Meet Dr. Anderson! - 6.19.2025

HI there!  Welcome to Psychwaves, where we review emerging and holistic treatments in psychiatry.  I’m your host, Dr. Teresa Anderson, owner, operator, and practicing psychiatrist of The Anderson Clinic in Cincinnati, Ohio.  And today, we’re going to do a brief introduction on our background and why we do what we do.

I did my medical school training at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, and residency in adult psychiatry at The University Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio.  Part of our training required classes and in-hospital work and part of our training was in the outpatient clinics doing psychotherapy and medication management for folks who had mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.

While I was in the outpatient clinic working part-time and doing my training at the VA, I fell in love with my work, with patients who had posttraumatic stress disorder.  What I came to realize over time, was that the trauma, or multiple traumas as it were, that nearly killed them, weren’t what the patients were actually suffering from.  The suffering arose around the stories they TOLD themselves about the trauma:  what it meant to them, how they judged themselves, the lens through which they saw themselves and the world around them because of that trauma.  What they perceived what others like friends, families, coworkers, or even their communities thought of them.

Yes, of course their nervous systems are absolutely functioning in a state of high alert or fight-or-flight.  In many instances, medications were the only things to decrease the hyperarousal of their overworked nervous systems.  But during weekly psychotherapy visits, they discovered so many ways in which  these false beliefs about themselves played out.  How they had even structured their entire lives around the lies that their brains had told them for years!

You see, our brains lie to us.  ON a DAILY basis.   The same brain that tells you to slow down when you see a yellow light because a red light is coming in traffic, is the exact same brain that tells you you’re stupid, worthless, when you make a very normal and human mistake.  It’s the same brain that tells you, “hey!  That extra piece of chocolate cake isn’t going to make you gain 5#.  It’s your birthday!  Calories don’t count on your birthday!”

Sorting out fact from fiction is hard when the same brain that is filtering information is incredibly bias.  We can learn to challenge ourselves and the lies we tell ourselves through counseling with a trusted advisor, or psychotherapy with a mental health professional.  It’s easier for someone who is outside of the situation and has no skin in the game so to speak to be more objective than your incredibly biased brain.

You need space and time in order to be more objective with yourself.  When you journal or participate in talk therapy, you put a bit of separation between you and the situation.  You gain more objectivity by putting a little bit of distance between what happened and the story you tell yourself about what happened.   Not to mention, you give yourself time to help your brain sort out what it believes about you based on the story you’re telling yourself!  Frequently, reality and perception are two VERY VERY different things.

I love what I do!  Because I love people’s stories.  I love hearing about their backgrounds, hearing about their relationships with themselves and the world around them, and how things that happen in their worlds change that narrative.  I love being a part of changing the narrative from incredibly biased and negative to realistic, and hopefully…eventually, more positive.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not a PollyAnna by any stretch of the imagination but I have seen people scrape themselves up off the floor when they had no hope and nothing left, and turn their life’s story around because they had someone in their lives who believed that they could.  And I’ve seen it enough times that I truly believe it can happen with regularity.

So throughout these podcasts, we’re going to be discussing a variety of issues:  some basic info about particular mental health diagnoses and conditions, various forms of therapy, current varieties of treatments both medical and non-medical, and up and coming cutting edge treatments in the field.  We’ll even chat about what you can do to best serve yourself and your brain when you’re working on changing your own mind.

If you find this podcast intriguing, please like and subscribe!  This is Dr. Teresa Anderson with psych waves, signing off for now, with one of my favorite sayings I’ve collected over the years:

“You can’t solve a problem on the same level it was created.  You have to rise above it to the next level.” —Albert Einstein