More Than Anxiety

Ep 109 - Beyond Anxiety: Unmasking Defense Mechanisms with Michelle May

• Megan Devito • Episode 109

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What do you know about Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP)
Join Michelle M May LPC, LLC, and me for an in-depth exploration of anxiety, defense mechanisms, and the healing process. Michelle is a leading expert in ISTDP and a faculty member at the Washington School of Psychiatry. In this episode, she shares her unique insights and practical strategies for overcoming anxiety. 

You do not want to miss the BEST NEWS you're ever going to get at the 26-28 minute mark! 

You'll learn:

  • How ISTDP works: How this innovative therapy approach combines elements of CBT, DBT, and narrative therapy to address mental health challenges.
  • The complex relationship between thoughts, emotions, and defense mechanisms: Discover how to distinguish between these elements and uncover the root causes of anxiety.
  • The importance of personal identity and mental health: Learn how to break self-limiting beliefs so you can heal.
  • Practical strategies for overcoming anxiety: Gain valuable insights and tools to reduce stress, improve your mood, and love your life.

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Visit Michelle's website.
Purchase Michelle's Book: What I Couldn't Tell My Therapist: The Truths We Told To Heal Our Lives

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You know you're overwhelmed, burned out, sick to death of work but also trying to do everyting for everyone at home. TAKE THIS QUIZ to find out why you're so overwhelmed and what to do about it.

Megan Devito:

Welcome to the More Than Anxiety Podcast. I'm Megan Devito and I help ambitious women break out of the anxiety cycle that keeps them frustrated and stuck. Get ready for a lighthearted approach that will change what you think, how you feel and what you believe about yourself. This podcast is full of simple steps, a lot of truth, talk and inspiration to take action. So you walk away feeling confident, and ready to live. Let's get to it.

Megan Devito:

Hey there, welcome to episode 109 of the More Than Anxiety podcast. My name is Megan. I am thrilled to have you here with me today to meet Michelle May. Michelle is a psychotherapist, an author, a trainer, a supervisor, a speaker. She is the head of the Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy Program at New Washington School of Psychiatry out in Washington DC, and she's a dynamic therapist. What she does is she provides psychotherapy to adult individuals and couples at her private practice out in Virginia. She also offers trainings to health practices, universities and organizations, as well as individual and group consultative supervision. She's the author of an upcoming book that is coming out on the date that this episode drops, october 8th 2024. And the book is called "What I Couldn't Tell my Therapist: The Truths we Told to Heal Our Lives."

Megan Devito:

She is amazing. She offers so much hope. We talk about labels, we talk about defense mechanisms and how we keep ourselves safe by not getting to the root of the problem and how, when you're willing to go there, when you're willing to get to the root of the problem, you can heal and you can peel that label off your shirt and get on with your life and have amazing things happen for you. I love this episode. She has an open invitation to come back anytime that she wants, so I think you're gonna really love it too. Enjoy Everybody.

Megan Devito:

Thank you for listening today. I want to go ahead and get started and just let Michelle introduce herself to you so that you can know more about her and why I'm so excited to have her on this week's episode.

Michelle M May:

Hi everyone. My name is Michelle M May. I'm a licensed professional counselor or psychotherapist with a private practice for adults and couples right outside of Washington DC, in Arlington, Virginia. I also teach and chair at the Washington School of Psychiatry in the Intensive, short-term Dynamic Psychotherapy Program, which is quite a mouthful. I often just refer to it as intensive dynamic therapy, but that is my specialty and I do it with individuals and couples, and I'm also a soon to be author.

Megan Devito:

This is so exciting. This is so exciting. So how did you end up teaching in this place and what is your background? What brought you here?

Michelle M May:

So I went to graduate school here and, for those that are listening, who have an LPC or even an LCSW, know that where you go to graduate school and start getting your hours is usually where you want to plant yourself because of all the regulations and accumulation of hours. So, thankfully, I also love where I am in Arlington, Virginia. But I got into my specialty after my last semester of graduate school I had a professor that specialized in this weird type of therapy called intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy and I remember thinking like why is it called that? That's so long, that's such a mouthful. But as soon as he described it to us and he even showed us some of his work on videotape as he described it to us and he even showed us some of his work on videotape I was sold. I was like this is what I've been looking for.

