Vanessa: Surviving the fear that 'everyone leaves'

Julia, a mother to a young child, is working hard to give her son the tools to regulate his emotions, something she's worked hard to learn as an adult. As someone who has struggled with addiction and a diagnosis of bipolar, Julia carefully hides away parts of herself. Dr. Hillary helps her embrace the complexity of her story. 

Dr. Hillary needs to tell her longtime client Vanessa that she's pregnant and that they will need to take a break in their therapy together, when Hillary goes on maternity leave. This is hard to hear for Vanessa, who has been left, physically and emotionally, by important people in her life when she needed them most. Hillary helps Vanessa navigate the pain of feeling abandoned while also assuring her that although their situation will change, their bond is secure. 

Listen for: 

• How Hillary gives Vanessa so much space to work through the grief and emotions associated with this big news and disrupts Vanessa's narrative that people always leave. "I'd really like you to see the throughline in our relationship that said look at how we've stayed together."
• How Hillary extends gratitude to all of the ways Vanessa has survived this feeling. 
• Why Hillary is comfortable using the word "love" in the context of the therapeutic relationship. 

Quotes from the episode: 

• "I feel like I put up a bunch of walls, like really unhelpful walls and just try and pretend like it doesn't bother me." - Vanessa
• "We all have this way of somehow tucking things away, just to get through, and then sometimes when there's space, when we're not in crisis anymore or when our needs are met to some degree, all of a sudden the things that were there all along that were unfelt and unprocessed come back up to the surface. It's as if our nervous systems, our bodies have this wisdom that ... something inside is asking for these parts of us to be healed." - Hillary
• "I'm going to hold you really well in that grief. It won't be minimized. And you won't be left." - Hillary