EP039: Bojana Obradović, Psychologist and Psychotherapist from Serbia

Sanja Milosavljevic: Good afternoon, good people. My name is Sanja Milosavljević and I am going to be your host for today. You are watching and listening to Mondopreneur podcast. A podcast dedicated to sharing the story of people from all over the world and our region, which mostly focuses on pandemic since it happened to all of us simultaneously at the same time and we can’t identify some current problems in another country or with other people and therefore we share the stories of people from all over the world to see that we are all, more or less, in the same situation. This whole project is supported by US Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia and thanks to them we can do this. My today’s guest comes from belgrade, she is a therapist and her name is Bojana. I am not going to list all the things that Bojana is working on, I will let her tell us something about herself. Hello Bojana, how are you? 

Bojana Obradović: Hello Sanja, fine, thanks for asking.

Sanja Milosavljevic: You are welcome. That is the main question today. Earlier, it was kind of a formal question, and today, when we ask someone how he or she is, we want to hear how this other side is doing. Tell me – I usually ask my guests to introduce themselves. To tell us what is their educational background, in what way their formal education affected their choice of career and whether they have some interesting hobbies. It is not just work, work, work, we need to have a place where we relax or express our creative sides of ourselves.

Bojana Obradović: Okay. I wasn’t expecting this – I like the question. I am a psychologist by education and I practice psychotherapy. At the moment I am working on several modalities, as it suits me the best. I work on a sort of integration and run project “Pričajmo o tome” (Let’s talk), which is a counseling center that helps students. We do various workshops, psychotherapy and lectures, which is very important to me, to provide help regarding mental health. Regarding hobbies, I was thinking, and at the moment I think it would be – plants. I am totally in love with plants and there are a lot of them in my life, at the moment, and besides that I love photography and I love to dance. Nothing professionally, but fulfilling, for me. So, thank you for that question on hobbies. Usually, people don’t ask that nowadays.

Sanja Milosavljevic: I like that question as hobbies show what we don`t want to show to other people, hobby is our own little oasis. It is great, I like to ask that, to hear what people do in their free time. You dancing, that is absolutely great. It is really fulfilling, it is not just physical activity, as dancing is beautiful by its nature. Tell me, how much do we need therapy? Where are we, and when I say we, I think our country and region? Are we afraid to go to therapy? Do we have that stigma that people who go to therapy and ask for help, that something is wrong with them, they are crazy? We use that word “crazy” if a person has some kind of a problem. Yes. So, where are we?

Bojana Obradović: Halfway. I think that we are moving slowly to better and you have noticed it correctly. We have transgenerational prejudice towards therapy. We usually say if there is a member of a family that had a nervous breakdown. It is a common thing. Do you have a weirdo in your family? Earlier, as marriages were arranged in Serbia, most of the time, unfortunately, people will go through family genetics. Were any of the members different, strange. Families would avoid connecting to other families who had a member that wasn’t great. Who isn’t perfect or for god sake, had a problem, people would investigate that. And then we talk about Grandmas that had nervous breakdown. Problem inSerbia is, when we compose a family tree, they usually don’t know what problems their ancestors had. They can’t even find out if they inherited some part of anxiety, if they have a predisposition for depression since there is a biological part to depression, which would help them a lot to feel better about themselves. And then we are society – we are a county of small towns. Belgrade is a center, but most of the cities are small and people have greater prejudices in small towns as everything is known. And people are much more afraid to go to therapy because they will be seen there, and then they will get the label that they are abnormal, and if they are abnormal, the stigma actually starts, in the workplace, the stigma starts in partnerships, not to mention the other members of families that will often create pressure to leave such a partner because people are afraid of genetic inheritance not knowing the truth about mental health and then, various myths start to create. However, what I am noticing regarding my profession – thank you Internet – some people don’t like it, I really appreciate it, I think it brought some positive changes in our society. Thanks to the Internet, more and more people are watching different podcasts, watching different shows, a lot of people are recording on YouTube – foreigners but also our people who started talking about mental health – influencers have started talking about it. And what I have noticed, especially in last two years, you can see how commercials more often use things that addresses mental health. In a way – it is interesting to me, for example – that it was not in the ads before, but you now notice that they are slowly under the influence of that positive wave and change, to talk about it. You will see that the ads have as the content – for example Schweppes had a whole campaign that included messages about mental health and then it slowly became normal for people to do so. And psychology is not a taboo anymore and I hope that we will be like Portugal or Brazil, where it`is said that every person has its own psychiatrist. I would like it as we have a dentist or a doctor, a personal trainer, it is not bad to have a psychotherapist with whom we talk from time to time, check how we are doing, go through a developmental topic and then there is simply no reason for prejudice, those things are healthy and normal.

Sanja Milosavljevic: I agree. Earlier, before we started filming, you said very nicely – as we go to the dentist every six months, to see if we have caries, plak, bad teeth, whatever, and that’s normal for us, we will easily do that. But to go somewhere to check our souls, it is a little bit harder to decide to go, or we go when it is too far gone. And can you please repeat, you put that nicely, when is the bad time to go to therapy? And when should we really go?

Bojana Obradović: Basically, we should always go, but we usually go when it is late. People come to therapy when they reach a bottom. When it is much more challenging not to go to the therapy, than to go. When they have serious problems – before a breakup, before devorce, when they are stuck at faculty, or experience burn out at work, which is serious condition, they come when they are in the stage of clinical depression, when anxiety exhausted them, when they started with medicine therapy and than they come to therapy for fast solutions. Because, they think they will come a couple of times and they will resolve some issues. But it is not like that. Sometimes it is quicker and sometimes slower. But it would be good to develop a culture that therapy is something that is normal and that as soon as you notice some symptoms that are atypical for you – sort of an increased heart rate. Not everything is for a cardiologist, some is for a psychiatrist. So, it would be important to train cardiologists what panic attacks are, to recognize clients who have a problem with stress and anxiety so that these people can talk to us to prevent more serious conditions from occurring. If we develop this kind of culture, I would love it if this was implemented in high schools and colleges. To teach people what mental health is and to go to therapy on time. For example, it happened to us – people come in some adult years, like 30s or 40s and then they find out that they are anxious. So, they don’t know what anxiety is, nobody talks to them about that. They have struggled with themselves all their lives, they have developed serious irrational beliefs that they are defective, that they are missing something, that something is seriously wrong with them because they feel different or are hypersensitive and no one knew to recognize that it is also something that is normal with humans, you just need to act differently, adapt to such children. And they come with distorted pictures of themselves as adults. That can be changed, of course, and if we knew that earlier and taught parents, peers, teachers, professors, we would be doing much better. You told me that you love REBT, that was my first psychotherapy practice.