Michelle M May:

I went through all of graduate school without finding like, really what resonated with me, and then when I found ISTDP or intensive dynamic therapy, I knew I had found my clinical home. So then, in order to you know, most, most specialties require postgraduate training, and so the Washington School of Psychiatry was local to me and offered a three-year postgraduate training in ISTDP, and so it requires a lot more training than you know. Normally, we're used to like three-day trainings and this, this or, like you know, a week or two weeks, but this is, um, at least a three year extra commitment for for good reason. And then, um, and then, after I uh graduated from the three-year program, they asked if I would come back to teach, which I did, and now I wound up as chair as well. I absolutely love it.

Megan Devito:

Amazing, amazing. So what is different about this type of therapy versus, I had someone on just a few weeks ago who talked about EMDR. We've talked about narrative therapy. I love hearing all the different ways that therapists help people. So what's different about this type of therapy?

Michelle M May:

Yeah, it's so cool that we do have all of these different ways right CBT, dbt, emdr, blah, blah, blah, narrative therapy, all these things.

Michelle M May:

ISTDP is really this way to work with someone that trains you to track, moment to moment to moment, what's going on within the patient and what might be best for them. So I actually might have a session that looks a lot more like CBT, or I might have a session that looks a lot more like DBT or narrative therapy. So it's in our program. We're really taught to psychodiagnose each and every moment to see what is actually best right here, what am I seeing? And it also is all about really cracking into the unconscious, and in order to do so, we have to be very well- versed in seeing barriers that people put up in front of you. So we're like defense mechanism experts and reading unconscious anxiety experts, and we actually videotape our work too. It's part of the training because we are you know, you are monitoring every moment. A sigh is a big indication of something, a shift in this and that, and so it's very an intricate way of working and a very powerful way of working, but also brings in other methods of therapy.

Megan Devito:

Wow, okay. So I have to admit, I give you all these questions and all of a sudden my brain's like okay now I have a million more questions.

Michelle M May:

Anywhere you want to go is fine with me.

Megan Devito:

Because I'm like, okay, so now we're getting into the sneaky things that I think so many people don't realize, that we do have all these behaviors and that when you notice the sigh, when you notice maybe they pause or they get defensive, which I am so guilty of so many times. I'm like, hey, but when we have those behaviors, just picking them out in the moment, how does that? How is that helpful? Because I mean, I have a guess, but I wonder what your answer is.

Michelle M May:

Sure. So, for example, let's say I have a client that comes in and they're like I've been really depressed ever since I started law school. It's especially this one. I'm just making this up, this isn't a real question, go ahead. I've really had this really hard time with this professor who, I think, hates me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah.

Michelle M May:

Now, one really important element of therapy is always tracking that we're working on a problem that the client is creating for themselves, even if they don't realize it Right. So then we would say to this client you know well what, what is happening inside of you that you would like my help with. And so maybe this client says well, you know, I tend to kind of think a lot of people don't like me and ruminate about it. So I'm already understanding that this client ruminates, right, that's one of their defense mechanisms. And maybe what I've witnessed in her so far is that she keeps doing this with her hands. She keeps clenching her hands, squeezing her hands together as she's talking. Now, this is a certain type of anxiety that has a lot of different names, but I'll keep it simple for now called voluntary muscle anxiety, which means she has the optimal level of anxiety in this moment to approach what she normally avoids. So I. Then the same thing goes with a sigh. So I, then the same thing goes with a sigh. A sigh is also an indication that there's tension around the intercostal muscles of our like lungs and thoracic region, and it is like a good indication that anxiety is being discharged through the optimal channels. But let's say, all of a sudden I asked her so what exactly happened in this law school class with this professor? And then all of a sudden I noticed her like flop her arm down to the sofa, loss of facial tension, and then start to get a little spacey. Those would be indicators that her anxiety has actually just shot up above what we call her threshold, and something about what I just asked is triggering essentially so much unconscious material that her anxiety pops above threshold. And I'll regulate her anxiety back until I start seeing some more of that like tension in her body and all that kind of stuff.

Michelle M May:

So that, just to go back to your original question, why do these signals matter? One of the ways that it matters is it helps me understand when to hit the brake pedal, when to hit the gas pedal. They're also like the beeps of a metal detector, right. So if we're looking for unconscious feelings and material that this client doesn't even know is there but is driving her suffering, right then I can't see it either, but what I can see are these signals and indications that something is going on below the surface. I can't know exactly what it is, of course, but I can know. Ah, interesting, this subject that we just changed to is eliciting an increase of defense mechanisms or an increase of anxiety signaling. Huh, interesting. Let's dive in there and see if we can get to the root of what's causing this person's suffering. So that is so cool.

