Welcome back to another episode of Faithfully Engaged today and I'm going to do my best
here, Jake. I have Jake Wiskersen. Did I get it?
Nailed it.
Yes, all right. I got it. So, got him on here for our guest today. I'm going to let Jake
kind of introduce himself and we'll jump into things. So, Jake, tell the audience a little
bit about yourself.
Thanks, Johnny. So, I'm a clinician and I'm a marriage and family therapist by trade
licensed in Nevada and here in northern Nevada. So, in Nevada, we're not just Las Vegas. So,
for those of you who are not geographically familiar with our state, we do have other
parts that are not Las Vegas. I'm in the Reno Sparks area, which is up north a little bit
right next to Tahoe. So, I own an operated, an outpatient counseling agency called Zephyr
Wellness. We do talk therapy and we're pretty well engaged in the community. And I wear
a bunch of other hats and sit on a bunch of different boards and stuff. But usually people
aren't really interested in a verbal resume. So, I'm just going to stop there and not bore
everyone.
Well, speaking of not boring everyone, that those of you that watched kind of my previous
content under Truth and Grace Counseling podcast know that I like to take things. We like to
talk about serious things, but like to take somewhat of a humorous bent. I think sometimes
we can just be a little, a little too serious at times. So, I've kind of conversed with
Jake on Twitter before and I know that he's the expert of dad jokes. So, I was wondering
if you had a good dad joke that you could, you could share with the audience here.
Oh, man, expert of dad jokes. I don't think I've ever carried that mantle before. So,
I'm going to tell one that's not, it's not cut for Twitter because it's long. So, but
it is, it is my favorite and it is my children's favorite. All right. So, these three strings
are sitting in a bar and over the bars, the sign says no strings allowed. And these three
strings are, you know, wanting some drinks. And so, the one string says to the other two,
he says, I'm going to go, go get us some drinks. He go acts up to the bartender and says, Hey,
we're keeping like a pitcher and three glasses, please take that pale ale over there and he
flips him a $10 bill. He says, that's for you. I'll pay as I go. The bartender looks
at me and goes, man, love to, but you see our sign. No strings allowed. Sorry, slides
him the 10 bucks back. Says, wish I could help, but you probably shouldn't even be in
here. So, the string goes back. He's all dejected. He sits down with his two friends
and says, Hey, you wouldn't go for it. Second string says, well, you just didn't do it the
right way. So he goes up there and flips him a 20 and says, Hey, Barkeep, keep that for
yourself. I'd like a pitcher and three glasses, please. And man, what a great place you have
here. It's a, I'd love to come back here with more of my string friends. And I'll bet if
you treat as well, I can, I can recruit some more business. Bartender looks at me, strokes
his chin and he says, man, you know, I'd love to, but, but this is our policy and you see
it. It's big. It's hanging right above your head. And I can't push them the 20 bucks back
and string goes and sits back down. He's all, he's all bummed. He says, man, I totally
thought that would work. I offered him more business, gave him a big tip. Third string
says, I got this. He goes in the bathroom. He ties himself up. He tussles his hair, walks
back up, doesn't hand the bartender any money. He says, Barkeep, you pitch him through glasses,
please bartender looks at me and he goes, aren't you one of those strings? He goes,
no, I'm afraid not. Oh man, you're, you're correct. I don't think that could fly on,
on Twitter. That's just too long. But man, that, that is like a, that's almost like a,
like a Norm MacDonald type of thing where he would have those real long things and it
would just be something so stupid, but he just has that ability to string you string
you in. There we go. That string you along.
That's my sound effects were working. I'd play the rim shot. But yeah, I'll take that
compliment norms, norms, norms, a legend. Yes. I'll accept that. I've been telling that
joke since 1999. And it is now 2023.
Hey, hey, it's stood the test of time then I guess at least for, for kiddos. And they're
the ones that matter.
Clean jokes. Yes. Yes. Hey, well, I know that I've ran across you. I don't think I've told
you this in a couple of different ways. One was initially just through, I had watched
some of Stephanie wins podcast, some kind of therapist saw you on there. And through
that, ended up through looking at walk the talk America of mentioned off camera. I'm
in, I'm in Oklahoma. So, you know, guns are pretty big deal around this part of the country.
And that was just such a, it was very refreshing and something I hadn't really seen in the mental
health world, looking at some of those training. So just kind of talk a little bit about what
the talk America is and why, why that's an important organization.
Yeah, it is. And it's a, it's a really cool story. I will tell it. But first, I want to
give a hat tip to Stephanie when if you're listening, I said no about her, you should.
She is absolutely dynamo. She's an incredible human being and just amazing, amazing work
that she's doing up in Oregon. Her podcast called you must be some kind of therapist.
And at first I thought it was like, it was like, you must be some kind of therapist.
But it's actually like listening to her intro, you realize it's like, you must be some kind
of therapist. She's like, yes, I am a therapist, right? And I think, I think both of those
work. It's kind of cool. And she's, she's incredibly intelligent, very well read, super
well spoken, fierce advocate for not only our profession and doing things right and
ethically, but also for challenging some of this woke postmodern erosion of values that
we're seeing now. And so I can't speak highly enough of Stephanie's work. So glad you mentioned
her. I'm really glad that you found me through her because that just makes me feel better.
But also about walk the talk. So walk talk America, I'll say WTTA for short, because
it, you know, walk the talk America's a mouthful. It was founded in 2018 by President and founder
Mike Soudini, who is a third generation firearms industry professional. He came into the field
because his family ran an importing agency or business called Eagle Imports, so they
would take guns from all over the world and bring them into America and sell them, brand
them, market them, put them on store shelves, whatnot. So he had a hand in that. And for
years I'd worked with, well, I don't even work with just talked with one of my best
friends from college, his name is Jordan Slotnik, and he manages Reno guns and range, which
is a premier range and retail store here in Reno, about how we connect these two cultures
of firearms ownership and mental health care. Because it's necessary because gun owners
are skittish and suspicious of what we do as clinicians because they think their rights
are going to get taken by acknowledging that they need some help. So one day Jordan texts
me says, have you heard of Walk the Talk America? No. So I look up the organization and realize
that they're trying to bridge the gap between firms ownership and mental health care. So
at that time, and I still do have a podcast called Noggin notes. And I that's a cool story
too I can get into later, but I basically invite guests on from all different walks
of life and we talked about mental health stuff. And so I reached out and said, Hey,
would somebody from the organization like to come on the show and Mike wrote back immediately.
Unbeknownst to me, he'd been searching for clinicians to help the organization and they
weren't in great supply. So my email was a was a godsend. And so we chatted for a little
bit got on the show, ran for about an hour and a half, ended the show, stayed on the
phone, talked for another hour and a half or so became instant best friends and realized
we had a lot of work to do and I had a role to play. What I'd forgotten until several
months ago was that at that time when I had him on the show, I said, we can talk about
your organization, but I want to talk about how I'm a concealed carrier. And he was like,
all right, cool, whatever. And I realized my self censorship was was the problem. And
since then, I've come out of the closet, as I like to say, as a gun running practitioner,
because I couldn't straddle that I couldn't I couldn't tip toe into it. If I was going
to be of a help, I had to be honest and authentic with my role in both of these fields. So what
we ended up doing was, we created a curriculum, which you have now taken for a course on firearms
cultural competence for practitioners. And it's not just mental health people, it's,
anybody wants to take it. But what we've done is we've gotten it validated for continuing
ed credit in the state of Nevada, and also with the National Board of Certified Counselors.