Sanja Milosavljevic: Yes, I would like it if you could tell us something about that. As you said you work in several modalities, but can you tell us something about that – for me REBT, and you said it yourself, I know people that went through REBT therapy, and results are just great.

Bojana Obradović: REBT is Rational Emotional Behavioural Therapy and I liked it. For example, Albert Ellis, founder of REBT therapy in the United states, went to kindergartens and taught their teachers what emotions are and they worked with kids. For example, it would be a great thing if we could implement something similar in Serbia. Why is this therapy great from my perspective – it brings back a sense of responsibility to individuals. So Albert Ellis loved philosophy and Buddhism a lot, he took us back to the period in time which is, now and here, and in a way he taught us not to blame the state, parents or friends who do not wish us well, but to take responsibility and take care of our own lives. You return to yourself, clean your backyard and you move forward.

Sanja Milosavljevic: Sorry to interrupt you – that saying, to clean our own backyards, it became a phrase that everyone is saying. But is it hard or easy to clean the back yard, or do we see dirt in our neighbor’s backyard rather than our own? How to – that interest me, how can a person recognise if they don`t know, you put that nicely – if nobody explain emotions to them. Those teachers explained emotions to kids. It seems to me that in Serbia, we do not recognize emotions or I not know how to say it in our language – they are separated from themselves. They don’t recognise when something traumatic is happening to them, they don`r recognise emotions, they don’t recognise they are angry. Or that they are furious – like they are not aware of that.

Bojana Obradović: Well, nobody taught us about that.

Sanja Milosavljevic: That’s true, I agree. And how can a person, if he/she has a lack of knowledge, how to understand that he/she really needs help, or how to understand that a REBT can help him/her?

Bojana Obradović: It seems to me that a lot has become accessible through movies and people through series, especially the younger generations, experience therapy as an Okay place, as a place to meet yourself or a place where you will improve. And you notices it nicely – we are not connected to our emotions. Our country is not famous for that. We like – remember the high school and Death of Jugovic`s mother song, we love that drama, we love pathos, we love to self sacrifice, poor us, it is always difficult to us. We have that culturological thing that we love to suffer and that is our collective burden. Guilt, pain, being a scapegoat, bad things are happening to you. I WW, what has happened, it is a set up for Serbs. And then what happens – when you have a whole transgenerational experience that something bad always done to us and that we can never be responsible for our own lives, and we were not responsible, it is the Turks, various others – history has sent a lot of those messages. And we entered the 21. century where we can, maybe, be responsible, but nobody taught us that. Our grandmas and grandpas were not taught about that, our parents – II WW ended, many people lost their lives. We are a generation that were born during Tito’s time and now freedom comes. Then our millenal comes, and he wants to be free, and what happens? I would like to be responsible, but I don’t know how to be responsible because my parents lived in a certain state system, they got jobs after graduation – we don’t have role models. We are suddenly in between west and east, our past and our future, we want to change but we lack resources and we don’t have predispositions. So, I have to defend our generations because they were not educated enough. But when people come to therapy, cleaning your backyard means understanding what belongs to you, what belongs to the past, what our ancestors bring us, what they in some way created through various messages they sent us through growing up, what our environment, our peers send, then the state system as a message to us, individuals to take responsibility and the world, yes, we are part of the planet earth, what does the planet earth send us as a message to us, as human beings. And we understand all that and clean our backyards, we can understand what our responsibility is and what we are going to give in return to others. Until we don`t do that, we usually say “state didn`t provide a job a for me¬. Or, “my parents haven’t helped me, enough”. Or, this friend of mine is less smart, but he managed better then me. Maybe we didn’t see that they have better social skills than we have. Maybe we are genius and average grade of 10, but we don`t know how to stand for ourselves, we are shy at job interview, we think that saying our virtues and qualities is narcissistic. There are people that go to job interviews and they won`t tell what they are good at as they think that’s not okay. And they need social skills. In that sense, cleaning your backyard means that you see what is something that you can change with yourselves. Of course you see where others deliberately sabotage you and you have to move from them, maybe you can change the environment, maybe leave some people for good. But in a way, you are aware why are you doing so. Until we clean our back yard, we often project our problems onto other people, shift the responsibility we need to take or get stuck, live in the mud and just whine. And Serbia is also known for its collaborative rumination, and that is the moment when you go for coffee and we all collectively blame someone, and then we drown nicely in it and then we are like “um, so it couldn’t have been better”. In that context, REBT takes us back to personal responsibility, or teaches us where others were responsible for something. When you learn where your responsibility is then you can realise where the responsibility of others is, and you can draw a line.

Sanja Milosavljevic: This is interesting to me with REBT. I read something about it, thought about it, in the end, prepared myself for this conversation – does REBT free us from that well known excuse – it’s our parents fault? That is my parents responsibility. We have that early development period, that is most important for us to grow up and become adult persons. And whenever something is bad, or we are having hard time, we fail – than we can blame our parents. It is the easiest excuse – they haven’t taught me, they didn’t give me, they didn’t understand me and so on. Do REBT teach us that is not just that, something is up to us.

