Send us Fan Mail

Welcome to Episode 0.125. It’s an impromptu addition to our prequel series, where we decided to turn the psychiatric lens on ourselves. We noticed in our text thread we were all having interesting reactions about finally putting our work out into the world, and the only logical next step was to put ourselves on the couch and let the shrinking begin. This process brought up some interesting themes around narcissism, imposter syndrome, and inadequacy. Yes, shrinks work through all of that too. So, join us as we explore our thoughts and feelings surrounding the soft launch, in real time. Because in psychiatry, it's all grist for the mill, and sometimes we also need our own time on the couch.

Deeper Learning Points

• “Grist for the Mill”
  • A metaphor for therapeutic material coined by therapy giant Dr. Irvin Yalom
• Overton Effect: A thing we plan to trademark
• 🧰 Overview Effect: A repeat from episode 0
• Overton Window
  • Per Wikipedia, “The Overton window is the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time”
• Self-disclosure
  • Self disclosure refers to how much we reveal about ourselves to our patients. We try to be intentional about it as the therapeutic setting is a unique environment and relationship wherein the exploration of the psyche is inherently more one-sided. Historically, therapists were supposed to be a “blank slate“, but even Freud let his patients into his personal life at times, and it is important for us to consider when this may or may not be therapeutic, and what the risks and benefits of self disclosure may be.
  • A major premise of the show Shrinking is exploring the different perspectives that the therapist characters have on self disclosure and just how rigid or permeable our boundaries can and should be.
• Imposter Syndrome
  • Some people are immune :)
• 🧰 Acceptance and Commitment Therapy/Values
• 🧰 Healthy Narcissism
  • We’re fans of the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy podcast, and they do a nice episode on healthy narcissism, to include its adaptive aspects
• Positive stress (“Eustress”)
• Freud’s psychoanalytic approach
  • There’s a lot to cover with Freud, including the concepts of transference/countertransference, which we refer to in the episode
• Loneliness Epidemic: The surgeon general declared this a public health issue in 2023
• Community Episode: We’re planning this for episode 4, released August 5th!
• 🧰 Internal Family Systems (IFS) / “parts theory”
• 🧰 Humor as Defense
• Opus No. 1