Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to "Lessons from the Couch", where we invite you to pull up a seat and join Corina and Mariana—two marriage and family therapists based in Illinois—on a journey through therapy, life, and everything in between. In each episode, we have honest and engaging conversations with therapists and non-therapists alike, exploring their unique experiences in and around therapy. Whether it's the story of a therapist navigating early career challenges or a non-therapist sharing how therapy changed their life, our goal is to show just how accessible and transformative these conversations can be.
We also dive into the diverse career paths and personal journeys within the field of mental health, from seasoned professionals to those just starting out (like Corina and Mariana, who are at opposite timelines of their own therapy careers).
If you're curious about therapy, mental health, or simply enjoy meaningful conversations, "Lessons from the Couch" is for you. Get ready to think, reflect, and discover new perspectives one conversation at a time.
Follow Lessons from the Couch on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts to listen to new episodes.
Co-Hosted by Corina Teofilo Mattson and Mariana Reyes Daza. Show art by Jae Avilez. Music by Brandon Acosta.
If you're interested in therapy services, either in person or via telehealth, and reside in Illinois, visit www.liveoakchicago.com to learn more.
One of the things I talk about with my students all the time is when somebody comes into therapy initially as a therapist, you should acknowledge the power of humbling yourself and not knowing. Your clients have made a huge, huge investment of emotion by calling you and scheduling an appointment. It's not an easy thing to do, right? So be humble to your clients. They're not just a fee.
Carl Hampton:They're not just a clinical hour. They are actually somebody who is at a point, the depths of their somehow suffering, they're reaching out for help. When you can do that effectively, then I think you really add to the field.
Corina:Hi, my name is Corina Teofilo Mattson.
Mariana:I'm Mariana Reyes Daza, and we are the co hosts for Lessons from the Couch.
Corina:Throughout this podcast, you're going to find us having intimate, deep conversations. We'll be talking to therapists and probably some non therapists, and we're going to bring you into the therapy room with us. Thank you so much for joining us, Carl, especially without knowing at all what we're going to do together. Mariana and I've been talking over time about who could come to join us at different times. This season, we're talking about expertise.
Corina:And you were someone I thought about when I think about expertise. One of the things I think about related to you is mindfulness and how many times students come out of supervision group with you having soaked up something about mindfulness. Would you mind starting by telling us who you are?
Carl Hampton:Yeah. Carl Hampton. I am husband of forty years and a father of thirty something years, and I professionally am a psychotherapist. Spent a lot of time working in community psychotherapy practice, and I enjoy it, and it kind of resonates and fits with my personality. And I'm just here to have a conversation about whatever it is we're going have a conversation about.
Mariana:Can you tell us a little bit more about how you came to knowing that being a psychotherapist fit well with your personality, and what was the path that led you to where you are now?
Carl Hampton:My students used to say when they would come in to first year supervision, All my friends used to come to me for advice, and they used to always come to me for, like, some sort of mediated or moderated response. I was pretty good at not reacting to dilemmas that people would sort of present me with. So I think part of it was just like, I'm a listener. Although I like to, run my mouth, I can stay quiet, and I can give people reassurance, and I'm relational. So I think those elements, those personal elements were probably the sort of precursors to me entering into the field.
Carl Hampton:But I started in the field working in like social justice, where my major as an undergraduate was correctional administration, criminal justice. I was very much interested in working with a lot of people who looked like me, who had adverse circumstances in their lives, because I had a lot of blessings and a lot of opportunity. And I saw how very capable people didn't have opportunity and as a result had really negative and adverse outcomes. And so I started out doing criminal justice work. I developed a Scared Straight program in Wappen State Prison in Wappen, Wisconsin, working with lifers to develop programs that could allow them to mentor young people like adolescents.
Carl Hampton:I tell this story because I think it's just very reflective of what happens in our field. I started out being an intern and really kind of volunteering my time while I was, I think, a second year student at University of Wisconsin Madison. And I did that for about eight months, which was developing a therapeutic component to this service program, where we would basically take kids who were diverted from the courts up to Wapon State Prison, and we would sit with inmates and basically hear their stories of their lives. And the hope was to scare them straight, was to give them some idea of the real struggles that people face and how they end up being in positions that they're in and some idea of the trajectory that people face when they enter into the criminal justice system. And so we did that for about eight months or so, and then the director's mother passed away, and she was from Milwaukee.