Bojana Obradović: I think it makes some sort of cooperation between these two. Yes, our parents are responsible for not giving us some knowledge, skills or love, some parents don’t give love. REBT says yes, they didn’t give us that. And since the past is something you don’t have influence in any case, you can’t change it, you can change how you feel about that past, and you can change how you’re going to affect to the fact that the past doesn’t determine the present or the future. . We are not going to say that it is not important, that they haven’t given us something. Yes, it is important, it affected our development. But, what are you going to do now? Are you going to stay in one place and to self pity yourself for the next 30 years or for the rest of your life, devalue yourself, blame them, or you’ll say they weren’t okay about it, but I now want to become a good enough parent to myself. I want to be there for myself and to make a better future, and at the end give my kids what I haven’t got from my parents. So, it a type of “and”. It is not rejecting, but sort of – they are responsible, it is very important, we should not deny that something bad has happened. It is always there as part of our history. But we need to go further because it is simply very important to be able to integrate that experience, to internalize it, to say what happened, to share what belongs to whom and to go further. And that is a good thing about REBT and schema therapy and the third wave, in every type of therapy. I am not familiar with every single one, I didn’t go through education for each, but I think that each type of therapy moves us to that. But REBT is very appealing to people because it explains how therapy works and people understand how a therapeutic change has occurred. And I think that is the magic of this type of therapy. People, with the help of homework and when they change their irrational beliefs into rational ones, also change how they feel, and then they have an experiential change, that is, they have to behave differently. They have this ABC model which is especially fantastic for some categories of people, to do these kinds of homework and then they feel capable of being their own therapists tomorrow and that’s a good part of the whole third wave of CBT. Our clients finally understand when therapeutic change happened, in what way and how to help themselves tomorrow. Some other types of therapeutic schools, that also work, have little mystery around them – it is not clear to people how they are feeling better. And they don’t feel okay, something is happening but they don’t know what is happening or how it is happening. And for people that love explanations, REBT therapy is excellent as they can understand what and how something happened. And that’s why I like it a lot. 

Sanja Milosavljevic: Well, that is rational. It is one of the keywords for REBT. What sorts of problems can REBT help us solve? I don`t know, you are an expert, but can REBT resolve clinical depression, or serious personality disorders or is it just for resolving some wrong beliefs? Where is it most effective, where does it give the best results?

Bojana Obradović: Well, there is-

Sanja Milosavljevic: Or, am I wrong? It is…

Bojana Obradović:  No, it is okay, you can ask any question. It is okay, that would be my question, if I was ignorant in some field of expertise, I would ask the same question, so it is fine. Research shows that REBT is perfect for depression, anxiety, panic attacks, fobias. There are protocols how many sessions should be done, what is the procedure for sexual issues, erectile dysfunction. However, REBT and the whole third wave CBT is good for personality disorders. And we are now seriously thinking – I hope that it will be introduced in Serbia as well – not to call it personality disorders, I do not like that term, but to talk about a prolonged reaction – a prolonged PTSD, where people have experienced certain types of traumatic experiences, or a large number of developmental traumas and then something happened in the personality structure. So those who have the problem are not defective, so something happened to them and when we approach to it like that, the recovery rate is much higher, things improve, the persons views themselves differently. And I can say that at the moment, REBT is introducing that part as well, and part dedicated to trauma, so the researches are done. And it is introduced in education. When I was a student and went to education, we didn’t talk about trauma and working with trauma. We were more focused on personality disorders, anxiety, depression and in time, you see how every modality is developing. So, it is not done, every school is still developing, like psychoanalysis, that becomes relational. After all, REBT had to introduce a story of childhood, although it was effective, at some point they realized that clients were coming back. It was interesting to me with REBT. You get pretty good- the client is well, however he comes back to you. Why is he coming back, because of the therapeutic relationship, because it is one of the most important parts of therapy and the most changeable. And then you realize that there is still some untold part of the story, that they are very functional here and there, that for example they have made a successful partnership and got a job and then, there is mobbing at work, and they come with serious symptoms. What has happened? In fact, it triggered some traumatic childhood experiences. Or they have a healthy relationship, but they notice that they treat their partner – boyfriend, girlfriend – in a way that is not okay and when we go deeper into that story we actually realize that there are some childhood stories that have never been told, which is important now we tell, to give them some context, to change behavior, to notice what triggers are. So in my opinion REBT is a good therapy of choice, especially if we want a quick therapeutic change, if we have strong symptoms, if we want to stabilize ourselves in some way to help ourselves get out of depression. What’s more, in a number of cases in my experience – I can’t talk about colleagues – it happened that people didn’t take medication. That we had agreements with them to do their homework and to activate themselves and people managed to push through change. It often happens that people come to you at that moment when we still have to talk about that childhood. Of course we will put it in the context of both REBT and other therapies, but that story in a way, always comes back and after so many years of experience I think that quality therapy cannot be performed without finding out about the client and that may be a complaint which I hope will improve now – it is not mine to improve it for sure – but to the educators and creators of the therapy themselves, that some stories cannot be told. Yes, after all, it is very important that we hear about the family system and about transgenerational traumas and about their parents. This is the story with “and” that I told you, but it often happens in REBT that you have, for example, some kind of problem that is successfully resolved but not told and you do not know that part about the client. That happens, for example, and people will tell you that they left therapy, got what they needed, and that’s totally okay. Well, maybe that’s the part that you mentioned were some people with situational problems. And indeed, for example, they had a good childhood, good parents, everything is okay, there was no peer violence, there were no major developmental traumas, but they are now experiencing a situation that has derailed them. We go to work, capitalism, we experience mobbing. We, especially if we have never had experience in our life with bad behavior – that someone labels us, that someone abuses us, that someone raises their voice on us, we can experience an acute stress reaction, we can feel great anxiety or for example if we lose someone the first in life – that is an existential crisis, a question about the meaning of life appears- and then go to therapy. We are basically functional people, we have good values, good rational beliefs, we are stable, but something came to us for the first time, that is unknown and we want to understand ourselves well. And here, for example, it is great because it gives us a kind of focus, breadth, how your thoughts shape you, how to experience your emotions and change your behavior. So we can do without it, but it is not that frequent 

Sanja Milosavljević: Yes, that’s why – you mentioned drugs. I’m not against it – I can’t say I support it, but I’m not against drugs either. Until the balance of hormones is achieved, why not, it should be introduced because it seems to me that then the path to healing and solving the problem is better. Not faster, but simply better and of better quality. But is it easy – in our culture it is known, everyone uses something – some pills, Bensedines, this and that. I read some research somewhere, but I can’t say which one, because I forgot. We take a little too much Bensedine in the past year, for example, or in the past five years. Why is it easy for us to take medicine, but difficult for us to talk about problems?

