CFDS 020 The One Thing Your Therapist Should Never Say To You Clean Food, Dirty Stories

My adventures of having a therapist and teacher who put us both into a bit of a situation. And the best food to soothe the gut and recharge your brain.

Hi everybody, I'm Barbara Fernandez, the Rocking Raw Chef, here with my Clean Food, Dirty Stories: one to entertain, the other to inspire.

I help people stamp out stress, depression and fatigue over at RockingRawChef.com, and today's title is:

The one thing your therapist should NEVER say to you

In addition to this story, at the end of this episode I'll share with you the best food to soothe the gut, recharge your brain AND bring you strength and connection to who you really are.

OK enough hints from me, let's get on with the story.

Right, so this story is a bit of a doozy and I've never shared it before except with a few close friends. So why not share it all over the internet, right? The reason I'm sharing this story though is because I feel it deals with a really important topic, and that is boundaries.

Let's talk boundaries

When I say boundaries, I don't mean fences or stone walls or anything like that. I'm talking about the boundaries that we all set that say to people, "You can come here but no closer". For those who don't know, boundaries are our (mostly unconscious) way of telling people what is and is not OK.

So for example your boundaries with your friends are probably very different to those with your coworkers. Friends can most likely get closer to you, not only emotionally and mentally, but physically as well. You probably wouldn't move away from a friend in an elevator if they were standing fairly close to you, whereas with a stranger, you would. Right? We talk about personal space and that's one kind of boundary.

Now why am I prefacing my story with talk about boundaries? Well, because this story is all about violating someone's boundaries - imposing upon them, in this case, mine - in a very intimate way...without even touching them. And this kind of behavior is just not OK, although it does make for an interesting story, as you'll see.

It started in a bookstore

This story takes place not in Paris as with some of my previous episodes, but in London, England. And it starts in a used bookstore.

My son was very small - he was about a year old - and he and I often found ourselves in used bookstores, whether we wanted to be there or not, because his dad loves books. He wanted to browse and scour all the shelves searching for whatever books caught his eye. While my son and I were waiting, I spotted a flyer on a bulletin board advertising training in a particular method of therapy that sounded really exciting. I won't say exactly what it was because this isn't about name calling and the story involves the founder of that method and, you know, I don't want to use real names because the purpose isn't to name and shame, it's just to tell a story.

I looked at the flyer and my intuition said, "You need to do this course. It's perfect for you". So I wrote down the phone number and the website address and looked it up at home. And sure enough, it looked fantastic. It was a full year of training in a small group to become a therapist using this method. I could even use my vocal skills, so I thought 'wow that really is perfect!'

Very exciting...a...