Daniel Gospodarek – Denver’s Revitalize Mental Health Practice for TBI, PTSD & Couples Dealing with Mental Illness

Transcript

Welcome to the podcast, Daniel.

It's so nice to have you here.

We're talking a little bit about you living in Colorado and came through this area.

And so tell us a little bit about what you're doing and how you're doing it.

For sure.

So I started my company based in Denver, Co primarily to serve people who have experienced traumatic brain injury.

These past trauma, sexual abuse, military abuse, or it could be sexual abuse in the military, combat, combat trauma, thought disorders, to include schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and then mood disorders, too.

So I lump anxiety in there, but also bipolar major depression.

And those are my four kind of target areas that I've really wanted to try to serve in the Denver and the Colorado community, thanks to the telehealth boom that that took place a few years ago so effectively.

Wanting to make a positive impact in the Community and change people's lives so that they can really live the life that they desire and maybe unshackle or learn to live with symptoms of mental illness and still achieve their values and hit the life that they want to. They want to get to.

That's a very noble undertaking.

Do you have a an actual office?

Do you work at your?

House. How does that?

Yeah, so great question. So I actually only rent space on the weekends, a little office off of I-25 and Evans in Denver.

And you know, there are.

There are people who want services in person and I'm more than happy to provide those.

And then there are people that I see scattered across the across the state.

Telehealth works just fine, so we've had really good success or I've seen really good success with cognitive processing therapy to target trauma, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy over telehealth.

And I've seen it in person too.

So it kind of is whatever works and I have.

Some people locally too are just too busy, and telehealth works.

It's so much more convenient to just show up at the screen than have to get in your car or travel across town, and you never know about traffic and.

Exactly. Exactly. And you know, offer sessions in the evenings throughout the week. So five 6-7 and eight.

So people can get their children to sleep or give them to a family member or whomever they are, right and kind of a comedy, those schedules.

It's for people. People work hard here, right? Denver's expensive people are working two or three jobs or, you know, trying to find creative living situations with roommates and stuff like that. So being flexible is huge.

Yeah, that is.

Really important.

So who would you say your ideal client is?

Know you.

Said you listed all the things.

That you treated but.

Who? Who would?

Be somebody that.

Would say yeah hey, I need you.

So I think anyone who is at a point in their life where you know their mental health symptoms have gotten to a point or maybe their traumatic brain injury has gotten them to a point where they're like, I need to make some hard changes in my life and have somebody to hold me accountable and challenge me, but also.

Support me with compassion and just genuineness and also look at me as a human that you know they may fail.

Clients struggle all the time, but so do we as therapists, right?

Like it's not immune to the human race.

Yeah, everybody does.

Like we all have our struggles, right?

We all have challenges with avoidance or escape or control or whatever it might be that shows up in the office.

So those folks that are wanting to make that change wanting to make that.

Either 180 or that hard pivot and also committed to the process, right because therapy, depending on what you've experienced in your life and obviously we don't know that until we start unpacking stuff.

It can take six months, nine months.

It can also take a few years, depending on if there's been long childhood trauma.

Right.

We're looking at complex post traumatic stress disorder or things of that nature.

I know first hand how impactful it can be and how long that it can take.

I have a really good friend who went through.

Complex post traumatic stress syndrome from raising a child, a foster care, or an adopted kid, she got out of foster care and.

Had so many issues and over a period it took almost four years that she went from hardly being able to function.

I mean, literally you'd.

It's it.

It was amazing to me how.

Much she struggled with just the basics of life.

To she's gone on to becoming.

She's trying getting her life or life coaching certification now.

She's just like she's.

Figured it out, and she's gotten control of her life, and she's just.

Like embracing life.

And I mean just the difference.

That having a a good.

Coach, counselor, therapist can make is is amazing.

It is.

It can be quite impactful in finding that goodness of fit is very important too, because not all therapists match with every person.

Not every person is going to match with the single therapist, and like a a therapist will be able to pick up on that over a number of sessions and can have that hard conversation of, you know, I I I get that you're struggling.