Carl Hampton:And she had to leave Madison and go to Milwaukee to deal with her family business. And it left me and a couple of other volunteers to our own sort of devices. And we ended up basically running the program, developing the program, and actually we got funding for the program. So it was trial by fire. We just got thrown into this role.
Carl Hampton:But I really enjoyed it because at that level, you really see that people are people. And if they're given adverse circumstances, it's very hard to sort of climb out of that. And they say, Save for the grace of God, go I. I was very similar to a lot of them, but I just had the fortunate situation of having both parents, growing up in a safe place, growing up in a place that encouraged education, etcetera. So that's my story of trial by fire and getting thrown with the wolves probably before you're ready to do that.
Mariana:You kind of just went right in and learned how to do it as you went.
Carl Hampton:I did. Yes. It's interesting because I do a lot of student supervision and training, and that's kind of the model.
Corina:Carl, I'm really grateful to hear that story because you and I met in community work at the Family Institute at Northwestern and you said that's kind of the model and it feels so true to me that the model of the work we do there is like create a container so that people can go trial by fire, do the work in context. And I wonder, can you tell me about the journey from that internship to Northwestern? And then once we get there, I'm curious how that internship experience informed how you thought about the work at Northwestern.
Carl Hampton:I kind of bounced around in a couple of ways. When I moved back from Madison to Chicago, I took a job in a sheltered workshop, a place called the Anixter Center, which I think still exists in existence. And I used to work at 6610 North Clark Street in a workshop. I started out as a learning supervisor. It was a piece rate production setup where these folks would screw bottle caps on bottles and push them down an assembly line, for example.
Carl Hampton:That's not a real example, but a similar sort of thing. They get paid and evaluated per piece that they do. And then after the sheltered workshop, there are opportunities for them to go out into contracted work sites and get jobs. And most of these people who were doing the work were considered mentally disabled, some chronic mental illness, and then some intellectual types of issues. And I did that for four years.
Carl Hampton:And what I really appreciated about that was, one, I learned how to live with absolutely no money because didn't really get paid very well. And two, I learned that there was really a path for professional development in mental health treatment and psychotherapy. Prior to that, many, many years before that, I worked at a state institution in Madison with developmentally disabled folks, and I thought, you know, that's just kind of like that's the dead end, but I realized that there was a bigger path toward private practice or bigger path towards community mental health that I could avail myself to over time. I did that for four years, and then I got a position at a police department in Evanston, Illinois, and I was hired to be a youth outreach advocate and victim services advocate. And that really gave me my first bigger sort of picture mental health experience.
Carl Hampton:It was amazing, but there were issues that we had to deal with that were challenging for me. One was most of the folks who came in in the victim services area were African American and was just sort of emphasized the challenges that people of color have living in The United States, living in the context that we live in. Most of the folks who got arrested, most of the folks who referred to the youth outreach bureau looked like me. And so that was part of it. Then the other part of it was that created a certain level of depression in me, think, just that realization.
Carl Hampton:And then another part of me was really triggered by substance, the nature of the work. So if there were situations where there was a crime and there was a death, we were called out to actually notify families, take people to court sessions, take people to the morgue identifying bodies. And I just am not cut out for that. I'm not cut out for being awakened at 03:00 in the morning and having somebody say, Come down to the police station. We need you to do a death notification.
Carl Hampton:And I'll never forget, there was a situation where one of my first death notifications, I was called out maybe three, 04:00 in the morning to go to an older woman's house to tell her that her husband had died in a car crash. At that point, I realized I am not really cut out for this. Because you kind of go into a situation like that cold and you really don't know how to react. You're giving people like the worst news that they could possibly get. You're trying to sort of manage their grief in the moment.
