The Different-Functional Podcast

If you struggle with anxiety, you’ve probably gone down the internet anxiety rabbit hole more than once, looking for guidance on how to cope with it. And there is an overwhelming amount of information and advice being offered by gurus, mental health experts, and someone’s Aunt Gertrude who swears by this or that natural remedy. Where do you begin and what actually works? The truth is there’s no on...

One of the biggest challenges that comes with experiencing childhood trauma or being neurodivergent is that we often don’t get the opportunity to discover our identity until we are adults. Most people get to cultivate their identity during their early developmental years, but for those of us who were expected to mask or who were living in survival mode as children identity development was a luxury...

Happy Easter everyone! This holiday is a generally fun and uplifting one for most of us regardless of whether we see it in a religious or secular light. The winter is melting away and with spring finally here we feel revived, refreshed, and ready for some goodies and games with our loved ones. Nothing illustrates these ideas better than Easter baskets and Easter egg hunts, and we’d love to have yo...

We all try to be good people and surely that must mean that our hard work results in us being altruistic angels full of Love and Light all the time, right? Hmmm… Maybe not. The truth is we’re human and that makes us susceptible to feelings of frustration, exhaustion, pettiness, envy, and egocentrism. Our desire to be good makes us want to believe that we can and should become immune to such feelin...

For so long, we were taught that neurodivergence was a glaring flaw in our design and that if we wanted to be successful (or even just normal) we had to mask what made us unique as though hiding symptoms or a horrible disease. Thankfully, the narrative is beginning to change as it becomes increasingly more apparent that we aren’t diseased and that “normal” is a word with almost no meaning. In this...

Love is wonderful and all but, let’s face it, relationships can be really hard; and one of the biggest challenges when you’re building a relationship and a life with someone is communication. One minute you feel like you’re on the same wavelength, reading each other’s minds and the next minute you feel like you’re not even speaking the same language. And if you and/or your partner has a trauma his...

We often look to music to explore and enhance our own life experiences and, for better or worse, “Love” dominates the airwaves. We are constantly inundated with lyrical messages about what love is, what it looks like, and how it feels. But how many of those messages are healthy, or even true? Love can be wonderful and fulfilling, but many of the catchy songs we find ourselves singing along to set...

Grief isn't caused solely by death. Grief can be triggered by any important loss we experience: loss of a job, loss of a relationship, or even the losses of innocence, ideals, and potential that so often accompany trauma. What exactly is grief? Why do we experience it? And most importantly, how can we make the experience of grief just a little easier to handle? We explore all these questions and m...

Happy New Year! Time to get back to work, lose that holiday weight, set new goals, and Change. Your. Life!!! But what if…and hear us out here….what if you didn’t do any of those things at all? In this episode, we’re discussing the social pressures that confront us at the start of each new year and exploring how to: determine if you really want or need to make changes; decide if the timing is even...

Throughout history, cultures have ascribed meaning to the natural cycles of the seasons, seeing in them the cyclical nature of our human existence as well. Spring brings new life and new beginnings. Summer brings growth and abundance. Fall is the season of culmination and harvest. But winter…winter is a time of scarcity, of death and grief, of letting go, of forced rest, and of personal reflection...

The holiday season can be a difficult time for anyone with a dysfunctional family, mental or physical health struggles, neurodivergent traits, or very limited resources; and while boundary setting is always important, that’s especially true this time of year when the pressure is on to play nice, play along, and put our own needs on the back burner. In this episode, we discuss some boundary setting...

Uh oh. The holidays are already upon us again. 'Tis the season, so they say, and while many people are giddy with excitement, some of us enter the holiday season with feelings of trepidation, anxiety, and grief. Even if you have a festive spirit and love the rituals and traditions of the season, it’s still a stressful time because there are so many more expectations, demands, and disruptions to ou...

