 Tricia Payness is greatly affecting your mental health, but so are a lot of other people in your life. And today, we're going to talk about how to fix that. What is up, everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul, where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health. And sometimes what I like to do is take different topics going on in the YouTube community and try to see what lessons we can learn to improve our own mental and emotional well-being. So if you're into that, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And follow me over on Instagram and Twitter at the Rewired Soul. All right. So yeah, Tricia Payness, I did some videos already on her coming out as transgender and all these other things. But anyway, she just uploaded a new video today. She's getting some more backlash. She came out and discussed her experience on coming out day. She was recently on The Doctors. She's been retweeting a bunch of stuff about that. And yeah, she still has a bunch of people who are really upset. And I'm sitting here and I'm looking at, I'm like, okay, who's upset and why? And we definitely need to talk about it. So just so you know, before I move forward with this, I am not diagnosing Tricia Payness. She has openly discussed the mental health struggles that she has had. Okay? If anything, I want people to be a little bit more compassionate towards Tricia Payness. And I think if you do this, it'll help you kind of chill a little bit. Because what I want to talk about is how we allow people to upset us who are clearly struggling with a mental illness, okay? And I'll start out by sharing a little bit of a story. So as many of you know, hi, I'm Chris. I'm an addict and alcoholic. I've been in recovery for a little over seven years now. My drugs and toys started with alcohol, got into prescription opioids, but I tested just about everything and snorted things and drank things and took things and it was a hot mess. But anyways, through my recovery, I also ended up working at a drug and alcohol treatment center. All right? And I did groups. I did one-on-one sessions and everything like that. And yeah, like for those of you who don't know as well, I am half African-American. I know I don't look it, but yes, ya boy is half black. So one day I was, you know, doing a group, like I always did. I did groups five days a week. And one day I was doing a group and nobody had warned me that one of the new clients who came in had Tourette's syndrome, all right? And yeah, I am in the middle of doing my group and then all of a sudden, boom, end bomb. Like end bomb, hard R, all right? And there were some other outbursts and everything like that. And like I just kept up with the flow and I got through it. You know what I mean? I kept my composure or whatever. But anyways, most clients in treatment, they're there for 30, 60 days, whatever it is. And a lot of my clients knew I was half black and everything like that. But I remember before one of the groups, one of the clients came up to me, a black gentleman, and he was talking to me, he was like, yo Chris, he's like, I love your groups. I love what you do. But I can't go in there, you know, with that dude who, you know, has these outbursts of these racial slurs. You know what I mean? And I'm like, I get it, right? And I'm not going to force this guy to sit in a group if he's clearly, you know, getting offended by it. But I had a heart to heart with him. I'm like, this dude is struggling with an illness, right, Tourette syndrome. And all of us in here were struggling with the disease of addiction. You know what I mean? And what I was trying to teach him is something that I had to learn was that we have to recognize when people are struggling with certain illnesses. We have to quit taking it so personally. Like, we, like, trust me, I am, I am a one sensitive dude. I can get defensive. Some of y'all know this. I could take things so personally, but I have to remind myself on a daily basis, like, not everything is about me. Not everything is meant to offend, right? So when we look at Trisha Paytas, Trisha Paytas has been very vocal about her mental health issues. And recently, you know, she again explained what it was like to have borderline personality disorder. And something I try to do is I try to educate people on what certain symptoms look like. All right. So for example, somebody who suffers from Tourette syndrome is going to have outburst, all right, potentially saying offensive things. Now, somebody who struggles with borderline personality disorder, you got to educate yourself about these symptoms and say what comes along with these symptoms, right? Certain attention seeking behaviors on the doctors. Trisha Paytas talked about kind of lacking a sense of self and this kind of draws people with BPD towards different identities and everything like that. So when I see people in the community getting offended by this, I wish more people would understand the illness. All right. And like I said, too, like I've worked with many people who struggle with addiction and part of my job was also working with loved ones. So this video isn't necessarily about Trisha Paytas. It's for you because how many people in your life are struggling with a mental illness and you take it personally, what they do, right? Like when I was working with family members, like addiction, like if any of you have an addict in your life, right? Like I hope they're better now. But when they're in their active addiction, we can be the most selfish, self-centered people. We become liars, cheats and thieves and everything like that. And it's not an excuse, but part of the disease of addiction is we do these awful things. So when I'm working with family members or loved ones, I try to remind them. I'm like, this is not a bad person. This is a sick person. Like I'm very fortunate that my mom, I say I'm fortunate and unfortunate because my mom is actually an alcoholic in recovery. She had seven