Light After Trauma

On this week's episode, Alyssa sits down with author Kimberley Pittman-Schulz to talk about one of life's toughest emotions: grief. Tune in to listen to Kim share her personal experience in losing loved ones. Kimberley sheds light on the grieving process and normalizes the intense pain that we feel in the wake of someone's death, whether it be a person or a beloved pet. In her new book, Grieving Us, Kim helps us to remember the ways in which we can continue to make meaning in our lives even in the midst of grief.

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Transcript:

Alyssa Scolari (00:23]:

Hey, hey, hey, everybody, this is a monumental moment because I am recording the very first episode in our new home, which is so exciting. The walls are pretty empty and pretty bare, but hey, we will get there day by day. This place is starting to feel more and more like a home, so I am really excited for it. I'm also very excited for today's interview. We have with us a very special guest, Kimberley Pittman-Schulz.

Kimberley is an award-winning poet and author who writes, teaches and speaks about death, living mindfully, and being a force for change in the world. With 25 plus years as a philanthropy leader and charitable and end-of-life planning advisor, Kimberley has worked with incredibly diverse people looking for meaning after the loss of a spouse, a partner, a child, a sibling, a parent, a grandparent, or a beloved animal.

Her focus is helping people cultivate joy every day, so they can more deeply experience the meaning and beauty of their one and only lives. With that being said, hi, Kim. Thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (01:47]:

Alyssa, thank you so much. I really appreciate the invitation to talk with you and to talk with your listeners. I really admire your podcast and I look forward to this conversation with you.

Alyssa Scolari (01:59]:

Thank you. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while, and I really think that timing is just so interesting to me sometimes. I almost feel like nothing is a coincidence. Speaking of grief, it's one of those things and I tend to be very open. The listeners know, I tend to be very open about my recovery journey on the podcast. One of the things that I think in light ... So I just recently moved.

This is the first podcast episode that I am recording in the new home, which is very exciting. One of the things that I think has come up for me, especially this week, so today is Thursday that we are recording this for the listeners, and I have been in the grief, a pit of grief since probably like Monday it hit me.

I'm starting to come out of it, but to me, grief is one of the things from my perspective that we tend to spend so much of our lives avoiding and running from and finding ways to numb out, because I think it's one of the most difficult things. What has inspired you to say, "I'm going to take one of the most painful feelings on earth and I'm going to dive right in and I'm going to write about it and share about it." What inspired you to do that?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (03:25]:

Self-punishment maybe? No. To be absolutely honest-

Alyssa Scolari (03:29]:

Self-loathing.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (03:32]:

I think grief, loss, I mean, none of us get out of it alive. Some of us get to live, some of us don't and those of us that are left behind need to deal with it. Grief is so many things. It's not even one thing. I mean, you've got anger and guilt and regret and longing, and there're so many emotions bundled up in that. Then there're so many different grieving styles. For me, part of it was learning to navigate my own grief years ago.

I very much was stuck in a grief hole for two years after my mother died and a friend committed suicide two weeks before she died, so I had these things bundled together. As a child, I survived a house fire that my two sisters sleeping in the same room did not. So for me, this loss and navigating it, my mother could never talk about it. When you're a little kid and you can't really talk about what happened to my sisters? What happened to the house? You have to do a lot of figuring out on your own.

When we got into the pandemic, I started just really hearing some people's pain, what they're struggling with and feeling like there's a million systems for getting better, but people were struggling. I thought maybe what has worked for me ... And I've worked with a lot of people over the years through my philanthropy and end-of-life planning work, practices that have helped them.

I really wanted ... And I love to write. I'm also a writer before I'm anything else. For me, it was about trying to help other people navigate grief and whenever you are trying to teach others, let's face it, you're also teaching yourself.

Alyssa Scolari (05:03]:

Absolutely. Right. We were just saying that before we started recording, right? Doing all of this, we're helping others as much as we're helping ourselves. Right. You are a writer, as I said in the introduction, and you have ... I think it's important to talk about. You have a book out that was just released in March of this year. It was a number one release on Amazon, in several different categories. The name of that book is Grieving Us. Now, is that your first book that you've written on grief?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (05:36]:

Yes. Yes. It's the first book I've written on grief, and the first book I've written other than poetry. My first book was 10 years ago. It was a poetry volume. Interestingly enough, the name of that volume is Mosslight. It was published by a literary publisher and won a national book award actually at that time. When you go back and look at the poems, there is a lot of grief, resilience, navigating loss.