And I may not be that person or that facilitator for that growth, but here are some, you know, vetted referrals in the community that you can access, right?

And I think also when you're in this therapy process and the recovery process, right?

You it's not just all about talking.

It's also about feeling.

It's also about learning how your body feels, right?

And our culture doesn't do a good job of teaching those skills, right?

It's very.

Just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you know.

And then you put your head down on the pillow and you do it all again the next day, right?

And slowing that down and integrating.

Different pieces of.

There's different pieces of material inside of the therapy session that can really facilitate those light bulbs or change those neural networks.

There are some amazing Ted talks out there about people who have schizophrenia, that are directors of, you know, doctoral programs at high class universities, right, or holding down multiple jobs and raising kids.

And so it's not like this.

Mental illness or traumatic brain injury has to be your defining label.

And it doesn't have to cripple you.

You can you can learn.

The tools to actually thrive.

In in those situations, whereas you know years ago they just used to lock people.

Up and like.

You're done, but.

We've come so far.

You would have talked a.

Little bit about cognitive.

Behavioral therapy and also the MDR, because those are kind of newer modalities not.

Everybody knows what they are.

So cognitive behavioral therapy was created actually in the 80s.

It it took a while, it took a little bit to gain a lot of mainstream awareness and essentially cognitive behavioral, right?

It looks like it looks at cognition.

It looks at behaviors.

How do they interact?

Or it inter Paul?

I'm struggling with the words interact with each other, right?

Our thoughts can our thoughts can increase or?

Increase or decrease certain behaviors.

Our behavior can also impact our thoughts, right?

And we're looking at the relationship there.

And depending on where you've come from, how you've grown up, right, the environment in which you.

Raised and we developed these beliefs about ourselves, some of them, some of them can be very positive that I'm I'm competent or I'm loved and supported and some of them are.

I am not loved, I'm incompetent or the world is this dangerous place, right?

And those then impact how we perceive.

Everything in our environment, right, and it takes a long time to shift those beliefs right?

Especially if they started, most of them started in early childhood or adolescence.

So it can take years, right? Because sometimes people show up and like, OK, let's do six months of therapy and it's like, well, you lived with this for 25 years.

Right, yeah.

It's not going to do.

A lot, right?

That's a we're already fighting a tip.

Teeter totter, right.

So that's a big one.

And then cognitive processing therapy is a derivative of CBT, but it's actually only for people who meet the post traumatic stress disorder threshold on the PCL 5 scales, which are just ways to rate trauma symptoms and then eye movement desensitization.

Reprocessing, or E MDR, is.

It's a beautiful intervention to look at, not only complex post traumatic stress disorder, but also PTSD alone and also just smaller traumas.

Like if maybe you were, you know, giving a presentation at work and you tripped going up the stairs, and there's a lot of embarrassment and maybe shame or guilt involved, right?

MDR can also target those smaller traumas, which is nice where CPT is only for the PTSD threshold, and it's a way of just kind of allowing and.

Restarting kind of jumpstarting your body's innate ability to heal.

From the inside out, am I looking at like what is?

What are some of that dysfunctional material that's maybe pent up in our nervous system that we just need to release right and.

When we experience that shame or gilded off and acts like blocks in our nervous system and how we communicate and internally, and that EMDR just kind of hollows that out or allows it to be integrated into our system so that we don't feel that stress, we don't feel that burden anymore. That doesn't erase the memories, right. It can maybe how we relate to some of the memories.

Right, right.

But at the same time, it doesn't you.

You lose kind of that like toxic charge.

Associated with those events.

So it's very powerful.

There's a lot of evidence on all three of those modalities, so.

There's a surprisingly large body of evidence and science that is going into a lot of these new modalities that are coming out, and even things like just meditating, the impact that it can have on your, on your whole Physiology from.

You know, changing the.

The brain patterns that you're of your thoughts that generate when you have a thought, it generates a chemical response and that does something to the rest of your body and most people don't even think about thinking, but everything starts in your head.

