Hello everyone and welcome to Therapy in a Nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family therapist,

and this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized nuggets of health.

In this video, I'm going to teach you a technique that therapists use in almost every session,

but you probably didn't know about.

And when you learn how to do it yourself, you can change how you think and feel.

But to begin with, I'm going to do something kind of weird.

So just give me 30 seconds.

And in case you didn't know, I use a lot of acceptance and commitment therapy. And one of the

things that comes with acceptance and commitment therapy is doing experiential therapy, meaning

therapy through experiences. So we don't just talk about, we don't just, you know, think about our

problems, but we try to create experiences that lead to a change in our perspective. So that's what we're going to do

right now. Okay? So 30 seconds. I just need you to answer this question. How is the desk the mother

of the chair? Go ahead and pause this video for 30 seconds and write down your answer in the comments section.

I'm really curious to hear your different answers. How is the desk the mother of the chair?

Okay, so maybe you think the desk looks older, so that's why. Or because the chair is padded, that's an upgraded generation, so it must be newer.

Maybe desks were created before chairs in the history of humanity, so that's why the desk is the mother of the chair.

I've asked this question of dozens of clients, and I always get different answers.

And they're all great answers.

And they're all wrong.

The desk is not the mother of the chair, But when I asked you that question, your mind immediately began filling in that answer. Your mind is a story creator.

It automatically creates connections between things, trying to figure out how the world works.

And when it doesn't know why something happens, it makes its best guess.

...