Actually going back and looking at that book and hearing from people who've read that book, reminded me that this is just who I am, you know? As we move further through life, I think it has a great focusing effect in helping you figure out, what am I supposed to do? How can I make the most meaning while I'm here on the planet for myself and others?

Alyssa Scolari (06:22]:

Yeah. Yeah. Now, can you give us a brief synopsis of your book? I love the title, Grieving Us. What does that mean?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (06:32]:

Right. The subtitle is important too, because it's based on a question that people ask me all the time. The subtitle is how to live with loss without losing yourself. Because the number one question I often hear is, how do I live with this without losing myself? I feel so lost. Because when someone that's been a critical part of your life leaves you, now we're talking about death here, but it can be divorced, it can be all kinds of reasons why somebody is not in your life anymore, you do actually lose part of your life.

There's a dailiness to the way we love people. I say in the book, love is a habit and how you love people takes shape and rituals and habits and routines, and so when that person is not in your life, your days can literally be broken. It can be hard sometimes for people to pinpoint why they're having a hard time as they're moving through grief, starting to find well-being or inviting joy back in.

The synopsis, Grieving Us is really intended to function on a few different levels, because I always say when one person dies, there's always at least three deaths. There's the person that you love who's lost. You cannot help. It is human nature to look at yourself and say, "Wow, I could be next. Am I next?" Or in some cases people say, "Do I want to keep on living?" We do reflect on our own mortality.

Then the relationship you had with that person is like a third party, if you will, because that is also gone and you have to hold onto that person in a different way. Then for me, there's another sort of level of meaning and that my husband has in, his end of lifetime. I'm living with my own anticipatory grief and trying to live with joy and grieving at the same time. It has a large context as well as very personal context for me, Alyssa.

Alyssa Scolari (08:24]:

Yes. I really appreciate what you said about the joy and the grief and that I think so many of us fall into a place of suffering partially because we feel that they're polar opposites and can't coexist, but I think it's very important to know that both can be there.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (08:49]:

For me, it's a basic premise. It can sound hokey or corny or naive to say, "Oh, yeah. Right. Grief and joy coexist." But I've discovered that that's just true. The question is how do you get there? Because so often, Alyssa, and I'm sure you hear it in the clients that you work with, I've got to get through grief to joy. As if joy is a destination.

I was having this conversation with someone recently, and it just bubbled out of my mouth and I thought, "Wow, that's kind of true." Is that joy is not a destination. It's really a dimension. Part of what I teach in my book, I start by having people tell their loss story to themselves because often we tell our loss stories to everybody but ourselves.

Then the next step, and what was really the healing aha moment for me is what I've come to call tiny come back to your senses rituals. It's creating ... I started with just literally a few minutes, like three minutes where I just created an opening in the grief and for that moment, I was just so fully in the moment. I mean, I could tell you a little bit more about the process, but the idea was that I had created a break in my grief through this ritual that allowed a little bit of joy.

When I say joy, I want to maybe define that a little bit too, because there's happy, right? Riding a rollercoaster makes you happy, but we say makes you happy because we know that's transient, right? A little bit later, we're looking for something else to make us happy. For me, joy is related, but it is a different thing. It's about knowing you're meant to be here. It's about being in this moment.

Right now I'm having this wonderful conversation with you and getting a chance to meet with you and talk with you about this and to be fully immersed in this moment and have it have a sense of meaning and purpose. Just knowing that no matter what else is going on in my life or the rest of the day, everything's okay right in this moment. To me, that's a big part of what joy is and it is there, ever-present.

It's just creating that break in the grief to be able to let the light of that come in and root and grow. Then the goal is as we move through grief to just make those breaks bigger and let a little bit more joy in.

