Session 479: The Work of Being A Girl Dad with Kier Gaines

Most of Kier Gaines’ therapy clients are women, many of whom are working through difficult relationships with their fathers. This week, Kier and Dr. Joy discuss what a father wound can look like, how it affects daughters in adulthood, and why receiving an apology may not resolve years of hurt. He also shares what he had to learn while raising daughters, from ordering underwear online to recognizing the parts of girlhood he could not anticipate. He and Dr. Joy discuss where attachment research falls short for Black families, how people respond to him as a big, dark-skinned Black man doing tender work in public, and why he is careful when people describe his content as “healing.” Kier’s new book, It All Starts When You Do, is out now. He shares why waiting can become a habit and what it takes to begin before you feel ready. Resources & Announcements Want to reflect on this conversation in community? Join us inside our Patreon https://community.therapyforblackgirls.com/ community where we’re unpacking this episode together. You can now catch episodes of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@therapyforblackgirls. Be sure to subscribe to get new episodes every week. Did you know you can leave us a voice note with your questions for the podcast? If you have a question you'd like some feedback on, topics you'd like to hear covered, or want to suggest movies or books for us to review, drop us a message at memo.fm/therapyforblackgirls https://memo.fm/therapyforblackgirls and let us know what’s on your mind. We just might share it on the podcast. Grab your copy of Sisterhood Heals. https://www.sisterhoodheals.com/ Where to Find Our Guest Grab your copy of It All Starts When You Do https://bookshop.org/a/20534/9780316587426 Check out (L)earned the Hard Way https://learnedthehardwaypod.com/ podcast Instagram https://www.instagram.com/kiergaines Stay Connected​https://click.convertkit-mail.com/27uv20p9mpioh8edr34s8ug63w344hg/58hvh8ug08p6wzc6/dGhlcmFweWZvcmJsYWNrZ2lybHMuY29tb3JibGFja2dpcmxzLmNvbS9wYXRyZW9u Is there a topic you'd like covered on the podcast? Submit it at therapyforblackgirls.com/mailbox https://www.therapyforblackgirls.com/mailbox. If you're looking for a therapist in your area, check out the directory at https://www.therapyforblackgirls.com/directory. Grab your copy of our guided affirmation and other TBG Merch at therapyforblackgirls.com/shop https://therapyforblackgirls.com/shop. The hashtag for the podcast is #TBGinSession. Make sure to follow us on social media: Instagram: @therapyforblackgirls https://www.instagram.com/therapyforblackgirls Facebook: @therapyforblackgirls https://www.facebook.com/therapyforblackgirls Our Production Team Executive Producers: Dennison Bradford & Gabrielle Collins Director of Podcast & Digital Content: Ellice Ellis Producer: Ndeye Thioubou Production Assistant: Bria Mosley See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to find a therapist in your area, visit our website at therapyforblackgirls.com. While I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a licensed mental health professional.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Hey, y'all. Thanks so much for joining me for session 479 of the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast. Today, I'm sitting down with therapist, author, and girl dad, Kier Gaines, for a conversation about what an apology can and cannot repair. Kier has spent a lot of time thinking about father wounds and the real work of healing, both with his clients and at home with his daughters. We'll get into it right after a quick word from our sponsors.

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  Host Nora McInerney is back for an all-new season of The Head Start, embracing the journey brought to you in partnership with ABV. As Nora continues her conversations with people living with chronic migraine, she's also reconnecting with familiar voices from seasons past to see where they are now on their journey. Of course, she'll be joined by headache specialist, Dr. Christopher Rhine, who offers insight into these challenges and the questions many of us have. So don't miss season four of The Head Start: Embracing the Journey. Listen on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  I've been a boy mom long enough to know that your children can introduce you to a world you love deeply but will never fully know for yourself. Kier Gaines understands that feeling. Raising two daughters has made him reconsider everything from how girls are taught to move through the world to what he can casually say in the group chat. At one point, he told his friends he needed to order more panties for his daughter. The other girl dads understood immediately. That was when he realized they might need a village of their own. A lot of people know Kier through the warm, funny videos he shares with his family. He has become one of the internet's most visible examples of a present and affectionate black father. But Kier is also a therapist, and most of his clients are women. Many of them are trying to understand

• 4:31Speaker 00

  what they did not receive from their own fathers. I wanted to know how he holds those two realities at once, raising his daughters with care while sitting across from women who are still carrying the pain of how they were raised. What happens when the apology finally comes and it still doesn't make you feel better? And can watching a loving father online help you heal? Or does it simply show you what you missed? Those questions also shaped Kier's first book, It All Starts When You Do, which is out now. Press play, and let's get into the conversation.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for joining us today, Kier.

• 5:12Speaker 05

  Oh, thank you for having me, Dr. Joy. Before we got on, I said it's something about your face that just makes me... So much of smiley face and your smiley eyes that just let me know everything gonna be alright.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I get that a lot. You know, people are like, oh, your parents did such a good job naming you Joy because it feels like it fits your personality. I was like, whoa, with a name like Joy, I didn't really have a choice. It's like being a grumpy character, so...

• 5:34Speaker 05

  Nah, it's definitely befitting. And it's good to be on here with you. And after listening to your podcast so many years, I felt guilty. I was like, am I supposed to be listening to other people, black girls? But I got so much from it. Yeah, I got so much from it.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  I love that. And now you are giving to the world in similar ways with the Learn the Hard Way Podcast, which we will get into. There's so much I want to talk with you about, Kier. I feel like, oh, gosh, where do I even start? But I really want to talk to you, Kier, because I think most people kind of see your work and they assume that you have a practice full of men clients. And I have even been surprised when I talked to you before that you say most of your clients are actually women.

• 6:15Speaker 05

  Vast majority, yeah.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And so something that we really went wanting to talk more about is the impact that black fathers have on their daughters' lives. And I know you are a very proud girl dad. But I would love to hear from you. Are there some common themes that tend to come up with your work with clients in tapping into this idea of like the father wound?

• 6:37Speaker 05

  Oh, my goodness, yeah. There's so many things that we have to fight through, both past, present, and future. I think when men and women come into the office and we identify that there are some gaps and needs that just didn't get fulfilled by the father, or there was a presence in the home that wasn't a symbol of safety or consistency or even warmth and love. We got to attack it depending on what the perspective is. For men, it comes across as, this was my template for who I was supposed to be and how I was supposed to be. And while that seemed okay in that house at that time, it doesn't fit on my skin very well, you know?