Carl Hampton:At the same time, you're feeling like, These people don't know me. They really probably are just looking at me like, Okay, you can go now, or Leave me alone. No one ever really said that to us. But it was one of those situations where the accumulation of those types of experiences really pushed me out of that area. I was like, Okay, I'm not really cut out for that.
Carl Hampton:It also helped me understand grief. So it was kind of like a double edged sword. After I did that, I started my own practice, which was a small practice, and then I went to work for the Rehab Institute of Chicago, where I ran a subacute head injury program. You know, am missing something? Before I went to the Rehab Institute, I worked at an insurance company.
Corina:I think I did know that. I forgot. Yes. Only recently, like maybe a month ago, think you told me that.
Carl Hampton:Yeah. And people go, An insurance company? This insurance company, I'm going give them a shout because they were really a healthcare company. It was called Celtic Life. And they did small group health insurance.
Carl Hampton:And what I did was I worked to coordinate what we called extra contractual benefits. So we would go outside, you you hear these stories of like insurance companies denying claims and saying, Wait a minute, we don't pay for those technologies because they're experimental. Well, we did some of that, but for the most part, if somebody had a head injury, somebody had a spinal cord injury, we did work with people who were having bone marrow transplants. If somebody had like a really catastrophic event, we would work with them, one, to find a more appropriate place for them to go, what we call centers of excellence. We would send people to Craig Hospital in Denver, Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, because we figured that, one, the care would be better, and two, the care would be more efficient if people went to quality healthcare environments.
Carl Hampton:I was the person who was coordinating the extra contractual benefits. I got to work with some very interesting people. We had like a medical advisory panel with spinal cord doctors and urologists and really interesting medical people. And I was in charge of meting out these benefits. And also a little bit of gratification because you would be really sort of granting the wishes of a lot of the insurers, which people probably don't think happens with insurance, but it actually was happening then.
Carl Hampton:I left Celtic when Celtic said, You know what? We need to be a small insurance carrier. We're not going to be able to do this any longer. The CEO was a visionary, a guy who wanted to be a doctor, but just never quite got that together and became an insurance executive. He was an actuary, so he was very mathematically oriented.
Carl Hampton:And he left, a couple of other people left, and the company shifted priorities. After that is when I went to the Rehab Institute and did the head injury program. And that was like a subacute unit is where people go who have significant losses of consciousness. People call them people in coma or persistently vegetative. I would work with families around discharge planning, but also working with the staff to provide the level of services that we needed to provide.
Carl Hampton:Our services were provided in a skilled care facility, a facility called the Imperial on Fullerton in the city. And it was a beautiful, beautiful facility. And some of the work that we did was absolutely amazing.
Corina:How many years were you there, Carl?
Carl Hampton:Maybe three. It was short lived. And then right after that, I got called to the Family Institute.
Corina:And how many years ago was that now?
Carl Hampton:Oh my god, almost thirty years. It was in 'ninety six, I think.
Corina:One of the things Mariana and I talk about is that we've noticed that maybe some of the folks who resonate most with this podcast are newer professionals. I just think it's really cool that in your story, you've talked about seven different options for how people can use this degree, and I think people don't always realize there's so many possibilities.
Carl Hampton:Yeah. Agreed. I tell students that you have the world open to you for what you wanna do. If you wanna be entrepreneurial and you wanna engage in business, you can do that. If you want to be a social justice warrior, as they are called, you can do that.
Carl Hampton:I mean, there's different sort of motivations that are connected to all sorts of professional environments that we don't even really think about.
Mariana:How do you think that having worked in the criminal justice system and then working in these rehab facilities, etcetera, shows up now in the work that you do at the Family Institute?
Carl Hampton:I've always been connected to the community at the Family Institute. I've never just done the practice at the Institute. And when I was hired, obviously that was one of my strong suits. Was hired because the Institute had a grant to do a violence prevention program and work with the YMCAs of Greater Chicago to provide early intervention and early socialization for preschool children and their families. And so it was a research project funded by the Crown Foundation, funded for five years, that was trying to look at, like, if you provide support for families and a curriculum, we had a very solid emotional intelligence building curriculum, you can keep kids who are at the margins or push them back toward the center, and you can prevent kids from engaging in previolent and violent pain.
