The Work of Being Human

Everyone's favorite dysfunctional personality type is back: NARCISSISM.

But are we actually helping people understand narcissism, or are we teaching them to label, manipulate, and dehumanize people they find difficult?

Today, I'm responding to a viral video from a Christian counselor offering a "7-second test" to expose a Christian narcissist. Her advice? Ask a pointed question, sing "Happy Birthday" in your head, and watch what happens.

I have some questions...

As a Christian and a licensed professional counselor, I'm concerned about the way narcissism has become a catchall label for anyone who challenges us, struggles with boundaries, or fails to meet our emotional needs. And I'm especially concerned when Christians are encouraged to engage in the very manipulative behaviors they're being taught to recognize in others.In this episode, I examine what's wrong with this approach, explain the developmental wounds that can contribute to narcissistic personality patterns, and introduce the work of psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, whose approach to treating narcissistic pathology centered on EMPATHY.

We talk about the difference between understanding someone's wounds and excusing their behavior, why boundaries don't require contempt, and why compassion and accountability must coexist.

• You can recognize dysfunction without dehumanizing the person.
• You can maintain boundaries without playing power games.
• And you can face reality without abandoning humanity.

That's what real mental health requires.

I'm Vanessa Bentley, a licensed professional counselor and a therapist who hates therapy culture. Around here, we don't do psychobabble. We do good ideas and real mental health.

Face Reality. Embrace Humanity.

Subscribe for more conversations about psychology, relationships, faith, and the work of being human.

Original video: https://youtu.be/PKp2cqaJtK4?si=6kyef7cp7Hd-xuHz

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Most of us don’t like conflict.

Some of us are afraid of it. Some of us avoid it because we don’t know how to do it well. And some of us have gotten so good at shutting down that we barely register conflict at all.

But avoiding conflict isn’t harmless.

Over time, the things we don’t say—the hurt we swallow, the disrespect we ignore, the conversations we refuse to have—do something to us. They change our relationships, but they also change us.

In this episode, I’m talking about what healthy confrontation actually looks like, why conflict avoidance can quietly erode your sense of self, and why learning to resolve conflict may be one of the most important mental health skills you can develop.

And then I’m going back 2,000 years to look at Jesus’ instructions for handling conflict... because when you examine what He actually taught, there’s a remarkably sophisticated understanding of human psychology underneath it.

What if conflict isn’t necessarily a threat to a good relationship?What if learning how to walk through it is part of what makes a good relationship possible?

This is the Work of Being Human.

What if the way we think about mental health is actually making things worse?

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Sami Timimi, retired child and adolescent psychiatrist, psychotherapist, author, and longtime critic of the medicalization of human distress.

And this conversation goes straight to the foundations.

We talk about a question I’ve been asking for years: What happens when we take ordinary—and sometimes extraordinarily painful—human experiences and turn them into psychiatric diseases?

Dr. Timimi argues that psychiatric diagnoses are not diagnoses in the medical sense at all. Unlike diabetes, cancer, or other medical conditions, psychiatric diagnoses have no objective biological marker that establishes the condition. Instead, they describe collections of behaviors and experiences—and then, far too often, we use the description as though it explains the person.

That distinction matters.

Because once we believe our diagnosis explains us, we may stop asking deeper questions: What happened to me? What am I responding to? What does my pain mean? What have I survived? What have I learned to believe? And how might my current struggles make sense in the context of my actual life?

We also turn the same critical lens toward psychotherapy. Dr. Timimi challenges the increasingly technical model of therapy in which a diagnosis supposedly determines the treatment. Instead, we talk about therapy as fundamentally relational: one human being encountering another, without reducing that person to a pathology or assuming the therapist already knows what needs to be “fixed.”

We discuss resilience, agency, suffering, meaning-making, the therapeutic relationship, and why understanding your pain as a reasonable human response may actually offer something the diagnostic model often cannot: Hope.

One of my favorite ideas from this conversation is beautifully simple: stories of suffering are also stories of survival. There is always more to you than your pain. And there is always more to a human being than a diagnosis.

We’ve heard about toxic masculinity until we’re blue in the face.

But what about TOXIC FEMININITY?

In this episode, I’m turning the lens toward us women and asking what happens when the very qualities that make femininity powerful become tools for gaining power over other people.

I explore the natural flexibility, responsiveness, creativity, and nurturing capacity of the feminine—and how those strengths can become distorted when we move from responding to reality to trying to control it.

Using the Karpman Drama Triangle, I look at three dysfunctional roles we can move between: victim, rescuer, and persecutor. Each one may look different, but all three can become strategies for gaining power in relationships. And women can move between them remarkably quickly: helpless in one moment, morally superior in another, and rescuing someone else... all before lunch!