• 7:21Speaker 05

  It doesn't fit the temperature of my house. It doesn't fit what my family is asking of me, and I'm lost and I don't know what to do. And I also need that warmth and that love and that reassurance from a man who is culturalized in a time to believe that that's not a thing. And from women, it comes across as, I'm sure you would guess a lot, in romantic partnership expectations, if it's like a heteronormative situation, where the father would be the person who would set the tempo, who would validate in a way that establishes very specific brand of self-love and self-respect. And when that's absent, she has to figure it out for herself and kiss a lot of frogs in the dating world and face a lot of pain.

• 8:05Speaker 05

  So very similarly, it's like my compass is gone. And that template of what this love, what this romantic love would ideally look like was never set for me. So we walk through that all the time in therapy. And Dr. Joy, sometimes people are surprised because they think they come in for one thing. And I was talking to Crystal about this on my podcast. They think they're coming in for one thing, and we discover something completely different. Or we discover how complex those emotions that you're dealing with are. There's so much more living under them than they originally thought.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. What's something that maybe has been surprising for you or maybe super surprising for a client that came in for one thing and then you realize like, oh, this is actually something very different?

• 8:50Speaker 05

  I'll tell you a theme I noticed. There is a theme of, let's just stay in the realm of fatherhood and father wounds. There's this theme of, I need my father to apologize for what he did and what he didn't do. I will feel better once he apologizes for what he did and didn't do. And this was some of the inspiration behind the title of my book, It All Starts When You Do, just thinking about those cases. And then the father comes to a realization, and he either apologizes or does his version of apologizing, and the client still does not feel better. The presence of the apology is not the absence of the pain. And it doesn't take any of the pain away. It makes it a little bit easier to reconcile,

• 9:34Speaker 05

  but you're still dealing with the distress from what happened to you in that accumulation over the years. I've noticed that so much with both men and women in therapy practice.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  And so when we think about like being a girl dad, right? Like, I think you have been a girl dad before that term really kind of popped off, it feels like a couple of years ago. But when you think about like what it means to be a father to black girls, what do you feel like that means?

• 10:01Speaker 05

  Well, first, I had to change my constitution the way that I even thought about girlhood because I never experienced it before. I've seen it, girl cousins. And I had friends who were girls in the neighborhood. You make all these friends and all these connections growing up, but I've never been a girl. I don't know what that feels like. I don't know what that experience is like from the inside out. So it's being an observer of an experience that you're expected to guide. And you lost the whole time. You don't know what any of these things are or why some of these things are so important. So for me, it was really about rearranging the way that I thought about girls and girlhood. It was a lot of comparing my childhood to theirs.

• 10:43Speaker 05

  My original thoughts is wow, girlhood is two things. Girlhood is so restrictive, I thought. I wanted to take my daughter out riding her bike, but she just got her hair done, so she couldn't do it. You have to be so aware where your body is. You don't have on shorts, so you can't do flips. You have on a dress, you have to cross your legs. You can't take up too much space. You have to be careful how you walk in. You have to be careful about how other girls see you. There's so much that you have to think about. And then knowing what's going on with your body. I have a prepubescent daughter right now, and she has to be keenly aware of what her body is doing. These are things I've never had to deal with before. So meeting that with grace and curiosity as opposed to the annoyance that a parent has to work through when you're dealing with something that is the cherry on top

• 11:27Speaker 05

  of an ice cream cone that consists of bills and marital stuff and maintaining your health and maintaining your friendship. Just dealing with your children while dealing with yourself at the same time can be profoundly challenging. Having these girls has taught me to be more cognizant of, like, just, I'm a little bit more vocal in my male circles when certain things come up or when there are misunderstandings. I have a group chat and I told one of my homies, Dr. Joy, I said, yeah, I gotta order my daughter more panties. And if you're a girl dad, there's nothing weird about that. Like, you order, I order so many panties all the time. Panties and leggings and socks,

• 12:12Speaker 05

  I'm always ordering them. And one of my homeboys said, panties? You mean underwear? That's inappropriate to call them panties. And it's like, ah. So now I'm forced to reconcile with this slanted way the other men and other boys view girls and women. And it makes me go back and look at the way that I have traditionally and how some of that stuff may negatively affect my daughters. And it is the Wild West in between my ears and behind my eyeballs in terms of what's going on and what I need to be aware of. But it's been the greatest joy of my life, for sure.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  You know, I feel like I've heard lots of other men kind of talk about that awakening they have after they become like the father of a daughter, like that it really forces you to think about, you know, the language that you use and maybe like how you're talking to your friends. I mean, we've seen recently more conversations around like how important it is for men to kind of expand their thinking and to also challenge their boys and their friends around some of this thinking. What do you think makes it so difficult to have some of those maybe sometimes awkward conversations?

• 13:14Speaker 05

  It's typically awkward when there's the imbalance of the person who you're trying to explain something to. One, them having a fixed belief that they are reluctant to move away from. And two, when you just have more skin in the game than they do. They have no contextual frame of reference. When he thinks panties, where does his mind go to automatically? I don't know, but it's very different than what my mind goes to when I'm going on Amazon and trying to figure out whether to get the 12 count or the 20 count, you know, whether I'm going to get the daisies or the roses. The conversations just in circles of men are so different from that. I find myself trying to hold these two complex things at the same time, having empathy for, and the level of

• 13:57Speaker 05

  understanding, practical understanding for the fact that he's never been here, so he doesn't understand versus this compelling, I guess, notion I have to correct them because I feel like you can't float throughout the world. That misaligned with the realities of people that you live amongst every single day and not have it checked or corrected or questioned or interrogated. So it's really, if anything, it's more of a, a challenge for me to know when to speak up and when to let things slide. Know I'm the only one in the group that's going to feel this way, so perhaps I need not to die on this hill. Perhaps I just need to say what I need to say and go.

• 14:40Speaker 05

  Learning that I can't convince everyone because some people don't want to be convinced and it's not my job to. It's challenging. It's like you're the one friend in the group where all the cool kids are smoking at the bus stop and you're like, guys, we're not supposed to be doing this. You know, of course, you're right, but being that kid comes with the tax that you pay. And it's whether or not you're comfortable living with that level of awkwardness and some of your conversational dynamics with some of your best friends.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Hmm. As you've gotten older and like as your girls have gotten older, has that resulted in you maybe expanding like what your friend circles look like?