Bojana Obradović: Well again, I would say it is culturally and transgenerationally, it’s that moment in the old days like coffee and brandy in the morning. When you come from the field, it is normal to drink half a kilo of brandy, so unfortunately a large number of people calmed their anxieties with it. I think that it was not culturally recognized that people have problems with stress and fears, but it was in a way anesthetized, such as in America there is marijuana abuse where that feeling of inner incontinence, restlessness, anxiety is also anesthetized and in a way we suppress deeper emotions. In Serbia, Bromazepam and Bensedine are number one. As America is a Prosak nation. And in that way, we will either light a cigarette, drink alcohol or take medicine because, after all, our parents – grandparents – are the ones who took the medicine. It has been normalized and it is in a way-

Sanja Milosavljević: It is a model, well accepted. We internalized it.

Bojana Obradović: You hear from the client “My mother gave me Bromazepam”, you will hear in the pharmacy that you can easily buy medicines for which a prescription is necessary. So it is a systemic abuse of drugs that is certainly known at the state level and is not reacted to. At psychotherapy, we psychologists do not prescribe drugs, psychiatrists do that. And you will always get it from your psychotherapist, hey, but it is important that you talk to a psychiatrist. We will consult, we will see if medication is necessary. They will be taken for three months, six months to a year – it is known why the drugs are taken, which drugs are taken, how the dose is reduced, increased, stopped and what are the side effects. And it is a serious process that neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist will enter into just like that. We really will do that when it is necessary. And then a client will come to you for therapy who is seriously abusing Bensedines and you have a problem explaining to him that it is not ok. It’s just a part of culture where something has been normalized, which in my opinion is not ok, it’s not normal. And we have to talk about it systematically. First of all, the state should take over the role of protection to introduce penalties in pharmacies, and that they must not do that. And then people who really need it, can take medication. Because in that way, I will express myself in a little bit informal way – you dull your emotions and the neurological system, and you don’t even know how you feel. So there may be situations that you can handle, but since you are used to taking Bromazepam, you will take it in situations where you can endure without it. You will be slightly anxious, the day will be fine, but you are used to saying to yourself aha, say I am going to work, today I have a presentation, it will be difficult – I will take one pill. In a way-

Sanja Milosavljević: Or drink a glass of alcohol or something like that. I mean, I’m not against drugs or alcohol, but not to be abused, but to be used, to have a purpose. Although the thing about our culture is what you said – we can’t imagine celebrating anything without alcohol. We had that case about 15 years ago, our friend celebrated the birth of a child and he was not serving alcohol – and only the birth of a child is that special occasion. And no alcohol was served. How angry everyone was. How angry everyone was at him. Like, how is it possible, so how does he think we celebrate the birth? So I said, be happy, a child has been born. Play music, tear a man’s t-shirt apart, but you don’t need alcohol to celebrate. So- I’m not against either of it, just to know the measure. And can you explain something – what is trauma? And if you can explain to us what is the difference between a traumatic experience and the trauma itself?

Bojana Obradović: Okay, so trauma is an event that happens to us too suddenly and that is overwhelming for us so that our body can’t actually react at that moment. And then there are processes that can occur – fighting, freezing or running away. And our body simply remembers the trauma through our nervous system, through various types of memories, through various types of sensations, beliefs that we acquire about ourselves and others at that moment, and emotions. We can very often dissociate, not be present at that moment and feel overwhelmed. Trauma can be something that happens at one point situationally, like we had floods so we all experienced it – accidents, refugees, war – but they can also be developmental, where they happen continuously for a long period of time. For example, parents are constantly arguing, we do not know whether we will be beaten or not when Dad enters the room, one of the parents is an alcoholic and then we continuously experience that our environment is unsafe. So these are developmental traumas that happen, happen continuously and leave consequences, and a traumatic experience is something that happened to us but we can now integrate it or we can’t, depending on how we handled it, and it now destabilizes us or internalizes it so we can go forward and talk about it. I think culturally we all have one type or another type of trauma. Maybe we never called them trauma, even we in college, who learned so much about it. Here I remember when I went to my therapy, so my therapist called my experience trauma, I stopped for a moment and said “and that’s trauma?”. Why does this happen? Because, unfortunately, it is normal in Serbia for bad things to happen to you. When you go to high school and read Dostoevsky, different types of stories “Prvi put s ocem na jutrenje”, you learn that bad things happen, that all families are unhappy in their own way and that everyone has that sad story. And we, in a way, normalize abnormality. So, for generations, we have been normalizing bad things – our history in the Middle Ages with the Turks, wars, losses, crossing through Albania, we are used to something bad happening to us. And when someone calls our experience a trauma, we are shocked because it is normal to us and when people come to therapy and when we tell them that what happened was actually overwhelming for their body, they only then begin to understand what is happening to them. Only then do they understand why they often project things on other people, why they are often full of anger, why they behave badly towards others, what is happening in their body, why they freeze. For example, they go to a job interview, someone raises their voice on them and they freeze. Not knowing that it was strongly connected, for example, with the beatings they received as a child. Or, for example, Dad before he beat you for what he did, he raised an eyebrow and your boss raises an eyebrow when he wants to send constructive criticism, and then the client comes overwhelmed and says that he has stomach problems, fever, he is not going to work, and freezes. What do we understand from that? What your boss is doing, he raises an eyebrow. It is a harmless situation, but people come with serious symptoms and only later do we realize that it is actually related to their traumatic experience where they were abused, received serious threats to their being and then you realize aha, so this is why I freeze at present moment and here. And that story about traumas is very important in Serbia because we imply too many things and because we all experienced them, we say somebody’s story is no longer important. Come on, let it go, I was also beaten. It is nothing, the beating stick came out of heaven. We have all experienced it somehow, it is now a collective mindset that these are completely normal things and it is unclear to us why then people protest, why they react, why they call everything trauma. I think that the time has come for our society to actually accept that we are a highly traumatized nation, transgenerationally, that it starts from the origin of the Serbs themselves and that until we process it, integrate it, we cannot have very healthy descendants. Because when you resolve the trauma, changes occur, epigenesis also happens, and in a way everything changes and you actually create healthier offspring. And it’s no wonder. In fact, few people know this, but in college, we learned that the first generation of children from Jews who were in the Holocaust was changed, that their genes were different and that they were called living candles. That they were prone to anxiety, that they had bigger problems with alcohol, that they felt more insecure, less self-confident compared to their peers. There was nothing that set them apart from others except that their parents had such a traumatic experience. So traumas change our being, leave changes within us and it is very important to talk about it because it can happen that what you experience may have nothing to do with you but may have something to do with your ancestors and you are not aware of it at all. So it is a very serious and broad story that is currently happening in Serbia. There is one wonderful project called “Trauma, our story”. Tijana Mirović and Marko Tomašević are doing a great job on this topic and they have opened us up to that. Now they are recording a podcast where they talk about such experiences and we are more and more ready to admit to ourselves that something bad has happened to us. And it wasn’t as normal as we liked to normalize it. I think our ancestors had to normalize it to survive – that’s okay. They lived in different times, maybe it had to be that way for them. For us, at the present moment and here when life expectancy is extended, when we face new challenges, we have to change something because of our children.

