it feels like pretty much everybody could use that.

Well, I mean, I'm a therapist because I got, well, I got some bad therapy, but I also got some really good therapy. So I, I'm a firm believer in it. I mean, it's, it's more about, you know, there are people who have actual very severe mental illness, severe chronic depression, severe PTSD or even moderate PTSD or eating disorders or I have panic disorder, I have panic attacks and I used to be anorexic. So, you know, those are real problems that need real attention and techniques to help people handle those kinds and to manage their illness. And that's certainly something that mental health professionals do. It's not just all life growth stuff, you know, but there are also many people, people who don't really experience the, that don't fit a criteria for true clinical diagnoses but are struggling. So, you know, not creating the life or being very down on themselves about the life they have created. Or again, some things can be happening to them. Like if you're getting, if you're a part of domestic violence, then sometimes, you know, you have to see it for what it is first. So yeah, I think everybody could use therapy, but probably it's just like sitting down and getting another perspective and hopefully a competent perspective. Yeah.

Reframing the problem. Reframing what actually happened.

Right, right, right, right.

Recently? Well, I guess it was a year ago now, but.

I went through a situation where I took a couple of Advil, and I. When I rarely take anything, and anyways, I. It. It burned a hole in my stomach right where I had an artery, and I ended up.

Oh, my goodness.

I ended up being. And they made me wait so long that I. That almost died, and a bunch of stuff happened to me, so I hit my head and anyways, I. I was there for nine days in the hospital, and just a very crazy scenario of everything that could go wrong in a visit to the hospital kind of went wrong for me.

Did go wrong. Okay.

And so when that was all over, I noticed that I was struggling to put words together or struggling to remember things. And so I had a friend who. Who's knew this guy who was the world's expert on post ICU syndrome, which I never even heard of.

Yeah, definitely a thing. Yeah.

I started. I flew out to see him in Indianapolis because when. Like right now at. Let's say you're over age 40 or 35, you have trouble, or at least I did. Sometimes you forget words or you, you know, don't put things together just right. And, you know, I'm just getting older. No big deal. But when you've been through something like what I went through, and suddenly I couldn't remember names or couldn't put words together, you can tell yourself that it's something that it's not.

Yes.

And so I was.

You Google it and you'll scare yourself to death.

So I was kind of spiraling down myself. I was like, what's wrong with me? Something's with me. Something wrong in my brain. My father died from hitting his head. My mother died from hitting her head. And then I hit my head.

Oh, my God.

Something's not right here.

It's trauma.

I went to work one day and had two different shoes on, and I turned the alarm on. Everybody. Just a lot of weird things I was doing. So I flew out to see this guy, and I went through their whole process, and when we were done, he said, you know, what you've got is ptsd, but as far as your brain working you, it's fine. It's better than my residents here.

Yes. Yes.

All I needed was someone to tell it was okay.

Yeah. It had a name. I can't tell you how many people have said.

You Know, whether you call it bipolar disorder, whether you call it ptsd, whether you call it anorexia or binge purge, I mean, whatever, even schizophrenia. I mean, people who are hallucinating and they don't know what a hallucination is, are scared to death. So, you know, I do think that now, I do think having a label is. Is helpful. What we don't want to do as a culture is then say, oh, she's the panic disorder and he's the ptsd. I mean, you are more than your diagnosis. When I was. Got rotator cuff surgery years ago, I heard someone say, oh, she's the rotator cuff in three. And I went, I'm not a rotator cuff. So, you know, so you're more than your diagnosis. But it can be very helpful because, for one thing, there are specific techniques, psychological techniques that help all of these. These different disorders. So, you know, you. That points you in the direction of where you want to go as far as treatment is concerned.

Kind of where I was going with that as well is I wondered what would have happened to me had I never had the opportunity to fly out and see this doctor and find out that I'm okay, because no matter what somebody told me, oh, you're fine, you're fine. I know you. You're fine. I wasn't fine in my own head until I had an expert tell me through all the, you know, the MRIs and all the things I went through, they said, your brain is fine.

