Meet Matt Tolstoy

We recently connected with Matt Tolstoy and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Matt, so happy to have you on the platform and I think our readers are in for a treat because you’ve got such an interesting story and so much insight and wisdom. So, let’s start with a topic that is relevant to everyone, regardless of industry etc. What do you do for self-care and how has it impacted you?

The most important thing I’ve done for my self-care is learn to more sensitively recognize when I’m pushing myself beyond a certain limit. Earlier in my life, I would override these signals, or maybe not be aware of them at all, which would lead to increasing levels of burnout. As the cliche goes, “rest is productive,” and it’s a cliche for a reason.

But there has been a bit of negotiation that has come along with this truer recognition of my capacities, and it hasn’t always felt good. Because sometimes it means I’m disappointed with what I’m able to do or how much it will cost me to grind something out within a particular time frame. I’ll be the first to admit, that in some ways things felt easier and better when I was more disconnected from myself and able to just push.

However, what was crucial to recognize in the reassessment was “just pushing” often lead to a bigger drop when I inevitably crashed, or I began to act terribly to those around me, or some other cost that I really didn’t like either. So seeing the connections across the larger picture, not just within the frame of “how much did I get done today,” that helped me develop a more honest relationship to my capacity.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I’m currently in private practice, and my specialization is in integrating mental health with physical rehabilitation. Most people who come to see me are struggling with both physical and psychological symptoms and, in one way or another, have been failed by the separate, siloed nature of healthcare.

I started my career in fitness, then transitioned into rehabilitation, and during the first ten years of practice, I saw how overlapping my patients’ physical and psychological experiences were. And for a certain subset of people, they needed interventions on both levels to resolve their symptoms.

However, even if these people were in therapy at the same time, something was being missed by continuing to treat the physical and psychological experiences separately. For example, sometimes physical treatment can bring on a wave of emotion; or during psychotherapy, physical symptoms might flare up. This shows how these areas are connected for the patient, but if the provider is only trained and licensed to treat one aspect of that picture, the patient suffers. Sometimes what’s best for the patient is to spontaneously move back and forth between physical and emotional processing when their system tells us it’s time.

So I decided I wanted to be a provider that could do that — flow between physical rehab and psychotherapy as needed.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

For me, the three most impactful things in this area have been 1) curiosity, 2) personal humility, and 3) learning about the brain.

1) In my line of work, curiosity is the bedrock of the entire practice. It’s really hard to change when we aren’t curious about our experience, because then we give in our to automatic assumptions and feelings about our experience; nothing new can get in. Modeling this curiosity as we explore our patients’ experience is crucial to the process. I’m not sure if there are ways to develop curiosity outside of recognizing how central it is to our practice, and while this may be a little rough to say, I think if you’re not noticing yourself innately curious about people and how they work, you might be in the wrong field.

2) Personal humility is important as a therapist, because we never really know someone else’s experience. Of course we have hunches, ideas, and see patterns over time, but people defy those expectations all the time; if we’re humble enough to see it. That’s my recommended way to develop this humility — to really be sincere in recognizing how often you are wrong in practice (and how that’s actually ok).

3) Learning about the brain, while potentially boring for many people, is essential for understanding human behavior and how change works. We’ve learned so much, particularly in the last ten years about the brain, emotion, motivation, etc. and those facts are so empowering for the beginning therapist (physical or psychological) to be of service to others. I wish there was a sexier answer to the best way to develop knowledge in this area, but as one of my mentors once said to me, “you just keep reading books, nonstop, forever.”

Before we go, any advice you can share with people who are feeling overwhelmed?

Sometimes the best thing we can do when feeling overwhelmed is to just stop. Stop for a moment and break the cycle of what’s happening.

When we stop having the surface conversation that we are currently having with ourselves and the outside world via whatever is overwhelming us, we can drop down into a central place inside and see what emerges.

⁣⁣⁣When we do this something unexpected usually pops into view —something we didn’t know we knew, something we forgot, something we didn’t realize before;and this can only occur when we stop telling ourselves the story as we’ve grown accustomed to telling it.

Then we are able to feel what we feel, know what we know, and then take meaningful next action steps based on that. ⁣⁣⁣

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.matttolstoy.com
• Instagram: matttolstoy