On this episode, Mike, Morgan, and Melissa explore emotional pain and its impact on mental health, especially when it shifts from normal, short-term sadness to deeper, ongoing distress. Everyday life struggles can build up and affect emotional well-being, so when this pain goes unrecognized, it can lead to feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or caged in. Recognizing when emotional pain becomes too much and when to seek support, is instrumental to protecting and improving mental health.

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Welcome to A Psycho Delicious Conversation on mental health issues and trends from three local mental health professionals in the greater Lansing area. I'm Michael Stratton, LMSW. And I'm Morgan Bowen, PMHNP. And I'm Melissa Black, PMHNP. And we're here to provide you with a deep dive into the human experience of consciousness and beyond. Our aim is to be educational and entertaining, so just kick back and open your ears and your minds.

And I'm Morgan Bowen.

And I'm Melissa Black.

I didn't have your mic on, Mike.

I did. I didn't. We don't have to start over.

No, we don't. But you gotta say, I'm Michael Stratton.

I'm Michael Stratton again. I'm still here. I'm still here. I was wondering why I couldn't hear myself.

Yeah, I'm the terrible producer, Daedalian.

Hi, Dalian.

You've never made that mistake. I'm gonna beat myself up today is

what I'm gonna do.

Oh, okay. Well, you've got a new that. This is masochism.

Self flagellation.

We haven't done that yet. We'll have to do that at some point.

Okay, well, I'm an expert at it, so.

Okay.

You'll be the featured guest. Featured guest and producer.

I am blushing right now too.

It's making me blush. This strikes close to home.

Have you been making mistakes today? Well, that was my first one as

far as I know, but the other might be waking up, I don't know.

Well, the first topic that we're going to talk about does involve pain. So I envisioned it as ordinary pain. Like, what kind of ordinary pain is there?

When do you differentiate between I'm sad, I worry, I'm frustrated, I'm angry to. I need therapy.

So we're talking about emotional pain or

emotional pain, the kind of pain that we deal with. So it's rare that someone comes in and says, what's your complaint? Well, my elbow hurts. You know, that's usually not the case.

So there's that kind of pain. The kind of pain that, you know, my first thought with this is that, gosh, now I'm blocking on the guy's name.

It was a really famous book that was written back in the 70s. But the first line of the book is, life is difficult. And what was the name of that book?

So the body knows the source.

Yeah, I'm Scott Peck. Yeah, exactly. That was that. Scott Pack.

Is that the title of the book, though?

No, the name of the book was the road less traveled. I hear the. Yeah, and so that was how it starts out. And I think that's part of why it was a big seller. Because life is difficult. Life is struggle.

The Buddha says that when he comes out of his meditation, life is struggle and. Or life is suffering.

Is it always a struggle? I would like life to be not so much a struggle.

That's going to be the second half of this show.

You're gonna get the answers.

Happiness part.

Life seems like extra struggling for me, actually, lately.

Let's talk about it.

I would love to. Let's book the bend in here. No, there's a lot going on in the world, and it's, you know, the backdrop of the world is conflicted, it's charged. It's.

It's just tough. It's tough. There's a lot of really, you know, it's easy to latch onto the negativity that exists in the world.

And maybe I even feel somewhat guilty in trying to find something that's not so negative to latch onto.

Yes.

So difficult to find the positive.

That dissonance between.

I know that if I pour everything into the things that are upsetting me and are just really upsetting in general, if I'm not giving enough attention to that, then I'm somehow not as present as I need to be in the world. But if I do do that, then I will not be mentally well.

There's a lot of uncertainty. I mean, on a national level, there's a lot of uncertainty.

But just now, the Supreme Court overruled the tariff thing for Trump, which is going to be very interesting.

I have not paid attention to the news this morning. Just this morning.

I haven't been paying attention at all. And I haven't been paying attention to

you guys, because I was looking.

What was that again? Explain that again.

M. Scott Peck, the road less.

No, not that part.

The tariff Less. Less. Oh, yes.

I did not hear this.

So, yeah, the Supreme Court has come out and they've said the tariff thing is illegal. That's the term they used.

One of the fears, I think, that has been plaguing me is like. And many people, you know, watching things that we know are, like, illegal. Happening.

Yeah, yeah.

And, like, happening at a broader scale. I know they were happening before. Maybe many of us weren't aware of some of that, but, like, it's very blatant.

And the dissonance of, like, oh, this is just happening. It's against the law. It's a crime. And the Supreme Court's just, like, cool, like, we're going to give a thumbs up. So to get the little or a

pass, we're going to say you can do that for now, but maybe we'll say something different in the future once

the Democrat comes into office or, you

know, like we're going to give you the temporary ability to do X, Y and Z, but we'll have a full ruling at some point.