• 15:14Speaker 05

  Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Even amongst dads, my friend Sean Williams, he hosts this organization called The Dad Gang, and we do this event called Dad's House, maybe once a quarter in DC. We just invite men, hundred, anywhere from 50 to 100 men come in and listen to a discussion. And we talk about all the nuances of masculinity and fatherhood. And it's really cathartic and we do a lot of grounded exercises. The men share a lot. There's a lot of tears sometimes. It's a really, it's an incredible experience. But I realized in that experience, Dr. Joy, that girl dads need their own thing. Being a girl dad is a subgenre of fatherhood where

• 15:54Speaker 05

  we have to have conversations that unless you're a girl dad, you just won't understand. So it's made me lean into my friendships with girl dads a lot differently, especially if they have children who are older than mine, so I can get an idea of what's just around the riverbed. And especially, especially if they have children who are younger than mine, so I can kind of give off some of this information that I've learned and help somebody else along the way. It's humbling because everybody can't go with you. You realize that there's some men that it's just not safe to have these conversations with. Or, and I mean, even on a broader level, some men that just are a little

• 16:35Speaker 05

  too sketchy to have around. You don't trust them in the same capacity. So, yeah, it's made me more aware of those friendships for sure. But you still have to be diverse. Not all of my friends can be girl dads. That's impractical. Yeah, that'll limit my village tremendously and it'll cause me a lot of strife, for sure.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  So I want to hear more about this subgenre because that definitely was something I was thinking about. Like, is there a different experience of fatherhood depending on like the gender of your child? And it sounds like yes, right? So what kind of awakening or reasoning did you have for like, oh, girl dads need their own space? What were you noticing?

• 17:10Speaker 05

  Just some of the comments that dads that don't have daughters would use, or even dads that have a daughter and a son, even still, it's a different perspective. But in terms of like crying, this is an example that comes up all the time. So I will have friends who have sons and they say, man, my son always crying about something. He always complain, always crying, always crying. If I had a girl, I understand, but my son needs to be tougher. And it hits me two ways. In one way, it's like, wow, that's, that's unfortunate that what will be developmentally appropriate for a child, which is to cry, just because he's a boy, he can't get the developmentally appropriate

• 17:56Speaker 05

  response, which will be a hug, there's some love, there's some reassurance, there's some confidence, there's some building. But also, what makes you think I can't be tough on my girls? What makes you think that they're so delicate and fragile that they can't hear no or they can't take firmness? That happens a lot. And when the conversation comes up, it never ends with a, oh, I see things the same way that you do. It's typically a big argument. Like, it's this big contentious debate because of the way that we frame boys and girls. We have an idea in our mind what girls are, what boys are, and we are terrified to even let these ideologies fall outside of the box that we created for. There's a lot of talk around dating, even young, which

• 18:41Speaker 05

  makes me uncomfortable because my oldest daughter is nine. And men and women do, do different things that kind of irk me a little bit. Men do this thing where we'll say, no little boy's going to come to my house because I'm gonna have my gun ready. Hey, bro, what message does that send? What are you really doing with that? Are you making yourself feel better? Do you think that's legitimately protective? And that stops you from even knowing this young man that your daughter's interested in. And women do this thing that really irks me when they say, oh, you, you're teaching your daughter how a man should treat her. So why are we focused on how a romantic interest is supposed to go with a nine-year-old? How about I'm teaching my daughter how a person is

• 19:22Speaker 05

  supposed to treat her? Because folks come into therapy with a lot of friend trauma too. It's not just romantic relationships. So I'm setting the tone on how she will allow people to treat her, not centering men, not centering relationships for a child. I find those conversations funny because adults have a hard time. We're so far past childhood that we even view childhood through an adult lens. And I feel like we miss the runway horribly on that almost every chance we get.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'm a boy mom, right? So we have very different experiences. And I do think there is something about becoming a parent that helps you to realize like how many really warped ideas we have around like, oh, they're a heartbreaker. And it's like, I don't want my child like adultified in that way, like they're children. But I think there is something about becoming a parent that helps you realize like how we've really normalized all of that language.

• 20:15Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And you being a boy mom is super important when we talk about black children, to not adultify black children. Because research shows that black boys on average are viewed to be a lot older than they are, and black girls are sexualized a lot earlier than some of their white counterparts because of body development, because of a lot of different things. There's so many conversations, and I actually enjoy talking to boy moms because I feel like y'all are our counterpart.

• 20:45Speaker 05

  You go through an experience that ain't on your resume.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 20:49Speaker 05

  Almost everything is new for you. And sometimes it's like, yo, what, what is going on and what am I doing here? So I enjoy being lost with boy moms.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  More from our conversation after the break.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions. Each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other? Tune in to find out.

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  Host Nora McInerney is back for an all-new season of The Head Start, embracing the journey brought to you in partnership with AbbVie. In each episode, Nora has honest conversations with real people living with chronic migraine, people who are figuring out how to adapt, advocate, and stay connected to the things that bring them joy. This season, she's revisiting familiar voices and introducing new ones who will share their stories about what it means to live with this condition. From the missed moments to the strategies that help them keep going when things feel uncertain. As always, she'll be joined by headache specialist, Dr. Christopher Rhine, who offers insight into these challenges and the questions many of us have. If you're new to the podcast, check out the three previous seasons, each one offering a different perspective

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  on this condition and the theme of resilience, displayed while navigating it. So don't miss season four of The Head Start, Embracing the Journey. Listen on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  So you know, kind of think dipping back more into the research. We know a lot of what we know about like romantic relationships and even the ways that children develop are related to attachment styles, right? And you know, we know that shows up in childhood and adulthood. We also know that we were not very considered in a lot of the attachment data, and definitely black fathers were not, right?

• 24:48Speaker 05

  Oh, no.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  So what do you think is missing when we talk about the data in terms of attachment style, especially as it relates to black fathers and their children?