years sober when she helped save my life and get me sober. But in my addiction, I was such a terrible person. I was such a terrible son. But because she had been through that experience, like she didn't just let me off the hook. She set up boundaries, but she understood that I wasn't just this evil kid, you know, doing these awful things. Like I was struggling with the disease of addiction, right? And through my own recovery process, part of me overcoming my addiction. And one of the ways I'm able to stay sober today, I made a video about this just the other day is I had to make amends to people. I had to apologize. But a huge part of that was changing my behaviors. And I no longer do all the terrible things that I used to do. But part of this, like to help you out, like people like Trisha Paytas or other people in your life, they may never, they may never get better. But when we come from a place of some kind of empathy and compassion and understand that they're struggling with an illness, we can kind of chill out and realize, OK, they are not purposely trying to hurt me. This is part of their mental illness. So something that I learned a long time ago through my own recovery program, I'm going to do a little quote for you real quick. But it said this and I go back to it over and over and over again. If any of you out there know which book this comes from, it's from page 67. First paragraph, write it down. All of you, if you need to pause, take out a pen and a paper. But come back to this every time someone pisses you off. OK. Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too. We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. When a person offended, we said to ourselves, this is a sick man or woman. How can I be helpful to him or her? God saved me from being angry. Thy will be done. All right. Even if you're not into the God thing, like I'm not religious, all right. But like I look at the message of that paragraph and it's telling me to not look at people as bad people, but look at people as sick people and how would I treat a sick friend? What helps me through this is I look at it as a spiritual sickness and I ask myself, how would I treat somebody with a physical sickness? Right. Like let's say let's say I had a loved one who was going through chemotherapy, right, and they threw up on me. OK. Like am I going to get mad at them because they're struggling with a sickness? No. I'm going to be like, oh, man, you're sick. That sucks. You know what I mean? I'm going to try to be there and help them. Right. But when it comes to mental illness, we treat them completely differently. And in my opinion, it's because we can see physical illness. We can't see mental health issues. You know what I mean? So this will help you kind of calm your own emotions when other people are treating you poorly. Like when I first got sober, I used to sit there and just repeat in my head. I'm like, this person is spiritually sick. This person is spiritually sick. Like I had to just keep saying it over and over and over again. It is something I'm trying to get back in the habit of doing when I feel that anger coming up because I treat sick people much differently than I treat, you know, someone I feel is a bad person. So the last thing I'm going to talk about, because I know a ton of you have already probably left comments down below saying like she needs to be held accountable and she needs to be held responsible and the person in my life who struggles with a mental illness and is doing this, they need to take accountability and responsibility. I will say this, all right. How much control do we have over that other person? All right. The time, the energy, the mental effort that we're putting into that and being angry and upset. Let me ask you this and you can leave a comment down below. How is that working out for us? How is it working out for us getting angry and upset about someone's illness and the things that happen as a result of it? Right. So what's the solution? We got to learn to set up boundaries. And sometimes that's hard. Like, for example, like if it's if it's Trisha Paytas, real easy. If you don't know her, stop watching her stuff. Stop looking at Twitter, see what's going on. Now, if it's a friend or family member, much different, right. But if the other person isn't at least working on getting better, we have to set up boundaries and we have to distance ourselves from them. It is possible to love somebody from a distance. Like my mom loved me from a distance until I got clean and sober, right? I had to put in the work. I had to put in the effort. Now, how much work and effort Trisha is putting in. I have absolutely no idea. Like none of us are in a position to gauge how much effort someone is putting in. You know what I mean? But we have to remember that we are in control of what we watch, what we look at and who we keep in our lives. OK, so if you're somebody who has someone in your life who is upsetting you based on what's going on with their mental illness, like I really want you to think about this and come back to this video. And I will recommend something that helped me out a lot, especially working in an addiction and mental health treatment center was learning more about the different mental illnesses. So it helped me understand why they're doing what they're doing. It helped me understand, you know, or expect certain things. You know what I'm saying? So that might be beneficial to you and I have a ton of videos on a ton of different forms of mental illness. So if you want to get a little bit more educated, you can check out my videos or like just go to Google, baby. You know what I mean? But anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and a huge, huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon, as well as everybody who supports the channel by buying my mental health books and merchant, all that good stuff. All right. Thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time.