Sanja Milosavljević: Yes, you said that nicely. We have to change because of our children. Can you tell us something about schema therapy?

Bojana Obradović: Schema therapy is-

Sanja Milosavljević: And thank you very much for this story about trauma – we could talk for hours and hours about trauma. Thank you for being able to … sum it up in a few sentences. And what is a scheme?

Bojana Obradović: Yes, the scheme belongs to the third wave of CBT and Jeffrey Young, the creator of the scheme therapy, who is a very similar character to me, I have to say that. He did both psychoanalysis and CBT, however he realized that it didn’t really work best for his clients and at one point he started doing serious research to see why it wasn’t effective enough, especially with personality disorder and actually came up with a serious story about trauma and to a serious childhood story and that, until we resolve it with our clients, it may not be good enough for them. They will return to therapy or have problems with depression, internal emptiness and will not understand themselves. So the scheme is therapy, a therapy that, in my opinion, is a great upgrade to REBT as if they were created for each other. I mean, it’s kind of an upgrade that helps us REBT therapists, CBT, and the like to actually get into a childhood story with clients, to understand their traumatic experience, and with the help of techniques to change that traumatic experience. What’s really going on? That’s what I say, a kind of magic, but it’s not magic, it’s very scientifically based, where you work with a client on traumatic experiences and with the help of techniques change the neurological response to it. So a client who once froze will now take action. A client who has been constantly struggling will now learn not to fight. Because you have people who are traumatized – for example, that was my favorite answer, I constantly fought as a child. And then I got used to fighting even when I shouldn’t. And then it becomes problematic in adulthood because you are also against people with whom you should not fight, in relationships in which you should indulge and be okay, you are constantly in some tension and want to stand up for yourself and have no opponents and in a way you are constantly expecting some kind of danger. This scheme therapy actually helps you understand what belongs to the past and what belongs to present moment and here and how to create a better future and it is a type of therapy where there is a lot of work on the therapeutic relationship where the therapist confronts the client, which is not typical for other therapies where you lead the client, you explain some things to them quite directly, but you also make a boundary and you are, in a way, an instrument of change. If the client is too passive, you push them – you have the right to push them. If the client is too dominant or violates boundaries, you set boundaries for them. You are actually kind of parentified – they are parentified children, so you are their parents, it is called imitated parenting. You are now playing that role that they missed in life and teaching them how to position themselves and giving them that role that they did not get. And that’s great for them. Ironically, clients do what they do, they do it with their partners. They expect their partners to be their best friends, to be the ones to save them. And then the partner has to do everything or the partner has to be a parent. If the partner is a parent, very often there is a loss of sexual desire because no one wants to sleep with their parents and then people come with relationship problems. And we understand that they play children’s games, aged 5-6, 10 years old children in a partnership, that they are stuck in that period and through the scheme therapy you make a bridge based on those experiences, change them and give them a completely new framework. So it’s nice for me and different for us therapists because we usually have little – I mean, REBT is otherwise active therapy, but it’s also more active here and you have a kind of empathic confrontation that I think is very important for us therapists as we usually, in a way, we have no right to any directness, we never say anything. But you are allowed in this type of therapy, when you estimate, to tell the client that they can no longer drink alcohol. So you simply have – it’s a serious kind of addiction, we can’t keep working you have to take that responsibility. And that is a moment, for example, you realize that that client has no one around him who will tell him that – there are no parents who will tell him that, there is no partner who will tell him that because he has chosen a partner who will not set that boundary for him. You are that person and then you educate the client why you set that boundary. What happened, what happens is so great and I like it because it develops us therapists in a new sense and it is very important that you have a lot of supervision to follow yourself. How do you behave as a therapist, do you cross a line, take some freedom, give advice that you should not give. This is now, for example, challenging for me personally, because we have never learned in therapy that advice is never given directly. And this is a therapy that still includes a different type of giving advice that is, guiding and directing that they did not have through growing up, so it is important for us to change as well. So I see it as a kind of personal development.

Sanja Milosavljević: And what does that story about personal development look like to you in general? It’s taken quite superficially now and everyone does something like that – which is great, I really don’t mind it, anyway – physically, mentally, every little thing is important. We can’t dismiss it. But it seems easy to speak, now everyone is doing something on a personal development plan. And what do you think about that, and what do you think about that – it bothers me a little now, I don’t know if it’s up to me – there is that “be the best version of yourself”. Constantly someone sends us a message to be the best version of yourself, where I wondered what I would simply not accept myself, change what is wrong, improve what can be improved and just to assemble, not to be version 2.0. To constantly fall apart and then be put together – it’s better to do it once and be me, not be a version of myself. That is, versions of yourself. So what do you think about that?