• 24:57Speaker 05

  I think it's just the cultural piece, like what attachment looks like for black people. And if outside of the black experience, I can see why you think that's an absurd statement. I could totally get that. But black people, we are culturalized to believe that we belong to each other in this really unique way. In a way, like we're responsible for one another. My mom told me, I used to catch the bus back in the day, back and forth to school in DC. I used to catch public transportation. My mom always told me, when you're on the back of the bus, don't act a fool, because one, you represent me, but two, they're gonna think that all black boys operate that way because you do. And it does give you this grand sense of racial pride, but also, man, that's a lot of pressure on you

• 25:42Speaker 05

  to believe that you represent people who you've never met just by your actions alone. So even something as culturally specific is that, if in the formulation of what attachment means, how we spend time as black fathers, how we show love as black fathers. A black father is more likely to make a joke about your upper lip looking funny and your hair being misshapen. And even though if you were from a culture where that's not acceptable, in our culture, depending on the context of course, that's totally acceptable. And that is a sign of love that is both given and received. But if in all of this amazing scientific and psychological research, we don't consider these very specific cultural touchpoints,

• 26:26Speaker 05

  then they don't get included in the numbers. And I don't know if, when you look at attachment and you look at the way that we do it, I don't know if you see it by that, that textbook definition. That's one of the frustrations I have with being a counselor, is we always have to kind of like re-wash the dishes on a lot of these therapeutic modalities because they never considered us.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, and I think that you do that in some very cool ways, especially with your online platforms, right? Like using the information that we learned in all these years of school, but talking to your audience and the people who enjoy your work in ways that are relatable to them. What has that experience been like for you to kind of translate that maybe very traditional knowledge into ways that are more applicable?

• 27:12Speaker 05

  It was scary at first. It was scary because I'm a big black man. I'm tall, I'm a big dark-skinned dude. And when I walk around in public people, their first thought is that, oh, look at this healer coming my way. They see me as a threat or some type of threat to their body, their mind, their experiences. This experience isn't one where I'm always well-received where I go, not even often well-received. So I think taking that into consideration, it was very hard because I felt that my approach to counseling wouldn't be well-received. I didn't think anybody would look at me and see someone who could possibly help or heal or facilitate or help guide in any sense of the word.

• 27:57Speaker 05

  But it's been reassuring. I believe that vulnerability is a superhighway to connection. And I figured if I could be vulnerable enough and chef up my particular rendition of counseling, maybe everybody would like it, but it'll be somebody that it touches in a really unique, special way. So scary at first, kept trying it, kept trying to distill these gigantic terms into easily digestible truths that people can take and do something practical with. And the response has been tremendous. I was just in Martha's Vineyard a few weeks ago, and this guy was at a bar and drink in hand, just pointed to me. He said, you the therapy dude?

• 28:39Speaker 05

  And came and this grown man hugged me and said, thank you. And I think it's one thing to sit in front of my laptop in my office with you. It's one thing to talk into the cell phone that I have and post it online and get responses. But it's another thing where you're in person and you can see the seeds that you sow grow into these beautiful little baby trees that one day will grow and produce fruit for themselves. And when people give you that type of feedback in a society where positivity and encouragement is becoming an ever-scarce commodity, they're not just blowing smoke. They really felt something that you gave them. And I think that level of authenticity

• 29:23Speaker 05

  is what helps that vehicle travel. So it wasn't something I wanted to do at first. I wanted to do it like everybody else. I didn't think saying ain't in my content would be considered appropriate or, you know, wearing a do-rag or even talking with my DC accent and letting it all hang out. But the more I leaned into it, the more comfortable I become and the more I realized that there's nothing wrong with the way that I do things. That is a script that was given to me that I am proving every day to be less and less true. Just gotta have the courage to interrogate it in a way that allows you to find that out for yourself.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, and a part of what you share as sharing on your online platforms is your experience of fatherhood. So how did you make the decision to kind of make the kids, at least a small part, like they're not the entirety of your content for sure? But how did you make the decision to include your experience as a father as a part of your content and not just your experience as a therapist?

• 30:20Speaker 05

  Because I did family content before I got licensed. So that's how I got started. The reason I did is because Alzheimer's and dementia runs in my family. And they say it's not hereditary, but ooh, man, the tea leaves. All signs are pointing south. I had a fear that, I just had this baby, and I knew I was gonna propose to my girlfriend at the time. She's been my wife for almost eight years now. I had this fear that all this would happen and I'll never remember it. So I wanted to capture these family moments on video so I could have them archived. And if my mind ever got to a place where I couldn't remember the people that I loved most, at least my eyes can relive the moments. And it blew up. The videos just started going crazy viral.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  For all y'all that's listening and don't know, believe it or not, on Instagram, things used to actually go viral. Like, that was a thing back in the day for the algorithm with cuckoo bananas, man. But we did that, the video, I had one video where I had just started therapy and I was encouraging men to go to therapy, just saying, you see me and Noemi, we hugged up and loved up. But if you don't go to therapy and see somebody about all the things you've been through, bro, you have all of this and you won't ever be happy. Like, I'm telling you. And it was right after George Floyd got murdered. So I think the world was in a place to just hear a black man's perspective a little differently. And went crazy, we ended up getting managed, got signed, just Hollywood came knocking on the door. We got catapulted to the national spotlight.

• 31:50Speaker 05

  I just continued on with what I always loved and enjoyed. And at some point, you know, my team, it goes from being a hobby to a job and from a job to a brand. And somewhere in that jump, they were like, hey, this family content is cool, but you're studying to be a therapist. I think you need to start talking about that more. I was reluctant, I didn't want to do it because I thought too many people online telling folks what to do. And the advice was horrible. I didn't want to be a voice in the number. And eventually, I just saw the need. For that grow more and more. And again, I slowly leaned into it until I had a comfort that allowed me to do it at the clip I do today. I would love to say it was a grand scheme that I thought out, but no, it just, it kind of happened.

• 32:31Speaker 05

  I let the environment inform me of what the best next step was. And I found a moment brave enough to just jump.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. Yeah. And I think people have lots of reactions to your content, right? Like you will often hear or see people in your comments saying like the way that they see you interact with your girls kind of heals their inner child and you will sometimes have some pushback around that.

• 32:54Speaker 05

  Okay, Dr. Hold on, Dr. Joy. Hold on, hold on, because what you're not going to do.

• 33:03Speaker 05

  Are you therapizing me? Is that what we doing?

• 33:05Speaker 00

  No.

