Untangled Mind℠, LLC hosted by Piper Harris

In today’s episode, we’re talking to anyone who’s ever been told they’re too much, too intense, too emotional, too complicated. The truth? You’re not too much. You’ve just been in the wrong room.This episode walks you through 6 practical tools to help you stop shrinking, challenge distorted thoughts, and start placing yourself in spaces that honor your insight, emotion, and depth.What you’ll learn:How to recognize misaligned environmentsWhy emotional reasoning distorts self-worthWhat healthy therapeutic spaces should feel likeHow to stop internalizing rejection as truthFor structured therapy built on clarity, strategy, and outcomes, visit:https://www.untangledmind.net

What is Good Therapy? This is a candid, standards-based conversation about what effective therapy actually looks like.In this series, I’m joined by Dr. Emily Ferrara of Simplify Life Counseling and Coaching. Our professional dialogue began around a shared concern: the growing gap between what therapy should be and what many clients are experiencing.Together, we explore:• How to identify a competent, structured therapist• Why some therapy feels vague or stalled• What to do when you’re not seeing progress• Why skepticism toward therapy exists, and how to evaluate it intelligentlyThis series is not about criticizing the field. It’s about elevating it. Therapy should include clear goals, defined methods, measurable progress, and an understanding of when treatment is complete. Clients deserve to know what they are entering into and how to assess whether it’s working.To support that, I’m providing a free listener guide:A structured list of questions to ask during therapist consultations so you can make informed decisions and pursue effective care.https://www.untangledmind.net/how-to-choose-the-right-therapistIf you are considering therapy or are currently in it and unsure whether it’s working, this series is designed to give you clarity, language, and direction.#untangledmindllc #premiercounseling #integrativeCBT #traumatherapist #anxietycounseling #EMDR #prolongedexposure #PTSD #GAD #therapythatworks #datadriven #Georgiacounselor #umpodcast

In this episode, I examine a subtle but increasingly common boundary violation: when strangers use moral or spiritual language to create unsolicited intimacy.This conversation is not about faith or intention. It is about psychology. I break down the behavioral pattern behind forced significance, why these interactions often provoke disgust rather than fear, and why women experience them disproportionately in public spaces.I also explore the broader cultural forces that enable this behavior, including the erosion of private meaning, the confusion of expression with virtue, and the growing discomfort with restraint.If you’ve ever left an interaction thinking, “That felt off, but I couldn’t explain why,” this episode gives language and psychological clarity to that experience.#untangledmindllc #premiercounseling #integrativeCBT #traumatherapist #UMpodcast

When symptoms resolve, functioning improves, and measurable outcomes indicate success, most people appropriately move on. But for a smaller subset, often those who have resolved trauma and reached psychological stability, progress gives way not to clarity, but to ambiguity.In this episode, Piper Harris, LPC explores the often-unspoken space that can follow symptom resolution. Drawing from developmental theory, integrative CBT, and existential psychology, she examines why this phase is not pathological, why not everyone reaches it, and why clinicians are rarely trained to recognize it.This episode is not about extending therapy indefinitely or searching for new problems to solve. It is about understanding a developmental transition that only becomes possible once survival-driven symptoms no longer organize the mind.If you’ve ever wondered why things can feel disorienting even after you’re “doing better,” this conversation offers orientation without pressure and clarity without forcing answers.#untangledmindllc #premiercounseling #integrativeCBT #traumatherapist #anxietycounseling #UMPodcast

In this episode of the Untangled Mind Podcast, Piper Harris explores a common but often unnoticed cognitive sequence: predictions, presumptions, and assumptions. Rather than treating these as personal flaws, this episode examines them as core functions of how the brain manages uncertainty.Drawing from neuroscience and data-driven CBT, Piper breaks down how the brain uses prediction to reduce cognitive load, how presumptions harden into certainty, and how assumptions quietly replace curiosity and learning. The episode focuses on what happens when the mind prioritizes efficiency over understanding and how this can stall insight, integration, and change.Listeners are guided to recognize when their thinking has moved ahead of evidence, how silence and certainty can feel protective while limiting growth, and what it looks like to reintroduce curiosity in a way that works with the brain rather than against it.This episode is part of the Bearing Reality: Thinking About Thinking series and is designed for those who want to understand how the mind organizes experience and how awareness can interrupt unhelpful patterns.#untangledmindllc #premiercounseling #integrativeCBT #traumatherapist #anxietycounseling #EMDR #prolongedexposure #PTSD #GAD #therapythatworks #datadriven #Georgiacounselor