And you can take these the series of three courses, there are two that are available
online on our website, and get a certificate at the end for learning about firearms, and
it's really, really great. So in conjunction with a couple of the other board members,
we've put together this series of courses, the flip side of that coin now is we're also
reaching out to the gun community to demystify what counseling is, so that we remove any
sort of suspicion or apprehension about getting into care. And at our root, we're a suicide
prevention organization. And the story is that Mike lost the president of his company
back in 2008, 2009 to firearm suicide with one of their own guns. And it's bothered him
ever since he tells a story better than I do, but I've heard so many times I'm comfortable
telling it. But it was like, they went to the funeral, and everybody just kind of moved
along, nobody addressed this thing. And if you look at the statistics, the gun deaths
overall pie chart, you look at that, and it's about 60%. So it depends on the year, but
somewhere between 58 and 64% of firearm deaths are suicides. And another third are homicides.
And then the remaining balance are negligent, unintentional law enforcement or, you know,
whatever. So it's the vast overwhelming majority of firearm deaths. So if you talk about, you
know, gun violence, which is not a phrase I like, because it attributes the act of violence
to an inanimate object, I don't like that kind of word comparison or compilation, I
just say violence. But if you're if you're going to say gun violence, you must stop gun
deaths, especially the preventable ones, then we need to focus on suicides and not mass
shootings mass shootings get the clicks and the attention for media because they trigger
the limbic system and make us pay attention and get scarce and all that. But the truth
is that they're, they're about a 3 tenths of a percent of all firearm deaths are mass
shootings. I mean, I include school shooting. Now, Pew Research just came with some new studies
because my information only went up to 2020. Well, since 2020, they've now captured 2020,
2021. And it looks like it's a little higher than a third of a percent. It's more like
one and a third percent, but still statistically insignificant. If we're going to focus on mass
shootings as opposed to suicides and suicides have increased since then also. So that's
what we do. We're trying to bridge this gap. And ways that we do this are by inviting people
to take free and anonymous mental health screenings through the website. I'm wearing a wristband
right now. It says WTTA.org slash love. So it's WTTA.org is the website slash love.
Takes us straight to the free and anonymous mental health screening link. There's 14 of
them or something, a couple of them are in Spanish. And those are powered by mental health
America, which is one of our partners. Mental health America does the ranking the state's
report every year that shows that Nevada, where I live is dead last every year in mental
health care and provision and access. So both of us live in Nevada, Mike lives in Vegas.
I live in Reno and it's imperative to us to get the clinical community hip to this so
that when ailing firearms owners come in for care, we don't off put them with clunky judgmental
language or just plain ignorance about how to navigate unsecured firearms in the home
and how to keep oneself safe when they're in crisis or when their kids are dealing with
something or what have you. So that's what we're trying to do. We also have a podcast
called guns and mental health and it's available wherever podcasts are found. I've got a little
sticker here. It's nice and shiny holographic. I love holographic stickers. Take one of these
I can mail you some of you on. And then we also have flyers that go into packaging that
invite people to take the free and anonymous mental health screening. So we partner with
gun companies and accessories manufacturers to put our literature in their boxes as well
as ranges and retail stores to have it sit passively on the counter. I'm looking around
here and I don't have a flyer I usually do. But on one side says, you know, as gun owners,
we often find it difficult to, you know, ask for help when we need it. Oh, there they are.
There's the second. And just as you know, mental health, it's okay to talk about it.
And then on the flip side, there's some white space for a local practice or agency to stamp
their logo. So it sits passively on the counter while you're making a purchase or whatever
you pick up and you're like, Oh, that's interesting mental health. We're talking to me on the
counter next to the register and his gun store. And then they flip it over. It's like, Oh,
there's a practitioner that's advertising this person or this place must be gun friendly.
And it's a nice, non threatening way to say these two things can coexist at the same time.
They're not mutually exclusive. So those are some of the ways that we're inviting people
to take care of themselves while also promoting education and training to, you know, demystify
a lot of what goes on around it. So there's my commercial was a little longer than that.
I don't know what their speech but
So for Walk the Talk America, I think that is again, such a an important organization.
And not only important is like I said, it's very unique. I'm a gun owner. I live in rural
Oklahoma. I'm a mental health counselor. And I hadn't put two and two together. Like I knew
that it was an issue, but it was again, it was just so refreshing because it's when you're
given those statistics like that, when we use gun violence and that annoys me too, are
we really getting at the issue? And I think unfortunately, the answer is not. So this
organization is fantastic to play. I don't know if we want to call it devil's advocate
or whatever. But let's say I'm a more left leaning clinician or just left leaning person
that says, Well, look, we see all these shootings in the news, all these bad things, wouldn't
it be better if we just got rid of guns and in general just had gun control because we're
looking out for the kids looking out for the better community. What's your response to
that? How do you response to that type of argumentation?
So I'll throw another statistic and then I'll answer the question. Approximately half of
Americans either live with a gun or own one themselves. So that's roughly half of our
clientele that could walk through the door. And we can't afford to be willfully ignorant
of the mechanisms and the dynamics that go into that. So depending on geography, that
will go up or down if you're living in San Francisco, it's probably a little lower, maybe
it's one in five, something like that. But if you're in rural Oklahoma or rural Nevada,
it's more like eight and 10, right? So so we can't afford to not know how to have a competent
conversation. Now to the anti gun people will just call them or the ones who are ignorant
and don't know the dynamics, I would say you got give or take 300 million guns in America,
you can't you can't get rid of them. And I say this in the training like this is a problem
where we have to we have to meet the problem where it is not where we think it could be
someday or where it is in some other country. It's just not feasible. It's not even realistic.
Now if you could wave a magic wand and make all firearms go away and everybody would be
whatever your definition of safe is, okay, maybe, you know, that's fine. Go repeal the
Second Amendment. There's a there's a process for doing that. Good luck getting 75% of state
legislatures to agree to it, I guess. But but let's say that that actually happens. We still
have a problem with people being mentally ill and wanting to take their own lives. We still
have a problem with people being unstable and wanting to take other people's lives. So
we swap out one tool for another tool. I don't I don't know that that hits the root cause
and we're we're big fans of root cause mitigation, which is why we push education over restriction.
Rights restriction is not something that appeals to me, especially when you're talking about
fundamental civil rights like the right to self defense. Projectile weapons is just one
of those ways that we defend ourselves. So I'm not interested in restricting that and
neither are places like the liberal gun club or liberal gun owners who are very active in
this space. And you can't see the back of my computer, but I've got a sticker, two stickers
from the liberal gun club one says unicorns do exist. It says the liberal gun club. It's
a picture of a unicorn with a rainbow coming out of it. And the others that traditional
rainbow that says every civil right for every single person. And what they're talking about
is the civil right of self defense. So you know, politics aside, I don't think firearms
ownership should be political. It's just not. And if we're going to split hairs on the political
spectra, I think that when you're talking about left leaning people, they're more you
and I know this vocabulary and so do the rest of the clinical community. They're more about
external locus of control. It's like reach out and control the thing rather than the
internal locus of control, which is self mastery, right? And then if you're on the right end
of things, you tend to be more toward liberty and an autonomy. And you say, well, you know,
it's up to you to control yourself. It's not up to me to control your environment for you.