Bojana Obradović: Yes, I think I know why you like REBT. The REBT itself introduced the concept of unconditional acceptance, that you can love yourself even while working on yourself. It means that you just love yourself, respect yourself, have a certain kind of common sense and somehow you are okay with being imperfect. You can say to yourself that you are 10 kg overweight and you don’t like that very much, but you will work on it, you will go to training and you will eat healthier, but at the same time you love yourself. You got up in the morning and you can love yourself today the way you are. You even have one exercise – to look at yourself naked in the mirror and to accept your imperfect body, even though in common sense you have that tendency to have better health, be fit, with more muscles. Well, that means even in this psychological construct that whatever version of ourselves we are, we can love ourselves and be okay with it. And to strive for a better version if we understand why we need that better version. That’s totally okay with me. I want to be more spiritual, for example, and I am working on that development – someone is going through Buddhism, someone is going through religion, someone is going through some other types of directions, school, someone wants to be more educated and finish college. And respect that, love that part yourself and move on – I’ll be a better version of myself. But it’s kind of – being the best version of yourself, that narcissism that constantly asks us to be perfect is imposed a bit. To be ideal in order to be worth anything at the moment, I must mention that American studies show that there is an increase in narcissism in new generations. If that is yet to come, we will see how it will be in Serbia. Where some messages come from that social, as I would say, come as a trend. So a social trend where many generations on the internet are constantly wearing make-up, always dressing well, they are always ideal and then with them comes that message about yourself. As, for example, for the generations behind us when Tito was the main one, that was the moment of the collective mindset. All for one and one for all. And somehow every generation has a story about themselves. Now this story is the bad side of the internet that we all have to be great to succeed at all. Which is not quite true. We can be okay and still succeed and we can love each other, but these are some messages that need to be seen and removed. Like, how to turn off a notification. For me- this doesn’t really work for me. For whom it works, great, but it’s not okay for me.

Sanja Milosavljević: Okay. Well thank you. I would like to ask you now, not just to tell us the history of the REBT and the scheme therapy – how are you? How did you spend last year, what has changed? In what way did it happen? I told you before the conversation, I had really serious problems at the end of last year – I couldn’t stand the coronavirus anymore. I wasn’t anymore – it was so hard for me that I reacted inadequately to some nonsense, to some little things that I wouldn’t pay attention to at all, but I was probably constantly tense, anxious and all that. And how was it with you? Now I know that all people think that therapists and psychotherapists are always Zen. I know some of your colleagues who are not, because they are human. How was it with you?

Bojana Obradović: Yes. And we are like others. We have good days, bad days, terrible days. And very irrational behaviors. I thought about it a bit before I came here because you told me you were going to ask me that. I think it was a serious and emotional and practical rollercoaster. The coronavirus happened for me just at the moment when I was supposed to open my counseling center with a friend, and somehow all our plans fell into the water overnight. The space we rented and paid for a while, we didn’t even enter it in the end. We never knew when we would start working live again. In the meantime, that state of emergency happened and we were all locked in houses and I have to admit I had a shopping mania. Somehow at some point I was healing my emotions by buying things I think I absolutely didn’t need. But luckily it only lasted a month and somehow I think we all suffered regarding that. And then in a way, as 2-3 months passed, it returned to normal. For me, I think it was somehow the most shocking in those first month and a half. We are suddenly closed, and everything is changing, we are moving to work from home. I don’t like it – I wasn’t prepared to work from home. I don’t even have a desk. So somehow it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that I would have to buy a desk, that I would buy an armchair, that it would be my life for the next year, two, three. I was not unfamiliar with online work, I have been working with clients for years like that, but I did not expect to work nonstop in that manner. That found me quite unprepared and I think that for a while it introduced me to a kind of numbness. Sitting in front of a screen all day, everything is the same and you don’t know where you are. So as far as business was concerned, I needed to get used to it, I wasn’t ready for it at first. And neither did the clients, it took time to adjust to working online. Those who have never worked online. Those with whom I was working online, everything was the same. But on the other hand I was just thinking it’s my little confession, I’m sorry friends and family, but I love that year so much because I was finally in touch with my- everyone sees me as an extrovert but I seem to be an introvert – I never had nicer time in my life. So I have to admit, staying at home that I don’t have to see people that I don’t have to go for Christmas and Easter – I apologize to mom and dad. But I liked it so much and everyone was shocked because I was like “my books, my walk”, I don’t have to see anyone, I don’t have to agree on anything, because somehow my life is socially quite active and it was always – After work we go to see each other. Weekends. I didn’t even realize how tired I was. I didn’t even realize how constantly I was with people and I wasn’t alone, so this was such a battery charge for me. I am now full of desire to see people, but it is as if my body also needed to slow down. And the fact that I’m not with people has somehow helped me understand how much of that time I want to spend with people. We who work with people in a way forget that it is exhausting because we are used to it – it is normal for us therapists. Yes, we are constantly in those processes.

Sanja Milosavljević: You are in a kind of a drill.

Bojana Obradović: That’s exactly it. And then, in a way this – the inability to see my people helped me understand how to be with them better and differently. But also to accept that side that I don’t need that much contact. I didn’t know that about myself before. Or I have changed, I will understand what exactly happened. I like that quite a bit too. I don’t know how it is for others, I think that some have experienced serious periods of loneliness and crisis. Anxiety attacks and how to be alone, and I like it very much now and in a way, I quite enjoy that reduced intensity of social contacts. 

Sanja Milosavljević:  And is it important to be alone? For example, I am that introvert and I have known that for a long time. And I don’t have a problem with that at all and it suits me that I’m alone. And I regenerate and recover best just when I’m completely alone. I have friends, family, husband, I don’t know what, but to be alone, regenerate and then I can be the same old me. And are we afraid to be alone, are we a little upset? To put it this way.

