Katherine Morgan Schafler
speaker
127 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Katherine Morgan Schafler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Sure, thank you for reading that. So these stories are fictionalized because they're not my stories to tell. I don't talk about my clients' lives in the book, but they are generated from the sort of kernel of truth and dynamic that appears all the time in my work. And so when I worked in a rehab as a group counselor,
it was not that uncommon for someone to show up to therapy intoxicated or under the influence, especially because a lot of my work was in early recovery. And so Ava is this client who at the end of our group, I typically have people go around in a circle and say something that they heard someone else say that stuck with them.
And Ava, she let go of that and just confessed to the group that she was intoxicated. She was drinking before group and she plans on getting intoxicated more after group. And this is what's called in the therapy world, a last minute bomb. It's when... It's when your client says something very important or otherwise urgent when there is no time for you to discuss this thing.
And it happens all the time. And I see it as a really healthy gesture because it's like, I really want to talk to you about this, but I'm too scared to do anything other than bring it up. And usually it's like the therapist brings it up at the next session and it's productive. In this case, I asked everyone to leave and for Ava to stay and she knows what she needs to do and what she needs to do.
And what all she wants to do is to take a hot bath. She just wants to go home. Her house is a 15 minute walk away from the rehab center. And she just wants to take a hot bath. But she doesn't feel entitled to do that because in her view, she effed everything up.
And so she's going to go out and drink more because she is in this mentality of I already ruined it, you know, so I don't deserve to do the thing that a healthy person would do. And I said, sometimes what I ask people when they make a mistake in recovering and they have a relapse is like, what would you do in this moment if you were five years sober?
What would a person who's five years sober do with these feelings they're feeling? And the person knows. They're like, and she said, I would just take a bath. I've been cold all day. And so something as simple as taking a bath, Ava is not going to do because taking a bath is for someone who didn't just mess up. Taking a bath is for someone who's smart and healthy, which she has decided she is not.
And so she's in a cycle of punishment. And to me, I define a punishment as doing something you know is going to hurt you or denying yourself something you know is going to help you.
And if I could wave a magic wand and get the reader of The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control or the listeners of your podcast to just hear one thing out of all the things I'm yip-yapping about, it is that punishment doesn't work. Personal accountability works, discipline works, rehabilitation works, and natural consequences unfolding work. Those are all very effective strategies for change.
Punishment is not. Punishment not only doesn't work, it makes everything worse. And the whole grand plan there is I'm going to make myself feel so pained about this situation that it's going to motivate me to never be in this situation again. And so you're trying to heal yourself by hurting yourself.
And when you think of the times that you've made the healthiest decisions, the most right decisions, the decisions that you feel are most reflective of who you are, your strongest, best self, you have made those decisions because you are in touch with a sense of strength and goodness inside yourself. There's a part of you that says, I'm a good person and I'm capable of good things.
and I can do this, and I deserve this. So you make good decisions when you feel good. And when you feel bad, which punishment is what, that's all punishment does. That's how you can tell if you're punishing yourself, because the goal of the punishment is to create pain. And that's how you can tell if you're punishing someone else too.
Like the silent treatment, punishment, your goal is to make someone feel bad. when you feel bad, you make decisions that aren't the best, brightest, boldest decisions. When you feel bad, you make decisions that make you feel, when you feel bad, you are not feeling strong, you're feeling weak, right?
And so you're like, well, it might as well, or I already ruined it, or you just have this defeatist attitude. And so I explain what happens to Ava in the rest of that chapter. And I think we all have like an Ava inside of us. That's like, I know what the right thing to do is, but I already ruined it.
People do this all the time when, when they're trying to do a goal and they have like those four golden days of January 1st and 2nd and January 3rd and January 4th. And I'm on it. And this year is different. And then January 5th comes and they take a backwards step back. Yeah. And they're like, well, now I'm going to make this a whole narrative about how I'm a failure and I'm not a good person.
And I don't deserve to feel good because look, I couldn't even do it for five days. And then you start this punitive self-talk and all this punishment. And then you do the exact thing that you've been trying and working hard to not do. And it's like, look, relapsing, taking step backwards, that's a part of growth. You can't, repetition is how we learn.
And we think repetition, like repeating the same mistake over and over again, we think that that's an emblem of our failure. No, that's an emblem of our growth. Repetition can represent failure, but it can also represent learning. We need repetition to learn. And we hate that about learning. We just want someone to tell us the definition of a word and then forever somehow memorize it and know it.
But that's not how it works. I can't even remember the restaurant I went to last week. It's on the tip of my tongue. I might need to have some repetition of that for a while. Habits need to be in repetition. thinking of ourselves as people who are strong, capable, good, worthy, loving, free, that identity structure needs some repeating. And by some repeating, I mean, maybe it takes you years.
That's okay. That's what it takes for everybody.
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