Welcome to the Relational Psych Podcast

Welcome to the first episode of the Relational Psych podcast. Listener, I am Tyson Conner, you've already heard my voice. I'm a therapist here at Relational Psych. And my guest for today, our orientation episode is Dr. Carly Claney.

Yay, hello!

Dr. Claney is a PhD in Clinical Psychology and is the founder, owner and CEO of Relational Psych, AKA, my boss. Hi.

Hi. I'm happy we're doing this.

Listener, I'm gonna give you a quick peek behind the curtain. We talked for like 40 minutes, and none of it recorded. So we are off to a great start with this podcast of just, you know, rolling with it. Dealing with what shows up. And today what showed up was a corrupted SD card.

But we're learning and obviously, this is our first first published one. So we'll be with this.

Right, you're listening to it. So clearly, we survived. And part of the goal of this episode is to kind of orient you, listener, to what you can expect from this show. So if if this might be the only episode of this podcast you listen to, and that's okay, if you listen to it, and you're like, that's not for me, that's fine. And if you're looking at like a long list of episodes, and you don't know where to start, hopefully you started here. So you can get a sense of like, what this show is about, what we're here to do, and what you can expect from each episode. I am a psychotherapist. And I'm also a supervisor here at Relational Psych. And I'll talk about what those things mean in future episodes. I've been in practice at, meaning I've graduated and been doing therapy for seven years at this point. And I'm going to be the host, I'll be here every time. Carly is going to be a regular guest.

Maybe. No, I'll come back.

And there will be a few other folks who you'll hear repeatedly. Other people who work here at Relational Psych, some guests we'll probably ask back asked to come back multiple times. But the goal is for me is to be a consistent presence. So if you're listening to this episode, and you're like, man, you know, it's fine listening to Carly, she's fun to listen to, but man that Tyson guy, his voice is just grating on me. It's not gonna get better. Sorry, this is what it is. So,

Goodbye.

Again, play it to your cat, let us climb those ranks. So why don't we start with the origin story? Because you know, we're, we're therapists and are interested in development and origins. So Carly, this was your idea.

Yeah, it was. Yeah.

How did you come up with the idea for the show?

Well, we're in a season of pretty explosive growth a couple months ago. And to back up a little bit, Relational Psych started in March of 2021. And the first year, it was kind of trying to find its feet. And then this past year 2022, we really, I think, found our feet- growing to now including myself, seven full time employees. And so this was back in September, where three of the new employees, including yourself had started. And we were doing some photography and some rebranding and some, I was writing bios and thinking about what are we doing? And how are we doing it and all of that, and, and I was, I was driving and talking out loud to myself, as you do. And in doing it, I found a different kind of energy than I had when I was just writing some of this out. And it inspired me to think we could probably talk about things in a way that it just hits different than when you read or write about them. And knowing you, we've been friends for a couple years now, knowing that you'd be excited about this as a little creative endeavor. It felt just really exciting to think, Okay, how could we do this? How can we do a podcast that had a couple different goals in mind, to do the marketing and have content for our website and for prospective clients, but also just talk about interesting things in a way that was both deep and approachable, right? That's just kind of the vibe we're going for here.

Yeah. And when you first brought up this idea to me, and we were talking very early on about like, what this podcast could be and could look like- I'd been having some conversations with some people. I'll even cite him. Hopefully he'll be a guest on the show in the future. Brian Pendergast, who's a therapist and psychoanalyst in the area, who actually has he's he's has a deep interest in the idea of like, taking out some of the impenetrable, difficult to understand, specific language that can get really confusing and can actually be kind of alienating to people. And instead just explaining things in simple language, he has a TikTok account called The Psychoanalyst, where he does little sketches and stuff, and also talks in plain language about these sorts of things. So he and I were had had some conversations about this. And then I heard this idea on a different podcast of like, of this aphorism, where, if you can't explain something in simple language, then you don't understand it. And that idea really caught me. And I, and it came to my mind when you first talked about this podcast, because I think there is definitely a place for a special language, you need special language to be able to work with certain complex ideas, and to be very specific, and to talk about complicated things. And I, I like this challenge of saying, like, look like, it's- psychology is not rocket science, which is to say that psychology is about being a person, and how it is to be a person, how we feel, and how we think and how we behave. And like, everybody does those things. And, like, we're not talking about, like the movement of subatomic particles that we need to wrap our brains around, we're talking about what it feels like to be. And for that, it makes sense to me that like using simple language and making this stuff, understandable and approachable, would would have a value. So I'm excited about about doing that here. And so we came up with a with a mission statement.

We did, would you read it for us?

I will, I will. Alright, here's the mission statement for this podcast listener. If this sounds good to you, then stick around. And if not, play it to your cat so that we can climb up the podcast charts. The Relational Psych podcast makes therapy more approachable by inviting real mental health professionals to explain what they do, why they do it, and why it works. Using simple understandable language that anyone can apply to their lifelong growth. That's what we're here to do.

Yeah. And we wanted to keep it broad enough so that we can evolve as we will, I'm sure you know, this should be evolving. And also broad enough that we can talk about like specific therapy things like how therapy works, and different types of therapy. We want to talk about things specific to how we work. So not just all therapy, but specific to psychoanalytic, or psychodynamic or relational therapy, all things that we'll define later.