And we, we have general application for that across all presentations. So to that, I would
say it's not feasible. The numbers don't work. The efforts don't work. And then you got to
deal with enforcement and collection and all sorts of things. Just it's just too heavy
of a lift where we can go the other direction. Much lower cost is to educate people on this.
And if, and if we haven't lost trust in our public health authorities over the last three
years, I think public health broadly could be very instrumental in that space in saying
things like store responsibly. That's one of the language things that we're trying to
alter within the gun community. And so saying safe, which is mercurial and subjective and
also been watered down since the pandemic hit. And it's like, what does safe mean? You ask
a random gun owner say, Hey, store safely. Like, of course I'm safe. Like I got guns
staged everywhere, loaded chambered in case ISIS kicks in my window at 3am. Like, well,
yeah, but is that responsible? So we're defining responsible storage to mean preventing unauthorized
access. And then the unauthorized access could be somebody who obviously, you know, smashes
your window and comes in and wants to steal your stuff. Or it could be the angsty teenager,
or it could be the neighbor's kids, or it could be you in that time of crisis, we need to
be able to figure out how to prevent access in the time of crisis to people who aren't
authorized in that moment to handle firearms. So again, we're shifting away from the external
locust control to the internal teaching firearms owners to be more responsible about how they
store their firearms. And let's face it, if everybody took that approach, then no irresponsible
people would be doing irresponsible things. That would be the shop owner. That would be
the owners themselves. That would be everybody who conducts a purchase. They would be making
sure that whoever handles the gun is responsible for handling it and is authorized, right? Now,
that's a little pie in the sky, I'm sure. But along the way, we have to be able to be honest
with ourselves about when we're in a time of crisis when the the darkness, you know,
overshadows the light. And we have to address that mindfully, and with with good competence,
without taking people's property. That's not that's not something that's up for debate
in our realm. So that's why when we get into red flag laws and talking about, well, you
know, it's a nice intermediary between sending somebody to jail and institutionalizing them,
just take the instrument, right? Well, okay, but do we need dot gov involved? Or can we
just rely on our friends and neighbors? And the answer would be yes, in an ideal world,
that would be great. But most of these states with red flag laws, mine included, also have
something called a background check law. So in order for me to hand you my guns, if I'm
in the time of crisis, you have to undergo a background check. And that's an obstacle
to care, it's an obstacle to doing the right thing. You know, sometimes you can read these
laws and they'll say, well, you know, in an exigent circumstances, you can receive somebody's
guns without going through the background check. But then they add language that says
something the effect of only so long as it's necessary. So well, how long is that? You
know, it's up to the judge or it's up to the person who assesses it later on down the road.
Is it 72 hours? Is it three months? Is it is it a year? I don't know how long is it taking
you to get right? So we want to we want to attack that and say, let's not let's not make
this about policies and legislation that don't do anything to move the needle. And let's
tackle root cause mitigation. How do we mitigate the root cause of what got somebody to the
point where they believe that it was a reasonable option to take one's own life or to take the
lives of other people. And now we're talking about things like family structure, time with
your children, getting off your devices, stop in taking negativity through the endless doom
scrolling of Twitter, anything that alters your psyche to the point that you fall into
depression or anxiety, right? So it's not it's not it's not feasible. It's not reasonable.
It's just not even on the table for for discussion as far as I'm concerned, not as long as we're
living in the United States of America with our Constitution written the way that it is
to protect those those rights. Yeah. And sadly, we get into these nuanced type of debates on
things that quite frankly, this is a situation that's really not that nuanced. It's it's
fairly it's fairly clear are there real world ramification? Sure. But yeah, it is what it
is. And I love the internal locus of control. That is, I think that not only is that a freedom
loving thing, but that it's it's liberating for the individual, even that's going through
a crisis. Let's throw gun stuff out of the way. I've got a a family member that just
died or or I'm going through a divorce or there's a tornado that hit, you know, something
catastrophic. If everything is external, my whole well being in life is by these outside
forces. That's a pretty helpless type of life. And if things don't go my way, the the election
doesn't go my way, I am in emergency mode. And that's not a way to live life. So on that
side of things, and this could be gun related or really just for general mental health.
What are some just basic internal locus of control things that everyday Americans can
use to just improve their their mental well being?
Know well your emotions, you can master them. And unfortunately, emotional functioning is
not in anybody's curricula. And so I've I've got a video series that's available for free
on this effort website, you can go to our YouTube channel to and watch me standing in
front of a whiteboard talking about your 10 core emotions is all based on the work and
research of Carol is heard. And what I want to do is I want to train people to know properly
how their brain works in response to environments so that you can navigate these emotional upheavals
that you experience without handing your power over to the external. So it's not he made
me mad. It's I allowed myself to feel anger, when I should have just felt the disappointment
in the failure to deliver on expectations, right? So disappointment or sadness is one
of our 10 core motions. As dudes, we are particularly disadvantaged in feeling feelings, but also
the most vulnerable ones like disappointment, sadness, you know, shame, guilt, anguish, despair.
So knowing that we can tolerate these things and life goes on is critical to navigating
when life presents these things to us. If all we do is reach for something that doesn't
accurately attend to that like anger or contempt, not only have we improperly address the emotion,
but we are left with a residue that doesn't get addressed either. So the limbic system
keeps running, whether or not we want it to, and we keep feeling feelings, knowing how
to accurately identify those as paramount if we're going to engage well with with each
other. So emotional functioning is one of those things. You have 10 emotions, we all
have 10. They've been around for the last 40,000 years that we've been walking the earth.
And if you know how to do that, you can improve your communication, you can improve your distress
tolerance, you can teach your children how to do it. Schools are getting a little better
at teaching this stuff, but in the form of like social emotional learning, but really
80 90% of social emotional learning curricula is poor at best, nefarious at worst, and the
remaining 10 to 15% or whatever is is pretty good. But the bottom line is, the adults don't
know how to do it to the kids anyway, we need to know ourselves what we're doing so we can
teach the next generation and also to regulate our own responses. So that's one practical
thing. And I know it's a kind of a non answer to a question because I'm referring you to
a video series, but that's what's required. If we're going to, if we're going to own this
internal locus of control, we have to make some efforts and we're going to get good at
whatever we practice. If we've practiced avoidance for a really long time, we're probably pretty
good at it. If we practice vulnerability, we're going to get good at that too. And then from
vulnerability comes intimacy and through intimacy is how we build human relationships. I don't
I don't want people wandering the earth with proxy relationships or feeling proxy emotions,
because that is a form of avoidance. And avoidance in my view is what's splintering a lot of society.
It's the it's the blame shifting onto the other. It's the externalizing. It's the, you
know, Congress is doing the wrong thing as opposed to I'm responsible for capturing my
own sanity and and happiness in life, right? So the more we push it off onto others, the
more power we're handing over to those people, things, entities, agencies, businesses that
they a, don't deserve, b probably don't know that they have and c, deprive us of the ability
to navigate our own life. And there's always going to be something that's going to pop
up that I can blame for my own circumstances at the end of the day, who's in the center
of it, me, right? So we have to get out of this mindset that it's somebody else's fault
that I'm feeling the way that I am. Well, that may be true. Maybe, maybe true that it's your
parents fault for raising you poorly and neglecting you or abusing you or introducing you to violence,
whatever it is. But at the end of the day, it's your responsibility. It doesn't matter
who's fault it is. You're responsible for, for dealing with it now. And I tell that to
a lot of my patients in an office, and it's amazing how well they respond to that kind
of thing. I go, Yeah, you know what, I like how you frame that. It isn't my fault, but
fault doesn't matter. What matters is that we fix it. So yeah, practically, look at
yourself, look in your own mirror. However, if over many, many years, you've been conditioned
to believe that it's a it's very hard to look at yourself because it's scary because you
might have to question everything that you thought you knew about the way the world works.