Part II of Bearing Reality: Thinking About Thinking examines what my highlights revealed about how I tend to think. Reading is never passive; what we attend to discloses our values, fears, and assumptions long before we put them into words. In this podcast, I explore patterns of attention around responsibility, coherence, suffering, sentimentality, and the search for meaning. This isn’t about self-analysis for its own sake, but about modeling a discipline of orientation; learning to observe how thinking forms over time.#untangledmindllc #premiercounseling #integrativeCBT #traumatherapist #anxietycounseling #EMDR #prolongedexposure #PTSD #GAD #therapythatworks #datadriven #Georgiacounselor

Bearing Reality: Thinking About ThinkingThis episode introduces Bearing Reality: Thinking About Thinking, a short series exploring how we examine our own thinking when certainty is tempting, but truth requires more discipline.Rather than offering conclusions or advice, this episode focuses on orientation: how patterns of attention form, how blind spots emerge, and why examining how we think matters as much as what we think. Drawing from psychology, neuroscience, theology, and lived experience, this series models a process of reflection I often ask clients to engage in themselves.This episode sets the foundation for the series by explaining how it began, why the raw material is presented without interpretation in the first blog post, and what it means to approach thinking as something that can be examined, tested, and integrated rather than defended.If you’re interested in work that respects human limits without abandoning responsibility, and that values clarity over comfort, this series is an invitation to slow down and orient your thinking more deliberately.#untangledmindllc #premiercounseling #integrativeCBT #traumatherapist #anxietycounseling #EMDR #prolongedexposure #PTSD #GAD #therapythatworks #datadriven #Georgiacounselor

As the year comes to a close, many people rush toward New Year’s resolutions without ever pausing to reflect on what actually happened and how they responded to it.In this year-end episode of Untangled Mind, Piper Harris reflects on why honest review matters more than goal-setting and why meaningful growth requires clarity rather than motivation. This conversation explores the balance between self-congratulation and self-flagellation, the value of examining painful or uncomfortable moments, and how reflection can become a formative practice rather than a judgment exercise.Piper also shares a brief year-end review of Untangled Mind and offers a grounded framework for conducting your own reflection with honesty, restraint, and purpose.This episode marks the close of Season 6, landing on Episode 72.If you’d like a structured way to reflect on the year, you can download a complimentary Year-End Reflection Packet here:https://www.untangledmind.net/the-untangled-life#untangledmindllc #integrativecbt #traumatherapist #anxietycounseling #endof2025

As the world counts down to Christmas, many feel excitement, others feel dread, and most never stop to consider what they could be counting toward instead. In this episode, Piper Harris invites you into a different kind of countdown: thirty-nine days of intentional shifts that move you toward clarity, resilience, and genuine hope.Drawing from cognitive-behavioral principles, neuroscience, and deep human insight, Piper walks through thirty-nine practical, grounded shifts, each one designed to interrupt unhelpful patterns and redirect you toward steadiness and growth. These are not affirmations or resolutions. They are small, deliberate pivots that shape the trajectory of your life.The episode concludes with a fortieth shift, pointing to the true source of lasting hope, especially for those who feel they have nothing left to pull from internally.If you’re tired, overwhelmed, or walking through a season where healing feels slow, this episode becomes a guide, a challenge, and a reorientation.Thirty-nine days. Thirty-nine shifts.And one true hope that anchors them all.#untangledmindllc #integrativeCBT #traumatherapist #anxietycounselor #Holidays #countdown #Hope #JesusChrist

In this fifth installment of the Empathy Series, Piper Harris turns the focus inward to the counseling profession itself. Our field has long celebrated empathy as its highest virtue, but what happens when feeling becomes the only tool in the box?Through clinical insight, CBT framing, and a touch of Shel Silverstein’s wit, Piper explores how the industry keeps “eating soup with chopsticks”, recycling emotional tools that look noble but leave both clients and clinicians hungry.She traces the historical swing from William James’s pragmatic psychology to Carl Rogers’s humanistic empathy, showing how good intentions evolved into burnout culture. You’ll hear how unmanaged empathy activates the brain’s threat system, why depletion is not proof of devotion, and how ethical, data-driven compassion offers a sustainable path forward.The Industry Mirror challenges counselors and anyone devoted to helping others. to trade performance for precision, sentiment for structure, and to finally pick up the spoon.