Megan Devito:

It's so cool. I'm just picturing one of those. Um, if you watch like a profiler show and how they'll watch their, you know what I mean. Almost like criminal profiling, where you're watching it and they say, well, did you see how they moved this way? And all of a sudden they're like that's the guy.

Michelle M May:

Oh my goodness, thankfully, as an ICDB therapist, we are your ally, right, right right.

Michelle M May:

We are here for you, you know so. For example, anytime I see a defense mechanism in a client that I know is contributing to their suffering, I'm going to tell them. So they're going to learn what I see. We're going to see it together so that they can put those defenses aside and face what they normally avoid. I'll give another example.

Michelle M May:

Let's say this client with the professor that she thinks hates her goes to another therapist and this therapist helps her reframe her thinking right, really common and often very effective tool and says well, what if you think of the professor's lack of calling on you in class, about the fact that he's overwhelmed? Right, what if you change the narrative so it's not about you? Again, that could be great, but what I usually find is that that's a short-lived or barely helpful band-aid, because the question is what is causing the original thought in this client's mind that her professor hates her? Is that right? So if I don't get to the actual cause of those thoughts and why they're popping up all over the place for this client, then her reframing tool oh, I mean, she's just gonna have to keep doing that and keep doing that and keep it's exhausting. So can we actually treat the real cost of why that would be yeah, I love that.

Megan Devito:

So really getting to the root of the problem, which I think so many times we want to skip over because it is painful and often we don't know what it is and it's stuck in there somewhere, but being able to use how people are moving to say what was that? Or maybe they wouldn't even realize that it's there.

Michelle M May:

They're using, right Like. I'll give another example. So let's say this client tells me she wants my help with, yeah, she thinks so many people hate her, but she wants to deal with the stress that she has in this law class with this one professor. And so great, I have a specific example to work with. That is always key, because if we just have generalities, we're going to get these general results. So the more specific we can get, the more specific our outcomes can be, the more powerful they can be. So, for example, I might say aha, so what are these thoughts you're having about your professor? Right, let's get an idea of?

Michelle M May:

In my mind I'm thinking how do her defenses work? She might say, well, he never looks at me, he doesn't call on me, and when he did call on me, he moved on really quickly. I think he hates me and I've been really depressed since I started this class. So I might ask for a first reality testing. So is it really in your best understanding that this professor really doesn't call on you as much as other people? And she says, no, genuinely, like I've looked, I've watched, he really doesn't. I don't get it. So then I'll say, okay, so we have a fact professor's not calling on her. That's the trigger. My professor is not giving me the attention I want, right?

Michelle M May:

So then I ask her what feelings do you have towards this professor for not giving you the attention you want? And she might say well, I feel like he hates me and I say so. That's your thought that's plaguing you and making you depressed. But what's your feeling towards him? And all of a sudden, this client starts to learn oh, I don't know my feelings, I've just been like a thought factory rather than like in touch with how I feel. So then we might say, yeah, so what feelings are there? And then she sighs right, which means great, because I blocked her first defense, which was to use thoughts to get rid of her feelings, and those thoughts are what's making her depressed. So then, when I move that defense aside, or when she moves that defense aside, I should say we get a little rise of anxiety. Great, because it's still not too much anxiety. She's still within her threshold. So then she might say gosh, I have no idea. Great, would you like to? So these thoughts don't have to come and drown out your feelings and make you depressed. Would you like to really know what's underneath? Well, that's, that's revolutionary for most people, because they didn't think there was underneath, right, it's like what do you mean? So that's so hope- building.

Michelle M May:

And then we work. I keep asking, yeah, so what feelings? And maybe her anxiety is rising as I'm approaching those feelings, because those feelings, maybe eventually she says I think I'm angry with him, but I've never been good with my anger. Right now, yeah, so then we start Okay, yeah, so how do you experience that anger physically in the body? Well, I don't Exactly. So let's help you get that into the body, so your anxiety can come down and feel comfortable with anger in the body, so you don't have to have this factory of thoughts that make you depressed and skew reality for you.