Then that's a challenge. And that comes down to how do you tolerate the fear of looking
at yourself and seeing all your potential? Yeah, well, and again, I think we have to
do as clinicians do a good job of balancing the fact of, yeah, there are some challenges
there. I tell people often, if they're going towards towards alcohol or food or whatever
that replacement behavior is, if we take that away, then yeah, you're going to be uncomfortable.
Like you're going to face some anxiety if you're going to dig into this. But one, we
need to build up some of those healthy coping skills to help you handle these emotions.
And two, you can do it. I think we spend so much time even in the mental health profession
of this is bad, that's bad, this is bad, that we're almost priming our clients to say, yeah,
this is awful. I can't do it without you. And almost a dependence on the counselor to
make them take them through whatever the problem is, instead of empowering that individual
that no, you can do that. What are your thoughts on kind of what I said there and how do you
navigate communicating that to your clients? We don't want to become yet another external
control locus for these people. I don't want to create a dependence. I tell my students,
my interns, my employees all the time that our job is to help make them better, not to
help them feel better. I want to get you well, not feel better. Feelings are temporary, right?
So we don't want to create that dependence. And we don't want to become another thing
to which they can point upon which they rely that's something other than self. So we want
to have an eyeball toward determination of treatment, not just Tuesday at 4pm in perpetuity,
even though it fathoms my wall and keeps you on the calendar, it also is highly unethical
to do that. I want to tap into your inner potential so that you stop coming through my door. This
is why we do podcasts and YouTube videos and that kind of thing. So people can arm themselves
with the information to solve their own problems in their own kitchens, instead of having to
come in all the time, there's always going to be professional psychotherapy available.
But I mean, to your point about, you know, not taking it too seriously, like, we want
to take the work quite seriously, but not ourselves. Yes, if I'm taking myself seriously,
it puts me at the center of their healing and not them. All I am is a guide and I should
be temporary. After the symptoms abate and they've they've replaced some behaviors with
some healthier ones, I'm done. And really, if we retreat to the medical model, you got
symptom presentation amounting to criteria that results in a diagnosis. Once the symptoms
go away, you no longer have a diagnosis. Now you're not treating anybody. That's that's
that becomes coaching, which there's nothing wrong with coaching. I have no problem with
coaching. But friends can coach, parents can coach, mentors can coach, your bartender
and your barber can coach. You don't need me. And I don't want to be that person, even
though I'm, you know, it's nice to take your money and give you some insight and advice.
That's not my role. If I'm if I'm adhering to the medical model, I want to make sure
that I'm targeting the problem area and achieving problem resolution. And once we're done, we're
done. So right behind you is somebody else coming in, I should not be insecure about
that. I need to I need to have faith that if I work myself out of a job in the entire
community in which I live is now healthy and healed, then I'll be happy to pay my bills
doing literally any other work because everybody around me will be happy.
Yeah. Great. Great. When we're talking about internal, external, locustive control, two
major things that, you know, certainly get all sorts of people in trouble for talking
about, but that's why we do these podcasts to talk about these things came to my mind.
One is what you referenced before public health, pandemic, all of that. Mental health is at
the center of all of that, which unfortunately is going to take us decades, I believe to
really unravel. And then the other one that's massive in our field right now is gender affirming
and care. So let's let's go for the just on the pandemic, the public health side of things.
Me real personally, I've shared some of this on my podcast before I was working in the
hospital setting back pre pandemic and then through 2021. And I'd like to be careful in
my language here because I was not technically fired. But it was one of those where, hey,
if you don't get the vaccine, you don't get the shot, then you will be. And I had the
opportunity and honestly, I could have gotten the religious exemption. But that wasn't my
primary reason for not getting it. And mind you, too, I've not had issues. I have co workers,
friends, families that got the shot and they feel great about and that's great. But I had
my other reasons. All that being said, public health kind of took took a job away from me,
which I don't think is the role of public health. And that's not mentioning all the
other missteps that were taken well before even shots were introduced. So as a mental
health professional, what was your first kind of reaction here of the public health people
may not have the public health best interest in mind. And now that we're mostly out of
the severe restrictions, mostly anyways, where do we go from here, particularly as a profession,
we can't take these things back like how do we gain some of that trust back. So I know
through a lot at you, but kind of do with that what you will.
I have a different experience. I was leaned on pretty heavily by some, some public health
people and some, some state people to lead the charge. And if I, if I demonstrate everybody
that my shot was safe, then we could reopen to in person counseling, right? That was the,
the apocryphal story that we were all fed, which is that, you know, it stops transmission
and all this stuff. And I was like, I was deeply skeptical about that. And eventually,
I, I got to a place where I said, I've got my own internal reasons. I was in my early
40s, I've got a history of asthma. This is an upper respiratory virus. If it helps me
to, you know, stay out of the hospital, then okay. So I ended up getting my first series
of shots in late 2020 as one of the leaders. And I posted on Twitter and I wasn't, I wasn't
a hundred percent in, but I thought on the whole, if this helps people, then great. Later,
we get new information and then find out that that, that we relied to and we were coerced
with donuts and free beer and all sorts of stuff that you shouldn't, you shouldn't have
to rely on if the product is good. You know, if you're a brand new restaurant opening and
you want to give a 20% discount for people to get, get in the door, eventually you stop
off from the 20% discount because the food stands on its own and people just recruit
themselves into your restaurant. And that didn't happen with these, these shots and
certainly not with the masking. The masking was absurd on its face from the beginning.
And I fought that pretty, pretty openly and pretty publicly and I still do. And I did
it on the premise of emotional development through facial recognition, which you can
see in the videos. And I did, I wasn't interested in stunting children's development, which
we did. And now we have evidence of that. And I hate saying that I was right, but I
was right. And it bothers me deeply that we went all in on this absurd face covering thing
that absolutely impacted children's ability to develop, not to mention the school colleges,
which now Randy Winegarten is denying she ever even had a hand in. So it's, it's, it's
very, it's very disturbing and distressing that so few public health professionals have
stepped forward and said, you know what, we probably miscalculated this. There's a guy
on Twitter, I follow his name is Kevin Bass. He has done an about face and he got skewered
by the, by the people who were doubling down because they, they got so locked into their
own egos that they couldn't let go of the narrative that they built because they didn't
have an authentic sense of self to, to withstand the ego change. And I'm saying ego and self,
I'm talking Carl Jung, analytic psychology left lens and frame of reference. So for
the uninitiated, the ego, as I'm saying, it is not a bad thing or a good thing. It's just
a thing. It's, it's your comfort zone. It's your, it's your place of being. And sometimes
it grows into how you see yourself and your own identity. And that's very dangerous because
if your ego, which is fleeting and temporary and often crafted by the world is conflated
with your, your identity, meaning your sense of self, capital S, you'll, you'll have a
really tough time letting go of that. So a brief analogy might be somebody who's got
a pattern of addictive behavior, say to a substance, and through that substance use,
they see themselves in the world. Letting go of that is going to be very challenging
because they don't know quote unquote who they are if they let go of the substance use.