In this pivotal fourth episode of the Empathy Series, Piper Harris takes the conversation beyond emotion into the arena of moral reasoning. From Empathy to Ethics challenges the assumption that feeling deeply is the same as being good and asks what happens when conviction outruns discernment.Through clinical insight, philosophy, and faith, Piper examines how empathy must mature into disciplined ethics, the capacity to act rightly even when it’s uncomfortable. She exposes how moral reasoning forces tension, demands humility, and calls every clinician to test their own biases.This episode explores:Why many therapists conflate passion with ethics—and how bias hides behind conviction.Real moral-reasoning dilemmas that reveal the clash between empathy and discernment.The neuroscience of ethical decision-making and the “moral muscles” that strengthen integrity.How faith and philosophy converge: Marcus Aurelius, Gandhi, C.S. Lewis, and Scripture all urging us to test everything; hold fast to what is good.From Empathy to Ethics : Reclaiming Discernment invites listeners to replace emotional certainty with moral clarity, to choose truth over comfort, and to rebuild integrity where empathy once ruled alone.#untangledmindllc #ethics #empathy #integrativecbt

Therapy isn’t always solemn faces and breakthrough moments. Sometimes it’s awkward silences, accidental “love you’s,” and yes… questionable telehealth decisions.In this episode, Piper Harris, integrative CBT clinician and founder of Untangled Mind, explores the humor and humanity of therapy: what clients say, what therapists hear, and why honesty (even the messy kind) always matters.It’s a candid, funny, and deeply human reminder that growth doesn’t always look graceful; sometimes it just looks real.#untangledmindllc #integrativecbt #umpdcast #umpathway #traumatherapist #anxietycounseling

What does it really mean to be seen?In this episode, Piper Harris explores the tension between recognition and transformation, what the Greeks called anagnorisis and epignosis. Drawing from her love of studying Greek and Hebrew (and the words she’s literally tattooed on her body at pivotal points of change), Piper shares how understanding these concepts can reshape the way we think about therapy, faith, and personal growth.Through stories from her own life and insights from her Untangled Mind Pathway, she unpacks how we uncover the D.I.B., the Deepest Irrational Belief, that quietly shapes our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. As she says, “Transformation doesn’t have an endpoint. It’s a way of life. It begins, always, with the courage to be seen.”Stay until the end for her announcement about Transformation Week, a lighthearted, meaningful Halloween tradition for clients to celebrate what they’re becoming.Want to learn more about being Seen? Read below:https://www.untangledmind.net/post/_seen#untangledmindllc #UMPodcast #anxiety #trauma #faith #Greek #exposed #therapy #deepestirrationalbelief #dansiegel

In Episode 3 of the Empathy Series, I move beyond the emotional and physiological effects of empathy to examine its cognitive distortions, the ways empathy can quietly reshape how we think, reason, and define morality.Empathy feels virtuous, but when it becomes a cognitive reflex, it can lead to emotional reasoning, bias, and identity fusion. In this episode, I unpack how empathy functions like a mental shortcut, a heuristic that tells us we’re “good” simply because we feel, while quietly eroding discernment, accountability, and boundaries.Drawing from neuroscience, CBT, and social psychology, I explore:*How empathy activates cognitive distortions such as personalization and catastrophizing.*The role of the prefrontal cortex in regulating emotional reasoning.*Why over-identifying with others’ suffering reinforces ego and moral confusion.*What to do when you find yourself trapped in someone else’s cognitive loop.*How to climb the empathy ladder toward compassion and clear thinking.Empathy as a Cognitive Trap challenges the assumption that feeling deeply is always virtuous and invites listeners to move from reflexive empathy to disciplined compassion, where emotion and reason finally work together.#untangledmindllc #empathy #empathyseries #UMpodcast www.untangledmind.net