Yeah, well, sometimes it takes a neurologist or it takes a medical mental health team in order to really. I would never want to make the mistake of saying, oh, it's just your anxiety, when really there's an endocrine problem or there's something going on that, you know, really needs to be looked at or neurological issues. So I try and I tried to not make that mistake and work closely with, you know, neurologists and, and all kinds of doctors, private primary care docs and all that kind of thing, just to try to make sure that, you know, if they need. If they need to just get a. A blood test, I mean, to go do that, you know, that's not expensive. And now an MRI is obviously more. But I think any good mental health practitioner would have said, you. You certainly have. Whether they knew about post ICU or not, you have ptsd. I mean, that would have been very evident to anybody with experience, because what you went through was traumatic.

Yeah.

So. And outside of the usual experience of people, which is one of the, you know, criteria. So you know, but it's funny, we're talking a lot about criteria because the reason why I wrote the book Perfectly Hidden Depression was because I know that people whose lives look perfect. You asked me a few minutes ago, is anybody's life perfect? There are people whose lives look perfect. And in fact they have had the.

To call it a strategy. It's not really anymore. It may have been very early on, but it has become an unconscious strategy to hide anything painful from themselves. In fact, many of them don't even have words for what are hurtful, damaging, even despairing experiences they had. They've been traumatized and they've got it so rigidly compartmentalized that they build a very perfect looking life in order to stay hidden. And unfortunately, what happens if and when they even do try to seek help? I had a woman tell me last time that she was suicidal. And her doctor said, you know, you're not depressed, you're just too, you know, you've just got your, you speak so well and you, you present yourself so well, you couldn't be depressed. And she knew that she had thoughts about wanting to hurt herself. But, so you, you have to understand and that there is another rubric out there, there's another way that, that depression presents itself and you have to ask different questions. As a, as a mental health clinician, doctor, whatever you have to say to yourself, wait a minute, would this person ever admit being hopeless and that you hand them that Beck inventory and they say, no, I'm not hopeless. But if they were feeling hopeless, would they tell you? They'd also say, no. And that would give you a little window into who these people are. What I noticed as a clinician was that someone would come in my office and they say, usually things like, I don't really know, I'm here, I feel kind of silly. And then I'd ask them questions about things and maybe in the next session they really wouldn't say much had happened to them. And then the next sessions they'd say, you know, when you ask me about sexual abuse, I did, I don't really think this is important, but you know, I was raped the week before I went to college. This is a true story. And she was smiling as she said it. And she said, you know, I've just never given it much. It was, you know, I just let it go. I never told anybody. But interestingly enough, all her relationships, she had not only had binge purge disorder, but all her relationships were incredibly superficial. Because at that point in her life, and there were some Other things in her childhood, she had just cut herself off from pain, just not going to feel it, not going to go there. And yet also a lot of these people that I'm trying to reach have these inner, incredibly critical voices, very shameful voices, fueling their perfectionism. You know, there's nothing wrong with constructive perfectionism. Trying your best. I mean, I'm sure you're a perfectionist. You have really worked very hard on all this stuff. Or you have some perfectionistic tendencies. So do I. But, you know, when it becomes destructive, it's when it's fueled not by desire and a sense of wanting to learn and be curious, but by shame. I must do this perfectly. I must meet everybody's expectations, or I have no value. I must accomplish this, or I'm a worthless human being. And often those voices are voices that you heard as a child that were screamed at you or that you came to think of yourself as someone who was only.

Only admired for your accomplishment. Or again, you, like we said before you grew up in one of those homes that you weren't allowed to say you were sad or angry. There are lots of ways to get to Rome, sort of. But I know that people are killing themselves. I'm sure all of us. Anybody who's listening knows someone who killed themselves. And everybody goes, well, I just saw him two weeks ago and he looked fine. Or she just raised $100,000 for this local nonprofit and she looked great, you know, and so it's these people that are wandering around with this inner loneliness and despair because they don't truly connect with anybody. Nobody really knows who they are. And those are the people that I'm so worried about.

