Who You Callin' Crazy?!: The Journey from Stigma to Therapy

By Juliet Lam Kuehnle

"Hi, my name is Juliet and I'm a therapist who goes to therapy."

This is THE book that finally peels back the curtain, mystery, and stigma around supporting your mental health journey!

From this first line on, Who You Callin' Crazy?! is honest, real, and relatable. Juliet, founder and owner of Sun Couns

• Language: English
• Publisher: Synergy Publishing Group
• Release date: May 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781960892034

Juliet Lam Kuehnle

Juliet Kuehnle is a therapist who goes to therapy! She is a National Board Certified Counselor and mental health therapist who founded and owns Sun Counseling & Wellness, a private practice with two locations in Charlotte, North Carolina, that also provides telehealth throughout North Carolina. She is also a mental health/wellness consultant, speaker, and a writer with two magazine bylines. Juliet hosts a podcast called, "Who You Callin' Crazy," that features practical therapy tips and conversations with interesting people you (want to) know. She has been featured on WBTV, WCNC, and in publications including Shondaland, PsychCentral, Parade, and Medium/Elemental. You can follow Juliet on social media @YepIGoToTherapy for relatable, helpful, and often humorous insight. You can also access free resources and shop her therapy swag at yepigototherapy.com.

Book preview

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Who You Callin’ Crazy?!: The Journey from Stigma to Therapy

Copyright © 2023, Juliet Kuehnle. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by United States copyright law.

Published by Synergy Publishing Group, Belmont, NC

Cover by Arielle Torkelson

May 1, 2023, Softcover: ISBN 978-1-960892-01-0

May 9, 2023, E-book: ISBN 978-1-960892-03-4

This book is dedicated to my fellow clients who do the incredibly vulnerable, sometimes exhausting, and always very personal work of going to therapy.

And also to my fellow therapists who do the incredibly vulnerable, sometimes exhausting, and always very personal work of holding space for others in therapy.

Introduction

Hi, my name is Juliet, and I’m a therapist who goes to therapy.

I’m also on a mission to lessen the stigma around therapy by talking about it openly in my community. At the time this book is being written, we’re in year three of a global pandemic. For over two years, I have had the honor of being interviewed for local TV and magazine interviews, and those interviews were primarily about the impacts of the pandemic on mental health. I’ve walked with so many clients in their journeys through it all while also living my own experience of parenting, working, and coping in these unprecedented times. WTAF! None of us knew what to expect as there certainly wasn’t a handbook, particularly beyond the naïveté we initially held:

Okay, we can do anything for two weeks!

Oh okay, maybe a couple more.

Oh… well, shit!

And my personal response was coming from my privileged, resourced position. I had options and the ability to pivot as needed while so many others did not. As is true in all socioeconomic systems of the world, those most marginalized and victimized by our systems suffered the most, though for the first time, we all had some taste of similar discomfort and suffering. This is the first time in our lifetimes that we have all faced a collective trauma, and we are really just experiencing the unfolding fallout and impact on our mental health. For many of us, the trauma caused by quarantining, navigating the unknown and the constantly shifting recommendations, feeling the worry, and losing connections—and even people—was a catalyst for a breakdown in mental health. We were not able to access our usual coping mechanisms, and what was happening was so beyond our typical frameworks or what we’re built to handle. Yes, we’re wired to tap into survival, to be resilient, and to use our inherent strengths. But living amidst a collective trauma, with other traumas layered on, was a whole different ask. Our bodies, our brains, our moods, and our relationships have really been feeling the impact. We’ve been pivoting and relinquishing control for so long, and our reserves are lower than ever before.

I want to use this shared experience as momentum to truly shift the stigma around mental health and to encourage us to be more genuinely connected to each other and to our deepest selves. We’re in this together. Perhaps in this new normal, we can acknowledge that the mental health crisis in this country is real. Society does not create a lot of room for our baggage even though we desire to be seen and known. As the needle shifts on this stigma, we need to learn how to embrace the fact that mental health is an integral part of what makes us who we are. This moment and movement is pivotal as we accept and share our own flavors of… crazy.

This book is divided into three sections:

•Part 1: Who You Callin’ Crazy?! I use the chapters in this part of the book to unpack the myths and misconceptions about mental health, understanding its stigma, and claiming (or reclaiming) what mental health means to you.

•Part 2: Maybe I Should Go To Therapy. People who are exploring how therapy might support them have many questions. The chapters in Part 2 work to answer the common questions about therapy and the process of seeking support. This part covers the following: what therapy actually is, how to know it’s time to go to therapy, how to find a therapist, how to know a therapist is a good fit, how to break up with a therapist, and much more.