And I think what you're seeing is a lot of therapies like over the decades are starting to shift and not just look at mental illness.

As only like through a western or a you know US perspective, but we're starting to really, really incorporate Western medicine right into that mindfulness meditation, right, breath, work, parts, work, whatever it might be.

And you're also seeing a.

Many different interventions and therapy modalities.

Some of that like.

One of the other seat cognitive behavioral therapy derivatives is acceptance and commitment therapy, and that is one that I actually aligned with much more than CBT.

Just because you're not dealing just with a lot of thoughts, you're also integrating that mindfulness through present moment.

Focus, right?

It can be very gentle when you start.

Figuring out where do you feel shame in your body and people are like, what are you talking about, right?

Because our society doesn't teach that awareness.

We don't even teach our kids how.

To identify their emotions.

We just have them be quiet.

And sit down.

Or we told them that you're not.

You're not.

You're not hurt or you're not like you don't have to be sad, right.

Which is also smaller form of gaslighting.

Yeah, yeah, you should be sad.

This is a sad situation, and that's the emotion you're feeling.

Go ahead and have your feels.

Right.

If you need a hug.

Down here.

Yeah, my daughter.

I have five kids, but my youngest daughter, she's always about her feels.

She would cry sometimes.

Just because and she would say I'm just crying because mom and I would say, well, just let me hold sarabelle and we'd sit there and she'd cry and she wasn't sad.

She really was not sad.

She just needed that emotional release and she recognized it.

She's one of the most emotionally intelligent.

Human beings, I've.

right, recognizing she's my daughter, but she's just an amazing human being.

Yeah, that's.

And that's beautiful, right?

Cause our society also shuns emotions, right?

Just suck it up.

Keep going.

Right.

And not saying that we shouldn't be able to persevere and have persistence, right, because those come into play in relationships, those come into play at work, right?

Those complain to our own recovery and.

Also, by saying just, you know, keep going and suck it up without noting that you know, hey, what I'm feeling is actually valid, right?

That's OK.

And sometimes you just need to release emotions and it comes out as tears.

MMM for sure.

That's how we were.

Created or anger, right?

Right.

OK.

To be angry.

It's what.

It's what you do with that anger, right?

It's how you.

And you know, one of the there's a really cool documentary out there.

It's called the mask you live in.

And it talks about how you know from a young age, young men, especially young boys, are channeled to, you know, play sports and follow directions and also a lot of them end up moving into, like, football.

Or hockey, right.

And those are sports that pride anger, right, that that pride, rage.

And then they graduate from high school and they're like, well, what do I do with these emotions now cause.

I don't have anyone to hit on the football field.

Right.

So and they're not developing those other skills to be like, OK, I can also go for a walk.

I can also go for a swim, right?

Or a Jacuzzi or a hot tub, whatever it might be that works for that individual.

And then they end up in.

Handcuffs, right.

Because they drink and then they hit somebody or whatever it might be.

So it's fascinating when you start looking at the systemic issues within our society as well that contribute to some of these personal challenges then.

And it's not, it's not just men.

Women have these problems too.

It's and the more.

Women step out and try to be everything to everybody, because that's what's expected of us.

And you, you.

Lose the ability to be able to say no.

I have to have boundaries.

This is this is my space and my time.

And we'll have to make other arrangements.

Right and.

And teaching kids boundaries and respecting your kids boundaries.

And teaching them to respect ours, right?

Well, yeah.

You would, you would expect that they would.

Respect yours as.

You're their parent, but having boundaries as a.

Parent and there are a.

Lot of people that don't.

They don't understand and I as a parent need to have boundaries with my children and I need to allow my children to have boundaries with me.

So that I'm not injuring them too.

One of the areas where our society really runs kind of boundaries out the door is in the works.

Right exit paths that are outside of your job description right and just more and more, more, more, more and.

It's like, how do you how do you learn to say no without like getting fired?