Foreign.

Take a moment to give our guest a quick break. I hope you're hearing how important it is to know your why. If you're ready to put an end to your frustration and unlock the code to your personal and business success, then after the show, make sure to head to yinstitute.com and discover your why. Today. It only takes about four, five minutes. Let's get back to the show.

So I'm really confused.

Ah, okay.

I'm more confused than I then not confused in that.

It feels like every one must be messed up. Then there must not be anybody who is normal. And I don't even know what normal is now. Because if you're a perfectionist, you must have had a problem with something. If you're not a perfectionist, you must have had a problem with something. So it's like no matter what somebody, what. What activity or whatever direction they go, there must be something that caused that, that was a problem in their life that they're overcoming with this. So how normal? What is normal? What, what am I looking for?

Well, I don't, you know, this is a criticism I've heard before. Oh, now you're turning, you're turning what is a very achievement oriented life into something that's pathological and that's not right. There's nothing wrong with constructive perfectionism. Absolutely nothing. And there are a lot of fairly healthy people out there, very healthy people who were reared well by parents who really loved them and nurtured them, cared for them. And they're, they're healthy. They don't need to come to therapy unless they just think they would benefit from another perspective.

So for me, what normal healthy is. Give us a picture.

There's no, there's no definition of that, Gary. I mean, you know.

It'S not.

Normal. Would, I mean.

We.

Normal, I think, is a word that in mental health would best be.

Would best be stated or defined as probably a fair amount of stability. Mental stability, emotional stability, spiritual stability.

And doesn't really matter how much money you have in the bank. But are, are the sort of the leg. If you're sitting on a, on a stool and all your legs of that stool are fairly, you know, you.

Sturdy and stable, then there's no, I mean, your mental health is good.

Is there such a thing?

Well, yeah, sure, of course there is. I mean, why would we want to, quote, unquote, create a better life or a more fulfilling life if there wasn't a, a more normal way or. I mean, but there's so many people that will call their lives normal and they're not, they're on some kind of roller coaster in a relationship. They have an addiction that they've denied.

They, you know, we all look for people that are a lot like us to hang out with. So we will be able to say, oh yeah, this is normal. If I drink a bottle of wine a night, my friends do, or If I work 75 hours a week, all my friends do. You can convince yourself that something's normal because you look for other people who do the same thing, or you work five hours a week, you call it normal. So I really think that I'm not trying to pathologize healthy, functioning people, but I had. When I was trying to figure out what this perfectly hidden depression thing was, I would write about it in my blogs and then I would ask people to please contact me if they identified with it. And do an interview, an anonymous interview. And to my amazement, a lot of people did. And I had brain surgeons, I had motivational speakers, I had advertising agency heads of those departments in different ways, all kind of homemakers, all kinds of people. And to a T, I asked them, why did you reach out to me? I mean, you've taken this risk. You're out in your garage whispering to me because you don't want anybody to know this is going on. And they said, Gary, they said, because we don't want. I don't want anyone else to live their life this way. When you're not known, when you're not connected with anyone in a true way, it's just so lonely and despairing. And most of them had either attempted suicide or had some suicidal ideation. You know, the suicide rates are going up exponentially in almost all age groups, specifically most in men who are 40 to 46 or 7, women who are 50 to 55, and teenagers. I mean, it is a cultural phenomenon. We have never had these many deaths by suicide. So you can blame social media. You can blame, you know, people trying to compare themselves with. With what they see on Instagram or Snapchat or whatever. But it's also, I think, this perfectionistic kind of trend that we are seeing all over the world, actually. So, you know, does that help your confusion at all, or are you still confused?

I'm still confused because, you know, usually when you're trying to accomplish something, you have a vision in mind of what. What health is.