Alyssa Scolari (10:56]:

When you say the break in the grief, you get that break in the grief through what you call the tiny come back to your senses rituals, is that correct?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (11:07]:

Yes. Yes. Yeah. I stumbled into it, Alyssa, really by accident. I mean, I was in this ... What turned out to be a little over two-year period of being what I call lost limbo after my mother died and Ruth had committed suicide and these were just so linked together. They're still linked together in my life and in my grief and in my sense of loss. We had moved across country from where I had lost my mother and happened to live on a stretch that had some river frontage.

I remember one of the things that happens when you're grieving, right? I'm sure you've experienced this through all of your own healing from trauma, is how broken some of your habits and rituals get. There's always a few things that you still do. For instance, I will always make a cup of tea in the morning, no matter what. I mean, the world could be burning. I'm going to have my cup of tea, right? Well-

Alyssa Scolari (11:07]:

You're having that tea. Yep.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (11:54]:

Yeah. Exactly. Well, at that point in my life, also, before I went to bed, no matter what, I always locked the doors. One night before I locked the doors, I decided to just wander out to the river. I walked out to the river and I stood at the edge of the river and I just listened to the water. I don't know if you've had this experience, Alyssa, or some of your listeners, sometimes the movement of water over rocks can almost even sound like voices and you think, "Is there someone upstream?"

It really isn't. It's just literally the voice of the water and the volume of it going through and over the rocks. Then you hear a bird shuffling, it's quietly in a tree, there's a little bit of fog coming in. I was really feeling the sensation of the fog on my arms. As I turned to walk back in the house, it suddenly just on me, in that little space, just a few minutes I didn't feel awful. I didn't feel awful.

I felt okay, and so as I came back in and I locked the door, I realized I was onto something. I began to then intentionally build some of these grief rituals into habits that were already working because I think that's the hard type thing, is people will say, "Go do X or go do Y." It's like, "How do I do it?" If you have to find that one or two things in your day that actually works, you can add on.

Start with just three minutes and even the busiest or most burdened people can find usually that three minutes.

Alyssa Scolari (13:16]:

Yes. I so appreciate that, and coming off the heels of feeling such intense grief the last several days, I know that for me, it's one of those things you can't snap out of it. There's no like, "I'm going to snap out of this." No. For me, the transformation happened in the 30 seconds that it took me to go online and book an appointment for myself and I noticed that while I was doing that, I was okay. I was okay.

I had my diffuser on, the air smelled really nice. I had a blanket on, my dog was curled up next to me. I was like ... It took me 30 seconds, but after those 30 seconds, I went, "Oh, I didn't feel like my world was crashing down around me for 30 seconds." To me, that's the process. More than like, "Oh, well, today I had a great day. I did this. I did that. I'm so happy. Thank God I'm not in that bad place anymore." It's like, it doesn't really work like that.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (14:23]:

No. You can have a day that's really crappy but instead of having a day that's crappy all day, to have a few moments like that, where you really are getting a break and you really are feeling like, "Okay. I'm not going to take on the universe here and I'm not the best I've ever been, wow. I got a break for a little bit." That to my mind is where it all starts.

Alyssa Scolari (14:44]:

Yeah. I also love what you said about your journey to the river, because I relate to that so much. I think that I first started tapping into this enormous wave of grief back in early June when we went to the Finger Lakes and we were on vacation.

It was my first time I went to the Finger Lakes and just sitting on the water and hearing the water splash up against the rocks and looking at the fish swimming in the water, I was like ... I find that my grief can be healed or at least not healed, but understood and I can get some relief from it in nature, particularly in the water, like near water.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (15:32]:

Yeah. I would share that. I'm a nature geek anyway so it certainly works for me. I've had people say to me though, "Kimberley, I'm just not a nature type so this isn't going to work for me." I would say, "No." I've worked with a number of people to implement something that works for them. One woman I used to work with, a colleague had ... I think it was her brother that she had lost.

She was talking about every night she would get through the day, she's what I call a hummingbird griever. She was able to keep going through it. Some of us want to be like bears and go in a cave and just leave me alone until I feel better. Others are what I call hummingbirds. They just keep doing, doing, doing, doing, trying to keep ahead of the grief, right?