Carl Hampton:Unfortunately, we never really got to a point where that research was really published. But a lot of the work that we did was, like, for example, multi client kids groups with preschool kids. We would teach them how to be patient, how to respect each other, how to respect rules and authority, how to manage their impulses, and we would do that using play therapy. We would also provide parent training programs. We would provide a teacher training program, and we provided counseling for those folks who needed counseling and therapy.
Carl Hampton:It was like kitchen sink stuff. And Bill Pinshoff was the CEO at the Family Institute, and one of Bill's strong suits is he's a visionary. And so if you walked into his office and said, You know, Bill, I'm really thinking about doing X, Y, and Z, he would always be like, let's look into that. And before you know it, you'd have a meeting and maybe a funder or two, and you're like, oh my God, this is really gonna happen. But he was very much a visionary.
Carl Hampton:And so I have to give kudos to him for that. But that was my first exposure to the Family Institute. And I was like, Oh, I could do this. There's a very sort of optimistic worldview. There seems to be resources.
Carl Hampton:And there was a desire for the Family Institute to really push sort of preventive care. At any rate, that turned into me working as a staff therapist, me being the director of the community programs, which Bill Russell started, and sort of existing at the Family Institute for twenty five years, whatever.
Corina:Carl, now you continue to supervise at the Family Institute, and you have a solo practice. How would you describe your solo practice, and what are the ways it's informed by all the experience you just described?
Carl Hampton:Lately, I've been seeing a lot of couples, middle aged men, who are sort of going through various transitions, career transitions, life transitions, relational transitions. And I think it's informed by where I am in my life. But right now, I'm not doing as much work with community organizations. I mean, we used to, you know, sort of set up shop in various schools or various resource centers. I'm not doing any of that.
Carl Hampton:I'm just doing mostly telehealth. In terms of informing my perspective, though, I again go back to, say for the grace of God go I, I go back to, you could have a 100 therapists, and they could have the same client, and they could all be doing different things, and they could all be effective. So the notion of equifinality is really solid in my head, but that comes from the work that I was doing back in the day, really realizing there's a million ways to get to the right place. Also, the power of relationships. We would go and, again, set up camp at, let's say, a Y.
Carl Hampton:We wouldn't really have relationships. We'd have to develop those relationships, not only with center, with our clients, with the neighborhood sometimes. And I think that's kind of at the center of the work that I do as a therapist. I don't know if there's magic because I'm trained as a Ericssonian hypnotherapist, but I believe in it. I don't know if it exists, if it's a real thing, but I believe in it.
Carl Hampton:I believe in the power of the subconscious. And I think all that stuff comes from that earlier life when I was doing that kind of work. Going back to this idea of meditation and mindfulness, I started meditation when I was like 14 or 15 years old.
Corina:How'd you get into it?
Carl Hampton:I had a really good friend who took a transcendental meditation course, And he was telling me one day, like, how effective it was and how helpful it was for him to quit some of the habits that he had that were not really good habits for him and helped him sort of deal with some of his distractions, which nowadays called ADHD. But at the time, there there wasn't an official label for that. So he was pretty much told me that something from a very simplistic sort of point of view that you find a nice relaxing spot, you you start to focus on your breathing, and you say this mantra to yourself over and over and over again. And the mantra has to be a couple different syllables so you develop this rhythm. Right?
Carl Hampton:So people used to go Nam myoho renge kyo. They used have these mantras that they would use, but he never gave me a mantra. Said, You gotta keep the mantra under your hat, and it's your mantra to use whenever you need to use it. This was the commercial end of transcendental meditation. It's not a mantra that you'd share with people and you do this kind of privately.
Corina:Was he 14 as well?
Carl Hampton:Yes.
Corina:That's incredible.
Carl Hampton:Very simple sort of understanding of what meditation was. I had no concept of really what the unconscious was or nonconscious process at that point. I think it was just sort of like, okay, let me do that. So I was doing it because it was helping me really just kind of focus. I did it for like three weeks.
