Your Mental Health: Mastering "Skills Over Pills."

Overcoming Child Sexual Abuse ~ With Kathy Andersen

Today, Dr. Meg Jay returns and we’re talking about her new book that has just been released, The Twentysomething Treatment. Dr. Jay’s new book focuses on essential skills that we need to handle uncertainties—around work, love, friendship, mental health, and more. While Dr. Jay’s book and specialization focus on the "Twentysomething" age group, we share how mastering these skills is so essential for all of us to handle uncertainties through and beyond the twenty-something decade.

Throughout Dr. Jay’s book, she takes us through an array of “How To” ways to manage through uncertainties with specific skills, and advocates for “skills over pills” to deal with life’s struggles. Meg puts forward that medication is sometimes, but not always, the best medicine, and argues that most 20 somethings don’t have disorders that must be treated: they have problems that can be solved… and reading Meg’s work, you can’t help but feel that might be said for many of us across our decades.

The one big thing that struck me as I was reading Dr. Jay’s book was whether childhood trauma "blocks" some of the skill development that can and should take place during our twenty-something years. I reflected that it took me well beyond my twenty-something years to move through the "How to” skills that Dr. Jay provides. And I wonder whether many of you listening might feel the same way—finding yourself still moving through and trying to master the "how to" skills that we may have missed because we were so immersed in survival mode—and that now, we’re still catching up, if you like, on "lost years."

And so in this podcast, we’ll talk about all of this and deep dive into Dr. Jay’s “how to” ways to move through life’s struggles and uncertainties.

Dr. Meg Jay is a clinical psychologist and an associate professor of education at the University of Virginia. She earned a doctorate in clinical psychology, and in gender studies, from University of California, Berkeley. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Psychology Today, and on NPR, the BBC and TED. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages; and her new book, The Twentysomething Treatment, is available now online and in book stores.

For more resources, visit www.OvercomingChildSexualAbuse.com and www.End1in4.org