And we do this with jobs and relationships and all sorts of things, clothes that we wear,
hobbies that we do. So how do we combat that? Well, I'm glad you asked. So what we want
to do is develop a very strong sense of self capital S. And the way we do that is we have
to find some anchoring principles, some matrix or rubric through which we evaluate the world
and make decisions based on a series of evaluated stances that we take that we know that we
know that we know are ours that are bigger than us and that are likely not to change.
So a lot of people reach straight for spirituality and religion because it's bigger than them.
It's usually anchored in scripture or doctrine of some kind. And it's usually not going to
change if you believe something very well and you've examined your beliefs, you can
stand on them when challenged, which it sounds like you did. You didn't give in to the, the
coercion and the messaging and the advertising use. You said no. Behind that, you knew it
wasn't really about the religion, which I applaud you for. And that's very commendable
because you could have punched out with the, with the escape clause there, but you didn't.
Instead you said, no, it's bigger than that. I'm not going to use this cheap excuse. I'm
going to stand on principle. So congratulations to you. Parents can do this with their children
when they teach values and say, these are our values. We do not deviate from them. Now,
that's not to say that you just rigidly adhere to them. Values can change. You can change
your mind. You can change beliefs, but you want to know why. So my favorite word in really
in counseling, but also in my life is intentionality. And it's something I picked up from my good
friend and mentor Christian Conti, who has a really wonderful way of dealing with people.
He calls it yield theory. And he's written a book about it. It's called walking through
anger. You can get for about 18 bucks on Amazon. Anybody can read this book. It's great. But
intentionality is the spirit of knowing why you do what you do. And if you don't have
anchored principles, you don't know why you do what you do. You've handed yourself over
to limbic reaction, belief response, whatever lens you view the world through. And you are
not in control now. Your beliefs are most people's beliefs are given to them by some
external source, parents, clergy, teachers, neighbors, media, movies. So we don't just
abandon our beliefs. What we do is we examine them very, very well so that when they're
challenged, we can know why we can explain with intentionality, why we do what we do,
why we believe what we believe, and then move forward. And if you're not anchored in that,
you don't have a sense of self. And you do become subject to the louder voices, the more
intimidating people, the policies that maybe you don't agree with, but you comply anyway.
So the challenge is evaluate yourself, stand on something that's bigger than you are that
you could point to know for us, we can take it out of the realm of spirituality and make
it very agnostic and say, what's the counseling profession ethical code based on basically
five ethical principles, justice, autonomy, fidelity, non maleficence, beneficence. Through
those we we give rise to our entire ethical codes. And now we know why we do what we do.
And those can can be negotiated, they can be flexed, they can have friction, but at least
we're mindfully examining them so that when we have to make a call to CPS and we're balancing
the difference between breaching confidentiality and protecting confidentiality, we can at
least articulate our position with some reasonable, rational understanding of the why. And that
way when the when the patient comes out, they're all angry, why'd you why'd you call CPS, why'd
you call for a welfare check when I was suicidal, like say, well, because of this and such,
and here's my rationale. And I'm more comfortable dealing with an angry person who breached,
who's confidentiality, I breached call the authorities to make sure you're safe, then
a dead patient whose family is suing me for protecting confidentiality. I'm more comfortable
standing on one ledge than the other. But you're standing on a ledge. And as long as
you know why, you're in a pretty good spot. But the only way you get there is constant
self evaluation. And if we go back to the union version of this, the the self, the the
psyche, if you will, the human spirit is infinite in its capacity, because it's a divine creation,
it's bigger than we are. And you can't ever achieve an arrival point of saying, I know
who I am, I am fully individuated, I am fully differentiated. Because if you do, you have
become tantamount to God, and you don't want to become God of your own world, because then
you're the one making the decisions and driving everything instead of mindfully reflecting
out of deference to what you're supposed to be doing and what you could possibly do someday.
So these are all the really deep fun things that I enjoy exploring, like the infinite
capacity of self also comes along with the negative side, right, the dark. It's like,
yeah, you got the capacity to be pretty dark. Whether or not you give yourself over to it
is up to you. And that's a matter of decision and choice. So that's how we do it. We find
out who we are. So that when the storms of life blow, we know that we're anchored in
something and we're not just going to blow away with them, which probably leads into your
thing about the trans ideology, right? Yeah, I was going to say that exact same thing. I
think that is exactly it. And why this has been, you know, I think that's part of what
makes this so interesting as a mental health provider, because we've known about transsexual
development and everything for a long time. This is not a new issue. What's new is how
we are coming about it and just the massive spread of this ideology. And it's so incongruent
with my value system that I couldn't sit there as a counselor or just as a citizen and say,
you know, this, this is okay. What we're doing. Tell me kind of your, your process with gender
affirmation care, where did you see this start kind of going off the rails, so to speak a
little bit? When did this start becoming an issue? And how do you make sense of this as
as a clinician?
First of all, your audio is doing that thing again, I'm going to let go because if you're
not noticing it in your headphones, it's quite possible that it's recording accurately and
I'm receiving it. Okay, okay. We'll just go with it. Okay. But it's not unintelligible.
So we'll just go. Okay.
All right, this is a tough one. Because like you said, we've had it in our realm for ever.
Only recently has it become pretty obvious that there's an agenda being pushed. And what
alarms me is the requirements, right? You're required to affirm, you're required to use
pronouns, you're required to do all these things. And it never seems to come from the
individuals. It's coming from they and they can be the professional associations, it can
be the activists online with their anonymous accounts that all seem to have like cartoon
avatars, by the way. It's never from an individual sitting in front of me saying, Hi, I'm Jake,
I go by, you know, they then pronouns, and I would prefer that you ask me, you know,
you refer to me as a cement. That's very weird anyway, because they would only know that
if I were referring to them in third person, which case, they probably wouldn't be in the
room. So that's bizarre on its face. Yes.
But for me, I, again, going back to Yield, if I'm meeting people where they are, and
I have this experience education and training behind me and my tens of thousands of hours
of clinical contact, then what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask holistically, what's
going on with you. And we're going to find out what your distress is. So let's go back
to the medical model. If you're not a clinician, or even if you are, and you're just new to
this field, maybe you don't know this, something like this happens, you come into my office
and say, Hi, Johnny, I'm Jake, how are you? What brings you in today? It's like my favorite
question, because it gets everything's kick started. Yeah. And Johnny says, well, blah,
blah, blah, and whatever blah, blah, blah is ostensibly your problem. And then from
there, from that problem area, we might discuss some things and I go, well, okay, that may
be a problem. Maybe there's something deeper, but we'll put it on the board at the top.
And right below that, we'll have a goal. What's your goal for counseling, Johnny? You'll
say, well, fix the problem, right? Something resembling that. And I said, all right, cool.
And then we'll develop some steps called objectives to that goal, so that we know that we're on
track. And then we develop intervention strategies. And I think what we've done is we've leapfrogged
the goal and gone straight to interventions. We did this with COVID. So COVID was the problem.
New virus, attacking people, making them sick. And we weren't straight to intervention strategies.
Nobody asked what the goal was. Was the goal to stop COVID? Was the goal to keep grandma
and grandpa alive? Because they're in the most vulnerable demographic. What's the goal?
We don't know. But put a mask on. Get your shots, separate distance, lock down, don't
go to school, don't go to work, except for the special people who are essential, right?