• 33:05Speaker 05

  Is that, is that what we doing right now?

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Of course not, of course not.

• 33:09Speaker 05

  Nah, that's, yeah, I do have pushback and I want to know what you think about this, actually. Really curious. It's not healing you.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:17Speaker 05

  It's not healing you. It makes you feel good. And it reminds you of something and it gives you a different perspective, but that is not the same as healing. I talk about this in the book and it all starts when you do. If I fell off my bike and I injured my wrist, watching other people successfully come back from injury isn't necessarily healing me, it's inspiring me. Watching other people ride their bikes isn't healing me, it's motivating me, it may be informing me. But healing is a really specific process and you have to be involved in it. And I love that people see the content and they vibrate with it and they get something from it. And it makes them think about their own childhood or even parenthood experiences.

• 34:02Speaker 05

  But this culture of psychobabble where we use a lot of mental health oriented words, use a lot of psychological terms, use a lot of stuff in the DSM that I don't even think people have ever cracked a DSM open to take a look at. I want to be cognizant and I want to be really intentional about how we use the term healing. Cause I hear that thrown about a lot. So no, I'm glad that it does it for you, but I will argue that it is not healing you. I want to know what you think about that.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I love that we stumbled. I wasn't necessarily sure where you would go with this, but I'm glad I asked the question because I do think people are using the term healing very colloquially, right? Like they are necessarily talking about it in the same ways that you or I might if we were having a peer supervision group, right? But the way that you and I talk about it like on a podcast might be a little different. And so I do understand that we do want to be careful. I also think psychobabble has like reached utter proportions, right? Like we got to rein it back in some ways. But I do think here for any of us, and I want to talk more about this too. I think that what they see when they see you interacting with your daughters, with your wife, is a corrective emotional experience, right?

• 35:13Speaker 00

  So it is not the entirety of healing, but I do think it opens their eyes to like, oh my gosh, like this is what this could have been like for me also, right? So it is a tiny like opening into the healing process. Now, I agree with you, you can't stop with you just watching Kier's videos on Instagram, right? But I do think it, it can awaken people to like, oh, that's very different than my childhood experience was, right? And like, I feel good about that. And now what else do I need to do to kind of take the next steps in the healing?

• 35:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. And that's the difference between the influencer who wants to make you feel good about the idea of healing and a therapist who can guide you through the process of healing.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 05

  Because it's not one or two things that you throw against the wall and you just take with sticks. It is an ever evolving, ever changing process. And to your point, I think a powerful insertion point into that process is when something makes you look at one of your experiences in a different way. If you can interrogate your thoughts, feelings, beliefs and prior experiences away from shame, blame and guilt, I think that you have a really good chance of seeing some amazing outcomes in terms of healing. But I think we get into this idea that it's something that you have to actively do. Like you're actively doing something and sometimes you're actively not doing anything.

• 36:37Speaker 05

  They think that you're always saying something and sometimes there's a lot of healing in silence. So I think we fall in love with this commercialized idea of that word. But what it actually means and looks like is completely different when you're on that journey. And I, I hope that one day we can close the gap so that people aren't utterly distressed when they are in the process of healing from things that happened to them in the process. And then they realize that it doesn't feel good.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:04Speaker 05

  It's like, no, don't quit. It doesn't feel good. Like that's, that's what this thing is. It sucks really badly sometimes. But we keep fighting because there's a beautiful valley on the other side of that hill. I promise you just never know how long the hill is until you keep walking.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And I've recently been seeing more conversations and more like posts around black women specifically looking for male therapists.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  That's a thing.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, which I think is a different experience. And I do think it is an incredible opportunity, especially if there have been some like father wounds or like issues with men to have a healing experience with a male therapist. It really presents some very different results that you might not get if you were working with another woman therapist. Can you talk a little bit about maybe some themes that have come from your work with women? And what that might look like for people who maybe are interested in working with a male therapist?

• 37:55Speaker 05

  Absolutely. The first one that comes up is just challenging your idea of what men are. When I was working at another practice, it wasn't mine, just when I was getting my hours to get my license. My first name is Kier, K I E R. So when you do your intake and they say, okay, we're going to assign you to Kier Gaines, someone will be like, oh, yes, sis. Okay.

• 38:16Speaker 05

  Me and Kier, yes, girl, we about to, we about to get this healing there. And then I pop up on screen and they're like, oh my God, you know, you're a dude. I got a lot of those responses and I'm not offended by it. I understand where it comes from. But I'll ask sometimes, I ask, does it bother you that I'm a man? And some people will say no, some will say yes, straight up. But some people will mean no, but not be comfortable. I mean, they'll mean, yes, it does bother me, but they wouldn't be comfortable enough to say it. So it's okay, let's do the intake. Let me get this information down. And then you and I can have a conversation. You can decide whether or not you want to continue with it. And I think it's a very unique thing to be in a room

• 38:59Speaker 05

  with another person, specifically for a woman to be in a room with a man. And there is a very unique power dynamic here. But in the room, I understand it. We're exchanging back and forth. I don't need to hoard any type of power, you know? I'm not here to subjugate you. I'm not here to denigrate you. This whole session is only about you. I don't even talk about myself very much. And then there's another thing where there's no, you know, a lot of our touch points with people of another gender are romantic. And this isn't romantic. There's nothing romantic about it. And then there's a trust thing. I have to trust this man? Is he going to know what a luteal phase is? You know what I'm saying? Is he going to know what a follicle phase is?

• 39:41Speaker 05

  Is he going to understand my womanhood in a way that'll be helpful for me? So now you're giving me a chance to surprise you. There's so much going on and then even with the transference, a lot of especially older black women, we, we got to stop sometimes, I am not your son and I'm not your nephew. I'm not your nephew. I get it. I get it. But that's not who I am. That's not what I represent in your life. But we can still have such a meaningful partnership here. And there is something about getting the perspective of someone who doesn't share a modicum of your closest held lived experience that just opens you up to ideas and thoughts and beliefs that you wouldn't have been introduced to otherwise.

• 40:24Speaker 05

  And we've done such tremendous work, such tremendous work, even getting an idea. Sometimes clients ask, well, you as a father, like what's your perspective? You know, in the, in the therapy session, I'm not giving you my perspective, not like that. But if it's in a way that's very helpful and we can start exploring and playing with ideas and I could push you a little bit, you say something like, well, you know, it's not that I hate my dad. I don't hate my dad. And someone, wait a minute. But what if you do? Let's explore. What if you do? Let's just talk about what that looks like for a second. And then at the end, you realize, oh shoot, I hate what my dad represents. And I never felt comfortable saying that out loud.