Seeing that little breaking news thing come into my email, I mean, I didn't dive into it, but it was like, oh, I felt a little kernel of hope.

Yeah, right, right, right.

Well, the uncertainty of what's going on and there's certainly, you know, on a daily basis almost, there's something that catches your attention about that and it's so far out of our sphere of influence that that you can start to feel kind of hopeless or helpless about that.

And it provides a backdrop of a lot of the clients I see will reference that probably, I'm guessing a third to a half will say, this stuff in the news is just really bothering me. And it becomes about half the session of what we talk about. And it comes down to that, well, what can I do about this? What can I do about it?

Do I limit my news intake? Do I get involved in this way or that way? Do I just, you know, how do I handle that? But that's that external sphere of influence that we.

It's like, it's like railing about the weather versus something that's more, that's closer to home. And some of that is, you know, family things that are going on in your extended family or in your own primary relationships.

I had one night this week and this was before I decided this is what the topic was going to be. But there's family drama. I will not go into any detail about it, but there's extended family drama.

And that night I woke up at 3am in the morning and that was it. You know, I laid in bed for another hour and a half and I said, I think I'm going to get up now because I'm just looping.

And I thought, you know, well, what do I advise to my clients when they talk about this? And I tried all those techniques and none of them worked. So I've got to relook at that.

Out of curiosity, I was wondering, is it your extended family or your wife's?

My extended family. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People in trouble that I'm kind of helpless to help.

But, well, do you feel.

So this is another thing that I've been thinking about is, you know, so I also I'd say ditto to, you know, working with people and, you know, the things that are going on in America and the world are front and center and what people will say, oh, and of course, the, you know, the world. All this stuff is going on in my life, and then of course, you know, everything going on in the world.

But what I was thinking was, you know, the things that we talk to our clients, our patients about, you know, are the things that we should be doing. And I do do, but there's some times where I'm, you know, maybe feeling less centered, less mentally. Mentally well.

So there is, I don't know, it's not a guilt, but it's a, you know, I need to show up for my patients. You know, I need to.

For sure, I need to do the things that I need to do to maintain balance so that I can be, you know, that can be there for patients, but that, you know, that that's a. Just a dynamic of a clinician's life. So how do you feel about that, Mike and Melissa or Melissa. Let's talk about Melissa.

I mean, I have very, historically poured way too much into work. Had to work, had to work a lot, had to support my. My kiddo.

And for a while, like my ex husband and like, put myself through school, like, all of that stuff. So I felt this immense pressure to work. And my working for the last 20 years has been taking care of people from a tech role to a clinician role.

But that turned into this also very unhealthy loop where, like, I was truly in work mode, putting everything into that. And then, you know, hence thyroid crashes, you know, immune system crashes, like body crashes. So I've been on the extreme end of that.

And then now in my mid-40s, have had the opportunity and privilege really, that I also feel guilty about with being able to, like, carve out time, being able to force myself to do those skills. But those skills, the hardest things I have ever had to make myself.

The self care.

The self care, yes. The boundaries.

Yeah, exactly.

With work specifically, like working on family boundaries, shockingly, was easier for me, and it was not easy, but it was easier than my boundaries. With my work life. I was like, whoa, that's tall. I get that. So especially now with the added guilt

component, we're talking about our pain. This is good for the goose, it's good for the gander, you know.

Well, I brought up that situation as an illustration in a way, because here's the deal. I got up the next morning, I did what my usual morning Routine is I did go to work. I went to a yoga class. It helped a lot. I was on the fence.

I'm like, I'm exhausted. I want to do yoga. I did yoga. It felt better. I went to work. I functioned throughout work.

Maybe we've talked about this on this show before, but I think there's an evolutionary thing about that because like in the middle of the night, that's when you're most vulnerable.

And maybe there's a kind of a hypervigilance that kicks in when your brain is still half asleep looking for where is it coming from next, what's going to happen, what's going to not work? But those.

In terms of an illustration, one thing you're looking at is not just a blip of pain, but an ongoing pattern of it, of something that obsessively grabs you and you can't let go of it. You just can't. And that it interferes with your functioning. You're not able to go to the yoga class, go to work, function at work.

And this is the differentiation of like ordinary pain, quote unquote, ordinary pain with something that's more pathologic or problematic.

Yeah, yeah. Is it going on for some of the literature looks at, you know, does. Is there a symptom that goes on for two weeks or longer?

I suppose that would be similar to a physical pain that if you have a pain and it goes it you, you know, you keep it for two weeks or longer, it's like, oh, this needs to be attended to versus oh, no, I just had this pain. I don't know why I got it, but it does.

That's interesting. I think six months is a chronic pain. You know, something goes on physiologically for six months. I just have that in my mind.