Yep.

And then we also want to give like, general, general mental health information. And then at Relational Psych, again, we'll talk about this later, we also do psychological testing. So we want to be able to explain what that is. And, and again, as Tyson's saying, like if we want to help people grow. Sure, there's concepts and theories that we're going to hold in our mind that we don't need to teach to our clients. And if we really want to help this depth growth, this like lifelong, you are changing for the long term like, yeah, there should be concepts that you're understanding about yourself. That you're able to, either consciously or unconsciously, like articulate within your experience. So I think it is a good challenge for us to be able to know what we're doing and how to talk about it.

Right? Yeah, yeah. And part of the hope for this podcast listener, if you want to subscribe and listen to every episode, and you find it all interesting. Great. I am here as the host, because I find every topic we talk about interesting. So hopefully, this is a show, I want to listen to every episode of. Not just to hear my own voice, but also a little bit of that. But also, if you're looking through the list, and like there are certain topics that stand out to you as really interesting and others that you don't care about, like listen to the ones that you like, listen to the ones that spark your interest, that there's not going to be some like running joke between every episode, there's no narrative arc. This is meant to be a resource. And if there's an idea or a topic that resonates with you, that you want to bring to your own therapist or to your partner or your dad, like, whatever. Like if there's an idea that you come that you learn about in therapy, and you want to try to talk to your, your family members about it. Maybe you can recommend an episode of this podcast so that they can have a foundational understanding. Our goal isn't to get you to like end on one of these 20 to 40 minute episodes, and feel like an expert, but rather to feel like you have solid footing in whatever idea or concept that we talked about, that you don't feel completely over your head or drowning in in all of these, words that don't make any sense.

Yeah. And that was the idea that you brought to to have this experiment each time too, which felt like a really helpful way of doing just that. So like, yeah, you learned some stuff. But is there a way to apply it? That you'll learn about this later - We don't often, like assign homework to our clients, some some of us do. I don't know, I don't really care about it. But there is often like this desire to do something with it. So what are some of those examples that you might have?

Yeah, so when when we talk about the experiment, we want you to be able to have an experience of the thing we talked about. So that can be like, practice a specific coping skill, or when you're out in the world, pay attention to how people do behave in these specific contexts. Or go online and take this like five minute like questionnaire quiz and look at the results, because that'll that'll be like, relevant to what we talked about - something that you can do to take what we're discussing on the podcast, out of the realm of ideas and into the realm of experience. That's the goal.

Yeah, yeah. Which I think is a good little microcosm of what we want to do in therapy too like, we want growth to happen, but it doesn't just happen in the room, it really does happen as things are being metabolized in you and I think this experiment is a way of engaging in that metabolizing. An enzyme. Yeah, that a science thing?

A catalyst.

Sure. Those are words we should define later.

Yeah, sure Yeah. Well, if we were a biology podcast, we would or chemistry, but I don't those things. So I don't actually know what the word means either. So yes, in terms of structure, this episode will be a little bit different, a little bit shorter than your average episode, we're just kind of getting you up to speed on what to expect moving forward. Every episode, I will be the host. I'll be interviewing someone, either another therapist here, who works here at Relational Psych, or an outside expert, another another therapist, or a psychoanalyst, or a psychiatrist, somebody who works in mental health, about some topic, we'll have a conversation, back and forth, be kind of like this, a lot of back and forth. I'll be trying to like ask questions and clarify, trying not to use that special language, trying to explain special language when we do find ourselves using it. And then, after that, that's when we'll talk about the experiment. That's when we'll go in and say, Okay, here's the experiment that you can do. And then finally, we'll include some, some further learning, right. And that will be things like if this is a topic you're really interested in, here's a book you can read. Here's a YouTube video, you can watch, here's another podcast, you can listen to, blog you can read whatever, something to dive in a little bit deeper, because again, these conversations will largely be pretty foundational. And if you want to learn deeper, we want to give you those options, we want to give you that springboard, we don't want to have you feel like, Oh, that was great, but we're now? We give you somewhere to go. And listener, this is the first episode that's coming out. So like, this is the structure we're starting with. It could change. We'll see how it goes.

Hopefully, if we change it too dramatically, we'll do another like, Hey, this is what we're doing now, to reorient you if you're getting lost.

Yes, that feels important. In two weeks, we will be back with our first full length episode. And then we hope to release every two weeks after that. At Relational Psych we're into relationships. So we do want this to be a bit of a dialogue. We don't have, you know, a subreddit, and we don't have a Twitter account that I'm aware of yet, who knows, maybe we will. But in the meantime, you can always send us an email if you have a suggestion or a request for a future episode topic, for someone you'd like us to talk to, or really just any feedback about the show. Don't hesitate to reach out. We hope that this is a resource that will be useful to you. We hope that it's a little bit fun, and a lot bit interesting. And you know, sometimes you might even feel some stuff.

Yeah. We want it to be meaningful. So if if this is a good way of spending 20, 30, 40 minutes of your time, love to have you and if it's not we really hope that you can use that time in another way. So again, hope we're adding value and we hope to see you back. Thank you.

Yeah, see you see in a fortnight.