Rachel Whitehawk returns to Ascend Health Show in this free-flowing conversation about avoiding societal pressures to perform and be at your best 100% of the time. Learn how to break free from the American Dream that just wants you to buy stuff. We can’t compete with the dopamine rush of our devices, and neither can our children.
Whitehawk Ranch in Bath, Ohio provides therapy with or without horses and relies on Rachel’s previous experience as a motivational speaker, certified professional life coach and certified recovery coach, high-fashion model, image consultant and author of life changing curriculum.
[Music] hello and welcome to the Ascend Health show I’m Nick Angelis, I am a nurse anesthetist and the owner of Ascend Health Center and I’m here with Rachel White Hawk it’s good to have you on the show again
thank you it’s good to be back appreciate it so we were just talking about how she’s going to be in a murder mystery show again at Stan Hyuet not really the topic of the conversation what it’s supposed to be today
no although murder mystery is always fun I mean I’ve written some of them
it is fun and and part of what we Advocate at the ranch is that you have that balance in life where you have your professional life and you do things that are hobby Hobbies or things that you enjoy that are fun so this annual murder mystery is is one of those hobbies that I do that I enjoy
it’s helpful too because I feel that today in our um over therapized World a lot of times like “oh wait let’s not talk on anything negative this is a murder mystery”
but I think part of having a robust resilient life is being able to do things that are goofy or weird uh
absolutely similar to how I’ve told you how I need to do this show because there’s actual cameras and lights so I actually behave for a few minutes rather than what it’ll dissolve into if I try to do this on my own right
right but it is it is so important to have things in life that you enjoy we’re so we live in such an enormously stressful pressure-filled life now you know we’re we’re I think we have too much information at our disposal and too much social media and all of that and I think it really has created a a a stressful anxiety-ridden culture right and there is absolutely a place to be to just enjoy and have a good time and to you know life’s supposed to be enjoyable
yeah it isn’t supposed to be a miserable struggle all the time and I think part of that too is noticing when we feel pressured like is this important like and sometimes I do this to myself like I’ll have uh I’ll want to play volleyball and also coach uh a kid soccer team and uh be out of work on time all at the same time and so I’ll realize like well this is stress that I’ve willingly put on myself so if I can’t do it all it’s just me being dumb and thinking I can bend time and it’s not that big of a deal that’s right that’s exactly right I think we we overextend ourselves um I was just talking to someone outside about how parents are just inundated with the pressures of keeping kids in activities all of the time and and two working parents trying to get children to activities can be you know an absolutely truly depressing maddening stressful environment that takes the joy out of raising children and enjoying the family unit
I often subscribe to the idea and I prescribe this for the people we work with um to just take take away some of those tasks and those those those societal pressures you know and just spend time being a family it is so healing and those that’s where you find real joy and you know life goes by so quickly kids grow up so quickly um it’s important to take the time to just enjoy them and not constantly feel like you have to be getting them to every activity that everyone else is you know and to stop competing with what you’re going to lose against
whenever we say to the kids like okay we’re going to do this activity it’s understood that there’s not an option of that you stay home and play video games instead cuz you can’t compete with that that’s right I mean I know I I wasn’t born in this generation but if I had a chance to play my Nintendo Entertainment System like that’s what I was going to choose so for parents to think that well if we do all these activities we’ll get them off their phones it’s a bit like no you can’t compete with that you just have to take that phone away if you don’t want them to do it because there’s no way that you can compete with like an immersive world that they have sociologists working to make sure that the kids get some dopamine rush out of it
that’s right that’s right the competition is too SE you’re right you have to with you have to withhold the inform that piece of it all together or it doesn’t work yeah and that’s part of the society pressure is like we have this expectation I got to win everything I got to show up like even going back to the soccer practice you know I’ll show up 5 minutes before practice supposed to start usually say well it’s a cultural thing I’m Greek we’re not really on time for things it might just be a laziness or not caring about other people like well we can go into that later you know here with my therapist but it’s like well of course you’re overstress if you’re like well I got to get my kid to practice well not at 5:30 when it starts but at 5:15 so we’re settled and ready it’s like how can you build a life with margins and not the sort of margins where you’re you know unnecessarily 15 minutes early for something that’s only going to take an hour right right I know well I think I think we’re over scheduled and I think a lot of our um societal stress comes from this the basic Foundation is we we are making decisions based on how we feel rather than what we know we’re not really you know part of the the fundamental thing that we teach at the ranch is we teach people how to separate what they know from what they feel when we live a constantly emotion filled and emotion-driven life we bring in things and and our distorted our our thought process isn’t clear it’s distorted because when our emotions are running High you know our ability to think clearly