This isn’t an argument against femininity. Quite the opposite. I want women to recover what is genuinely powerful about being female without turning our vulnerability, nurture, emotionality, or adaptability into weapons.

Face reality. Embrace humanity.

This is The Work of Being Human.

ADHD isn't a good enough explanation... Paul Drayton was diagnosed with ADHD in 2021. Like many people, receiving the diagnosis brought relief. Experiences and behaviors that had confused him for years suddenly had a name.But does giving something a name explain it?In this conversation, I wanted to try something different. Instead of interpreting Paul through the diagnosis, I wanted to understand HIM.So we moved away from the label and into his life.We talked about the sensitive little boy who sometimes escaped the noise of his home. A family where emotions weren’t easily expressed. A teenager whose mind wouldn’t quiet down. Alcohol. Addiction. Creativity. Impulsivity. Relationships. And a deeply human desire to be heard and understood.And the further we moved away from the diagnosis, the more interesting the conversation became.We also examine what we actually know about ADHD, what we don't know, and the difference between identifying a collection of behaviors and establishing their cause.This isn't about replacing one reductive explanation with another.I simply refuse to reduce a human being to one in the first place.Paul is not "ADHD."He is a man with a history, relationships, wounds, strengths, choices, adaptations, longings, and a story still being written.And, like every one of us, he is infinitely more interesting than a diagnosis could ever account for.Paul Drayton is an actor and author of Ride — Or Die Trying.Click subscribe to follow the show!Follow me on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vanessathetherapist/Follow the show: https://www.instagram.com/theworkofbeinghuman/Paul's book: https://www.amazon.com/Ride-Die-Trying-Before-Laughter/dp/B0HDR233Q9/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.zbHEfHT7LWcK5skFtpnfetf2njpzYJGzMI6RJNu1CPpuD5HHsQjOh90A5MEFcA0xH3moj6EYSJ9y00dLLQ71rHc0ARZH9Qg04Yb57OK4wc8M8guK4rxDGn2jKNsggHDjlb9UXuyUB4xDRErXjDrauCiZ4SnmlsS45HtjoLyljj7cVOd7nU7tGGSGGzPb2zLu5-FPsc6xieqIVkY7LpgxRVYYS0qG-f4kSd5X3tCo9hs.ywH5bmWrV2VuQCVSm_epW66i1Kr9WKadQIPBtYjw5Dg&qid=1789350621&sr=1-1

I’m a therapist who 's had enough of therapy culture!

One of my biggest pet peeves with it is the way we’ve turned mental health diagnoses into explanations for human beings. Depression. Anxiety. ADHD. Bipolar disorder. Narcissism. We throw these labels around as though they explain *why* someone thinks, feels, and behaves the way they do.

They don’t.

A diagnosis tells you the WHAT. It does not tell you the WHY.

This week, I’m digging into what psychiatric diagnoses actually are, how they evolved, what we really know about “chemical imbalances," and what can happen when a diagnostic label becomes part of someone’s identity.

Your suffering is real. Your symptoms are real. But you are a human being first—and your humanity, your history, your relationships, your pain, and your adaptations deserve to be understood.

The label should never take the place of the human being.

Follow Vanessa: https://www.instagram.com/vanessathetherapist/

Follow the show: https://www.instagram.com/theworkofbeinghuman/

It seems like every public controversy eventually divides us into two camps: the people demanding accountability at all costs and the people so focused on suffering that accountability starts to disappear.

I call them the Moral Police and the Victim Brigade.

But I think both sides are getting something fundamentally wrong.

In this episode, I’m looking at the relationship between truth, compassion, and personal responsibility through the lens of mental health.

• Does understanding someone’s pain make them less responsible for the harm they’ve caused?
• Does showing compassion mean softening our judgment of what is right and wrong?
• And if someone really did do something wrong, what is compassion actually for?

As a therapist, I believe compassion is essential to healing—but compassion and excuse are doing two completely different jobs. Compassion is about connection, not culpability. It allows me to understand your pain without pretending your choices didn’t matter. In fact, real compassion can create the safety necessary for someone to face what they’ve done, understand why they did it, take responsibility, and actually change.

Psychological maturity requires us to hold two truths at once:

• Truth allows me to say: You did this. It was wrong. It harmed someone. It’s yours to own.
• Compassion allows me to say: And I will not stop seeing you as a human being while you own it.

Truth without compassion becomes condemnation.

Compassion without truth becomes enablement.

We don’t have to choose between them. In fact, if we actually want human beings to heal, we must have both.

This is The Work of Being Human.

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Follow the show: https://www.instagram.com/theworkofbeinghuman/

What does it actually mean to be a strong man?

In this episode, I sit down with therapist Trey Tucker of Rugged Counseling to talk about men, masculinity, strength, shame, vulnerability, and the deep need many men have to know that they are valuable—not simply for what they accomplish, provide, or achieve, but for who they are.

