Be Honest With Yourself and Talk About Your Dirt

In this next episode, we hear from Ray Tebout, a strength-based human resources professional, addiction counselor, and founder of Mind Frame & Development Solutions.

Ray reflects on how people sometimes grow up normalizing what they feel, including the bad, and move through life thinking there is no alternative. Ray shares how healing was not always important to him and how changes in his nutrition allowed him to realize that some of what he was feeling was connected to other aspects of his life including his eating habits. Ray talks about losing his mother at a young age and growing up with a father who struggled with drug addiction. He dives deep into what it was like to become the “unofficial head of household” and carrying the responsibility of being an adult and caregiver to his siblings while still being a child himself. Ray discusses how all of these experiences led to him becoming good at disassociating from his feelings, and being very calm in crisis situations, but how this inevitably led him to make some very poor choices in his life as well.

Ray reflects deeply on his personal relationships and discusses how he dated the same kind of people, and repeated similar unhelpful dynamics in his professional life. He also talks about coming to the realization that his friends were not equipped with the tools to help him, which inevitably led to him finding a therapist for himself. Ray shares how he approached therapy with very clear goals and was intentional about finding a therapist that he could truly connect with in order to get the support he needed to get to a better place. Ray recommends reading the Grief Recovery Handbook. He also suggests that listeners find someone objective to talk about their deepest thoughts (or dirt), whether it’s a therapist, a spiritual advisor, or yourself; because we need to have those honest conversations and hold up the mirror to ourselves.

Be sure to connect and support Ray via: 

Gmail: rtebout@gmail.com  

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ray-tebout/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ray.tebout