Episode 1: The Advice I Give That I Struggle to Follow

In the very first episode of Both Sides of the Couch, Kari, a therapist, writer, and human navigating chronic illness, introduces the heart behind her new podcast: bridging her professional insight with her personal reality.

She opens up about her dual roles as therapist and patient, and how living with chronic illness has reshaped the way she works, connects, and finds balance. The episode centers on one truth many can relate to: it’s easier to give advice than to follow it.

Through a story from her own therapy session, Kari explores the trap of labeling days as “good” or “bad,” especially when every day includes challenges. She shares how both she and her clients are learning to embrace neutrality, seeing days not as successes or failures, but simply as experiences.

Drawing from DBT’s concept of Radical Acceptance, Kari reflects on how acceptance and gentleness toward herself create space for peace, even on hard days. Her therapist’s reminder, “There is never a not enough for you,” becomes a grounding mantra against perfectionism and overdoing.

Kari closes with a heartfelt takeaway: instead of asking whether today was good or bad, ask,
 ✨ What did I enjoy today? What were my peaceful moments? ✨
And when in doubt, focus on mini moments, small, restorative pauses that feed your energy without demanding more from you.

Transcript

0:02

Welcome to both sides of the couch. I'm Carrie, a therapist who also happens to be a human navigating chronic illness, which means I see life from both sides. This is where I share honest stories, lessons, and little reminders that you don't have to have it all figured out to keep showing up. Let's get into today's episode.

Kari 0:22

Today's episode is the advice I give that I struggle to follow. This is episode one, the first episode, my test to see how this is gonna go. Something I want to share about myself. I'm a therapist, obviously. And if that wasn't obvious, welcome to my podcast. I'm also a writer. I recently published, my first book earlier this year, but I've also been writing online for blogs and publications. Since about 2020. I started this book. Uh, I don't remember what year. 2023 I think. And it was published in 2025. The book is a hybrid workbook aimed at couples.

1:09

It's called listening to understand instead of respond a workbook for couples.