Well, I would ask. I asked my patients, how would you define being happy? What would be going on in your life that you would, you know. Well, I would. I would be able. I have a guy right now coming to mind that he says, you know, I'm such a workaholic that every time I'm with my family, I don't give them enough attention. And I would be happier if I had more of a balanced life. So we work on, you know, focusing techniques. We work on things to help him better detach himself from his professional life when he's in his. His family life. So normal for him would be, yes, I can go to work and focus on my work, but I also can come home and focus on my family. That's where he wants to go. That's where the balance is. So normal for him is that.

I think maybe what if I had to sum it up, I would say the goal is not to be happy, but to be happier.

Well, happy is one of those words that I, you know, although it's Very. It's very. Everybody wants you to use the word happy. I think that, you know, I love the Buddhist idea of if you cling too much to anything, you, you know, you know, it will end. Sorrow ends, happiness ends. It's more of a relinquishing of the idea that I must be happy all the time to more of an idea of, you know, I want to. If I am, if I have a happy day or a happy moment, I want to be in that moment and not worry about, oh, it's going to end, it's going to end, or if I'm sad, I'm not going to feel so overwhelmed because I know that gradually my grief will. Will dissipate. And it's. It's about knowing that life is more in flux. You know, I think you asked me a few minutes ago what healing was, and I. I think healing. I mean, I'm 66 years old, and there's still things that I'm figuring out. And I think of healing as a journey, not a destination, but there is a place in therapy, I mean, I say very practically, it's my job to do myself out of a job. So when I have someone who says, you know, I'm feeling really good, and I. I like feeling good inside, and I like what I'm creating outside, that's called congruence. You know, you. What you want on the inside of you is reflected in your outside life. And, you know, people say, you know, I think I figured this out and I'm good, and I want to go practice on my own. And I'm like, great, let's celebrate. You know.

So.

It'S not just about.

It's more helping people reach goals that they believe are important. And if, through my experience, I believe that that goal could be tweaked a bit, another man comes to mind, in fact, who was a millionaire. And he came into therapy because he was divorcing his wife. And what he revealed in therapy was that his father had always told him he. He'd never amount to anything. And he said, what I really want to do is I want to stop working where I'm working, and I want to go volunteer somewhere so that I can feel like there's a higher purpose for who I am. And I said, what would keep you from doing that? And he said, because I still hear my dad screaming at me all the time, and I've got to make more money and more money and more money. And so he didn't go volunteer. He left therapy because he said, I just can't do this right now. And I said, and so I was willing. You work on the divorce. We mean, that was. That was a direction he couldn't go. That doesn't mean he failed. That just means he's still on that journey trying to heal what happened to him between himself and his dad.

So maybe the goal then of therapy would be to help people improve the journey.

That would be a succinct way of saying it, I guess, you know, because.

You'Re not going to change the. The journey is no life. Right. It all ends the same for us. But you're helping us improve the quality of the journey.

Yes.

Again, I think that that quality of the journey is very unique. And so again, it is not cookie cutter. If you these rules, then you will have a healthier life. You will improve your life. I just, I don't believe it's as simple as that. I mean, there are things that I can reveal about myself now that there's no way in the world I would reveal it. In my 20s or 30s, I become much more accepting of vulnerability and talking about vulnerability. And I think that, as Rene Brown often has shown in her research, that there's a lot of strength in that. But there's some people that are probably not going to embrace that idea. So if you have somebody like that in therapy, then what is their version of improving their life?

Yeah, you see what I mean?

It's not for me to decide, like, you must be vulnerable or you won't have a happy life. No, doesn't go like that.

So maybe. Yeah. So when did you decide what. What brought you to writing your book?

The.

The title for everybody again.

Sure.

Or you can say the title.

Go ahead.

