LPP #137 Reclaiming Your Mental Health Experience with Evie O’Conner

Evie O’Conner is a trauma-informed yoga teacher and therapist in training. She is currently completing a Masters in the Clinical Mental Health program in Contemplative Psychotherapy and Buddhist Psychology. Her offerings focus on awareness, allowance and integration of all layers of self: physical, mental, emotional, energetic, spiritual, societal, cultural and ancestral.  Evie teaches yoga classes, leads women’s groups and circles, offers 1:1 inner-child healing sessions, teaches Intuitive Eating and this year, is very excited to be taking on clients in her therapy practice. Evie believes deeply in each individual’s capacity for self-healing and views healing as a lifelong, non-linear journey. Her aspiration is to hold space for her clients to reconnect to the healer within themselves and the medicines of the natural world. 

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON

CONNECT WITH EVIE:

Website: www.evieyoga.com 
Instagram: @eviemarie.oconner

CONNECT WITH ME:

Email: engrid@livengproof.com
Instagram: @livengproof
Liveng Proof Podcast
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IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

Her natural curiosity & desire to learn as a child

Our humanness is the doorway to the spiritual.

What’s come up for her during this global uncertainty

Informed consent in how we heal

The western approach of the medical model. What this model excludes. 

She offers an alternative inclusive approach to the medical model – for those who have not found resolution with the medical model – one that offers the patient agency and sovereignty in their healing journey.

How seductive it can feel to use ways to escape reality 

The non-linear journey of healing 

She shares about her own struggle with an eating disorder from ages 10-19

Having gratitude for our coping mechanisms

Learning to sit with our own pain rather than obsessing about the symptom. 

Learning how the symptom (obsessive thoughts about food + body, or depression, anxiety, etc.) is an indicator of something that needs our attention.

Working with diagnoses in mental health: when are they helpful? When are they harmful? Who do they serve? Who do they disempower?

How a mental health diagnosis can feel like a trap to some and empowering to others. 

Everyone is the master and expert of their own experience 

The power differential that can occur between a therapist and client (therapeutic aggression). 

How we can lean more towards a client centered approach where co-creation is the foundation of the relationship.

The anti-psychiatry movement

The history of diagnoses in mental health

Psychiatry is a modern day witch hunt

The history of the DSM

How have mental health diagnoses created a broader cultural implication of pathologizing the human experience? 

Archetypes: pathologizing the neurotic expression vs. the wisdom expression

What are the causes of mental illness? 

Are there some causes that don’t get validated as much as others? 

At the end of the day- what matters most is how each individual/client works with diagnoses and if they experience it as helpful or harmful. 

RE