• 41:07Speaker 05

  Of course, a lot of different people can bring you to that conclusion or bring you to that understanding. But I think especially comparative to just the way that we talk about gender online and the way it gender scripts and what we believe folks are supposed to be in the world. When you have an active antithesis of that in front of you, unfolding every single day, it just gives you a lot more latitude to begin being more curious and questioning your long held beliefs. And I don't think that there is a singular thing that is healthier for growth than questioning your longstanding beliefs.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I really appreciate the nuance that you added there. And I agree with you that a lot of the, you know, opposite gender experiences we have are often only romantic, right? And so then you get in a room and there is this power, there's incredible intimacy in a therapy relationship, right? And so we do know that like sometimes there can be feelings and people like are confused and like, what is this I'm feeling? Because this is not a romantic relationship, but like, I think he hears me. He understands me maybe in a way that other men have not in my life. So what are some of the conversations maybe you had to have with clients? Cause we know that it is a very normal experience, even with same sex therapeutic relationships, right? Like sometimes there are like what feels like romantic feelings, but they aren't necessarily right.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Like you just are not used to maybe this kind of an intimate experience where romance is not involved. So can you talk about like how you maybe will have some of those kinds of conversations with clients if it's necessary?

• 42:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. And when you're a therapist, you have to have very strong boundaries because it's incredibly intimate. And it is so symbolic of a friendship, but it's very important to remember that I'm not your friend. I'm not your friend. I'm your advisor. I'm your therapist. We're not homies. We're not buddies. We're not key keying together. That's not it. We're here for your benefit. There are different conversations. There are some women where the dynamics with men, they'll lean into their sexuality just instinctually. And the first thing I want to do is I'm gonna have a conversation about it when I notice it. Let's get curious about it. The first thing I'll let you know is there's nothing going on here. And quite frankly,

• 43:25Speaker 05

  I don't like that energy coming toward me, but I'm curious. When you said that to me, what did you want me to think? Or what do you think I see when I see you? Just to get an understanding, I want to have a conversation about what's going on and not in a way where we're inferring anything or we're hinting toward. No, let's have a very outright conversation. I think sometimes if there is a little bit of transference, I've had women who have told me that they, I remind them too much of someone, or they don't think that I will understand. And I don't fight them. I said, okay, well, I can refer you out to another colleague that I think will be better able to help you. It's about your comfort. If you're not comfortable talking to me, you're not going to be comfortable talking to me.

• 44:09Speaker 05

  That's not an indictment on me as a therapist. I'd rather you go somewhere and receive the help that you know you can get, that you feel confident you can get from another practitioner. We have a lot of those conversations. A lot of conversations, I think, because clients will find my social media sometimes. I never leave with that. No one knows that, you know, especially well, now that I got my own practice they do, but before, folks ain't know. They would stumble across it eventually. I think everybody Googles their therapist after a couple of sessions, just to see what type of person they are. But when folks get really curious about my life, particularly female clients, when they get really curious about my life, I always make sure we, we don't stick on me too long in this fascination about

• 44:53Speaker 05

  what's going on with me. I only got 45 minutes with you this week, and we had a lot of work to do and a lot to catch up on. So we gotta focus on the main thing right now. Just the conversations that remind the client what this relationship is and what we're here to do. I'm so glad you feel comfortable with me. I'm so glad you love these sessions. I love these sessions too. I absolutely love helping you. But in the time that we have together, let's make sure that we're really doing the work that prepares you for life out in the wild when you get back out there. Because you don't have me in your ear when you're out there. And I need you to take the tools and these grand aha moments that we stumbled upon in the session, be able to utilize them out there. It's crazy. It's

• 45:35Speaker 05

  a wild job. I think, what, 11% of therapists are black. And if you talk about black men, I can't imagine it must be anywhere about 2% if that, you know? So it's rare. I get the novelty. I get why it's fascinating. But there's still a job to do. And we gotta make sure that we keep that as the most salient thing in the room.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. More from our conversation after the break.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other? Tune

• 46:44Speaker 00

  in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:53Speaker 05

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.

• 47:13Speaker 04

  I had this dream of being a musician. And everyone I had known was kind of like, you're not good at music. You know, you should probably have other things to back up, play and whatever. Felt like I didn't have anyone close to me. And my wife had flown out to visit, and she found out I was sleeping in a car. She didn't know. And she was like, let's do it. And she slept in a car with me. And for the first time in my life, I realized that in a life full of what I thought was things happening to me, something was finally happening for me.

• 47:40Speaker 05

  Dude, that's like the most romantic shit I've ever heard.

• 47:43Speaker 04

  Coolest thing ever.

• 47:44Speaker 05

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Jason Timp from Hoops Tonight with Jason Timp. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which can mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  Host Nora McInerney is back for an all-new season of The Head Start, embracing the journey brought to you in partnership with AbbVie. In each episode, Nora has honest conversations with real people living with chronic migraine, people who are figuring out how to adapt, advocate, and stay connected to the things that bring them joy. This season, she's revisiting familiar voices and introducing new ones who will share their stories about what it means to live with this condition. From the missed moments to the strategies that help them keep going when things feel uncertain. As always, she'll be joined by headache specialist Dr. Christopher Rhine, who offers insight into these challenges and the questions many of us have. If you're new to the podcast, check out the three previous

• 49:07Speaker 00

  seasons, each one offering a different perspective on this condition and the theme of resilience displayed while navigating it. So don't miss season four of The Head Start, embracing the journey. Listen on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Something else I want to jump back to parenting, because in a lot of your like online content, when you did the Today Show last year, you also talked about like how much of parenting is us sometimes filling in the divots of what we didn't get, right? And so I want to hear about like, what's the line though, right? Because I think sometimes we can over, like go do overkill on what we missed as opposed to like parenting the child that is actually in front of us. So how do you like not lean into projection when we are parenting?