Alyssa Scolari (16:11]:

Yep.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (16:11]:

She would get home at the end of the day she said, "I'm just crying into my Chardonnay every night. It's just that I'm drinking too much of it too, to be absolutely honest. I don't know where I would put ..." I said, "You know what? Why don't you start your tiny come back to your senses ritual around that glass of wine?" She says, "Okay. Well, I get the taste and I can try to remember to smell." She said, "But how do you hear wine?" I said, "Tap on the edge of the glass."

Alyssa Scolari (16:35]:

Oh, yeah. Tap.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (16:36]:

"Or listen to the sound of it going down your throat. I mean, just be very, very mindful. Try to use all five senses when you drink that glass of wine." It was several months later I ran into her and she goes, "I thought what you said was kind of crazy, but you know what? It slowed me down. I actually enjoyed my glass of wine more." She said, "I'm not drinking as much of it." For her, she had what she called her wine time.

That was her tiny come back to her senses rituals, was just really experiencing the entire glass of wine with all of her senses. Sometimes it takes a little creativity to figure out what works. That's what I love about what I've tried to teach, is that this isn't take what works for me now you have to make it work, because you're a different person. But you can take the concept and adapt it to what's meaningful for you.

Alyssa Scolari (17:21]:

Exactly. Exactly. I love that. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit because I really want to dive into this. Can we talk about animals for a moment? Because ... And, oh dear Lord, if I get through this conversation without shedding one tear, that will be a huge victory because animals, I love. I have three dogs. All animals, I am a huge animal lover.

I really think that this is important to talk about because I can't tell you how many people come into my office and have lost pets and are absolutely devastated beyond belief, but feel as though they shouldn't. This is not an uncommon thing. So many people feel that losing pets can be harder in some ways than losing people.

So many people, myself included, I will watch TV and I will watch true crime documentaries all day long, but let me tell you, if there is one episode where an animal is harmed or killed, I'm done. Done. I'm not alone. I know I'm not alone in that. Is that something that you can talk more about? Is there a reason why it feels so much harder?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (18:52]:

Oh my gosh, Alyssa, I am just-

Alyssa Scolari (18:55]:

I know, that was a lot.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (18:56]:

... so simpatico, but no, I mean, I feel exactly every word that you just said. So many people I've known and worked with, I feel the same way. Early in my life I worked with UC Davis School of Veterinary medicine. It was the first veterinary school to actually create a pet loss support hotline because helping veterinarians learn how to deal with the grief that their patients had over a pet was such a big issue. Veterinarians did not handle it.

About a year ago I gave a talk on death to estate and financial planners who are focused on helping people plan for the end of life, but never want to talk about death. Pets are huge for people. It certainly depends. In my book I tell a story about after my dog died, technically he was my stepdad because it came with my husband like a dowry, right? The person-

Alyssa Scolari (18:56]:

Oh, what kind of dog?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (19:46]:

Yeah. It was a mutt, Heinz 57, but he was really cute, really sweet. We walked together, did a lot together. After he died someone in the community ran into me and said, "Oh, well, at least it's a dog. You can get another." I am not a violent person, Alyssa, but I really ... The vision went through my head of really smacking her [inaudible 00:20:05] just because it wasn't just a dog or just ... I mean, you wouldn't say that if somebody lost a child or a spouse.

For me, part of what I think can be in some ways ... And this is why I do think some people ... I have a friend who lost her father and a dog within a few weeks of each other. She says, "Of course I miss my father. He was 94. I spent the last few months caring for him." She goes, "I have to admit, the dog is actually way harder. It was a rescue dog. It had been doing great and then something just suddenly came up and it was gone."

I think one of the things you don't hear people talk a lot about is the dailiness of people and animals in our lives. Animals are often ... Spouses may come and go to work, partners may come and go, kids come and go, but often those dogs or cats, like right now, I'm a cat lady. We have kittens, or technically cats, but they're still kittens to me. It's-

Alyssa Scolari (20:58]:

Always kittens.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (20:59]:

... always kittens. Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari (20:59]:

They'll always be kittens.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (21:00]:

Yeah. You have this dailiness of like this morning just brushing my hair. The cat's on the counter in the bathroom watching me brush my hair. We have little things that we do. Little habits together, and so throughout the day they're an intimate part of my daily life. When you lose a companion animal, again, you have all those little gaps that you have to learn to bridge because that being isn't there.

