What Would Dr. Meyers Do?

Confronting others is often feared and not always easy, but it does not have to be equated with conflict or hostility. It is a necessary aspect of communication that can result in getting your needs met. Dr. Meyers offers an empowering perspective and elements of delivery that facilitates the ability to communicate effectively.

A story of emotional and physical abuse from an adult who experienced a fearful sibling relationship and her process towards self-care and self-preservation. Rachael cut off her abusive brother and shares her path towards reunification and repair. She shares her experience through childhood and adulthood and her ability to heal through shifting her perspective of her sibling as someone who needed help.

There are long-term implications of being raised by Holocaust survivors. Gloria LeBeaux, LCSW reflects on her challenges around vulnerability, safety, and caregiving in her youth. She addresses how she has shifted her identity from being a child of a Holocaust survivors and all that entails to being so much more: a social worker, friend, and mother. The events of October 7th present new challenges to living in a world where safety feels compromised.

Finding a therapist can feel daunting. What is important when seeking therapy? Dr. Meyers and Dr. Brady discuss typical anxieties about starting therapy, and considerations for choosing the right therapist. They address types of therapy and approaches, and the training and credentials that one should consider when entering treatment. Do you want to know what a good fit looks like between a client and a therapist? Tune in to find out and ease the experience of choosing the right therapist for you.

Frustrated with not being able to help his physically ill client feel better, my guest contends with his own history of helplessness with his father who died at a young age. Understanding his countertransference helps the clinician get grounded and set realistic expectations for himself and subsequently his client.

Are you overwhelmed with work, even if you love it? Do you find it hard to balance work and personal life? Is it our human right to disconnect from and NOT engage in work-related electronic communications during non-work hours? How can you create a boundary to advance your personal needs? Join Dr. Meyers and her guests in a lively discussion about the Right to Disconnect Laws. It's time for the U.S. to adopt Euopean laws that protect the well-being of employees.

Join us for another very personal account of sibling abuse as Dr. Meyers speaks with Jennifer, a survivor of sibling abuse. In this poignant episode, learn about how Jennifer navigated her early experience with her brother, how it impacted her intimate relationships, and how she continues to try to grapple with her sibling relationship.

What would you want in a therapist? What does it mean to be a modern therapist? Dr. Meyers speaks with with two dynamic, flexible, and innovative therapists who embrace genuiness in their work and recognize the need to be adaptive in their approach given the world we're living in. If you think therapy should incorporate the trends of our times and acclimate to the needs of a new generation of clients, then tune in! They also cover the very real experience of burnout across all professions and offer practical, sustainable advice on living a more manageable, restorative lifestyle.

How is it for you to provide or receive feedback? So many of us have difficulty doing this: we don't want to create hurt feelings or have hurt feelings. However, feedback is essential to growth. Feedback Informed Treatment (FIT) is an evidence-based practice that involves routinely soliciting constructive feedback from clients about the treatment and their experience of the clinician. This week, Elizabeth Irias, an expert in FIT will discuss how this process works, her experience with client responses, and how she manages countertransference.

There is a lot of pressure these days to be "woke"; to be culturally sensitive, culturally competent, and culturally humble. What does this look like as a clinician? Join Dr. Meyers in an exploration of self-awareness and self-reflection and a few simple tools to work towards inclusion and culturally humble practice.

We hear how important self-care is, but how do you take the first steps towards making sure you take care of YOU? Self-care leads to self-compassion, even though you may think that self-care requires self-compassion! A true practitioner of self-care, Alina Haitz, had to become an expert in this area to address her mental health diagnosis, and along the way, she learned self-acceptance and self-love. Who doesn't want that for themselves?!

Being a target of sibling abuse certainly takes its toll. But there are contributing factors that help to mitigate the long-lasting effects. What are they? Some of these protective factors occur during childhood and some require survivors to be pro-active in adulthood to regain their sense of self. There is hope. Take a listen to feed yourself or nourish your clients or friends.

Dr. Steve Burghardt, LCSW, an activist and professor of social work talks about his committment to valuing social workers. He shares his thoughts fueling his book The End of Social Work and challenges the expectation that social workers labor under intolerable working conditions and financial strain. Dr. Burghardt advocates for the increased pay of social workers and addresses the leadership failures that create a culture in which they should handle burnout through self-care rather than collective action.

We are facing a mental health crisis. Children are plagued with anxiety, depression and chronic school absenteeism. This is resulting in social and emotional delays in addition to academic issues. The pandemic has increased social anxiety. Social pressure is allayed by, yet increases social isolation. Dr. Carrie Sollin talks about the short-term and long-term impact of this crisis and offers individual tools, familial, and school-based approaches to shift a generation of troubled youth.

Hajrah Beig, first generation Pakistani-American embraces her heritage but can find it tricky bridging the culture she identifies with at home and the culture she finds at school and the greater environment. As she talks about family norms and expectations, contending with oppression, and her experiences navigating bias we can all learn to be more culturally humble.

Most of us are aware of the stereotypes associated with the child welfare system and the realities of this system's limitations. Two BSW graduates discuss their experiences navigating the demonstrated lack of professionalism, engagement failures, and interventions that contradicted the social work values they were learning in the classroom. Contending with a punitive approach to family management, they worked to adapt and thrive in that environment, with a few lessons to offer along the way.

Sibling aggression and abuse are the most common forms of family violence yet these impacting and traumatic experiences are still not being wholly addressed through policy, advocacy, and systemic change. There is hope! Learn about an Initiative (SAARA) that is breaking ground in the realm of sibling abuse awareness and change. If you have experienced sibling abuse this episode is sure to resonate with you. If you are in need of resources to address sibling abuse, this episode is for you. If you want to learn more about the impact of sibling relationships, especially when there is non-normative conflict, this episode is for you. And, if you want to learn more about what is being done to advance this social issue and what what you can do, you will learn how.

Dr. Meyers discusses the state of, and fear of vulnerability in a way that most anyone can relate. She makes the case that allowing oneself to be vulnerable is imperative to growth. Social workers also must experience vulnerability to develop professionally and also to be aligned with clients.

Are you in co-parenting distress? Do you work with someone who has major conflict with their partner around parenting choices. Separation and divorce create complications for children. Brook Olsen, a high-conflict divorce expert talks about processes to help navigate stressful and destructive communication and cultivate a healthier environment for the children involved.

Adolescence is hard! We know that first hand. The pressures of this time of development impact parents and their desire to protect or punish youth as an effort to influence behavior. Adolescents struggle with impulse control, the need for immediate gratification and experimentation as a means towards growth. How does this impact social media use - and how does social media use and other peer and societal pressures impact behaviors? A social worker shares her expertise working with adolescents and gets real about her own challenges with her teen daughters.