is not in most cases so you know we have to kind of go back to the basics and even parents you know I deal with a lot of divorce situations and Blended families and I’m doing a lot more of that in the in the last year and a half than I’ve probably ever done um and it the foundation is there it when you when you are making decisions based on emotion it is a recipe for increased stress and disaster in some cases in many cases you know so we have to go back to that fundamental idea and it’s hard for people because we we’re we’re raising generations of people who are very fragile very emotional um the Advent of social media has simply made that more difficult you know the smallest infraction the smallest negative comment on social media is so large and has such an imprint that it’s it adds to the devastation of emotion in our culture and we’re just we’re running a muck with that so you’re saying the problem is that we have all these people who who their truth is based on their feelings of the day but their feelings of the day might depend on you know how their body is digesting gluten that exactly because I think that’s one thing I’ve recently read a book about attention and it showed that this idea of personal responsibility of like every person being a silo deciding what truth that that’s why you know they had all those ads about cigarettes and that’s how the tobacco companies for example and it went into sugar soft drinks bad food like everything that we do if we think well this is our personal choice and the one example I use was actually state sponsored gambling saying that you know we had this idea of like well if you have a problem we’ve got a resource for you but the meantime we’ll design these machines to Extinction yeah there’s a there’s a there’s a term in the industry called Extinction meaning that the person has no more money so they walk away penniless and that’s the goal of how can we bring each person to Extinction where they can even swipe their ATM card on the machine as they’re gambling and and so it’s like well this is no longer a person’s personal choice this is an augmented reality meant to separate a person from their will and their choice based on their fleeting emotions that’s right and and and and we so many areas of society capitalize on that um social media capitalizes on that especially where teens and girls are concerned but it it’s it has become uh a a bad habit in society you know so much of the way we think and the way we make decisions is Habitual you and I’ve had this conversation before um and and we don’t realize maybe that we have the ability to step back create a framework from which decisions can be made and then we stick to that framework despite how we’re feeling at that given moment right and that’s where programs like mine and other programs help people to kind of get in touch with that methodology and that idea and learn how to separate what they know from what they feel and once you do that the feeling of empowerment and control because we often try to control the things outside our world that we have no business trying to control because we can’t other people right exactly so when we realize we can control this and we should it it’s lifechanging absolutely life-changing yeah a lot of times what I tell the patients at Ascend is look we can do ketamine infusions which help you discern reality it it sounds kind of inuitive like wait this is almost like a psychedelic experience how would this help me understand what reality is if I’m seeing shapes and polygons floating in The Ether but almost some patients they’ve actually needed that to actually get reground in reality like this is what’s important this is what matters this is what doesn’t almost like a near-death experience but that’s often what I say is like look we can go to this where we’re pumping a medicine into your vein so that you can detach from this uh pretend reality that is just a consumer fueled Matrix or you can take more simple steps to take a step back from like wait who’s actually pressuring me to do this is it because Amazon wants me to buy more more stuff you know it’s almost like uh in the ‘ 50s the whole argument of the nuclear family was actually so that each family would buy a ladder rather than sharing with their neighbors or friends each family would have like all these things and they could sell so many more products and now it’s just mushroomed into nightmarish proportion so what’s a much simpler way to reconnect with what reality is other than what I’m proposing of IV infusions well you know I think I think having a format and having a methodology that works and having people walk through that you know you have to be able to take yourself out of your your personal life long enough to take a moment and think about it you know and really really think and learn how to change the way you perceive things you know we spend so much time running from maybe our feelings or or how you know we get so caught up in the habitual um life you know force and just staying so focused on competing and staying in and you know information and we’re we’re inundated with things that really don’t serve us right and I think the I’m going to say personally I think the lack of faith in our culture has done a lot to to delineate that and to kind of Ruin um and change forever people’s basic core values and basic moral compass You’ got to get back to a sense of what is right what is wrong there are there are ways that are better there better Ways to Live than other ways and it’s okay to actually say that you know we’re very careful now we can’t we have to be very careful about how we Define you know normal or traditional or good and evil or good and bad uh and I think we need to get back to some of that because without without that um that Baseline you’re you’re going to just fall into the same trap that we we see so many people falling into now and it’s it’s a it’s endemic and I think that only works too with what I said where we’re realizing slowly that what we call our personal choices are simply influenced by media where like the the new God so