Michelle M May:

And maybe, as we explore her anger, we realized, yeah, every time her mother made her angry, her mother couldn't handle it and so her mother would go away. So she equated anger towards mother with being left. Yeah, right, and maybe this is where it gets even deeper when she was angry with mother. Right, because anger comes with aggressive urges. Anger comes with force and power. It doesn't mean we'll act on them, right? And so maybe she imagined biting mom, right, let's think she's four years old. Maybe she did bite mom once, but now there's guilt in there too, right. And so we kind of like follow it back to its origin stories and help the body experience what it normally avoided, but in a safe and regulated body, and it takes all of the gasoline out of the engine that was propelling her thoughts that were making her depressed. So now she doesn't even need to do reframing, she can just sit there in class and feel her anger towards her professor for not calling on her enough, and life gets much easier.

Megan Devito:

I love that you brought that up, because it's so, I say this, I say this all the time. But when I'm coaching with somebody and I'll say okay, what's what's, what are you thinking about? You know what's going on? Why? Why are you so stressed? And they do. They always go like I'm stressed because look at my calendar and I'm like, yeah, that for sure, that would be stressful. And when we start saying I'm like, well, how do you feel? And they'll say bad. Bad, like what? I'm like I don't know, it's just bad. But it doesn't just get so knotted up. Because I think even, and maybe maybe especially, but for myself, working through my own anxiety, back when I was anxious all the time, was realizing that, oh, this isn't just anxiety, this is, this is guilt, this is shame, this is, you know, this is defense mechanisms right? It was like all these things that are just like this knotted up mess of emotions that I was like,

Michelle M May:

Yeah, this. Rght, right. And people need help pulling that apart, right? So, for example, usually 99% of the time, shame isn't a feeling, it's a defense mechanism, right? For example, let's bring back to this woman in law school, right? Well, I just feel such shame because clearly he thinks I'm stupid, right? Yeah, no, that's actually what we call a defensive affect, or an emotion being used as a defense against her rage towards this professor that won't pay attention to her. So we would actually block the shame, we'd actually move it aside. So, you're absolutely right. We have all of this confusion around what's an emotion, what's a trigger, what's a defense mechanism and cause anxiety is not a feeling either. Anxiety is a symptom of a buried core feeling. So, yes, you're absolutely right, such a mess sometimes that we have to it is.

Megan Devito:

It is. It's a big mess. It's just a giant. Yeah, like what do we call it? Just a nest of just emotions everywhere. It's so funny, right, and I feel like we're at this, really interesting, I think positive place in history or culture or life or wherever we are right now.

Megan Devito:

There's so much good energy going into getting mental health help. You know, seeking therapy. You know we've taken all of the like the weirdness out of it, or you know I can remember I'm old enough to remember when people say, oh, are you going to a psychiatrist? And people not knowing the difference between a psychiatrist or a therapist or a psychologist, but if you went, or took any medicine or you got any help, there was this whole like, oh, she's crazy, and we've just gotten so far past that. But it almost seems, from looking on social media especially, that now we've become our own personal experts and we are diagnosing ourselves with so many things because we can get on in Google, which is terrible and say, oh well, obviously I have this, this, this, this and this. What is your opinion on this because I think that there's a yay, we're learning about ourselves, but, right, I mean there it's a mixed bag

Michelle M May:

Right, because there sometimes we're learning accurate information about ourselves. Yay, but a lot of times we are actually applying something incorrectly to ourselves and there's no way we can do better because we just don't know. So it's really a mix and you know, a label. If we look at like, oh, I found out that I have anxiety, or I have generalized anxiety, or I have ADHD, or whatever it might be, a label helps us get rid of shame. But that's unfortunate, because we never should have had shame to begin with, and a label can sometimes then also be used as a defense itself.

Michelle M May:

For example, I hear this all the time Well, it's my ADHD, well, it's my anxiety, and so therefore I am unable to do X, y or Z, and sometimes that's true, and most often it's not, and so it is also sometimes that label a defense against ownership and responsibility and our own internal power. But it really depends on every single person I've ever seen has done something a little different from the person that came before them to social media or Google or whatever, and truly get tailored information, which is why it's so important to go to somebody who's well-trained and understands how to diagnose the difference say this is very common the difference between anxiety and ADHD. Right, because they have a massively overlapping presentation. And so, yeah, it's a real mixed bag, because some people find freedom, and good freedom and helpful freedom from information they learn, and some people get stuck and they end up going down a rabbit hole that they don't even realize is a rabbit hole.