Trey and I talk about the fear underneath so much male performance: *What if I'm not good enough?*

That belief can send men in opposite directions. Some spend their lives achieving, dominating, accumulating, and proving. Others withdraw, play it safe, and avoid the possibility of failure altogether. But underneath both can be the same wound.

We also explore what happens when a man begins to heal that wound. What does strength look like when there's nothing left to prove? What does safety mean to a man? Why can vulnerability require more courage than physical risk? And what happens when strength stops being something a man uses to protect himself and becomes something he can offer in service of others?

We talk about resilience, the importance of small tests of strength, why men sometimes shut down in relationships, and the difference between being needed for what you DO versus being valued for who you ARE.

Because real strength isn't the absence of fear, pain, failure, or vulnerability. It may be the ability to face all of them without losing your heart.

Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vanessathetherapist/

Buy Trey's book: https://www.amazon.com/Tough-Enough-Cultivate-Purpose-Strength/dp/0310370566/ref=sr_1_1?crid=42W7F0TRXNXP&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.U0BPVKGFEwtqPajYP-pHkB_fR0Hz4yccFXDfkqDjWsRx-ckoxASjHukpwEy3cPEY7RGUoREZ6zxQU0_a2bN0uPe2CfiVFjG7xh6yAwcZRIq5ZkOtt_kS9WlT89YH6Bci7GKKdTn3lc01alqUS13M-nGG7UQRfc6raAejWNhxHFC5cd0Uzxu19X2Czk-uhlnikAlHgbIKWu7CkFb1z7Ah60QJFldCUFgjKrVWrxEbwx8.yepO4IOc0nbTdQePMkqgUq-b5oEUlO-CZ0DbzMRQEpo&dib_tag=se&keywords=trey+tucker&qid=1786927194&sprefix=trey+tucker%2Caps%2C167&sr=8-1

Trey's website: https://www.ruggedcounseling.com/

“My truth.” “Follow your truth.” “I’m just speaking my truth.”

We hear these phrases everywhere. But what exactly do we mean by truth—and what happens when we confuse our subjective experience with objective reality?

In this episode, I’m breaking down why that distinction matters so much for our mental health and our relationships.

Mental health isn’t the absence of pain. It’s our ability to live in reality without denial, deception, or distortion—and learn to thrive there. That means reality has to matter, even when it hurts, even when we don’t like what it tells us, and especially when it tells us we’re wrong.

I’ll unpack the difference between objective truth and subjective truth, why both matter, and why confusing the two creates serious problems. Your feelings are real. Your experiences matter. Your interpretation deserves to be heard. But none of those things automatically become objective facts simply because you experience them deeply.

We’ll also look at what this does inside relationships. So many conflicts become unnecessarily destructive because two people are arguing over whose subjective experience gets to become the reality. Instead of learning the other person, we demand agreement. Instead of saying, “This is how I experienced it,” we insist, “This is what happened.”

There’s a better way.

We can learn to speak precisely. We can distinguish what we know from what we feel, remember, interpret, or believe. We can honor someone else’s experience without surrendering reality. And when reality shows us that we’re wrong, we can simply say it:

I was wrong.

Because mental health requires a commitment to two things: face reality and embrace your humanity.

What does it really mean to be mentally healthy?

In this conversation, I sit down with mental health advocate Gabe Howard, of the well-known Inside Mental Health and Inside Bipolar podcasts, to explore one of the biggest questions facing our culture today: How should we understand mental illness?

Gabe shares his deeply personal story of being diagnosed with bipolar disorder after waking up in a psychiatric hospital at 26 years old. Together, we talk about what that diagnosis meant to him, how it shaped his identity, and why hope—not hopelessness—became the turning point in his recovery.

Along the way, we wrestle with some difficult questions:

• What is the difference between mental health and mental illness?

• Are diagnoses permanent identities, or can people genuinely heal and grow?

• Why are terms like OCD, ADHD, anxiety, and trauma used so casually today?

• What happens when our beliefs about ourselves become disconnected from reality?

• How do childhood experiences shape the stories we tell ourselves as adults?

As a therapist, I also offer a different lens than diagnosis alone. Rather than beginning with symptoms, I ask, "Tell me everything." I believe understanding a person's story often reveals far more than simply naming a disorder.

We discuss:

• The difference between diagnosis and case conceptualization

• Why context matters in understanding suffering

• How shame distorts our thinking

• The role of attachment, identity, and early family dynamics

• Why memory can become fragmented when we're living in survival mode

• The importance of telling our stories honestly—and having someone who is willing to listen

Whether you agree with every perspective we discuss or not, my hope is that this conversation invites you to think more deeply about mental health, healing, and what it means to become more fully human.

If this episode encouraged you, I'd love for you to subscribe, share it with someone who might benefit, and join the conversation in the comments.