• 49:55Speaker 05

  Oh, my goodness. One of the ways that's really helped me and a lot of my clients is understanding that my kid's childhood is not my childhood, is theirs. There are key differences. For one, my kids don't have my mom, they have me. It is a completely different experience. I think being mindful of how you mold their childhood to be reminiscent of yours or symbolic of yours, especially when that is counter to who they are as an individual. I think that's something to be mindful of. Being mindful of your own fears and apprehensions when it comes to what you will or won't allow, like even like your

• 50:36Speaker 05

  dreams deferred. A lot of my friends who had hoop dreams that didn't work out, like, yeah, I'm gonna get my son into basketball, and we're gonna do these drills and these practices. And I think there is something to learn in a skill of a sport. I think there is something to learn in the dedication and the discipline that it takes to practice and become better. But you have to listen to your child. If your child does not like basketball, I think that's when you stop, you listen, and you have to be self-honest enough, but sit with your own thoughts enough to know that you are trying to make something happen that makes you feel good. It makes you feel complete, makes you feel like you're being a good parent, makes you feel like you're being proactive. But it does not align

• 51:19Speaker 05

  with the needs, goals, and desires of your child in the moment. And that's where the friction is. The problem comes in, in my book, one of the first things I talk about is uncomfortable truths, these things that exist in our lives that we don't have the foresight, the bravery, or the emotional, mental availability to see in the moment. It's how close you are, how comfortable you are, acknowledging what your uncomfortable truth is in the moment. I want this for you right now, because this is going to make me feel like a good parent. It's not fun to arrive to. I just said healing's not fun, right? I just said healing hurts. Sometimes healing is understanding when you're doing too much, and you're doing it in the wrong direction. But that you have to be honest with yourself, and you have to realize

• 52:04Speaker 05

  that that's not something you can always get right, but it is something that you can correct. And it's something that you can notice yourself doing in the moment, and slow down, or pause on, or even stop if you're feeling really brave. The understanding where you are mentally and emotionally is one of the first steps to being an effective and attuned parent. Because it's very easy to make it about us. And we can rebrand it so that it doesn't look or feel that way to us. But that will be your child's reality.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  So I want to talk more about the book. And one of the first things that I am really curious about, because I know somebody who has so many interests and has done such incredible work across your career, there were a lot of places you probably could have gone with this book, but you started with, it all starts with you, when you do. What made you choose that as both the title and like the message for this book?

• 52:56Speaker 05

  It was the reoccurring theme of people coming into my practice, or coming to see me after a speech, or coming to me in the street. And people are always talking about waiting. They're waiting. They've become masters at waiting. And I think the natural next question is, what are you waiting for? And it's a myriad of things. But the things that they're waiting for. I'm waiting to feel ready. I'm waiting to feel inspired. I'm waiting until I feel better. After my kid goes off to college, then I'm gonna really start my life. Once me and my wife work out all our difficulties, I'm gonna get started. I'm just waiting till that calms down. The sound of that can being kicked down the road has to be a beautiful sound because we do it every time we we come up to the can, we just kick it further down the road and kick it further down the road.

• 53:41Speaker 05

  And what we don't realize is that we're practicing. We are practicing waiting. And when you practice waiting, oh, these great, I call them excuses. Sometimes they can be branded as justifications. But like, they just start solidifying and I head to a place where you can say, you know, I'm gonna wait until I'm I'm gonna pursue another career, Dr. Joy, but right now I'm just busy. I'm gonna wait until I'm less busy. And the moment where you're less busy will come, where you're like, yeah, I'm less busy, but I'm not less busy enough. This version of less busy that I am right now doesn't look the way I imagined it in my head, so it's not a thing. I'm going, it's gonna come back again. Don't worry. And I'm gonna start when it comes back around. And it never comes back around for some people.

• 54:26Speaker 05

  So it doesn't start in the most convenient moment. It starts when you do. And now is the most opportimal time to start. Which is probably the best lesson that being a therapist has ever taught me. The best time to start is now. I'm not prepared. Yeah, me neither. Let's start. But I'm not ready. Yeah, me neither. Let's start. I don't know what I'm doing. Yeah, me neither. I get it. When I first decided to be a full-time content creator, I had never edited a video on a laptop before. Let's do it ugly. Let's do it scared, but we can do it. And just like you can practice waiting, you can practice doing it ill-prepared. And you can kinda like patch it up as you go along. You can ask for help as you go along. You can make discoveries, but you have to start.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  So how do you hope that people will engage with the content in the book?

• 55:11Speaker 05

  Meaningfully, I think that I went a different route than typical self-help. I've read a lot of self-help books. And some of them are tremendous, but some of them leave me with the rented confidence of the author. I didn't really learn how, I learned what. I learned your idea of success. I learned what your idea of forward-thinking and of grit and tenacity is. And instead of telling people what to do, I wanted to write a book that invited them to be curious. And understand what curiosity looks like beyond the lens of shame and blame and guilt. Understand why you shame, blame, and guilt.

• 55:52Speaker 05

  I even mentioned it in the book. We talk about shame is a really effective tool. Shame, it works so well. As soon as you shame and guilt, as soon as somebody sneezes in public, what's the first thing we say? Bless you. Why is that? Because throughout your time, let someone sneeze at you and not say bless you. There was shame and guilt in not saying that. I don't go to a buffet and just

• 56:19Speaker 05

  without covering my mouth. Why? Because there is shame in not covering your mouth when you sneeze. Like shame allows us to get on the same accord socially. It sets up a lot of protections. You're not gonna talk to certain people a certain way in public. You're not gonna put people at a certain amount of risk and danger because of shame. It's effective when it's effective, of course. But just like there's things that we do, as humans, there's nothing that we don't overdo, and we overdo shame. So having people understand why I'm shrouded in that mist, what it's doing to me and encouraging them to be more curious about how to climb the cells out. That is the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is just to become more curious and be comfortable in your curiosity.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Is there a favorite part of the book?

• 57:06Speaker 05

  The end. I like chapter five. They don't tell you this, but when you're writing a book, you read that joint like a man. You read it cover to cover so many times. And it's so easy to be like, ah, I don't like any of this anymore and just start realigning. But I've read something different every time I read the book. And the end is the same way that my therapy sessions are when we're done. This is the conclusion of our relationship. And it's always a little emotional for me. I'm not a really emotional therapist. But when we're at the conclusion of our time together, I always do a thing where I remind the client where they started, what all the work they did, what all of it was, and where they are now.