Megan Devito:

Yeah, and then I can't help but wonder if they have gone on and they have, you know, with good intention, figured out, oh, I have some characteristics of this or have some characteristics of this, and they've decided. I think there's so much damage in my own personal experience of saying I have anxiety and how much you don't do, how much you just say, oh, I'm not going to do that, because it makes me anxious, and to be able to say, well, what if you weren't anxious, would you do it? Would you want to do it? Well, yes, but I can't. And I'm like, oh, you could, no you can. We just limit? It feels like there's so many limits out there. And, yes, labels, but also, do we all want to have a label? I'm just not sure. I mean, that's just me thinking out loud.

Michelle M May:

Exactly, do we need a label to explain our behavior? We really don't, but we do it because we're afraid of judgments of others. So part of it is being able to stand on our own and really say okay. So, for example, I don't have generalized anxiety disorder, but I certainly have anxiety, right, I don't know a person on this planet who doesn't have some form of anxiety.

Michelle M May:

And so I remember, you know, when I started doing more podcasts and, recently, radio, it's like my anxiety was barely tolerable, like it was intense, it was higher than I've experienced it, and I don't even know how long. And if I had said, no, this is my anxiety, I can't do this, I wouldn't be here, right? So I can thankfully say no, I just needed to be so gentle with myself during that time, but still, a nice gentle push forward so that I can really come in to this power that we all have inside of ourselves. We all have capacities that we have not even tapped into yet, but it's also true that some of us are just too tired because we've been pushing ourselves in not a gentle way for so long, and so it's a fine line to walk.

Megan Devito:

It is, it is. It's been very interesting and I have gone down that rabbit hole. I mean, I've gone down that. Is this anxiety? Is this ADHD? Let me find out how many things I match on both. I'm like, oh, look at that, yeah, yeah,

Michelle M May:

Yeah, yeah, it's in graduate school we were going over the DSM, you know the Diagnostic and Cystical Manual of Mental Disorders, and you know all of us were paging through this, going oh my God, I have this, oh my God, I have this. And my professor was like that's called medical student disorder, where every single thing you see, you think you have right, because if I look up narcissistic personality disorder, I'm going to hit at least one of the criteria Right, and so yeah, like you said oh my God, then do I have NPD?

Michelle M May:

No, no, but we do have a little bit of everything, and we're so afraid of realizing the complexities of ourselves too, that we sometimes search for neuro definitions. So it that's why it's so important to talk to someone who can get to know you specifically, rather than just finding everything online.

Megan Devito:

I love that you brought this up because it brought another question to mind. I see so many people talking about well, I'm neurodivergent and I look at them like, mmhmm. I'm like, but what I like, is there actually a neurotypical or is it a spectrum? I don't know. I have thoughts, but I don't know, because I'm not trained in any of this.

Michelle M May:

It's a humongous spectrum. So if I have somebody and I'm not a specialist in autism or anything like that, so I want to make that clear too it's a huge spectrum. And again, if I have somebody that comes in to me and they say they're neurodivergent, my whole thing is I just want to know exactly what they are talking about. What do you experience? When does this come up for you? And then, through the data that the two of us observe together, how do they relate to what they refer to as kind of being neurodivergent? When does that come up for them in conversation with me? How does that play into the presenting problem? For you know why they're seeking my help. So I'm going to really try to understand it on an individual level, because people now, like you said, have this. This label comes up a lot and it could be very helpful and it could be very detrimental, and it's somewhere all the way in between. So I am more interested in the individual and how they are using it. Does it help, hurt them if it helps them here, or does it hurt them there? Is it some mix of in between? So that's really the most important thing to me. You know, it reminds me. You know, again, all details are changed for confidentiality.

Michelle M May:

My previous example was made up, but now I'm thinking of someone specific. They had a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder and when they know what, they were in therapy with me and they're no longer qualified for it. They definitely did when they came in, but they no longer did, and so I had this conversation with them. I said, hey, you know, on your insurance invoice it's no longer accurate. Are you ready to take it off? And they said no, this is who I am. I'm so attached to this diagnosis, and so it's like then that in and of itself becomes something very important. And then we worked with that and then I think it was a couple, maybe a month later, they said yeah, I'm ready to, I'm ready to, you know. And so that's a little bit more of what I'm interested in for each individual person and their identification with a certain label, whether it's accurate or not.