Bojana Obradović: Well some people are. Especially if we lived in families where there is a symbiosis, so there are no boundaries, so we do everything together, we are together non-stop. Being alone can often be an overwhelming experience. For example, there are parents who do not develop our social skills, we do not know how to turn on the washing machine, pay the bill or sleep in the dark. There are families that are so connected and there are no boundaries that when they are left alone they are simply terrified. But then, there is also that period of development where we are afraid of loneliness because loneliness brings the question of who I am. What is my purpose, what is the meaning of my life, and in a way, it leads to problems, we get an anxiety attack or we get some kind of emotional emptiness, it is not okay for us to stay with ourselves. While we are running away from these issues with others, then when there are finally no others, which unfortunately the pandemic for some people led to, they began to communicate loneliness, depression and serious panic attacks because that was the first time they came in contact with themselves. So there were no distractors, there was nothing to save them, they were left alone with themselves and only then did they see how much they did not know how to be alone with themselves. And that it is a place to be learned. And some people while they’re alone are pretty lonely and then we realize that often those social relationships are kind of like I would say – well the network we’re clinging to. In which we maintain ourselves to function and somehow the pandemic has led us to realize how deep relationships we have or don’t have, which has been sobering for some people. Like yeah, I think for some people we have in our lives, but actually we’re good to go for cafes, for some vacations and now that we’re supposed to be there for each other emotionally, to see how we are, to support each other, those relationships are actually very empty. And that actually put some people in a pretty serious sense of loneliness. To understand that the relations they have are relations that are superficial and that do not form the essence, and then they had to make some kind of change, and that is a serious change, and a pandemic is happening on a global level. And then the divorce rate increased, a lot of people changed jobs, a lot of people stopped hanging out with some people and this is … so this pretty often led to a lot of “yeah this is actually happening in my life” and that it is painful but ultimately better for us.

Sanja Milosavljević:  Well, yes, I also see a pandemic as a chance, but not a chance in a business sense and we can use it, everything is an opportunity, nothing – a pandemic is a chance for me to face myself. Suddenly you were forced to be alone, you couldn’t escape to work, shopping or socializing, you had nowhere to escape because you were locked in your four walls. And what will happen to us – I mean now, it doesn’t matter, I can’t ask you to be a prophet and predict what our future will be like, but how will the pandemic affect us? I am, in several of these conversations, especially with people who are from this region – Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia – we have that experience. You alone mentioned – refugees. You mentioned it yourself. How will this affect us? I think that we are already damaged a little, in general, collectively, and how will this affect us?

Bojana Obradović: Well, I think we are already seeing some consequences – you noticed that nicely, the increased drug abuse that is happening. Then there is a lot more anger on the streets. That is what is noticed, that is in the air. Yes, people – because they cannot express that dissatisfaction – there are changes at work, there are dismissals, family systems suffer a lot of disagreements. The crisis is bigger, we can’t gather for family gatherings, we can’t have those comforting moments. There is no joy, no baptism, no weddings, no- our people are joyful. No matter how much sadness we carry within us, we somehow know how to have a good time and it is a kind of recovery and regeneration for us and there is no such thing now. What happens then? We see a kind of collective rage, collective apathy, and this, when it is over, only then will the traumas emerge. Because it is all connected with our past and our future, but there will also be some kind of painful realization that what we have already said has happened to some people, only then will it happen aha, who really wasn’t there for us. How much our employers hurt us, how much they betrayed our expectations. For example, whether they gave us that help from the state or not. There are stories that can already be seen underneath. How many women lost their jobs because they became pregnant, what happened to the dismissals, how many people lost – for example, drastic salary cuts. Loans from the banks. And those are some things that will start to happen on a collective level. Not to mention one thing, I have to mention it again, but it is important – the loss of trust in the system. So, a research was done at the Faculty of Philosophy, where it is shown that our citizens have seriously lost trust in the profession of doctors and in the profession of epidemiologists and in our government. Now, even if you do not trust some systems that are crucial for maintenance for a whole year, then the question is what will happen in the future with our health system? What will happen tomorrow when science comes, and people no longer believe in science? Not to mention conspiracy theory, we Serbs have always been prone to conspiracy theories. Now we have gone to the extreme. And I’m pretty worried about that. This morning I listened to the radio – a rarity. But thanks to that – since I don’t have a TV, thanks to that radio, I realized that our government offers the help of 3,000 RSD for people who will get vaccinated.

Sanja Milosavljević:  I haven’t heard of that. I hear that from you. That is a disaster.

Bojana Obradović: Yes, yes, the citizens who will be vaccinated for the first dose of vaccine will get 3000 RSD. And that is something that speaks about our mentality. I am now thinking that some people who may have had some certain views will go for the money. It tells you about what happens when one can change their attitude for 3000 dinars. Your attitude about medicine, your attitude about something you thought you had in your life. And that shakes generations and generations to come because we realize that then- what do we believe in, for example? So before, our people believed in religion, then at one point they started to believe in science. After the pandemic, I think that some serious research should be done, it is a question of whether we will have anything at all – apart from a small number of people – we can have confidence and why we should have confidence. And that is something that will shake our foundations, and then the question is what will happen. How many people will leave the country or not. If people leave, it affects those who stay again, so I think this will affect us all quite emotionally and most of the challenge will be who to trust now, how to trust yourself after all this? First of all, we don’t trust the system, we don’t trust nature either – we don’t know how much it can surprise us and take us away so easily, and somehow it has its own natural flow, we forgot that. It’s always been that way, but we kind of forgot a little bit and now it’s back, but when we realize that we’ve lost some friends or experienced some crises, then that experience comes up – can I trust myself to be stable when something bad happens again? Of course, this should be integrated so that we all experience a kind of challenge, to internalize some things, to understand that we still managed. But I think for some people who don’t work on themselves, who don’t talk, this will remain as a bad experience that will actually be a trigger in the future that when something like this happens, they destabilize. And if we actually talk, like in this podcast that you host and that’s great and that I hope a lot of people will hear, it will help people actually embrace their experience, validate it, integrate it, and maybe learn a lesson from it.

Sanja Milosavljević: You said that better than I could have imagined. Now, since we’re close to the end, I want you to tell me something about “Let’s talk about it” I like the name of that project so much because it is- I really think there is salvation in the story. Not in telling stories, but for me to hear your story, for you to hear my – authentic story. And so, of course, we will do it with the help of therapy, with the help of drugs, but that is the first step for me, to start talking. It means that you have at least become aware of something and that is one step closer to healing. What is that? What is “Let’s talk about it”?