• 57:49Speaker 05

  I reminded them of the first thing they ever said to me. I go back and sometimes I show them how their treatment plan has changed. And then I'm not gonna give away the end of the book, but at the very end of the book, I say, hey, I gave you everything that you need. Like, no, it's not perfect yet. And it was never gonna be. But that's not the point. The point is for you to sharpen this and feel confident in your ability to successfully try out there in the world. It's like, you got it now. That is my absolute favorite part of the book because my favorite part of counseling is when we've done the work that we can do together and now it's time for you to go outside and you to practice that. That is the most gratifying part of the experience. When you got what you came for

• 58:33Speaker 05

  and it's still gonna be more growing to do, but now you got the tools to do it. You don't have to eat out at the restaurant. You got all the ingredients at home.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it sounds like something that you will revisit probably multiple times throughout your life when different goals are said, different experiences, right? Like something you can keep going back to.

• 58:51Speaker 05

  Absolutely. From the time I first started writing these ideas until the last time I read the manuscript, even when I did the audiobook, my life has changed so much. And therapist me and person me are two different things, or two different entities. And therapist me can't help person me live and live in color. But therapist mode was writing this book. And me being a person just going through life was reading and narrating this book. And even Dr. Joy, I'm telling you, so many of the things that I wrote down that I didn't realize that's how I move clients through healing. It made me realize so many parts of my life where my thoughts

• 59:35Speaker 05

  and my perspective and my way of just looking at the world is completely different than it was. And it helps me in a different way now. So yeah, it's something that I definitely think you'll revisit. It's something that you'll put down in a chapter. It's like, hold on, I need to I need to reflect on that. It's gonna call you out, but it's gonna call you in. It's gonna call you in so much, which is exactly what a good therapist and a good therapeutic alliance is supposed to do.

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  Hmm, I love that. I love that. So especially for our fathers in the DMV, we wanna hear, what is a good suggestion for a daddy-daughter date?

• 1:00:12Speaker 05

  That's such a good question. It depends on what your daughter is into. So I like to separate dates into two different experiences. Me and my baby, we love Vietnamese food, me and my oldest. So we will go and get pho. And we will put our phones away and we will talk as we eat. We'll share food. We'll eat off of each other's plates. We'll reminisce. And then she and I are walkers, so we'll just be in the middle of downtown DC and we'll just walk and talk and enjoy the sunshine and have conversations with random people. So two experiences that you all mutually enjoy. And then like the latter experience, bro, just do something that she enjoys. Go to a playground, go to a park, go see a movie, whatever she likes, but make sure that you all are sharing and interacting in that experience.

• 1:00:57Speaker 05

  I think what you do in the experience is just as important as going. The National Harbor is a great place. We go K Street Waterfront. You know anything about DC, Dr. Joy?

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  A little bit. Like, I know the National Harbor. I don't know K Street Waterfront, though.

• 1:01:11Speaker 05

  It's nice. I mean, the brunches be like a hundred thirty dollars, so stay out of those. With the little ones, yeah, you don't want, you don't want them wasting lobster tail money and they eating chicken nuggets. But you know, my youngest daughter, we can go and get acai bowls in the spot called Old Town Alexandria. That's what we do. And we sit on the swings and we just eat our bowls. We don't even talk. She is a sit with me in silence kinda girl. What she gets from me. So we don't talk, we just swing. She's four. We don't say anything. We just enjoy each other's company silently. Don't do the thing that you think you're supposed to do. Do the thing that you all mutually enjoy and the thing that she actually likes. That's how you create the moments and memories.

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  Beautiful. Thank you for those suggestions, Kier. So let us know where we can stay connected with you. What is your website? Where can we find the book? What is happening next for you?

• 1:02:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, so my book publishes on September 1st. The book is called It All Starts When You Do. It is a guide to self-healing. I made it so that That you don't have to have a degree in psychology and know all these fancy therapeutic terms in order to read it at all. It is a very eye level, story driven. It's like a conversation type of book that'll definitely give you some guidance in terms of where you are versus where you ultimately think that you deserve to be. So you could find the book, It All Starts With You Do, anywhere that books are sold. I have a podcast with an amazing, one of my executive producers is Dr. Joy. She gave us the blessing to do the podcast,

• 1:02:44Speaker 05

  Inspired by Therapy for Black Girls. It's called Learn the Hard Way. It's a podcast. It was originally about men's mental health, but Dr. Joy, forty-nine percent of our audience are women.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  I'm not surprised.

• 1:02:55Speaker 05

  And it's been a joy to have them and have them glean so much information from what we share. There's, you can find me on Learn the Hard Way Podcast. You can follow me on Instagram. You can follow me on all the socia's. It's Kier Gaines, K I E R G A I N E S. I would love to have you be a part of the community.

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  Absolutely. We will make sure we include all of that in our show notes. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today, Kier. I appreciate it.

• 1:03:22Speaker 05

  Thank you, Dr. Joy. Make sure you bring me back. I got so much more I want to talk to you about.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I knew two other episodes at least that I want to talk to you about. So I'm sure you will be back.

• 1:03:31Speaker 05

  Okay, man. That's what's up. Thank you. I appreciate you.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  I'm so grateful to Kier for joining me for this conversation. To learn more about him and his work, visit the show notes at therapyforblackgirls.com/session479. And don't forget to text this episode to two of your girls right now and tell them to check it out. Did you know that you could leave us a voicemail with your questions or suggestions for the podcast? If you have topics you'd like us to discuss, leave us a message at memo.fm/therapyforblackgirls and let us know what's on your mind. We just might feature it on the podcast. If you're looking for a therapist in your area, visit our therapist directory at therapyforblackgirls.com/directory. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram at @therapyforblackgirls and come on over and join us in our Patreon community for exclusive

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  updates, behind the scenes content, and much more. You can join us at community.therapyforblackgirls.com. This episode was produced by Elise Ellis, Inde Chubu, and Bria Mosley. Editing was done by Denison Bradford. Thank y'all so much for joining me again this week. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you all real soon. Take good care.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Stugatz from Stugatz and Company Live. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive

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  Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound Terzepatide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity, or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains Terzepatide and should not be used with other Terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic

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• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  What's that? My fresh detector. Uh, your what? There it is. What is it detecting? Fresh produce, fresh meat. Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Apparently, we celebrate. At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.