We didn't know what the goal was. Two weeks to flatten the curve turns into two and a
half years. So when somebody comes in the office, I go, what's the goal? If you're in
distress, it's to alleviate the distress. Now, at some point, you signed some paperwork
that handed some of your autonomy over to me to give you guidance. Now, I'm going to
respect that and I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. I'm going to ask you
what you think the pathway is to peace and tranquility through your distress. Affirming
care doesn't allow for that. Affirming care, and it starts with transaffirming care, that
it ripples into other types of presentations. Affirming care says you're not allowed to
give feedback, you're not allowed to give direction, you're not allowed to give perspective,
you're only allowed to agree. And that presumes that the person coming in knows what the goal
is and the interventions. Well, okay, then what are you doing in my office then if you
already know the answers? I don't need to exist. So where I see this becoming very dangerous
is not just with children are completely, we're talking about adults, children, that's
a different argument, and I'll get into that if you want. But adult comes in says I'm really
struggling, I don't know who I am inside. I'll go you have an identity issue. And I'll
go back to the concept of the true self, divinely inspired living within you. Well, who do you
think you are? Who do you want to be? And we start exploring much more holistically than
just whatever gender presentation it is. Gender may be the most available thing that we can
pluck and point to. So I just feel like I'm a woman, I go well, you said the word feeling,
you only got 10 feelings, unless it's a physiological feeling like hot or cold or fatigue or hunger.
So don't feel like I'm the right gender is not a feeling it's not one of our 10. So what
is it? It's a belief. Now beliefs can be changed, we already went through that that comes from
the frontal lobe. What is it that leads you to believe that you're not aligned with your
true self? Gee, I don't know. Now we have a whole different conversation about where
this came into being and we can explore that mindfully. Somebody's just coming in looking
for a green so I go yeah, alright, you feel like a woman but you're you present as a man.
Well, what do you want me to do about that? Just agree with you. Yeah, you're a woman.
Now what? You're fixed. You're healed. And never is that the case. Right. It's always
a trauma history. It's always a failure to integrate socially. Everybody points to autism
these days as you know, there's a lot of autistic kids who don't know who they are on the inside.
It's like, well, yeah, that's because they lack social skills to be able to navigate
their environments. And they don't know where the guardrails are on how to interact with
other other kids, right? Bullying can do that. It's not just, you know, the traditional presentation
of abuse and violence and neglect in the home, it could be bullying on the playground. I
don't know who I am because I second guess myself every time I step on the playground
because one kid says that I suck at basketball, the other kid says I suck at baseball, I go
try chess and they don't like me either. I tried, you know, playing the trumpet, not
very good at that. Now I quote unquote don't know who I am because of the external environment,
the trumpet, the baseball, the basketball, the chess, those are all external. Those aren't
who I am. Those are things I do. And now we're talking to another sense of self. We get midlife
crises all the time from I was reached for Bob the accountant. I don't know why the accountant's
name is Bob, but he's Bob the accountant. I say, you know, Bob the accountant is approaching
his retirement. And for his whole life, he said, I'm Bob, I'm the neighborhood accountant,
Bob the accountant, Bob the accountant. Well, now he's approaching retirement and he doesn't
know quote unquote who he is without his accountancy practice. I will deed, Bob, your, your husband,
your, you know, part-time homebrew, you have children, you have grandchildren, you're lots
of things that aren't just your job. So when we identify self with activity or self with
presentation or self with external environment, now we've conflated what we think what we
believe with who we are at a much, much deeper level. And we've carved out opportunities
for us to be anything, but what we've repeatedly told ourselves or people have told us that
we are. And I don't want to limit people's potential. That's, that's not, that's not
for me to say, but I also fundamentally think that if people are infinite in their capacity
to do and be all things, then why would I allow that in my practice? I'm not, I'm not
just going to agree to agree. But here's the real danger. You have parents, this is already
happening before affirming care guidelines came into place. Parents come in and say,
here's my kid, he has ADHD, fix him. And at Zephyr, we have a policy on our intake form
that says we don't do fix my kid. It doesn't read like that. But basically it says, you
know, he was the executive of your home as go you, so go your children. So you're going
to be involved. This isn't due to you. So you don't drop them off for an hour and come
back, right? So I'm not going to fix your kid. You're going to help fix your kid. And
I might see that ADHD presentation as lack of parental involvement. Say, look, you just
got to show up your parenting parenting structure, add some add some dynamics in the home that
integrate more family time, be fully present, don't be on your device. And oh, by the way,
what's your parenting philosophy? And usually people give me the trout faced look when I
ask them that like what parenting philosophy. And so yeah, you know, the lens through which
you conduct your parenting. So we start with that. But here's what affirming care does.
Affirming care says I'm not allowed to do that. I'm allowed to just agree with the parent
and affirm that the kid has ADHD. They are cool. I don't prescribe medicine, but maybe
by advanced. And then again, why am I in your life if all I'm doing is agreeing with your
problem presentation, we're trying to reach solutions here, we're trying to achieve a goal.
If the goal is distraction avoidance and diminish the hyperactivity, which again comes back to
personal responsibility and sense of self, then I can coach you in that I can help you
with that. But if my job now because of affirming care is just to agree that your kid has whatever
you said they did because you watched a TikTok video, I'm rendered irrelevant. And we probably
won't help your kid, except maybe get him addicted to pharmaceuticals. And then what do we cease
to exist as a profession, because all we can do is agree with whatever they came in after
they searched WebMD that doesn't doesn't really jive with our ethics, which flies in the face
or seemingly flies in the face of do no harm. The non maleficent component of our ethical
precepts says person comes in complaining of whatever distress. And my job is to simply
agree with that distress and do nothing to fix it. That is causing harm. I'm being unethical
by agreeing to go along with the continued distress presentation. So I'm just not on
board with that. It's wholly unethical at its root. And it's already happening. I've
had people leave and, you know, go seek care elsewhere because I say no, I think it's actually
a parenting thing. How dare you say, you know, can't you see that my kid is doing whatever
he's doing? I'm like, he's sick. He's supposed to be distractible. And so that's where that's
where I fear that this is going. And it's not it's not a good outcome, especially when
litigation might be involved or licensing threats, because right now the AMFT, for example,
has 26 pages of LGBTQIA plus affirming care guidelines. And for those of you don't know
the entire ethical code from the AMFT is only 11 pages. So we got 26 pages of affirming
care guidelines. We're one step away from being work from having those integrated into
our ethics as it is. And once that happens, ethics are often embedded into law or adopted
by reference into law. And then it becomes illegal not to affirm. And at that point,
I probably just loudly renounce my licensure and become a coach, because I'm not I'm not
interested in being unethical with my patients.
That year last piece there, that is pretty much 100% of why there's this rebrand of my
my podcast. And it's it's essentially a an insurance that here's this other entity that
I can form into coaching or something different, just in case. Now, Oklahoma has passed some
laws here recently that. Thankfully, I think we may be one of the last ones to kind of
go that route of getting those ethics into law. But if you are a clinician that whether
you're right left wing, whatever that you have any apprehension to gender affirming
care, I don't say this to be alarmist, but just for best practice, you need to be prepared
of what if the law is going to dictate, I have to affirm, what are you going to do about
it? And again, just prepare, don't don't be scared, don't don't freak out about it. Hopefully
things get better. We have more and more voices and organizations talking against it. But Jake
lined out very well, some of these legitimate concerns that are heavily influenced the top
of the top of organizations, American Council and Association is similar of some of the
things that they're saying, you will be affected. So be prepared now, be prepared to fight out.