to speak is capitalism where like this is what you need cuz you know you’ll even look at a consumerism right yeah that’s a good way think of it that everything’s like well how can I live better how can I be happier and I see that a lot at our Clinic that where I’ll say like well wait maybe you just need to talk to a therapist because I don’t think this is a serotonin imbalance I think this is a right what you want running into what reality is or what Society is telling you what you want right and the cure for that isn’t like numbing you with zof so exactly exactly and you know I think it sounds very basic and rather silly and I I have to tell you had I had it not been a part of my life I would understand why people feel that way but the act of gratefulness MH it sounds so ridiculous but it is such a dee rooted uh philosophy that you have to really dig into and think about but the idea of changing your perception and being grateful for what it is you do have is transformative right it absolutely is transformative and it actually helps you by doing that and we have a methodology that we that we teach at the ranch but there are lots of programs that that can do this for you um but once you begin to go down that road and gratefulness becomes something that you think about and not just mindfulness but truly gratefulness it automatically gives you parameters um and boundaries right it’s just a natural you know offshoot of being in a different mindset they’re just natural boundaries that kind of take place in your life and your mind as you go through this and as you develop a new way of coping right you know so many of us have learned negative ways of coping through life and we decide unfortunately that that’s our personality I’ve told you this many times in our in our conversations people come into my office and they say well this is just who I am and as we dig a Little Deeper we find it’s not really who you are it’s who you’ve become it’s these are skills maybe not skills but maladaptive skills that you’ve learned to kind of cope with things and they’re these things are not serving you M and there is in fact a way to eliminate those from your life and replace them with better thought processes and better habits and it is that simple it’s not necessarily easy to do but it’s simple to lay out and begin to to do if you if you’re focused and want to do it it it often happens when people reach a crisis point in their life you know I know you deal with that as well people come to you because they’re at the end of their rope uh and in many cases there’s a lot more rope it’s just the perception right um and I think that’s the case in a lot of a lot of the people who come to us they they we can handle much more than we think we can if we’re given the skills the appropriate skills to do so and usually what I say too is we need to get you out of survival mode because in survival mode you don’t ask questions like how much will this cost how much do I have to do for this uh but those are relevant questions to feel empowered and those are appropriate questions so you WR our society has this weird dichotomy where it’s like what my health yeah I don’t know what my health insurance pays for just do whatever you need do and then in another are is like wait can I save a dollar here so it’s completely backwards yeah well said well said so how do we reduce the noise of society’s expectations cuz what you said about gratefulness another sentiment I would like to use is contentment so uh whether you’re angry at corporations or the government or some other or even a conspiracy of some sort I think what we realize is that what the society want us to do everyone around us they don’t want us to be content because what do you do when your content that’s right you don’t buy things that’s right you’re no longer that consumer that helps the economy right you just are content and you don’t really need much and you’re perfectly happy contentment completely erodes consumerism right and so if you’re happy because I’ve um so our ketamine and fusions uh insurance doesn’t pay for the complete cost so it costs money and I’ve told patients and I’ve said this before on our shows sometimes we get a little offensive but I’ve told patients like look I think you’re spending money on Amazon at night because you’re not happy and so we’re not talking about you investing more money we’re talking about the same money being repurposed from like God bless you for telling people that I do the same thing I’m very direct with people and I think you have to be because if we don’t fight the messages in society with information people aren’t going to wake up and realize that they have a choice I mean a lot of people feel that they don’t have a choice especially where consumerism is concerned and to your point most of consumerism is the result of a basic unhappiness and an attempt to find happiness through the purchase of things and or even and even experiences even paying lots of money for experiences that are you know not necessarily founded in good thinking and and good self-care right but contentment is a is a perfect component to start with with people because once you begin to see that and you begin to develop the the skills around it you you begin investing to your point in in better in better things in life investing in your future financially you know capitalism is great if we do it right and that is we we consume what we need we save what we need you we know we’re not a we’re not a nation of Savers like we should be we should be spending a lot more money a lot more time and effort saving and investing well without the the pull and the draw to constantly be acquiring physical because what you’re saying too is that it’s self-care that like we care enough about ourselves to care about the future instead of this like wait maybe there’s a possibility I could be even happier than I am now right well self-care means in the in the media in social media in particular self-care can mean a lot of other things it can mean you know getting as much material wealth as you possibly can because that’s the