Carl Hampton:I developed my own mantra. My mantra was strawberry. Now there's a problem with that. And I went to my friend after three weeks and I said, I like the feel because I could actually close my eyes, repeat my mantra over and over and over again, and almost twenty minutes to the second, I would open my eyes. So I was actually able to kind of go there, but I kept getting interrupted by the smell and taste of strawberries.
Carl Hampton:And I told my friend, I said, This isn't great, but I really smell strawberries and taste strawberries. He said, Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you. Your mantra can't really mean anything to you. It can't have a meaning. It can't bring any sensation into your consciousness.
Carl Hampton:It has to be just something that you use kind of like as an anchor. Needless to say, I then changed my mantra to bing jia, which I'm gonna tell you because I don't believe that telling people your mantra is a problem. And once I started doing that, I was like, wow, this is really effective in making me feel rested, making me feel focused, making me feel like I could actually lock in, keeping the distractions out. And so that's how I began my mindfulness practice and have been, for the most part, doing it ever since.
Mariana:Live Oak Chicago is a primarily queer, trauma informed therapy practice located on the North Side Of Chicago, offering both in person and virtual therapy, consultation and workshops. We are committed to the practice of becoming a model of a community of diversely identified humans working together to transform the emotional, psychological and spiritual well-being of individuals, families and communities, beginning with ourselves. To access therapy, training, consultation, please visit ww.liveoakchicago.com. When I hear you talk about this mindfulness practice, and you also mentioned before this idea of like different therapists approach working with clients very differently, one image and one story that comes to mind for me about you Carl, that I'd love for you to then walk us through is I remember being a graduate student and sitting down with my friends at lunch outside and suddenly we see all our supervisors walking out one of them blindfolded with a bandana all of them different colors and then the other one like holding them tightly and guiding them all around Evanston and all of us just looking at this and thinking like we have never seen any of our supervisors out and about first of all like why are they outside are they allowed to go outside of the family institute don't they just exist in there and then like seeing this experience of one person like looking very shaky unsure what was happening while the other one guided them and then I walk into supervision and my supervisor tells us oh yeah Carl made us do that and I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit more like what was happening and in what ways is that informed by like some of this mindfulness and, like, creative practices that you are talking about?
Carl Hampton:It's informed by building trust, right? But as you were talking, I was thinking, yeah, and it also demystifies and shifts the way people think about supervisors. We're in a field where lifelong learning is real key principle. Being open to difference is really, really important for us throughout our careers as therapists. And what you said was you, at that point, realized, Wow, our supervisors are doing their work too.
Carl Hampton:They're not just like the experts, and they're also doing their work, we're not sure what it is, but something's going on that's informing them. But the exercise in itself is trust building and really kind of establishing curiosity. Establishing curiosity means you're increasing your other senses while you do that, and you're also learning how to communicate with somebody without the gift of vision. And that's the reality some people live every day. But the actual trust building exercise is something that I did with faculty and with my supervision group and something that I've always enjoyed doing because it takes supervision into another sort of level.
Carl Hampton:Not just our clinical development, but our development as far as empathic human beings, right? Now you can sort of relate to what it's like to not necessarily have this sensation of sight.
Corina:Carl, as a supervisor, what are the things you're most hoping your students leave your group with at the end of their time with you?
Carl Hampton:Curiosity, respect, understanding cultural differences and cultural nuance, and being lifelong learner and being humble to the process. You know, when somebody comes into one of the things I talk about with my students all the time is when somebody comes into therapy initially as a therapist, you should acknowledge the power of humbling yourself, not knowing, and coming into therapy. So your clients have made a huge, huge investment of emotion by calling you and scheduling an appointment. It's not an easy thing to do, right? So that's one of the things that I want our students to take with us, is that be humble to your clients.
Carl Hampton:They're not just a fee. They're not just a clinical hour. They are actually somebody who is at a point, the depths of their somehow suffering, they're reaching out for help. And when you can do that effectively, then I think you really add to the field. I think we kinda get caught up and like, you know, people get caught up in their revenue sources and they get caught up in all these other things.
Carl Hampton:But at the end of the day, it's about helping people and humbling yourself to people who are willing to reach out and be helped.
