The Truth About Therapy, with Kier Gaines

(gentle music) Headspace Studio. (gentle music) Hey, what's up y'all? My name is Kier Gaines and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Monday morning. I have the pleasure of guest hosting Radio Headspace this week, and I'm so excited to be here with y'all. For those that don't know me, I'm a therapist and a mental health advocate, and my area expertise is men's mental health. So establishing healthy relationship dynamics, that's kind of my thing. I'm really pumped to be here with y'all this week in honor of Movember. Yes, Movember. Movember is all about bringing awareness to men's health problems, and that includes mental health, which is very close to my heart. So this week, we're gonna explore different ways to destigmatize men's mental health. And one thing that I really wanna stress is that this is a group effort. So if you're not a man, there are most likely some men in your life, and we need to all work together for things to change. To kick-off this week, we're gonna start at the root of it all, stigmas around therapy, specifically, with men. As someone who's been on both sides of the therapy couch, both on the couch and in front of it as a client and a therapist, I can tell you that therapy is very often misunderstood and I've seen firsthand how we can change lives. We're gonna dig into why it's taboo, how stereotypes hinder some people's experiences with therapy, and how we can reframe how we view, and approach clinical health. So there are a lot of misconceptions when it comes to therapy, and I understand why, but let's separate it into two categories, misconceptions that a lot of people have, and misconceptions that men have specifically. (soft music) So the reason that people have misconceptions about therapy, one is because you've never seen therapy really work. A lot of us, even in grad school, as I was studying to become a therapist, I noticed that I didn't get to see a therapy session in action. And because we don't get to see it in action, the imagination makes up some remarkable things. It's a mix of what we saw in movies, what we see in TV, and kinda what we hear from casual conversation amongst peers. (soft music) Therapy used to be specifically for people with profound psychiatric challenges. Now, those people weren't treated very well back in those days, and because we don't have our eyes on what a therapy session looks like for individuals with different lived experiences, it's hard to fill the gap between what used to be that mistreatment is only for people who were "crazy." And what therapy is now a really brilliant experience, conversational experience that's transformative in the way that you see yourself and the way that you see the world. The misconceptions about therapy in terms of how men think about it, come from the fact that masculine ideology is really hinged on two things,...