idea of being self-care being able to just you know buy all of these things and have a you know have the freedom to to do that but that’s really not necessarily Freedom at all right and In some cultures the idea of like hoarding all this stuff is itself like a sin like there’s a Biblical parable about the man who died as he stored up grain and in that culture if you’re storing up grain that means somebody else isn’t having grain so your riches are actually impacting your neighbors right which is not something that we ever think about in our culture where it’s very much like this is me and I to take care of myself and I’m not responsible for anyone else and no one else is responsible for me and and and the people who H who who live that way aren’t happy either you know that all the the accumulation of wealth and and you see it all the time I I just read a book a couple of months ago um about a billionaire who gave it all away because it never brought him the joy and the peace and the satisfaction and the security I mean how much security does one person need is the other side of it you know before you’re just accumulating to to fill a void and honestly it is easier to just be like Scrooge M duck MC duck and lie around with your money right but uh and we often when I talk to therapists we have this discussion about you know there’s also the trend to like uh take people out of your life who are toxic and some of that is good and over do but a lot of it is like no you just have to have some hard relationships in your life and uh there’s more statistics out now that how many parents and children are estranged and it’s often for silly reasons so absolutely it’s expectation that well in order to preserve my peace I can’t have uh a relationship with this person or that person it sounds a little counterintuitive because we’re also saying being content and grateful and also like don’t get rid of all the annoying people in your life well you know what I think here’s what I think I think you have to find the perspective you have to be able to deal with people a measured way right we it goes back to not being able to control everyone’s Behavior the culture says you know if somebody SLS you cut them out and in some cases that’s necessary absolutely sometimes there’s you know there’s abuse there’s you know all kinds of things that require we eliminate toxic people from our lives but to your point I think we we need to start um advocating that we get a little bit tougher emotionally and we learn to kind of balance difficult people the crazy uncle um or the the annoying step stepmom or the annoying mother-in-law or whatever it is and find a way to balance that against completely annihilating people and disrupting relationships you know the divorce rate is so high in large measure because we are we are intolerant of the things that we should perhaps be more tolerant of um not that that’s the only reason people get divorced but there are there are so many problems that exist when when we don’t become emotionally resilient if we don’t learn how to put emotions in a in proper perspective and separate them from the knowledge and the foundation of a core of values that we have we are going to consistently be making decisions that disrupt and destroy our lives and I and I really believe that and I think it’s black and white in some cases and you and I see a lot of that because we we help hurting people and all of us are imperfect all of us need work but it is not our job to make sure that everybody else is doing the work if we will work on ourselves we will find that we have a much better uh life and a happier life if we can get that balance strike that balance in our own lives because we’re not in charge of how other people do their life well and that way we can have more freedoms to feel emotions and rather than I’m sad we can actually go to another level like well I’m actually Melancholy or I’m wistful or I’m this or I’m that because that case we’re using emotions as they’re meant to be which is not positive or negative but these are vital clues that I factor into my decision so that way you don’t have to repress an emotion because you’re not thinking well because I’m angry I better punch someone it’s like no this is a very useful emotion let’s drill down and find out is this anger grief or is this anger disappointment or what’s the cause of it and then I can make a decision you know partly based on my intuition and my emotions but not because I have this fleeting emotion that maybe due to my sugar intake or my dopamine levels or any of that and I don’t know why we don’t see more of that in the mental health world I don’t see I don’t understand why we don’t have more therapists looking at individuals and their lives from that perspective because it is so foundational you know we’ve seen great success in what we’ve done you do much of the same thing it it’s it’s so important and emotions are have a place in our lives you know to avoid them completely is is not what we’re suggesting um there are we have difficult hor horrible things that happen in our lives but we have wonderful things that happen in our lives those highs and lows are part of life and to be able to manage those and navigate them in a normal healthy way is what we Advocate we don’t I don’t see that anywhere in our society I think you have to seek it out I think to answer your question it’s much more lucrative for mental health businesses if the idea is we’ve got to get your emotions in a certain State because there’s a lot of pills there’s a lot of therapy to force emotions rather than saying like oh today was really terrible maybe tomorrow will be better that allows you to have resilience and doesn’t require you to have another appointment with a therapist or try uh cuz right now the the some of the best drugs in Psychiatry are ones that affect both serotonin dopamine and sometimes even norepinephrine where they’ll just change the levels of each one that creates an environment to have less depression and they’re great drugs but it’s that same idea of if your primary goal is well I need to feel