Open Book Interview: Kier Gaines, LPC
In IT ALL STARTS WHEN YOU DO, you argue that people often look for “quick fixes” to problems that require deeper repair. What made you want to challenge the self-help industry’s promise of fast transformation?
I work one-on-one with clients who absorb these flash-bang, quick-hit, fast fixes, and then when they come in to see me for counseling, it leaves them unprepared for the “and then what?”
When you‘re working on your wellness, your resilience, or capacity, it‘s almost never about how fast you go. It‘s about the sturdiness of the thing that you create. It‘s hard to move quickly without skipping steps, and skipping steps is a really good sacrifice to build quality. I wouldn’t mind drinking out of a glass that was built in a day. I would never want to live in a house that was. Speed and sustainability have the same last name, but they aren’t related.
The book uses the image of a “pebble in the shoe” for uncomfortable truths we avoid. What are some of the most common pebbles you see people minimizing in their own lives?
“I don’t believe in myself” and “I’m scared of being rejected.” Those two can start as thoughts that eventually morph into beliefs. When you have a pebble in your shoe, it‘s not hurting you initially. It‘s just annoying. You just carry that irritation with you, and you don’t really have to stop. But the longer you carry that irritation, it later turns into pain, and that pain can become so severe that once you remove the pebble, it doesn’t stop that feeling. My book was written for folks that just keep walking. You can’t overcome a problem that you don’t process and identify as a problem.
You distinguish sharply between feeling weak and being weak. Why is that language distinction so important to emotional health?
This language makes a distinction between an experience and an identity. An experience is what you feel in the moment. Identity is who you are or what you become. Feeling weak localizes the issue that you have and makes it specific to the moment. It signals the impermanence of the discomfort. If you begin to take your negative experiences as central to your identity, then you will believe that about yourself, even in the face of overwhelming counterevidence.
IT ALL STARTS WHEN YOU DO is critical of toxic positivity—what you describe as putting Band-Aids on bullet wounds. What does healthier optimism look like in practice?
I think toxic positivity sometimes speaks to certainty, which is something that we are rarely able to control. It‘s wrapped in a thick layer of idealism, while healthier optimism centers possibility. It essentially gives you more control and puts the focus back on the quality of your effort without marrying it to the likelihood of the outcome. I can’t control whether or not I get an A on the test, but I can control how hard I study. Toxic positivity doesn’t allow you to process the experience that’s actually happening to you; it ignores the reality before giving you a chance to practice reckoning with it. You can’t just overlook the distressing parts of life or you‘ll never practice coping with them and managing them.
You describe “emotional hijacking” as the force that can derail even our best intentions. How can someone recognize that they are being hijacked in the moment, before they act in a way they regret?
Before you do anything, you have to pause. You have to buy yourself time between the moment something happens and the moment that you respond to it. It gives you more runway to consider all of the possibilities and let the heat of the moment subside. In a world obsessed with hurry, pausing almost feels counterintuitive. I don’t encourage my clients to work on erasing emotional hijacking. I guide them toward getting comfortable with the pause that allows them more space to consider everything that this moment means.
You use stories of clients and personal experiences throughout the book. How did you decide which vulnerable moments from your own life to include, and what did writing them teach you?
I didn’t decide what vulnerable moments to choose; they just popped up on me. In my most ideal expectation, I wouldn’t have chosen any vulnerable moments. The benefit of being a therapist is the privilege of hiding your own problems to hyper-focus on other people’s. Sharing these stories taught me that I am a lot further in my healing journey than I originally thought. It‘s one thing to have an inkling of where you are on the road to recovering from the things that hurt you most. It‘s another thing to write them, say them out loud to yourself, see them on paper, and read them back several times. Even though the changes felt very small, I remain curious about what could happen if I leaned into them more.
You describe yourself as a therapist who might be listening to trap music before a session, wearing sweatsuits, and speaking with a D.C. accent. How has embracing that full, unapologetic version of yourself helped you connect with people?
I think authenticity is contagious, and so is comfort in oneself. Throughout our lives, we hear things and see things that negatively reinforce the idea that there’s something wrong with our presentation. Or it confirms a narrative that we don’t agree with—validates an image that we don’t find preferable. I’ve tested this theory over time. I found that when it comes to the things I’m most self-conscious about, all the things that just don’t stereotypically fit the motif of whatever my identity is, it seems that I cared about them a lot more than other people do. The therapy space is a moment where you really practice being brave and honest with yourself. Facilitating counseling sessions helped build my curiosity and made me braver around testing things out. That is what you are seeing in real time: me testing authenticity out. Also, it‘s very hard to ask anyone to try the things that I myself don’t exercise.
Before becoming a therapist, you worked as a personal trainer. What lessons from the gym still shape the way you talk to people about mental health and personal growth?
Almost all of them. There’s so much that personal training and mental health counseling have in common. The biggest lesson that’s spilled over is not giving the mind or the body more than they can handle in the moment. Does bench pressing 300 lbs. make me strong? Absolutely. Does benching 300 lbs. make me strong if I can only lift 50? No, I’ll just fail and possibly be injured. It‘s the same thing when it comes to the way that we heal and the way that we grow. If we bite off more than we can chew at one time, we compromise our ability to gradually make our way toward the goal. Whether the goal is to have nicer calves or be able to recover from people’s negative opinions of us, the same rules apply. Reps over time matter.
There are many things to love about IT ALL STARTS WHEN YOU DO, but if readers were to take away one thing, what would you like it to be?
There is absolutely no such thing as the perfect moment. Most of the best things that can happen to you can be started in an unideal place and time. This book was written to help you sharpen the best tool to maintain your health, wealth, relationships, and positive self-messaging.
Curiosity.
I think the most prolific thing that anybody can say is, “I’ve never thought about it that way before.” There’s so much nutrition on the other side of that reality.
What if the biggest obstacle to happiness isn’t your environment, your past, or other people—but a blindness to some uncomfortable truths about yourself?
In the book his fans have been waiting for, one of the internet’s most beloved therapists, Kier Gaines, sets the record straight: mantras and toxic positivity won’t solve your problems. Instead, Gaines offers a bold new path to getting what you want in life: You need to know yourself better. A lot better than you do now.
In It All Starts When You Do, Gaines walks you through the hard but rewarding work you need to do when you simply can’t figure out what feels off in your life. Whether your career is stuck in neutral, your family is driving you crazy, or you’re struggling to find love, you’ll learn how to:
- Begin healing from the inner wounds you might not even be aware you have
- Conquer unconscious emotional hijacking
- Align your actions with your true desires
- Build self-esteem based on solid evidence and effort, not empty affirmations
- Stop consuming the empty calories of negative self-talk which can destroy progress
- Overcome the illusion of comfort that keeps you stuck
- And much more
It All Starts When You Do will arm you with the tools you need to stop sabotaging your life, and get down to the business of living it.