And if your value system kind of going back into that importance of looking at yourself
and your values, if it goes against this, it's better for you to keep your values than
to keep your job and keep your license. It's not it's not worth it at that degree. I hope
it doesn't come to that point. But again, you would be foolish at this point to to not
prepare. Is there anything on that end of spectrum as far as licensing and the ethics
that you wanted to hit a little bit more?
Yeah, the concept of having a license only is relevant if you want to bill insurance.
That's that's how it works. So insurance companies want to have the guarantee of minimum confident
competence as stamped by the state. So the state guarantees minimum competence, they
don't guarantee maximum competence with your license. And we all know clinicians who are
not good at their jobs, but yet retain their license because they renew every year, they
go through their continued courses, and that's all that's required to be maximally competent
requires much more effort and a lot more digestion of information and consumption of research
and analysis and whatnot. So if you don't care about billing insurance, and you think
that you're going to stand on your own as a practitioner without that crutch, then that's
an option, right? The insurance companies aren't really is a little cynical, but they're not
really interested in a healthy populace, they're interested in membership retention in their
organizations, right? So you continue paying your policy premiums, which is why they're
incentivized to keep the networks artificially small by denying enrollment onto their panels
and so forth. So in Nevada, we've we've run into that in a few cases, where they say sorry,
we have enough of your kind in our network, we're not adding any more marriage or family
therapists or clinical professional counselors or psychologists or whatever. You go really,
last I checked Nevada was dead last in behavioral healthcare and provision. So we've we've cured
mental illness in Nevada is what you're saying, we have an adequate network to address the
continued year over year statistical analysis that says that we suck at things we don't
want to suck at really interesting. So what do we do we go to our legislators and we say
let's let's adopt any willing provider law, you don't have to, you don't have to pay,
we're not asking you to authorize all claims, we're not asking you to authorize payment
and perpetuity, we're just saying add people to the network who want to join if they're
minimally competent and they're licensed, add them to the network. Nope, insurance comes
right over the top with their lobbyists and says don't do this because why more people
would access care, more money goes out the door, and their shareholders profits diminish.
So it's a money thing. And and that we see that with claim denials, I mean, I got one
the other day speaking of ADHD, an adult we've been treating for some time, finally got a
claim denials says ADHD cannot be possible in adults. Like, okay, so now you're just
overriding the DSM altogether. And that's that's what they do. And they throw up as
many roadblocks as they can to retain profits. And when it becomes so taxing to the provider
that they don't want to do that anymore, they just screw it, I don't want to bill anthem
or whatever. And then anthem wins, because anthem's not interested in healing people,
they're interested in enrolling people and throwing up reasons to deny care. And I'm
in and I'm in touch with enough medical providers up and down the ladder from primary care to
pediatrics to cardiology to emergency care, they're all dealing with it. You can't get
an MRI ordered unless you go through six months of physical therapy first. And then you know,
if you still have pain, then we'll get the MRI. It's like MRIs are peanuts. Once you
pay for the machine, all you do is pay for the electricity to run it in the tech to
to read it, right? It's absurd. But it's yet another nickel and dime strategy to keep
people away from care. So back to the what's what's the solution? I don't want to complain
without a solution. The solution is we get better at our jobs and we teach people that
that the answers are within. Maybe physical therapy is the more appropriate low level
of intrusiveness. I'm a big fan of that. State and about a Medicaid requires least level
of intrusiveness to address a problem before leveling up to the next level of intrusiveness.
So low level of intrusiveness to me is talk therapy. Next level might be medicine, and
we can debate that. It doesn't matter. But the next level after that is multiple contacts
per week of therapy. So in the form of an intense about patient program, IOP, or the
next level, it might be partial hospitalization. And then all the way up to hospitalization.
We don't want to jump right to hospitalization. If talk therapy will work once a week. And
I'm a big believer in that. I absolutely think that that's the most right thing to do for
the patient who wants just their symptoms alleviated. Well, what is gender affirming care do, especially
with the medicalization? It says validate that this person is accurate in their assessment
that they need to change their external parts to fit their internal sense of self and medicalize
it. Well, that's not that's not the least intrusive method to achieving the distress
relief. That's that's hideously expensive. But people profit off of it. So now it's it
seemingly that there's, you know, forces at play who are interested in generating revenue
off of chopping off healthy body parts of children and sterilizing them with Lupron.
When all that all that might be required is me sitting down with the kids and hey, look,
man, you've been bullied for a little while. Of course, you don't know who you are. But
let's let's shore up yourself efficacy and give you something to reach for that doesn't
involve irreversible damage to your body that you may regret later in life. Affirming care
says I'm not allowed to do that. So we want to make sure that we're doing the least intrusive
methods possible first, and then failing those look to the next step, not just leap to the
most extreme, that's absurd. So yeah, I do see it all over the place. And if as long
as we ourselves have a strong sense of self, we have a good, good sense of our author authority
as you know, given to us by law, then we can push back and say no, no, no, no, no, I'm
not going to sign that letter that sends you to the surgeon. I'm going to work with you
on dealing with the internal stuff first, being able to push back on the bullies on
the playground, maybe work with your parents to be more present in your life, ditch the
substance abuse, whatever it is. And if they don't like that, then you know, that's the
beauty of a free and open market, you can choose somebody else to go to. I'm just not
going to be a part of it. I don't I don't have to be compelled into that. But when they
take away my right to assess things as I see fit as deemed minimally competent by the state,
that's when I have a problem with it. Because now you're you legislator, who is non clinical,
are inserting yourself into this clinical realm, as though you have this incompetence.
And to me, that sounds like practicing out of scope.
Yeah. Well, something that I know we talked on Twitter just real briefly about how I'm
making my own practice, not centered around insurance, just due to the nature of my value
system and kind of how I'm portraying to clients. It just doesn't seem to be in my best interest,
nor my client's best interest. And I'm going to take this outside of my own practice for
a second. I'm actually a part of a direct primary care. And I've been beating this drum
very, very hard. Direct primary cares, they work outside of insurance, insurance is not
exchanged in any part. So I'm I can see this as a consumer and see the benefit that when
my medicine is out, we have a tech system or I can give a call and bam, we can get that
taken care of. If I have a quick little cough, and normally I wouldn't go and see the doctor
because I have to pay a $50 copay and wait in the office for two hours. I can call up
my my doctor and hey, I can fit you in tomorrow at this time or do you have time for me to
swing by real quick? He's even done some home visits and bam, we get that the level of care
like you've talked about, it's through the roof. I have not experienced anything like
this in a medical type of way. I've always just felt like cattle being herded in and
out. And when insurance is out of the question, it just the creativity is opened up. And I
actually kind of get excited to talk to the doctor because I feel like I get my whole
concerns lined out. I know I feel assured that if my daughter gashes her head open that
we won't have to pay $2,000 my doctor can just stitch it up. It it really is worthwhile.
So as a as a clinician, if you're worried about the price tag and things like that, I know
it's a different world than insurance, but as a consumer, there is a massive benefit.
And if you're doing your job well, having that maximum competence like Jake is mentioning,
your clients are going to be able to tell that difference.