Let's face it, animals love us no matter what we look like or act like. I mean, unless we're abusive people, I mean, it's truly the most unconditional love you're going to find.

Alyssa Scolari (21:41]:

It is, and even, you know what? Sometimes even if people are abusive, an animal will still look at you and beg for love and attention and affection. It is the most-

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (21:52]:

It's true.

Alyssa Scolari (21:52]:

... unconditional love that I think I've ever experienced. I'm thinking of this morning as we're having this conversation. We moved into this new house and we used to, in our old house, because we had carpet upstairs, we kept the dogs downstairs. Didn't let them upstairs. They weren't in the bedroom. We don't have carpet in this house and the dogs are upstairs, downstairs. They're everywhere. Everywhere I go I'm tripping over a dog.

This morning, I opened my eyes, my eyes popped open suddenly and I see ... I have two Australian shepherds. One of my Australian shepherds, he is two years old. His head was resting on the bed and he was making direct eye contact with me and grinning from ear to ear. I could see all his teeth. He was so happy. He was just staring at me, waiting for me to get up.

As soon as I opened my eyes, he was like, "Mom, hi, let's get up. I love you. You look beautiful. No, your breath doesn't stink." As I'm breathing my morning breath on him. I'm just like, those are the moments that are unparalleled. Unparalleled.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (23:13]:

Well, there's nothing quite like dog love like that. I mean, there isn't. Someday when that beautiful little being is not a physical presence, you're going to continue to have that wonderful emotional presence. You just don't forget it.

Alyssa Scolari (23:33]:

Never.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (23:33]:

Again, that dailiness, I mean, other people in your life except maybe a spouse, partner or kids, who else fills that kind of a role? I mean, it's just a very ... And if you are, as I am, an animal person ... And what's tough is when animal people then are experiencing losses around people who aren't and don't get it. What I usually say to people is resist the temptation to let that be a burden to you or be frustrated or angry, because that's just more emotion on top of grief.

It's better just to let it go and just know that's their loss and just focus on caring for yourself. The problem is a lot of times people are made to feel like they're grieving wrong. That's true with humans too. Particularly with animals, people can be made to feel like they're wrong or weird. I'm just here to say, no, you're not.

Again, if you didn't love, gosh darn it, it wouldn't be a problem, but you love so when you lose that physical presence of someone you love, whether that someone has four legs, fur and a tail, it's going to hurt.

Alyssa Scolari (24:35]:

Excruciating. Excruciating grief. Yeah. I think that that's a huge problem, is that people are in their grief, but then they're also made to feel somewhat guilty or a little bit weird for the grief that they have. I remember when I got my dog, I have a little dog. I got her ... She was born six days after I escaped from an abusive relationship. I got out of his house on July 14th and she was born six days later.

Two months after that, I had her. I had no idea I was getting a dog. She found me. I swear to this day the gods created her because they were like, "All right, she's going to need some love." Have her. Two days ago, she turned eight. I remember when I first got her, when I tell you I'm enamored with this dog and was, people would say things to me like, "Don't you love her a little too much?" Or like, would say things like-

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (25:52]:

Oh my gosh. How is that even possible?

Alyssa Scolari (25:53]:

Right? How is that even possible? Or my favorite was like, "I know you love your dog, but you do know your dog's going to die eventually, right? You got to separate a little bit." I-

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (26:06]:

It's like, well, I know you're going to guide too, but hey, you know?

Alyssa Scolari (26:08]:

Well, I felt like, "Yeah. Well, yeah."

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (26:08]:

Right. Exactly.

Alyssa Scolari (26:12]:

[crosstalk 00:26:12] less now that you said that. Yeah. These are the kinds of things that we say. Like for people who are avid pet lovers or people who have lost a pet, it's like, "Oh, you just get another one." It's like, so now on top of our grief, we feel guilt for the love that we have.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (26:33]:

Guilt or like we're stupid or weird or abnormal, and that's just no good at all. I mean, it's just no good at all. There're so many other ways too, through grief that people feel that way. I'll take anybody who loves and grieves any day, over someone who surprisingly doesn't love that much and so they don't have to navigate that grief journey as much.