Kari 1:14

You can buy it on Amazon, you can also buy it on anywhere. You can buy a book online really. But if you go to my website, go to the podcast page, there'll be links it's really about teaching couples. Or each part of a couple, or anyone really that wants to be a better listener about getting into deep past the surface skills of a listener and how to apply those in your relationship. The workbook piece, the workbook aspect of it was super important. For me, because I feel like I could write a book and tell you how to be a listener, but if you didn't actually practice any of those things, it wasn't gonna do anything for you. So the workbook stuff, I think is what took me the longest. It wasn't the writing like the words, it was the workbook activities that I tested out of like, will this make you a better listener? Will this help you understand this concept? Anyways, that's all I wanna say about the book. I really enjoyed it and I'm always kind of looking for more ways to help people without just having them directly be in front of me in the therapist, client capacity, and also part of having a chronic illness. I have to manage my time as a therapist a little bit differently than some people do. So for me that means less direct client work, because of the mental load that can take on me. I also only do telehealth now, which is in part to that. It gives me a lot more accommodations for my chronic illness. So I'm able to function better as a therapist. I'm just always kind of like finding the best possible way to be a therapist in my situation. But anyways, I've always toyed around with a podcast. I love listening to podcasts. I just never really knew what I had to offer that was different than what was already out there. And I had this idea of combining my personal. Thoughts and reflections with my therapist view on them too. So this is kind of like the therapist and the human side of each topic. So sometimes these episodes will be a little more focused for therapists and sometimes they'll be a little more focused for a chronically ill person and sometimes they're just for everybody who's a human. So, but I kind of wanna like structure these episodes. With a balance of me as a professional and then me as just a human that struggles with chronic illness. I really don't know a ton of other therapists in this situation. I do know other therapists that have chronic illnesses that are going through similar things to me. I also know a lot of people with chronic illnesses struggle with their mental health or struggle with managing their day-to-day stuff and use therapy as a tool. So I think those two parts of me combine really well when it comes to a podcast. So I wanna keep these as kind of like on the shorter end of podcasts. Like I don't think I'll ever produce an hour podcast. I'm thinking more like 20, 30 minute episodes at most, where you know, we can talk about a topic and I'll give you a takeaway at the end. But yeah, so today we're gonna talk about the advice I give as a therapist and as a friend, that I struggle to take myself. So I wanna start with a personal story and I just wanna preface. Every time I bring up any client stories, I may be changing some things to keep confidentiality and anonymous details about my clients. I've been doing this a long time, so if I'm sharing something, whether it's on this podcast or as a friend, just know there's no way you could identify this person based off the amount of information I'm giving. And the point isn't really to share details about somebody's life, right? It's about the process of being a therapist. So hang with me, this is gonna make sense in a few minutes. This was towards the end of my work week, a few days in fact, after I attended my own therapy appointment. And I was reminding a client that just because a day had bad moments, it didn't make the day in total a bad day. And I remember my client saying something along the lines of, Carrie, are you sure? And I was just like, no. And we moved on. But it's funny because I was talking to my therapist about this in opposite roles. I was on the other side of the couch in my therapy session and my therapist was telling me that I was focusing too much on thing. Bad things happening, happening to me during the day, feeling bad during the day. And if I did that, every day would be a bad day, because being chronically ill means that I feel bad every day. Yes. For those of you who are lucky enough not to have a chronic illness, that's what the word chronic means is that we feel bad every single day. So, yeah, my therapist was explaining this to me, and I mean, I agreed. I'm a good little client. I agreed you're right, but I'm just really struggling when I feel so bad all the time. And I'm hitting flare after flare after flare, and doing all of the things I'm supposed to be doing, and I don't really feel better. In fact, sometimes I feel worse. It doesn't make any sense. So we were talking about ways to look at the day differently. So I wasn't rating things as a good or a bad day. As I remember saying, and I think this all the time, like I can remember the last time that I had a good day. And it's sad because it was so long ago. And if I look back to the time before that, I don't know, that's how long that it was. And I mean, she agreed. It was sad. It was sad, right? And that's not what I should be focusing on. That's not gonna make me have more good days because. There's nothing that I did to control that good day that I had, and there's nothing that I'm doing overall that is making me have bad days. So what I was trying to come across to this client was what my therapist was trying to come across to me is that we have to focus more on the little moments. The problem with. Good versus bad days is it's really black and white thinking like there are not only good days and not only bad days, right? There are other kind of days too, and if I'm only looking at good or bad, I'm missing everything in between rating so many days as bad when there maybe are a lot of not bad moments happening during those days. So. Something that I could work on or my client could work on is looking at things with more neutrality, you know? Was that good or bad? No, it just, it just was, I experienced this, I had a day where these things happened. There's a concept in DBT therapy called Radical Acceptance that falls along the lines of this. Instead of looking at something as. Really, really good or really, really bad. You just look at something as having happened and accepting that it's happened. And it's a really hard skill to learn, especially if you have a chronic illness.'cause you're focused so much on your symptoms. You're focused so much on the day-to-day and all of the things you're doing to manage this chronic illness. It's hard to just accept and be neutral. So something my therapist told me once, and I wrote it down and I've been saying it to myself almost every single day, is, Carrie, there is never a not enough for you. And what that means is I tend to overdo it and that costs me, but my mind is always telling me, what if it wasn't enough? What if you didn't rest enough? What if you didn't exercise enough? What if you didn't? Count enough of the things that you're supposed to be doing. So I tend to do a little bit more and suffer the consequences for that. So reminding myself there's never a, not enough for me, makes it easier to make decisions on what I should be doing next. I have a tendency to try to add something like my therapist asked me, how can you have a good day? Oh, maybe I can add in something that I enjoy, and sometimes I just have to tell myself, girl, it is too much. You don't have to add things in all the time to have a better day. Sometimes all you have to do is focus on just existing and the day doesn't have to be rated. I don't have to rate my days. I don't ever have to rate my days. Yes. So when I shared this moment in session with my client that I had where, you know, my client was like, care, are you sure? And I said, no. My therapist laughed along with me. You know, it's funny, as I mentioned earlier, the stuff that you need to work on always kind of pops up in session. But also we kind of reflected on that more. And what did I learn really is that I'm still learning. Yeah, just like I don't expect my clients to come to session the following week and being like, all right, I mastered that. I'm no longer rating days. I'm looking at things more neutral, and I can stop using language of good and bad. No, that's not gonna happen. I didn't develop that tendency and a week's time. It's not gonna undo itself in a week's time. It's probably gonna take a really long time, especially when in the big picture. The main struggle is accepting the fact when you have a chronic illness that's incurable and you're probably never gonna feel better, and there's really not much else you can be doing to feel better on a day-to-day basis. That's just like a very large pill that's hard to swallow. Yeah, and I have experienced in that too. It's not fun. So while I'm learning. I am trying to just exist while I'm finding that balance and I keep moving forward. What does that look like? Well, I'm just trying to enjoy the good moments more and focus way less on the bad. And I know I'm still using that good versus bad language here, but that's part of me existing. The therapist's perspective in this lesson, I think really is just that acceptance is key. Accepting my chronic illness, accepting the future outcome around that chronic illness. My tendency to rate days is good or bad, my struggle to find the enjoyable moments. I have to accept all of those things and the fact that I'm a human, I have to accept that too. That's the human perspective. That part of that acceptance that I'm working on is really accepting that sometimes I'm still gonna focus on having a bad day, and if I then get upset with myself over that, it's just gonna make it worse. I can't punish myself for doing things wrong. Doing things wrong, like overdoing it and then feeling more fatigued or potentially having triggered a flare, doing things wrong, like focusing all day on how I'm having a bad day for many days, and then realizing that I've been falling into that pattern. Yeah, I just have to accept that that happened. And move forward. So part of that human perspective is sometimes I just need a mini moment when I realize that's happening. I just need to take a really short amount of time and find something not good,'cause I'm trying not to use that word, but find something peaceful, something enjoyable, something relaxing, something that feeds my energy. Something that makes me smile. So that's my takeaway for today. If you're listening and you're wondering if you too are having too many bad days, I want you to ask yourself this instead. What did I enjoy today? What were my moments of peace? What made me feel good? And have more mini moments if, what can I do for 10 seconds? What can I do for a minute? What can I do for 10 minutes? Mini being the key and trying not to add that in, but incorporating it into things that you're already doing. Let me know your thoughts.

14:55

Thanks for joining me on both sides of the couch. If something you heard today resonated, share this episode with someone who might need it. And if you'd like to support the show or find more of my work, check the links in the show notes. Until next time, take care of yourself on both sides of the couch.