That's kind of one of the diagnostic where it switches to like a chronic. But in the dsm, so two weeks of depression or two weeks is typically kind of the range for a mood,

like at least two weeks. So we've seen this course and this kind of repetitive pattern for at least two weeks.

Yeah.

And then like with adjustment disorders, I think that does say like six months. Like you can't keep someone in an adjustment disorder longer than six months? Longer than six months.

This is a new thing that insurances are doing.

Yes.

Is it, is it official now? Is it.

Well, with Blue Cross Blue Shield, it's official. Or Blue Care Network? What? Maybe both of them. But again, I don't necessarily agree with that. Like, I don't.

But truthfully, our lives are run by insurance companies.

I think that we can have adjustment disorders that are not necessarily major depression, like.

Right.

So then I will typically end up. Okay, insurance companies making me do this. I'm going to say depression and anxiety. Unspecified.

But what about something else? Like more like a problem.

Say like you are really unhappy in your job or somebody in your life is really rubbing you the wrong way and it just like keeps coming back and keeps coming up and like work

bullies, toxic work environment.

Because we're talking about more like sorry syndromes and like, you know, disordered syndromes.

But for a therapeutic, like when does, you know, ordinary pain, like the, the issue at hand crosses over into something that you need, you know, help with or should seek help.

You know, I've seen that like more than 50% of people don't like their jobs. So it's almost like morbid. I like my work, I really do. And I, I'm guessing, did you always like your wear? No.

Because you're in a different stage of your.

I know that's like 40 years.

Yeah. 40 years in private practice. Yeah. Before that I was working at an agency, a couple of different agencies.

The first agency I worked at, I really didn't like my job at that time. There were aspects of it I liked.

First of all, I was a new therapist, so a lot of it, a lot of times I didn't know for sure what I was doing or I was unsure of myself. And that drove me to get a lot more training and a lot of heavy duty intensive training.

So at the end of that three year period of postgraduate work, I felt like I was competent. I felt like, okay, now I know what I'm doing. And I was able to at least show that. But that was part of it and the other part of it.

A lot of these agencies have just these screwed up internal politics and it often is in the place of human care of some kind, including, I don't know, different healthcare situations.

Yeah, needing to be like flexible, like flexibility in these, like normal human flexibility, like wanting us all to conform into these certain, you know, categories or strata. And, like, we don't do that. Like, that's not. That's not normal for humans to do that. I know they've been. They have been treating the man

or the woman.

Yes.

And the woman.

It's come up twice this week. It came up in my office, you know, someone asking me, okay, Melissa, when. When should I. What is a sign that I do need to go back to therapy?

You know, they come to me for meds. We do a little bit of supportive, you know, just therapy. Want to know what's going on in life. But, you know, that.

That I didn't have a concrete answer was frustrating. But then I took to the person. But then I took that opportunity to be like, yeah, like, this is all a gray area.

It's so subjective.

And now we're talking about that very gray area.

Yeah, right now.

Well, I just started therapy myself last week. Thank you.

First session.

Yeah, it was last week. So every two weeks is kind of the. The tentative.

You can have.

Go back to the therapist or regress in my. Yeah, my therapeutic process. Yes, absolutely. So. But as I talked about, you know, this isn't crisis intervention therapy.

I have been so, you know, talking about, you know, just more. More surly, more. More irritable, angry at times. Things are more. The surface is like scratching the surface.

There's more of a reaction from me than I'm comfortable with or that has been there. You know, that. That type of reactivity has not been there for me for a long time. So, you know, and I've had a lot of stuff go on so much. Yeah.

So my, you know, my dad passed away and our living situation has changed. There's just been a lot of stuff. And so I was. I said in the. I'm ready to level. To level up. There's something. There's something going on, and I'm not.

I have some ideas, but, you know, like, it's not a good idea to therapize yourself.

Well, stage. Stages of development.

Word.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love the stages of development.

The stages of development. As you're moving through life, you. You. Different things come into focus. And when I was, you know, really. You're in your 40s, right? I'm beyond.

I'm a few years older than that. And I can't tell.

I remember being in my 40s and having that sense of leveling up or like, what was it that I wanted to achieve and am I on track for doing that? And what's keeping me from doing that? And really, really starting to push.

Yes, this is it. That's it.

Yeah. I think that's normative. But it also involves struggle. Cause it means for me to do that, I've got to challenge myself.

I got to get out of my comfort zone in this area. In this area. I've got to do something that is like. Well, I'll tell this brief story.

I was on a. I went to this retreat that was supposed to help people boost, you know, to transform in some way, shape or form. And I got there, it was going to be four days long and they were going to be intense. Long, long days, like 14 hour days.