We have a plug for the most recent Naga Notes podcast that came out most recently as of
this recording anyway, with Molly Rutherford. She's a doctor in Kentucky. She's big in the
primary care, direct primary care stuff. And she lit a fire in my soul once I talked to
her about that. And she introduced me to this thing called DPC Frontier, direct primary
care frontier DPC Frontier.com. And they just recently had a conference actually it's happening
right now over this weekend. And it's in Kansas City. And there's anesthesia is started by
an anesthesiologist actually. So there's more and more people who are getting on board with
that. And I'll tell you as an employer that that sounds great to me, because I don't like
the idea of spending $90,000 a year on my employee's health insurance, which by the way,
is only half of that because they pick up the other half. When we could save all that,
I had two emergency room visits last year, $1,300 a piece, the entire bill for the visit
was like 2,600. So it was like, I was paying half of that out of pocket. And how much of
that really is the cost versus the inflated cost, because they have to recover what they
need from insurance. So if we can get around the insurance by doing this, it's great, everybody
wins. But you're flying in the face of the cultural intro jack, which is another Carl
Jung term, which is the unquestioned belief or assumption that this is just how it is.
And people can't can't wrap their heads around the idea of like, not submitting claims or
having that I think it's a sense of security, it's a safety blank. It's like, Well, what
if I get in a horrible auto collision, and I have to end up in the ED, like, well, there's
a way around that too. And if you really must have insurance for catastrophic stuff, it's
way cheaper than what we're paying for HMOs and RPOs. So that is something to be explored
in behavioral health has, I think, a moral obligation to get involved in that as much
as they can. I don't know how it works with, you know, drop in visits and stuff like that,
because our current, I won't say that this is the way it is, but it's the way it's been
is the orthodoxy is continual care until the problem is resolved very much like physical
therapy. And I don't know that that's necessarily the method. I think if you get in deeper,
faster, you don't have to drag people out in perpetuity weeks on end, I think you can
have some very, very powerful conversations at a much less frequent occurrence, so that
they can take the stuff home and integrate it and practice it and also load them up with
homework. You know, I think we can do that. I think I don't think weekly sessions or twice
weekly sessions is necessary. I think maybe for functioning people, you know, who are
otherwise living normal lives and just have some distress, we can make great strides in
their healing, seeing them once a month on that model. Now, I will say though, not everybody
has access, right? So if you're compelled into insurance by the state, because you're
in the indigent population, or you know, you live in a rural area and Medicaid is your
thing, I think we have a moral obligation to deal with that too. So if you can't afford
insurance and the state has covered your insurance and is essentially free to you, that's not
free, then we as direct primary care providers, I'll just want myself in that category, if
I'm there one day, which I hope to be, then we have to manage to navigate those who traditionally
wouldn't have the financial means to pay the subscription fee, which is nominal by the
way, and it's way less, way less. So, you know, if it's 20 bucks a month and all you
want is behavioral health care, I think most people can probably afford that. If you're
extremely indigent, then maybe the state figures out a way to fund the direct primary care
people instead of the insurance companies that will always stick middlemen in the way
with their managed care organizations who are pilfering at every step. So it is possible,
it can be done, it requires a rethinking. And again, we go back to self examination, we
have to question some of those introjects question some of those beliefs, so that we
can have mindful control over why we do what we do. I don't think we need to have a Medicaid
system if we can rethink it. I mean, I have solutions to the stuff is that it takes a
lot more political will than most people are willing to commit. It also takes looking down
the field 20 years instead of two. And root cause mitigation, you know, to the point about
guns, mental health, root cause mitigation is not politically expedient. No politician
is going to solicit donations by saying stick with me for the next generation, we can solve
this. They're more interested in, you know, flashy pizzazz, limbically triggering campaign
statements and promises to, you know, ban guns or, you know, in improve mental health
care with billions of dollars like, well, where are the billions going? Most of it goes
to the managed care organization, they don't go into my pocket. So, you know, it can be
done. And we just have to be more, I guess, more connected in this form more podcasts
would be good. Everybody needs more podcasts. But also, we have to have the courage to stand
up against the system say, I'm not doing it anymore. I'm going to take the, I'm going
to take the chance based on evaluated data and think that the market will sustain my
practice and my living, not playing the game and being part of the problem. And then, you
know, the more we grow in that capacity, the more courage that we have to step away from
the orthodoxical system. I think the more people get healed too, because ultimately,
if you're doing outcome based treatment, you're going to be successful because people get
well and then they tell their friends and that's, that's really how the market works
anyway. Right now in our profession, because the pendulum has swung so far from, you know,
nobody talks about mental illness to everybody needs a therapist, it's really easy for grifting
opportunists who are very bad at their jobs to stay in business, because the market can't
differentiate among good, fair, poor elite. And we all just kind of look the same. And
it's not until you receive care from a really highly trained elite professional, they go,
man, what was I doing spending all my time with those other people who are just making
me feel better instead of actually getting me better.
Absolutely. And it is encouraging. And again, that's kind of the basis of this podcast of
we're not going to always figure everything out and have it all lined out perfectly, but
can we get you in the right direction? And I think this for our field as best as we can.
And I'll be honest too, like in my own practice, while I am getting it going, it's not my only
source of income right now. I'm having to do some of the more traditional things contract
wise in the background. So it's not an overnight thing, but be looking that way, especially
if you have issues with kind of the bigger entities in the mental health profession.
It's definitely worth it to get in that independence. Well, Jake, I think there we have talked about
some fantastic things. Are there any any other things that you would like to plug and where
are some places that the audience can find you?
Certainly on Twitter, I'm at Jake Wisk, it's J-A-K-E-W-S-K. You can follow me there for
whatever that's worth. I invite everybody to watch the emotional functioning videos,
because I think if you're in charge of your emotions in response to an environment, you
can stay out of my clinic. I want to work myself out of a job. This is not my identity. This
is something I do. I'm very happy to do it. I'm comfortable doing it. I'm very good at
it, but I don't need to do it forever if I don't have to. And I would love nothing more
than to stop bullying on the playground and watching my kids get made fun of and watching
couples arguing in the line at the grocery store. If that stopped, I would happily go
back to food service or drive in forklift or put paint on walls to pay my bills. I'm
not threatened at all by the disappearance of my profession if it's disappearing for
the right reasons. So watch the emotional functioning videos. Those are available at
the Zephyr Wellness website. It's ZephyrWellness.org. Just type in on our search thing, the emotional
functioning that the video series pops right up. And then walk to Talk America, W-T-T-A
dot O-R-G. If you want to support us, we're 501-C-3. Certainly we can welcome your financial
contributions, but also just share it around. Know that if you're a practitioner, stop hiding
in the shadows. Come forward, register yourself as part of our 50-State Directory. We get
solicitations all the time from people who are in the gun community who are suffering
and don't know where they can turn because they don't want to be judged or have their
rights taken away. So having a 50-State Provider Directorate, people who are out of the closet
putting their names on our website and saying, you can come to me and trust me that my first
lever to pull isn't going to be the authorities to take your property. They know that they
can enter with confidence. And it'd be nice to have somebody in every state who can do
that. And then if we can grow from there, that'd be great too. So those are the three
things I would offer people. And in the meantime, I just really appreciate you having me on
and probably closer than other dad jokes. So this mushroom is in a bar and he wants a drink
and he walks up and bartender's like, I'm sorry, we don't serve your kind here. And
the mushroom looks at me and he goes, why not? I'm a fun guy.
Perfect. Perfect. He doesn't take it, but I'm telling you the King of Dad jokes, especially
if you follow him on Twitter. It's relentless over there. So I'll include all the Jake's
information down there below is absolutely great. Haven't having you on the show today.
And yeah, those of you listening, I hope that you, you learned and that you will continue
to engage in your life and not just sit there and be angry. So until the next episode, I'll
catch you next time.