Childhood trauma imprints on us like nothing else can. It lives rent free in our heads and takes a toll on our lives well into adulthood. Our minds and bodies hold onto those memories for decades, expressing them again and again in ways both subliminal and overt. It can resurface when we least expect it, causing us to relive painful memories as though they are happening again in this moment, and o...

Happy Halloween! It’s that time again, to dress up as ghosts, ghoulies, and whatever else floats our happy little spooky boats. But what about the masks we wear every day, the social personas we slip on each morning when we venture out into the world? Are the masks we wear to convince others, and sometimes even ourselves, that we are the living embodiment of a particular archetype also a little sc...

There’s a lot of information out there about trauma recovery; some is valuable and honestly, some is clichéd and irrelevant nonsense. It can be a challenge to discern the truth from the myths, especially early on in your healing journey. It can also be hard not to judge yourself harshly when you’re basing your progress on what are actually unrealistic expectations and rules around what healing “sh...

How can you support someone who is struggling with their mental health, trauma recovery, or neurodivergence? If someone you love has ever experienced these challenges, then you know how painful it is to watch from the sidelines and not know how to help. And if you’ve struggled with these kinds of things yourself, then you know how frustrating it is to be surrounded by well-intentioned but clueless...

Admit it. You have compulsions. Do you count floor tiles for no reason? Feel a need to correct a strangers' grammar or speling? Do you jiggle the heck out of the door knob to make sure it's locked, only to come back and double-check anyway? Ever felt the desire to scream in a library or church? Are you unable to resist meowing in response to a cat? Have you ever wanted to throw a potato at a stran...

Let's face it. Trauma is complex. It hits us where it hurts, the wounds are deep, and the scars often leave us feeling flawed. Today, we're discussing some of the ways trauma can negatively impact our self-esteem and sense of identity, but more importantly we'll also be diving deep into how we can change the narrative to take back our power. If the trauma you've experienced has ever made you feel...

Yes! It's our off week but we wanted to share a little something extra with you. We hope you'll enjoy this special mini-episode from our Patreon vault, a sample of our comedic segment Unnecessarily Disastrous! If you're curious about our other Patreon perks and content you can find us at www.patreon.com/differentfunctional

How do you feel about yourself when you look in the mirror? From our earliest developmental years, we’re fed messages about the connection between beauty, health, popularity, love, and success. Some of these messages are insidiously subliminal while others are painfully overt. Either way, we’ve all felt the pressure to submit to these rules and felt insecure when we’ve found ourselves falling shor...

It's so freakin' HOT! Summer has been taking us for a crazy ride on this heat wave for too long and I don't know about you, but we're ready to feel a chill in the air and down our spines. The start of Spooky Season is still weeks away, but we're going to pretend it's right around the corner. So gather around the campfire with us and we'll tell you some of our ghost stories and other paranormal exp...

You ever try making friends? If you're anything like us then it's surprisingly hard. When we're kids we just ask some other random kid at the playground if they want to be our friend, but then we get older and all of a sudden it becomes complicated. The are different rules, processes, and rituals that are involved in friendship as adults. So how do you make friends when your neurodivergent brain h...

Last time, we discussed what it's like when depression takes up residence in your head, but how can you actually deal with this frustrating, unwanted roommate? Today, we're exploring a variety of coping strategies and treatment options, and not all of them are textbook. We've both lived alongside depression for most of our lives and if we've learned anything it's that each person's relationship wi...

Depression is one of the most common mental health struggles that people experience. For some, it is a temporary response to a specific trauma or loss. For others, the battle with depression comes in waves, seldom has a triggering event, and will last a lifetime. Today, we're talking about what it's like to live with depression, getting into the gritty details of how it impacts your health, your r...

Today, we're talking about the convoluted connection between reality and personal experience. You can expose several people to the exact same event, and yet everyone involved will walk away with unique and often conflicting accounts of their experience. This becomes even more complicated in dysfunctional families where secrecy, isolation, and complex relationship dynamics cast a long shadow over e...