How to Radically Embrace Your Neediness for Better Mental Health
Norbert Kunz, Traci Ruble |
TEDxKassel
• October 2021
Hear how Traci Ruble went from San Francisco Silicon Valley tech person to working for 17 years as psychotherapist to tech leaders on their marriages, their personal lives, and their leadership. She has witnessed how the changes in technology and innovation change how we see ourselves and harms our shared humanity and mental health. We need each other but many find our neediness and human fragility grotesque www.traciruble.com.
Traci started to notice people changing in her therapy practice. They were expecting therapy to eradicate their uncomfortable feelings. It felt, to Traci, like people wanted to eradicate their humanness to be more optimized entrepreneurs. Over time, she wondered if therapy was the last place people could go to be human with one another. Tech innovation was changing us to be more machine-like. But the reality is, we cannot positive-think our way out of needing one another.
In this talk Traci shares her own personal story of depression, becoming a therapist, and building a global movement of rehumanizing each other by putting her therapist chair on a public sidewalk in San Francisco in 2015. Now thousands of others join her listening on sidewalks around the world www.sidewalk-talk.org.
Traci has been featured in Forbes, the BBC World Service, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Oprah Magazine, and gives keynotes at organizations about the importance of our shared humanity, feeling our feelings, listening, and healthy neediness. There is something about treating each other like humans and allowing ourselves to need each other that captured many hearts and minds who watched Traci’s talk.