Megan Devito:

I think you maybe just unintentionally dropped the greatest little bottle of hope on people that you don't even have to have generalized anxiety disorder forever. It can be gone.

Michelle M May:

Oh absolutely. No, this is not a lifelong uh-uh.

Megan Devito:

his, no, thank you yeah yeah, it's not like it's something. You have brown hair, which we can also change, but yes, but yeah, it's. Or your eye color maybe is a better example, but yeah, it's not. It can be temporary, like a broken arm, oh, exactly, exactly right.

Michelle M May:

If you get to the root of what's causing the symptoms that make up a diagnosis, you absolutely can change it, especially something like generalized anxiety disorder or adjustment disorder with anxious components or whatever that might be, even depression. Absolutely, absolutely.

Megan Devito:

Yeah, I hope everybody heard that because that's very important, because so many people just feel, I think, trapped by a diagnosis, or trapped by how they feel and they don't know what to do with it. They just are like, well, this is going to be me for the rest of my life, and it's not exactly.

Michelle M May:

Well, I think a very unfortunate thing is that it's very hard to find providers nowadays that know how to get to the root of a problem. So you know, you do have people that go to therapy well-meaning therapists. All they want to do is help, but they didn't either learn about or have access to certain types of training that would help them target the source and therefore, you know, have the symptom presentation slowly disintegrate. So I mean, the same thing goes for like borderline personality disorder and things that people think they can, you know, just need to live with forever. Those things certainly take longer on average to treat. But yeah, getting to the source is so important.

Megan Devito:

That is amazing. I mean, that is so much hope and I really want to be able to bring that to people just to say, hey, it's going to get better. You know there are, there are therapists to help you, there are coaches that can help you create different routines and habits. Like you got so much backup, but you have to ask for help. So you have to ask for help. Yeah, you can't sit there and just say, well, I'm putting all of these little hello, my name is anxious or whatever it is down your shirt. You have to be willing to ask for it. So I know you have a book coming out and I know that that is going to be a great way for people to get some help.

Michelle M May:

So tell us about that, tell us where we can find it, what it's about Sure Um, the book is called, "hat I Couldn't Tell my Therapist and you can buy it anywhere you normally buy your books.

Michelle M May:

The e-book is also available and it will be published on October 8th, so we are coming up fast. People learn that the things that they usually hide from themselves and other people can actually be the key to their transformation. So it is a intertwining story with three different patients, one of which is myself, and so you have my story, and then the other two people, who are called Emma and Walter. I am their therapist and all three of us go through our own journeys of uncovering our defense mechanisms, facing the truth, dealing with our anxiety. So really, everything I've described here so far today you're going to see in so much more live and living color in what I couldn't tell my therapist. So it really helps you dive into the work and, like you, basically join us in our intensive psychotherapy sessions where we're confronting things that we have hidden from ourselves for decades and decades.

Megan Devito:

My daughter's going to school right now to get her MSW, then her birthday is October 4th, so I'm like, oh, she's getting a late birthday gift this year, yay, yes. So how do people connect with you? Where can they learn more about?

Michelle M May:

you Sure? Well, you can find me on my website www. michellemmayLPC. com. LPC, which stands for licensed professional counselor, may. And then you can also find me on Instagram, which is also michellemmaylpc. On my Instagram page. It's quite different from what you see with normal mental health, uh practitioners, I'm really uh teaching people about defense mechanisms and how to recognize them in certain environments. Uh, so if you want to learn more about how to recognize these metal detector beeps like we talked about today, uh, definitely head there to find out more. Perfect.

Megan Devito:

And I will link both of those in the podcast show notes so that people can find you and connect with you. This has been such great information and it's so hopeful and just for people to know that there is. You know you can get to the root. There actually is a root, and now I'm going to be on the lookout for defense mechanisms in myself all day long.

Megan Devito:

And already knowing that I can tell when my defenses go up.

Megan Devito:

I'm going to be like oh, there's another one.

Michelle M May:

Just remember to be kind and gentle, as you do so.

Megan Devito:

Yeah, it's there for a reason, right? So thank you so much for joining me today. This has just been an honor and so much fun.

Megan Devito:

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the More Than Anxiety podcast. Before you go, be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And, of course, if you're ready to feel calm, to stop overthinking and have a lot more fun, you can go to the show notes, click the link and talk to me about coaching. I'll talk to you soon.