Unbreakable Mind & Body
Welcome to The Unbreakable Mind & Body podcast with host, Tiana Gonzalez—a multi-passionate creative, storyteller, and entrepreneur with a fierce love for movement. This is our space for powerful stories and actionable strategies to help you build mental resilience and elevate your self-care practice. Together, we’ll unlock the tools you need to create an unbreakable mind and body.
Unbreakable Mind & Body
Therapy's Gift: 5 Life-Changing Lessons
What happens when you combine pandemic isolation with heartbreak? For me, it became an unexpected catalyst for deep personal transformation. After ending a relationship just before lockdown—the first time I'd opened my heart in nearly a decade—I found myself without the usual distractions of gyms, social gatherings, or even casual coffee dates to escape the emotional aftermath. There was no outlet and that forced confrontation became my greatest teacher.
Through therapy over the course of my lifetime, I discovered five powerful strategies that not only helped me process my breakup but fundamentally changed how I navigate life's challenges. I learned to examine my inner narrative critically, questioning whether the harsh self-talk that had become my default was actually truth or simply inherited beliefs. The ability to triage my thoughts prevented anxiety spirals, allowing me to separate pandemic stress from personal heartache rather than letting them compound into overwhelming fear.
Perhaps most transformative was learning true forgiveness—especially self-forgiveness for times I hadn't trusted my intuition. This process taught me that personal evolution requires letting certain pieces of yourself "die" to make room for growth. Like shedding a layer of skin, we must sometimes release our tight grip on who we think we are to become who we're meant to be. Therapy wasn't about changing my core identity but rather developing strategies to become a healthier, more whole version of myself.
The pandemic's isolation, while painful, created the perfect conditions for this inner work. Five years later, these therapy strategies continue to shape my approach to challenges, proving that sometimes our greatest growth comes when we have no choice but to sit with our discomfort and work through it. Subscribe to hear more about transformational journeys and the strategies that make them possible.
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Disclaimer: This show is for education and entertainment purposes only. This is not intended as a replacement for therapy. Please seek out the help of a professional to assist you with your specific situation.
Welcome back to the show. This is Tiana, and today, on this episode, I want to share with you five things that I feel are super valuable, that I got from going to therapy. We are approaching the five-year anniversary of lockdown. In the beginning, it was very scary, very uncertain, and over time, as the world started to see that it was not going to be just two weeks to flatten the curve, as they said, it would be significantly longer than that. There were layers or rounds of things beginning to reopen and constant change of all the regulations. Now, we all went through it, so I don't need to go through all of that, but what I went through personally during that time was a breakup.
Speaker 1:I had been dating someone from September of 2019 until right before the lockdown. We were heading in a certain direction and once I realized like okay, we're not on the same page, I don't think I want to continue this anymore, I abruptly put a stop to it, but it was still really painful. It was one of those like almost but not quite type of situations. It was the kind of situation that I probably could have played, pretend a bit longer or settled, but ultimately it wasn't the right fit for me, but I really did. Like this person, I cared tremendously and it had been the first time I had opened my heart in about a decade. So it was really hard, but I owe it to the strategy that I learned in therapy, to my quick progress and processing of all of the pain and the emotions and the feelings that I was sorting through Now, like I said, it was a short relationship, but it was intense and it still hurt a lot, even though I was the one that chose to dead it.
Speaker 1:We couldn't see our friends, we couldn't go out to eat, we couldn't socialize in restaurants, bars, clubs, because the world was in lockdown. No family parties. It was really hard. Oh, also the big one. No gym. I just had to sit with my feelings and process and ride the waves. In some ways, it was absolutely horrible and excruciating because there was no escaping. In other ways, it was the greatest gift I could have been given, because I was forced to face everything. I was forced to deal with it. I was forced to sort things out. I spent a lot of time in nature things out. I spent a lot of time in nature. I started learning about iPhone photography. I took an Instagram marketing course that I bought online and I got into a social retail company. That was a lot of fun too, because it was all virtual, but we were a community and that was a lot of fun, and I owe it to that business for sort of propelling me into going into online business like full throttle, because that's how I found certain mentors and coaches and realized that I really loved being connected to people.
Speaker 1:I want to go through my top five favorite things about therapy and why I recommend everyone go and do the work. The first thing you get to learn strategy. It is not about changing you there's nothing inherently wrong with you but what therapy can do for you is give you strategy so that you can handle situations differently, with more tools to add to your toolbox. So one of the things that I really needed help with was examining my belief system, examining my inner monologue, my narrative, trying to understand why I was so mean to myself all the time. Trying to understand why did I constantly pick myself apart and treat myself so harshly, but I could be so kind and gentle and loving and tender to the rest of the world? Was it true, or was it just a belief that was pushed into my brain or something that I grew up in, an environment or a situation or a thought pattern that was just a part of my family lineage. They say that the first several years of your life is really where you are created and formed your personality, your beliefs, on a deep, deep, deep level, and then, superficially, it changes over time.