better and I need this emotion yeah like that’s a lot of doctor’s visits and a lot of expense to and and not necessarily a guarantee right you know in fact I’ve had a lot of people who’ve come to me who’ve had a lot of alpath and Mental Health Care um and a lot of drugs and and at the end of the day it’s not rendered the result that they’d hoped and it’s the hard work of transform transforming your thought process that that makes the difference and those drugs can Aid people you know and we’ve talked about this before you know as they go through the Journey of getting getting better especially people with chemical you know depress depression and things that really do need to be altered but the vast majority of people really just I believe in my heart believe really need a good methodology and a and a good coach or therapist to work alongside them to get them to the place where these thoughts become uh a mindset rather than just a fleeting thought and they transform their thinking and it we’ve seen it work it’s worked in your life it’s worked in my life we know and I can see too there’s probably some viewers like oh come on this is like the 55th show show and all of them I think there’s a Magic Bullet and I to end up working on myself this is dumb that’s the Magic Bullet but I think what we’re saying is like look someone doesn’t require you to see a therapist every week some of it is like you could probably I mean they should look at your website for one but there’s ways to use the internet to find these methodologies of like making better decisions not being controlled by uh cuz you know again we talked a lot about the roles of consumerism how pervasive our media is to like live your own actual life Guided by principles that don’t shift because of whatever whatever fleeting thing happened that day and I I do prescribe I’ve written several books on different topics that people can go to the website and and get those books they’re very inexpensive they’re quick reads I find that as I developed my writing books I I thought the the brief you know kind of um practical skills in a short book is is maybe more helpful because of the time constraints that people have um but you you absolutely by limiting your media all media um and I prescribe this all the time to people who come to the ranch you you find the time and the space to get back to who you are and who you want to be and I don’t think that you can make the transformation while constantly being fed social media and media information on a regular basis we really do need to cut back adults as well not just teens no I I had a a young patient who we did ketamine infusions there a lot of physical and mental health issues and the some improvement I like okay The Next Step actually isn’t me doing anything uh until you decrease your Instagram usage uh I can’t treat you anymore because I’ve reached the limit of what I can do with these chemicals until you do that part and then we can continue on because we know that that alters your chemical brain you know as well we know that it changes how you feel we know that it increases depression we have all the statistical information we need to suggest that all media access needs to be reduced on a regular basis um this is too bad cuz I really like reading the news and it all started I think it was like the war in Ukraine I was like oh this is interesting and it didn’t stop and so every day I’m really well informed so you know if any International leaders need me to uh tell them what to do with the world I I’ll solve peace in the Middle East and all that apparently well I have to tell you I practice what I preach and I I am not I I’m certainly aware as I need to be about the the world at hand but I don’t watch television don’t have cable don’t I have very limited internet usage um and I find that it has changed my life and improved my life tremendously and this is going on you know many many years now right helps you to be more authentic and also absolutely beliefs not swayed by like whatever that and I enjoy my life doesn’t mean that the bad things don’t happen to me it doesn’t mean that I don’t have difficulties but I manage them better and I move through them and I’m able to live happily and contented you know to your point um so I I you know I don’t offer anyone suggestions that I’m not taking and doing myself you know because it works abs abolutely there’s nothing better so if you are reaching out for help you can always check out Ascend healthccenter.com we do Psychiatry ketamine, counseling, transcranial magnetic simulation, a lot of Novel approaches that don’t involve uh taking pills every day for the rest of your life though again for some patients great that’s all there is to it and that’s fine and then can you tell us since we don’t have much time left a little bit more about the ranch
well we have all kinds of programs and we are a horse ranch we are horse ecoin facility we do use utilize horses in our therapy but not exclusively in fact I do a lot of work I would say now I probably do maybe 60% of my work just in a clinical situation at the facility it’s a beautiful Ranch a beautiful place to come and get away for a little while you’re more than welcome to interact with our horses if you want to but it is not uh mandatory in the program um we do family coaching we do individual counseling and and um coaching anything that anything that you are struggling with we we can help you get through it because as we’ve said it it really does come down to the fundamental shift in perspective right and we love what we do and we we love everyone we treat and we’re here to help you whenever you need us and you if you don’t want to come to us take a look at the books that are offered on the website AB a great way to some help some of this is self-help too like everything has to go through a professional but that’s right absolutely there’s a lot there are a lot of good resources out there but don’t be spending all of your time on Instagram trying to find happiness it’s unfortunately you’re not going to find it there well
thanks so much for being on the show