Sure. It's called Perfectly Hidden Depression. How to break free from the perfectionism that masks your depression. Yeah, whatever. Well, actually, this idea found me, Gary. I did not want to write a book. I had no plans to write a book. I was very happy being a therapist. And yet one day I was writing my normal blog and I thought about some of these people that I've been telling you about and thinking how divorced and detached they were from any kind of language, emotionally painful language. And so I started writing about them, what they look like. They look normal. They look healthy. Healthy. They look stable. They look. Yet underneath, there are real secrets. Well, that. I called it the perfectly hidden depressed person. Are you one? I just kind of grabbed that term out of the air and it went viral. And then at the time, I was writing for the Huffington Post, and when it was on there, I Had left my email at the bottom of the post and I had hundreds of emails in 24 hours. This is me. I can't believe you've. You're reading. It's like you're reading my mind. And so I decided to look to see what was there. And I did of course, found, find Dr. Brene Brown. And there was a guy, Dr. Terrence Rose, who'd written a book for men only. I don't want to talk about it. Where he talked about COVID depression. But nowhere in the popular literature did I find this distinct connection between perfectionism, destructive perfectionism, I should make more clear, and depression and even suicidality. It's in the research. It's called socially prescribed perfectionism. In the research where you're constantly trying to meet the, the expectations of other people. Constantly. It's like the better you do or the better you are, the better you should be. So you're always, you know, trying to create more, create better, create, make more money, make. Meet the expectations, meet the goals of everybody else. So.

I saw that and I thought, okay. And you know, I had some encouragement, you ought to write this book. Oh, you know, and sure enough, I did and I got encouragement for my family and some of my blogger friends. And so I wrote the book and it was published in November of 2019. So.

Thank you, thank you. I. It has over 60 exercises in it that are drawn directly from my therapeutic practice to try to help people who are, they might call themselves control freaks, they probably don't call themselves perfectionists, but there's something about that they know in their gut that something's wrong. You know, they're trying to figure out what, why they need so much control and why they can't talk about their painful emotions and why they hear this shame and self criticism all the time. And so, you know, as I wrote about those people, I guess so many people, other people have decided, you know, I identify with that as well.

I love that. Well.

Thank you so much for being here today. It's been great talking to you. It's been fascinating learning about what you're doing, Margaret. And I'm sure you're making a huge difference for so many people that you've been able to bring your message, bring what you do to many, many more people using the Internet, which has been. Been awesome, I'm sure.

Well, I think, to your point that I think I was in a particularly rebellious mood today. I filled out questionnaire and there is part of me that likes to challenge things and certainly the book is a challenge to the mental health profession to say, we've got to wake up. We've got to realize that there's this.

Syndrome of behaviors that if you see them fitting together, then you need to question more. You need to not accept just what's on the surface and realize that there could be something else going on.

You know, you need to look beyond the eating disorder, look beyond the panic disorder. Look beyond the, oh, yes, I have a couple glasses of wine a day. That's the mind they're telling you about. So you. You have to do. Can they talk about their pain? Can they talk about. Do they talk about. It's like, I just can't stop. Do they use phrases that indicate that they are destructively perfectionistic? And if you do, if you ask the right questions and sometimes, you know, we're going to be able to save that person's life because they're going to find a person in a trusting relationship where they can finally talk about the things that they have never allowed themselves to even admit was there.

Yeah. So if people are listening and they want to get a hold of you.

Sure.

How should they connect with you?

My website has a creative name of drmargartruthersford.com.

Yeah, that famous or infamous email is Ask Dr. Margaretrmarketrutherford.com I have. You can certainly go to my website. And the podcast is there. The blog posts are there. The book is on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. You can help out your local bookseller and go order it from there. You can also order it from New Harbinger Publications as well.

Awesome. Well, thank you.

And it's in. And it's an ebook and audiobook as well as a paperback.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah.

Thank you for being here and I thank you, Gary. Staying connected as we move forward.

Sounds great. Thank you so very much.

Take care.

I really hope you enjoyed today's episode and that through today's guest, you heard how important it is to know your why and how impactful it can be in your life and the lives of those around you. Be sure to head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. Remember, the more you know about yourself, the more you'll know about others. I'm Dr. Gary Sanchez, and I'll see you on the next episode.