Bojana Obradović: Well, thank you for asking. “Let’s talk about it” is my project, of course, with colleagues, which was created in 2013. and we help students. The reason I chose the students is because the future me – this is the one here now – went to save me then and somehow to be there for myself. And the project deals with students. The reason I chose the students is that they are the population that is one step away from adulthood. These are future employees, parents, young spouses and it seemed to me like a great developmental period that people who have mental health problems want to work on themselves. To go to a psychologist, ie a therapist, to get free support and help. Because somehow taught by my own financial situation and my environment, I realized that there are people who want to work on themselves but will not be able to afford the minimum price of therapy and as they are interested in it, they will be able to get the support of psychotherapists to get to know themselves better, and somehow resolve problems. And my experience is, I have to say it is beautiful on both sides. First of all, from someone who leads the project with my colleague who has been constantly participating for eight years now, we always have new volunteers, the project works thanks to them. I mean, I still have students I work with for free, but I certainly couldn’t do anything to make it sustainable. So the project is, I think, of special importance for our psychological community in Serbia because it is a story about people who work as volunteers. So they come here to actually help clients for free. And some of them do that for years, some for a certain period of time. And students show up, work on themselves, and we slowly break those prejudices. The first name was “Talk about it”, for that very reason, let’s talk about the problems and our first campaign was “How are you”, just to talk about it. And “It’s okay that you’re not okay”, these are some of the first things we started with, and I think it started a kind of change at the social level where we started talking openly about those things and resolving them in some way. And later, it got a kind of other notion, because when you solve things, because, Brene Brown appeared later in my life – 2016, 17, 18, and she speaks about authenticity. Her research is phenomenal and she talks about telling the story again. That’s when we actually embrace our experience and now recount what you said, traumatic experience in a new way. So, in fact, “Let’s talk about it” is constantly evolving so that it has a nice and positive connotation, and what we do is make lectures and workshops. The lectures are also open to the public, they are not just for students and I am thrilled – there are people of all ages. And they come, ask questions, tell personal stories, there is so much humor in those lectures. It is a completely new experience of psychotherapy for me and for me, for example, the most beautiful lecture was 2018 – that’s exactly what I feel the need to share. Where five of my clients came and shared their experience with therapy, and people – first of all, I was thrilled because I never believed that clients would want to show, to be seen, to talk. Usually people want to write and share stories anonymously – they are okay with those experiences, but they decided that they still want to tell and that is something that was so healing. So seeing someone telling their story, who carries it, who stands there in front of people, maybe some 40-50 people and that was for me as a therapist – I have to admit, I’m young, but that was the peak of my career. Okay, maybe something happens but as a therapist you sit with your clients and talk about what happened. There are some other people who realize that this is actually one of the most normal things in the world – going to therapy. So, there you go. So “Let’s talk about it” is a project that exists and will exist, I hope. I plan to take it over to the new generation every 5 years. These people are a future development step, but I would like my colleagues to design similar projects for other groups because everyone deserves help, and we realized that we can’t really help everyone and that for some group of population, it wouldn’t be okay to work with young volunteers. Our volunteers were students until recently, so now they are in education, they are similar in years, so it’s a great part with therapists and students who click quickly and somehow we match. So I hope there will be projects for high school students, adults and seniors alike – that would be so great.

Sanja Milosavljević: Oh great, it’s great from my perspective. Especially since we need to go back – from the earliest time when kids can be self-aware and recognize, I think it’s time to start. So, high school, for example, is ideal for me, especially since high school is a teenage phase, so it’s a bit of hormones, so it’s a bit of rebellion. Everything happens – in those teenage years, everything happens to us. I really like that “Let’s talk about it”. When I first saw Brene Brown I think I was enchanted watching her for hours and hours, until eventually I got tired and said I can’t take it anymore. My next was Gabor Mate, for example, I was also listening to him for hours and hours and I couldn’t stop. Wherever I was – in the bathroom, in the car, I listened to them non-stop. I was just enchanted with the two of them. Would you please send us a message? I usually ask – I ask people to – it doesn’t have to be a message now in the sense of a saying, it can be a recommendation to read a good book, watch a good movie – it doesn’t have to be – anything you think is important to share with other people.

Bojana Obradović: Yes. So, since you in a way said that a podcast is a story about our understanding of the experience during a pandemic, even though we talked more about some other things, let my message be that a pandemic was actually an abnormal condition and if we did experience any abnormal reactions, they are normal, in abnormal situations. So if you’ve been a little weird to yourself for the past year and if you’re a little weird for some time more, you realize it’s part of some normal thing because something’s happening to us that we weren’t prepared for, for which there were no instructions, manuals, we all somehow managed in something completely new. So if that’s what happened to you, it’s important to accept yourself and allow yourself to be whatever version you are. And it will pass and you will somehow allow yourself to look back later and see okay what am I going to do with this now, what strengths should I strengthen? Maybe somewhere I’m not okay, what would I like to improve, have any of the things that happened to me during the pandemic awakened the spirits of the past? Trigger? Maybe I can go to a therapist to talk a little about understanding myself better. So I think this was – and still is – a story about all of us to understand where we are, where the planet earth is, where we are with each other, how to understand each other and in some way get to know each other better and accept more ourselves and if this is not a reason for you to start therapy, maybe the idea that life is one – I would like to say that. And whoever goes to therapy will definitely get to know themselves far better. And then somehow when the end of our lives comes, when we look back we will be able to wink so sweetly at ourselves and say that we have done a good job. And somehow I think that part of therapy is fantastic where no matter how painful it is, no matter how much you realize some of your flaws, you see how unique you are, learn how to be authentic through life, really realize some of your values and skills and even potentials for which you had no idea you actually owned. And in a way, you self-actualize, you reach your full potential and then whatever happens to you, that’s not a problem. So it doesn’t matter if life is short or long, you are somehow with yourself, you love and understand yourself a lot, you accept all those life experiences that are both good and bad as they come and you somehow live it to the fullest. And that’s why I say therapy helps you make life living and not pass it by. So I would always go to therapy to live.

Sanja Milosavljević: To live, yes. Well thank you – I could go on with you for hours. Like what you’re doing next week. Since you said really nicely, we didn’t even scratch the topic of the pandemic, but I wanted to ask you this, to ask you that, and in the end … we devoted very little time to pandemic. Good people, you listened to and watched the Mondopreneur podcast. Be good, be in good health and see you in a week.