In this episode of the Untangled Mind Podcast, Piper Harris unpacks Carl Jung’s famous quote: “The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.”Drawing from a recent dialogue on LinkedIn, Piper explores how projection shows up in the therapy profession itself through defensiveness, appeals to authority, and circular reasoning that protect therapists but fail clients.The conversation examines why modern therapy has drifted toward validation over transformation, how this drift leaves clients turning to AI for answers, and why the profession must confront its own shadow if it wants to remain relevant.This is a call to action for therapists to stop projecting, start owning their blind spots, and return to the real work of psychotherapy: lasting change.#untangledmindllc www.untangledmind.net

This is Episode 2 in my Empathy Series. In this conversation, I explore what happens when empathy doesn’t just drain us emotionally, but actually hurts the brain and body.We’ll look at what neuroscience reveals about empathic distress: the way empathy lights up pain circuits, activates the stress response, and, when left unchanneled, leads to burnout and exhaustion. I unpack why the phrase “compassion fatigue” is misleading, and how what many in counseling, medicine, and caregiving actually experience is empathic distress fatigue.I also examine how our fields too often wear this exhaustion as a badge of honor, and the severe consequences of staying stuck in empathy-only modes, including dissociation and even group-level hysteria.Most importantly, this episode offers a way forward: moving from empathy to sympathy, and ultimately into compassion—the place where resilience and real change live.#untangledmindllc #empathy #trauma #anxiety #compassionfatigue

This is Episode 1 in my new Empathy Series. In this opening conversation, I explore what I call the empathy trap: how unchanneled empathy can paralyze us, reinforce hidden payoffs, and keep both clients and clinicians stuck.We’ll look at where the concept of empathy came from, why it’s been elevated as the highest virtue in therapy and culture, and how it differs from sympathy and compassion. I share composite client stories that reveal how empathy often serves unseen purposes, like giving us identity, attention, or a sense of purpose, while holding us back from real growth.If you’ve ever wondered why “just feeling” doesn’t bring change, this episode will challenge you to climb the ladder: from empathy, to sympathy, and ultimately to compassion.#untangledmindllc #traumatherapist #anxietycounseling #umpodcast #empathy #compassion #carlrogers #psychology #empathytrap

Too many choices don’t just overwhelm us; they expose hidden patterns that keep us stuck. In this episode, Piper Harris explores the darker side of choice: how blame, ego protection, and even subtle manipulation distort our decision-making. Learn how to spot these biases in yourself, what to do when others use them against you, and practical steps to reclaim clarity and agency. If you’ve ever felt paralyzed by “what ifs” or drained by someone else’s avoidance, this episode will give you tools to break free and move forward.Read more:https://www.untangledmind.net/post/the-tyranny-of-choice#untangledmindllc

Every relationship is like a ship. Some sail smoothly, while others drift aimlessly or sink under pressure. What makes the difference isn’t luck, it’s whether the ship is built and steered with care.In this episode of the Untangled Mind Podcast, Piper Harris unpacks three essentials that keep relationships seaworthy: standards, boundaries, and expectations. Through stories from her practice and personal experience, Piper reveals why:Standards are the hull — the values and integrity that keep the ship intactBoundaries are the sails — the limits that protect energy and directionExpectations are the navigation — the agreements that prevent drift and collisionYou’ll also learn the warning signs your ship is sinking, why assumptions are so destructive, and how unspoken beliefs from trauma can sabotage even the healthiest relationships.If your relationships feel adrift or exhausting, this episode offers clarity, structure, and a way forward.#untangledmindllc

What do a silly online quiz, a 17th-century philosopher, and a neuroscience book have in common? They all helped me articulate what’s been true about my therapy approach all along. In this episode, I explore how Rationalism, Idealism, Existentialism, and Pragmatism influence the way I work with clients — and why I reject the outdated split between mind and body. We’ll dig into Descartes’ Error, The Master and His Emissary, and what it really means to treat the whole human being. If you’ve ever felt stuck in therapy that overexplained or underdelivered, this one’s for you.