Corina:I have found with you that that comes through, Carl. And I don't think it's always so obvious to me how much that lifelong learner and humility is something that that you have been a real mentor and guide for me about. I would say I'm a bit obsessed with it. Obsessed with trying to teach others students, therapists, clients that our humanity is the gift, getting it wrong, being human. And so much of your language has informed who I've become as a therapist, supervisor and person running this place.
Corina:Actually recently I was talking to someone we both know, Neil, about the supervisors needing at the Family Institute and we're talking about like bringing creativity, ingenuity to it all stuff that I feel like you have always been modeling and teaching me and all the students. And the thing I hear students leave your supervision group with is an entry into mindfulness. And I think if every therapist could enter the field with an entry into mindfulness practices, we would do less harm.
Carl Hampton:Agreed. And over the scope of thirty years or so, I have witnessed therapists' tools going from, I don't know what to do with this, to, oh, you know, let's see if we can focus on shifting some of that mental energy. And I've been doing this personal research on gut brain issues, and I have seized there's so much of it is related to how we sort of deal with our consciousness, how we deal with our anxiety, how we deal with our depression. And now there are actually tools that we therapists use to help people in the moment. Let's slow our breathing down.
Carl Hampton:Let's close our eyes and and take a few deep breaths. All that centering stuff and and grounding comes from, really, back in the day, like Milton Erickson back in the day, but comes from us understanding the power of mindfulness. And mindfulness is a, what we call cultural appropriation.
Corina:Indigenous practices.
Carl Hampton:Because the indigenous practices have been going on for the shamans and those folks who are out in the woods in Costa Rica and Brazil have been doing that since the beginning of time.
Mariana:Well, what does mindfulness look like in practice for each of you all's lives? Like, apart from the images that maybe we all have, how do you all find that you actually put it into practice in the day to day?
Carl Hampton:It's paying attention to that which you normally don't pay attention to.
Mariana:So mindfulness being putting attention to the things that you usually don't put attention to?
Carl Hampton:I think so. You know, the things that sort of like are just like components of our lives, it's about really sort of paying attention to that and learning to focus on that, learning how to narrow the things that are sort of like impacting us and understanding those things.
Mariana:Are there things that you notice within yourself that tell you that you're not present and that you need to, like, ground yourself? How do you kind of identify, oh, I need to practice some mindfulness in this moment?
Carl Hampton:They have, like, a history of attentional issues. So, I can tell when I'm losing that sort of connection and that focus. And I might say with a client, can we take a second and just center ourselves? You know, a lot of people have this notion of the therapist as being the wizard of Oz, but I don't. And I will say to people, stuff that's going on sort of in the unconscious realm is gonna affect what happens between the two of us.
Carl Hampton:And at any point in time, we can step out and say, okay. Hold on. Let me just let's center ourselves. Or if a client feels that I'm not focused or centered on them, You certainly don't feel insulted. I don't feel insulted if you say, Hey, wait a minute.
Carl Hampton:I just don't think you're getting what I'm saying, or I don't know if we're on the same page here. That has to be part of the dialogue as therapists, right? Nobody knows everything. Nobody has the answer for everything. So that goes back to the being humble about what it is we know and what it is we don't know.
Corina:I love that example, Carl. And to this question, Mariana, I think it's funny because when you asked the question, I thought about how for me my practice of mindfulness started. I would do it before bed because so often I would get pulled into thoughts. My planning brain, it starts as planning brain and then it just moves towards thinking about thinking. And so my mindfulness practice was to help to bring me back into my breathing and sensations and going to sleep.
Corina:But it's 1,000 things now and one of them is just Monday, but it actually happened four weeks ago on Monday. Was in a session with a person and we were talking about the big bill and I had only recently learned that it had passed at the time, like maybe even in that session. So I was kind of like in that experience with this person, which isn't inherently bad, but I wasn't super attuned. So part of my mindfulness practice is that in the past feeling like I'd gotten it wrong would have been a big deal and it would have felt like I wanted to deal with it immediately. Thankfully for the journey that wasn't true on this case.
