Modern Entrepreneur - In conversation with Liana Kerzner

In conversation with Liana Kerzner, host of It’s Not Therapy as heard on Sauga 960AM.

Q:  What first drew you to an interest in helping people?

I started peer counselling in grade 11 in the Jane Finch area, working with 9th graders. Many were in the foster care system and… well, every bad thing you can imagine happened to these kids. They were turning in absolutely zero schoolwork, and teachers begged me to get them to write something, anything, that could be graded.

So I got them to write papers about why school sucked and the teachers were thrilled. For some of these students, it was the beginning of a feeling of acceptance: they’d asserted themselves and they hadn’t been silenced. 

Q: What do you believe are the most misunderstood things about dealing with mental health issues?

Too often, people get labelled “mentally ill” when the problem is an emotional skills deficit. Can you name your feelings? Do you know how to set and enforce boundaries? Do you know how to actively listen? Are you setting healthy goals?  No amount of psychiatric medication is going to replace those weak or missing skills.

Too many people also treat feelings as failure instead of feedback, dismissing legitimate emotional warning signs as “mental illness”.  Too many people use anger to hide more vulnerable emotions like fear and sadness. Meanwhile, people with legitimate reasons to be angry in the face of unfairness are treated as “irrational”.

There are also some prominent people pushing the idea that you shouldn’t strive for happiness. That’s absurd. The problem occurs when you miscalculate how to maximize happiness: if doing something makes you feel good for an hour, then guilty for a week, that’s really bad happy math.

Q: When did you first think about using media to help people and why?

Back when I was a producer of Ed the Sock at Muchmusic in the 1990s. The VP of the station at the time, Denise Donlon, believed that teens wanted programming that was relevant to their lives. 

I’m a video game developer as well. Games can help encourage compassion and help people through abuse, trauma and bullying… or they just relieve stress.

With It’s Not Therapy, I wanted to see if it was possible to combine the benefits of one-on-one conversations with the ease of access of mass media. 

Q: Who is the It’s Not Therapy audience?

People who believe that it’s possible to feel good, live with purpose, and have a sense of control over their lives, but don’t connect to new age self-help stuff.  I draw on a lot of pop culture references, like Star Wars, superheroes, the Rocky movies, Disney princesses… stuff people understand.

Q: What do you want people who listen to It’s Not Therapy walk away with?

That’s where my Top Ten phrases come in. Things like “healthy goals are based on things you can control”, and “listen twice before you talk once” seem so basic, but people forget them under stress.

If you think of therapy as emotional medicine, you can think of what I do as emotional nutrition.

Q: Why do people feel you are best suited to help them?

I don’t try to make them “normal”. Trying to be “normal” is what makes a lot of people miserable. You’re not normal! You’re you! What even IS normal?!

Q: What’s the best therapy for Liana Kerzner?

Video games! The God of War series back in the day when I was in PSTD therapy gave me a narrative structure for my struggle.

Right now I’m into the Yakuza series, because there’s a character, Majima Goro, who uses the fact that everyone thinks he’s nuts to have an incredible amount of freedom and fun.

If I need to get out of my own head, Doom Eternal works great.  If I have to work some stuff out, an open world game like the Far Cry series or Ghost of Tsushima give me the exploratory breathing room to unpack stuff.

There’s a lot of junk out there about the negative impacts of video games. I call it junk for a reason. One PS5 game gives me dozens of hours of self-examination, for less than the cost of one therapist’s visit! I swear by them!

Join Liana every Thursday at 7 pm on Sauga960AM .
ou can also find her at @NotTherapyShow on Twitter and Instagram.
Email questions to liana@nottherapyshow.com