But people were saying great things about it. And I'd seen people that had done this transformational thing.

So I went to this and I'm sitting in the parking lot and I'm sitting there and I had this thought like, what if this doesn't work? And it was really sad. And then a scarier thought came in and that was, what if this does work? You know, what's going to be asked of me?

What am I going to have to put out? What am I going to have to raise my game to? And that's a painful thing too. Of just like, okay, I've got what I wanted now what?

You know, So I remember finishing my graduate program and like how many. Just very difficult time of life, family, school, work. But I'd made it and I did it. But then there was like this empty space of like, okay, I did it.

Yeah, okay, I'm tired, I want to go to bed.

The play is over. Yeah, like the letdown after all that hard work.

I think it took months and then like the transition into the new role. But I think these things, like whether it's part of the stages of development or just something that happens in life, like I think that's.

Those are definitely times where like we could use that extra help, that extra support. Like we think of that really easily with like kids who graduate high school, they're moving into college.

I mean when you see that group of folks, like seeing someone for adjustment struggles is super normal. But I, I like normalizing it. Middle age old, you know, in your 70s and your 60s, like, yeah, different,

different challenges each time. People in their late 20s who are saying, well, my life is pretty well over, I can't go back to school.

And you're like, you are so young, you don't realize how young you are. I don't know. You're related to this Dalian. You're very quiet. I was quiet.

I had A thought to your point earlier where you were talking a little bit about the sleep and waking up. And I had a point where I want to say it was about a month ago that I was having difficulty falling asleep. And then.

And when I did, I'd wake up kind of doing what you're doing. Thoughts going through my head.

I don't know why, but I started about a month ago of making it a point before I fall asleep or when I go to lay in the bed every night, I sit there and go, okay, brain, it is time for you to officially turn off and stop thinking. And it has been working. Now, I say that, but every night that I have woke up, all of a sudden, thoughts start racing into my head.

And they're not bad thoughts necessarily, but it was weird. And I just. I didn't have a problem getting back to sleep because eventually I'd go, okay, turn off again. And it'd work. So.

But, yeah, well, having a technique like that works. And I've got a technique I'll talk about in the second part. About what generally. No, that's good. It's good, but that's.

You need to have a pocket full of techniques that kind of work and help you get through different things when it comes up. So we've talked about. Oh, another thought I had regarding this topic.

I have gone through a couple of episodes of major depressive episodes in my life where it was just ongoing and it was really deep. I really felt hopeless, and I pulled out of it. Didn't need to use antidepressants, but I was pretty close to it.

But what I realized at a certain point is that when I would get sad about something, I would get that feeling of like, oh, no, here it comes.

You know, as opposed to, no, I'm sad, and maybe I'm sad for an hour or for an afternoon, but this is kind of a normal sadness versus, like, oh, shoot, here it comes. So I became almost phobic about sad feelings. And I think most people have more of an ease of feeling certain emotions than other ones.

Like, for some people. I do this with people in early recovery, too. Let's name the different emotional states. And you described to me what was the angriest you ever were.

And let's talk about that and what was happening. And, okay, how long did that feeling last? Okay, now let's talk about the saddest you ever were. And same thing. How long did that feeling last?

Let's talk about the most scared you ever were. And how long did that last?

And usually people are able to identify, well, that lasted for a day or that lasted for a few hours, or that lasted for a week, you know, but it doesn't last forever. So that fear of having a strong peak emotional state is something that I try to dispel with people.

You know that your feelings are there for a reason. There are roadmaps. They're there to help you to get out of something, to avoid something, or to stop doing something. All of those things.

I think a good barometer for me is how do you feel when you first wake up in the morning? Like on an immediate awakening, your eyes open and what is the overall tenor of your feeling? Is it like neutral?

Is it like, oh, or is it, you know, bright eyed and bushy tailed? And so in that space I think there's some, and this is just my own thoughts on the subject, but there's some.

It's not temperament but some space of what is happening. You know, what is kind of the baseline? Yeah, what is the baseline?

Yes.

We'll find out more about this in our next chunk.

Chunk.

A Psycho Delicious Conversation is meant for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is no substitute for therapy and should not be treated as such. If you feel a need for real therapy, you should consult your local provider, Google “therapy” or “therapists” in your area. Check with community mental health or a suicide hotline if you are feeling suicidal. Mike, Morgan and Melissa welcome your questions, feedback or dilemmas. Feel free to send your emails to psych.deelish@gmail.com that's P S Y C H dot D E E L I S H at Gmail dot com. The views expressed on this podcast are solely the opinions of Mike Stratton, Morgan Bowen and Melissa Black and do not reflect the views or opinions of any site broadcasting this podcast. Replication of this podcast without written permission is strictly prohibited.