Hey folks, I’m Dave Kydd, and this is the eighth episode of The I Am Podcast — where we build our Internal Art Museum one image at a time. Each week, we take a simple image from my psychotherapy practice and use it to make sense of everyday stress, emotions, and problems.

In this episode, we talk about stress — yours, mine, Lily’s, Charlie the dog’s (not Billy the cat, he’s fine) — and we picture it like a barrel. As stressors pour in, the barrel fills up, and when it overflows, coping stops.

We walk step by step through a practical way to understand and manage stress, using a familiar example: Ross from Friends. By breaking stress into pieces, we look at what’s filling the barrel, how full it really is, and what you can actually do about it.

You’ll learn:

• What stress really is and why it feels so heavy
• How to identify what’s actually filling your stress barrel
• Why you don’t need zero stress — just manageable stress
• How to reduce stress coming in
• How to increase stress going out using your own “taps”

As always, we add a new image to the Internal Art Museum — a drawing of me inside a stress barrel — to help make this idea easy to remember when life starts piling up.

Join me as we continue filling the walls of our internal art museum — one image at a time.

Check out the video version of this episode on Youtube.

Find us on Instagram and Tik Tok @the_iam_podcast

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, I’m Dave Kydd, and this is the sixth episode of The I Am Podcast — where we build our Internal Art Museum one image (and now one movie) at a time. These are the pictures, metaphors, and now moving pictures I use in my therapy practice to help people understand life more clearly and grow into who they were always meant to become.

Welcome to the new series called Moving Pictures! Moving Pictures is a new gallery where we use well-known movies to explain therapy concepts. In this episode, we explore one of the most famous illusions in movie history: The Wizard of Oz. Is your problem really all-powerful… or just a booming voice with a microphone behind a curtain?

We’ll look at how many of our “villains” — anxiety, depression, anger, low self-esteem, the need for approval — use the same strategy as the Wizard: intimidation, illusion, and selective storytelling. I’ll talk about how these internal villains convince us they’re stronger than they are, why their power is mostly bluff, and how to pull back the curtain in your own life to see the truth.

You’ll learn:

• Why your problem feels huge even when it isn’t.
• How your villain uses “selective spotlights” to rewrite your past.
• What happens when you refuse to believe the illusion and push back.
• How to shrink your villain by doing exactly what it doesn’t want you to do.

Join me as we continue filling the walls of our internal art museum — one image at a time.

Check out the video version of this episode on youtube!

Find us on Instagram and Tik Tok @the_iam_podcast

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

👋 Hello folks. In this episode, we’re talking about parenting — and why it helps to picture it like swimming lessons.

We’ll explore what it means to start with your kids in the shallow end, holding them close, and slowly guide them toward the deep end — where they can swim on their own.

Along the way, I’ll share how parents can balance encouraging with challenging, and why every child’s journey down the pool looks a little different.

This is also a special one — our first guest episode — featuring my two daughters, Rosie and Lily. Together, we’ll talk honestly (and laugh plenty) about what worked, what didn’t, and how we all grew up along the way.

It’s a heartfelt conversation about learning to let go, trust the process, and celebrate the beautiful, messy art of raising humans.

Join me as we keep filling the walls of our Internal Art Museum — one image at a time.

Check us out on Youtube and all social media platforms @the_iam_podcast

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.