Speaker 1:Now, for any professional therapists that are out there, if I'm butchering the way I'm explaining this, my apologies. I am not a licensed therapist. I'm just speaking from my own anecdotal experiences and how I've put this all together. So when I was sitting in my bedroom especially the first couple of weeks of lockdown sitting in my bedroom and it was raining and cold a lot, it was the end of March, early April. We had a few fake spring days, kind of just like we do now. We've had a couple really warm days that you could go out with a light jacket on, but it was breezy and I remember in 2020, it just seemed to be gray and cold and rainy for a real long chunk of time, and then we would get a nice day and then it'd be cold and gray and rainy again, and being able to stop a thought and really sit with it and ask myself is this true? Or is this just what I keep telling myself is true? Hmm, let's think about that.
Speaker 1:The second thing that I learned in therapy that really helped me was I learned how to triage thoughts, or compartmentalize thoughts. When I was younger, I would have these tragic ideas or I would get anxiety, and things would snowball, one into the next, into the next, into the next, into the next, and before you know it I mean even in middle school and high school I would be up tossing and turning, worried about all of these things that I really shouldn't even have been concerning myself with. So when we were dealing with this lockdown situation and I was dealing with my own crappy personal life situation, I would stop and ask myself okay, is the anxiety I'm feeling real because of this global crisis, or is this more localized? And this is something I'm feeling because I'm kind of thrown off of my center right now, because I'm emotional. And again, I sat with it, I thought about it. And again I sat with it, I thought about it, I journaled on it.
Speaker 1:Therapy also taught me how to find new ways to see things. There have been many situations in the recent years where I am in a moment and I can simultaneously be present in the moment and also almost like a film or like an outer body experience be like a fly on the wall, examining myself in the moment. I could be having a conversation with someone at the gym and while we're talking and I'm watching the body language and I'm feeling the energy and I'm saying things, it's almost like I would say something and then in my brain I can also simultaneously go oh, that was a cool way to put that Good job and still be present and plugged in and in tune with the person that I'm speaking to. I try not to let myself get distracted too much, but I do think that I have a bit of an attention issue and that's definitely something that happens from time to time.
Speaker 1:The fourth and most important thing that I've learned from going to therapy is is forgiveness, and not just forgiving others, but truly forgiving myself, most especially, forgiving myself for not trusting my God, not listening to my intuition in the past. Now I don't even question it. My intuition is always spot on. Humans are predictable, human behavior is very predictable, and if you work in a capacity where you are of service in some type of industry I'm a trainer and I help people with their nutrition as well. You know the signs. You can see it coming from a mile away. The fifth, most powerful and still most evolving thing is that I've learned how to become a better version of myself over and over and over and over again.
Speaker 1:You have to actually release pieces of you, or let certain pieces of you die, leave them behind, in order for you to get to that next level. It's almost like shedding a layer of skin, and a lot of times we hold on so tightly to our identity or to our beliefs or to who we think we are, that we're not willing to let it go. Seventh grade was a lot of fun, right, right, it was the first year that I was in a school where we like changed classes and had a different mix of people from science to math to English to gym and it was fun. But at some point the school year ends and you have to move on in life and you have to go to the next grade on in life and you have to go to the next grade. And that happens also in our professional lives.
Speaker 1:As you advance in your career, sometimes you have to leave certain habits behind. You have to leave certain things behind you, have to leave certain ways behind you because you need to be a more refined version of yourself, or a more managerial side of yourself, or if you no longer work for a company and you're an entrepreneur, well, now there's a whole new set of parameters and requirements that you need to operate in in order for you to be successful. So this is all in your best interest. It's not that you're pretending to be something or someone. You're not. It's just that next version of you. And so all of these different ways of thinking or these different items that I brought up examining your beliefs and your narrative, learning how to compartmentalize when you're in the heat of the moment, finding new ways to see things, forgiveness and then becoming a better version of yourself All of this is what really helped me to get through what I was feeling during this really interesting once in a lifetime time that we all know as the pandemic, where all of us were home.
Speaker 1:We were missing our friends, we were missing our extended family, we were missing connection. We were stuck with our thoughts, with our streaming services and our Zoom calls and our virtual classrooms for our kids and our at-home workouts which, oh, by the way, I have a video somewhere. I actually had a short barbell and bumper plates and I was snatching in my living room trying not to let the bar slip out of my hand and crash into the credenza that had all of our alcohol in it. So, yeah, there's that. None of us miss that time. I'm grateful for it because I love the transformation that I went through and the people that I was able to connect with, virtually who I'm still connected to now.
Speaker 1:So if you are on the fence about therapy and you found yourself saying I don't want to change, it's not to change who you are. It's to give you strategy so you can become a better version of yourself, so you can improve the quality of your life and the life of those around you and the life of those that you love the most. Because when you do work on yourself, when you care for yourself, when you work to make yourself happy, healthy and whole, that is how you make the world better. If you are looking for help with your specific situation, please get the help from a qualified professional, and if you found this episode helpful, please subscribe to the show by hitting that follow button. I would greatly appreciate it and I'll see you next time.