•Part 3: Yep, I Go To Therapy. These final chapters take a deeper dive into practical tips and takeaways for improving self-awareness, a little taste of therapy, if you will, that you can take back to your own therapist and support your mental health journey.

The book is organized with the intention that you can start reading wherever you feel you are in your journey or wherever your curiosity takes you. Also, at the end of each chapter is a Too Long/Didn’t Read (TL;DR) summary of the key highlights of that chapter’s content. I want you to feel more belonging and connection to yourself and in the world through relating to certain parts of the stories, questions, and concepts you’ll read about, and I want you to be able to go back and quickly review what was covered. My hope is that you will feel less shame or judgment around your individual story as you read. If you leave with some practical tips that may help you soothe, heal, or grow, that’s a bonus. I must acknowledge that choosing and being able to go to therapy is a privilege that we don’t all have. There are also many things that can support mental well-being other than talk therapy. For the purpose of this book, I’m going to proceed as though you are someone who is curious about mental health and considering therapy.

Any names used to share stories throughout the book have been changed to protect their identities. You’ll also notice that I use we a lot in this book, and that’s purposeful because I remind you again that while I bring my education, training, and years of professional practice to this conversation, I bring my humanness first and foremost. We’re on this journey together. Let’s freaking go!

Part 1:

Who You

Callin’

Crazy?!

Chapter 1

Where Does Crazy Come From?

My friend Stephanie has been going to therapy for over a decade, takes medication for anxiety and depression, teaches yoga, practices consistent self-care, maintains healthy relationships, successfully mothers two nearly grown children, has been happily married to her partner for decades, has a fulfilling career, and sets appropriate boundaries. It may seem that she has done all the things because she puts in the work to care for herself. She’s done this work because she is determined to put a hard stop to her family history of instability. Her mom, her grandma, and her great-grandma all have histories of unstable relationships, abusive behavior, addiction, and other self-destructive tendencies. Stephanie has drawn her line in the sand and is holding her own.

Yet, at Stephanie’s daughter’s high school graduation party in a crowd of Stephanie’s friends, her mom randomly (and loudly) said, "I worry about Stephanie, she’s just crazy. What do you mean? one particularly brave friend asked in Stephanie’s defense, while trying to keep an even voice and locking eyes with Stephanie’s mom. Her mom said, conspiratorially, I mean, she is just so out there with all that yoga and organic food, and you know she’s on medication!" Stephanie’s friends, having realized this was intended to be a shit-talking session, mumbled something noncommittal and wandered off. Stephanie wandered away with them, deeply hurt.

Why would Stephanie’s mom say something intended to hurt her? Possibly Stephanie’s mom was posturing, to seem less crazy than her daughter, to distract folks from her own crazy due to a lack of insight, or perhaps she tells herself her daughter is crazy in order to not address her own mental health issues. Regardless, the weight and insinuation of the word crazy is apparent.

Let’s dive into the idea of crazy. While crazy can more colloquially be used to express wild behavior, unhinged passion, and intense enthusiasm, according to the Oxford Dictionary, the word crazy has historically meant: mentally deranged and an inability to think in a clear or sensible way. By this definition, any disparaging synonyms for crazy we use are indicators of someone being less than and not quite right. It begs the question: not quite right compared to what? I want us to consider, as we work to change the conversation around mental health, that we all have some amount of crazy. I think what we really mean when we so casually say crazy is human. Much of the stigma around mental health is rooted in pathologizing language: kooky, crazy, nutty, batty, cuckoo for cocoa puffs, loony, insane, and the list goes on. All of it references mental health and mental illness in a derogatory, silly, dismissive, and judgmental way. I spent a lot of years feeling crazy, and most of my clients come to me to help them with their crazy. The truth, though, is that we haven’t really been given better language or permission to present in all of our humanness and to understand the layers of our mental health and that of others. I’m not trying to cancel any of these words, necessarily. I get why we use them, and most of us certainly know what’s being implied when we hear them. I simply want to call our attention to how the use of words and messaging like these play into our behaviors that perpetuate stigmas around mental health.

There tends to be a lot of fear at play when it comes to how we conceptualize mental health. We fear people who are different from us. We fear the unknown and the potential of what could be: What if I ‘go crazy,’ like it’s something you can catch if you’re not careful. We don’t want to be crazy, and we don’t want to be associated with it because when things are misunderstood, bias shows up. When we don’t understand something or we judge or fear it, we tend to label it as negative. For evolutionary reasons, we are wired to pay more attention to the