Corina:So I put it on my calendar for the next time I was going to meet this person, was going to be weeks later. And so the next time we met I said I just wanted to go back to what happened last time. Wanted to name that I was not at all present for your experience because I was too in my own experience. And then we got to have this really beautiful conversation about how it feels to tolerate me talking about my humanity and getting it wrong. It feels to tolerate an apology.
Corina:It was beautiful conversation, but it was started because I could slow down enough to notice that I wasn't present, which is something that would have felt kind of intolerable to my younger self to think that I'd messed up in that way. And now I'm like, oh, this is the best of it all. This is the juiciest bits.
Carl Hampton:And you're not carrying that into the rest of the session where you're something like just consumed by like, Oh God, I missed something. I'm not really understanding what they're talking about. I think the average person has an attention span of not too long, right? It's just a few minutes. So you're dealing with somebody for fifty minutes or an hour.
Carl Hampton:There's gonna be times where you just kind of, you're like, what?
Corina:Exactly. And you and I both have ADHD, if I remember, right? Yeah. Yes.
Carl Hampton:So we can relate to that.
Mariana:I hear that in both of y'all's practices of mindfulness, there's an aspect of maybe I can call it forgiveness if it happens, like inviting oneself back into the present moment without feeling like shame is the thing that is most predominant in that moment. But saying like, yeah, my mind goes off sometimes and as long as I am returning, there is nothing bad about just existing in that space.
Carl Hampton:That's right. And just owning our own vulnerability to humanness.
Corina:There's nothing wrong. And also it might have a negative impact, and that would have been fine too. In this case, I really actually would have welcomed it if they had felt angry at me. That wasn't how it played out, but it's so interesting to feel so differently about something like someone being angry at me, which when I was younger, I really had low tolerance for.
Carl Hampton:Have to make it better. Have to make it better. Talking about it empowers maybe this is a client who really needs to stand up for themselves or something. We needed to empower so many options and possibilities.
Mariana:You say it's that aspect also of humility that Carly were mentioning before of like us sitting there and pretending like we are in 100% attention for the whole one hour session would actually like imply a level of almost perfection that is really unattainable in general as humans. It's a lot more human to be present and notice if there's moments where we come in and out of the session as long as we are still centering the client's experience.
Carl Hampton:So many of the challenges as a therapist are really sort of how to tap into humility because there are those people who have a certain qualities, let's call it maybe a little bit of narcissism. I did this or I did that. It's the sort of thing where the end of therapy is like, Good job. You did great work. I was just here to be a tour guide, and you did the work.
Carl Hampton:Because I don't want my client to think, Oh, I have to go back to Carl because he's the only one who can understand or fix me. I want him to say, I have the ability to do this myself now. That's a good therapy, right? That's like a good outcome.
Corina:Mariana, what's your relationship with mindfulness these days?
Mariana:One thing that I have been noticing more and more is that I in general am a huge music person. I am probably listening to music every second of the day when I'm not doing something else. And I've actually been a little bit more intentional lately of if I'm going on a walk or even if I do have a few moments at home of trying to not be listening to anything and just notice my surroundings. And I feel like it's felt really beautiful in many ways to like go outside and almost feel like a playfulness in my energy because I'm trying to be present with the world around me. That feels like it's been one of the primary ways that I've been practicing that present moment awareness of grounding myself in just like the simplicity of things instead of getting stuck in too much of like a overworking my brain in every moment of the day in trying to do too much and instead just slowing down a little.
Carl Hampton:That's such a Western culture inspired process. There are people who go out into the forest and sit for hours, and that's their day. Can't really understand. It's like, well, you're not producing anything. You're not creating anything.
Carl Hampton:Yeah. I'm creating energy for myself or an energy that keeps me from cutting the trees down in the forest. There's all sorts of intangible benefits that we sometimes can't see because we're culturally blinded by.
Corina:Thank you, Carl. This was wonderful. Thanks for being willing to be with us.
Carl Hampton:It was great to be with you all. When you say things over, you're like, oh, okay. Now I really kind of deepened my understanding of myself.
Mariana:It was a process of mindfulness in itself.