Right.

And at what point do you go from being an employee?

To just being a slave.

There are a lot of situations where the line is very thin.

There is and we a lot of people, you know, that's awareness too around like being cogs in the wheel and I'm not telling people to go, you know, quit their day jobs.

Right, like we need to have income to support those we love and ourselves.

But to have that awareness of like is this is this also like what's what my life is about, right?

Or is there more right and being able to say OK how do?

I build that right and that that kind of gets more into the coaching aspect of things.

But having that awareness is a huge part to develop because sometimes people only see I need to work for 40 years.

Yeah, and that's so depressing.

It can be very demotivating.

And people can get trapped in, in careers and jobs because they've spent a lot of money on an education.

That and they hate it.

And they don't think that there.

Are any other options which is kind of sad.

When you think about it, my.

My youngest daughter again.

She's she was working.

My all my.

Kids graduate when they're 16 from high school.

Just to start with, cause I want them to.

Have a couple of years head start.

Figure out.

What they want to do and.

Go for it.

So she went to work in the local ice cream factory.

And that's the slavery job.

They work you a million hours and pay you hardly anything and.

They just have all these rules and stuff.

So she did that for a full.

Year and she saved up a whole bunch of money.

And then she decided.

Mom, I'm going to take the.

Summer off because you know I'm 18.

Yeah. Go for.

It so she takes the summer off and then she decides she's going to.

Become a Baker.

So she works part time.

As a Baker and at something.

Loves doing it, it fills her creative cup.

It's a.

Little bit of interaction.

With people, but not a lot.

But it meets your needs, it's not full time.

And she's good with it.

She has all of these other interests in her life that she can explore and do.

So she's not trapped, and it makes me happy for her that she came to that conclusion on her own.

Yeah. And what?

Right at such a young age too, right?

Because time is time is the thing that we don't get more of.

Yeah, yeah.

Like how do.

You free up time.

How do you make time?

How do you make your time more valuable to your family?

Your love of the maybe distant family, your even your even your workplace, right?

How do you make that time when you're there more?

And then what do you do to try to create more?

You can't create more time, but you can create more space, right?

And that that's a lot where accountability comes in, in execution and prioritization, right.

And sometimes mental health symptoms, or TBI, is, you know, fall out.

That can impact those thought processes, right?

And we just kind of get stuck in this gloom of, you know, are things gonna get better?

I don't know.

Right.

So that's what.

That's where therapy can come in.

Therapy is one of those.

Kind of newer things to come on the scenes in a way that more people can access it than have ever been able to before.

I think, at least in my experience.

So what is?

The one thing you would really hope that people would take away from this conversation today again.

You are more than your mental health challenges or the fallout from a traumatic brain injury, and those can also look like mental health symptoms too.

So could they be lumped together?

Sure, but sometimes the traumatic brain injury itself can present as a mental illness, right?

But because of those areas of the brain that were injured.

I call them different things so.

But that's what I would I would want people to know is that you were more.

Than those things.

And just perfect.

Do what you need to do to step into that value.

Do you do you help people?

Everywhere are you only licensed in?

In the state of Colorado.

I'm only licensed in the state of Colorado, so you'd have to be have a permanent residence in Colorado.

But I'm happy to you.

Once you're one, as you're a therapist and growing right, you develop connections throughout the country.

So if somebody you know was like, hey, you know, I'm over in New Jersey or wherever, you know, I can, I'll do my best to try to set you up with a couple of, you know, connections.

I can't say that they'll turn out as anything but.

I'll do my best to support anyone that's looking to make those changes.

Perfect.

So you want to share your website with people if they're in the Colorado area?

Yeah. So my.

Yeah, for sure. So my website is revitalizedmentalhealth.com my our Instagram or Facebook is on there.

So you can follow along for updates and then putting up new blogs for people to read and try to just learn some, learn some techniques to manage stress or you know lower level symptoms and things like that.

But you can submit a form on their phone numbers there.

Give me a call so.

Thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you so much.