Alyssa Scolari (26:57]:

Yes. I don't remember who said this, but I remember I heard this quote and this is one of my favorite books is David Kessler, The Sixth Stage of Grief. Finding Meaning. A phenomenal book for the listeners out there. I know I've recommended it multiple times on this podcast, but he talked a lot about how grief yes, there is a way to avoid grief, but the way to avoid grief is to avoid love. You can't avoid one without the other, without avoiding the other.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (27:32]:

It's like two sides of the same coin, really. I mean, absolutely. The whole issue of meaning too is really important because I feel like when you talk about human beings, what makes human beings different than a lot of other animals. As a kid I grew up and the answer was always opposable thumbs, you know? Right? Because we can grasp things with our opposable thumbs, but I really think it's actually meaning making is our super power as human beings, because it allows us to grasp things with our minds.

That means you can really assign meaning where you want it. You get to choose what's meaningful to you. That can be who you love. It can be how you grieve. In my book I tell a story about that I can teach my cat to know the word dragonfly. I have a pond in my yard, so I can say dragonfly and the cat knows I'm referring to that thing that she'd love to catch going back and forth above the pond. What I can't teach her to do is what I do when I see a dragonfly, it is tied to my mother.

When I see a dragonfly, I'm also thinking of my mother. I asked myself, "Could I ever teach my cat a word that when she saw the thing she could equate it, not only to the thing in the physical world, but to a memory of her own mother as a kitten?" I was like, "I don't think I can." That is, I think ... And I know David also talks about things like this in his book.

This whole idea of meaning is ultimately I think how we move through grief and get to a better place of well-being, and even defining what joy means and how we make more of that in our lives comes through our ability that we get to say what's meaningful.

Alyssa Scolari (29:07]:

Yeah. Yes. Finding meaning is so helpful. Does that for you, from your perspective, fall into the same category as helping others, finding meaning also with helping others? Because I know you talked about how much helping others can be hugely impactful in the grieving process.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (29:31]:

To me, they're tied at the hip. I mean, certainly for me personally. Sometimes when I think about I spent a lot of my career working in philanthropy with people, we don't often think about this. Even people who work in philanthropy often, unless you stop and really think about it, so much of philanthropy, so much of giving back, whether that's a financial contribution or volunteering or random acts of kindness, when you drill down to what motivates a person to do those things, what you often realize-

Alyssa Scolari (30:00]:

I just saw a cat.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (30:03]:

I couldn't make her stay out so it's just I thought rather than having her paw at the door, it'd be easier just to let her be.

Alyssa Scolari (30:09]:

Oh, I love it.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (30:10]:

I woke her up talking about animals or something. I just feel like as we move through our grief and our healing process and we think about what's meaningful ... And so for me, what I realized is a lot of that motivation to give back and help others in any sort of way, often does come from a place of loss and of trying to ... One of the things you can't ... Like when I talk about meaning, people will say, "Do you mean I'm supposed to believe that someone's death, there's meaning to that, or it was done for a reason?"

I said, "Well, you have to decide if that's what you believe." I personally don't think somebody died because it was the thing that was supposed to happen. That's my personal belief system. For some people they really do believe that death is part of a plan. I think again, each person has to find their way there.

What I do believe is that when we start to think about giving of ourselves, it not only makes us feel good to be helping others, it not only creates a little bit of a break and a distraction in pain, but it does make a difference in other people's lives. So much of the giving impulse does come from a place of pain.

I've sat with many individuals, volunteers, donors, people involved at doing frontline charitable work, hospice volunteers and nurses, how much of that motivation comes from a place of pain and trying to make some meaning for them by helping others.

Alyssa Scolari (31:38]:

Yeah. Absolutely. Right? Even therapists. Right?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (31:43]:

Yep. And podcast hosts.

Alyssa Scolari (31:46]:

Podcast hosts, writers, right? People aren't writing about this stuff because it's coming from a place of joy and never having lived or experienced. People are writing from their own pain or working or whatever it is they do, volunteering, coming from a place of their own pain.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (32:06]:

Definitely. No. Definitely. I think even small ... We tend to think of random acts of kindness as being goody two-shoes or Pollyanna or something like that, or maybe even sounding hokey. But to be absolutely honest, that's a strategy I often suggest.

I was literally writing a post that I'll be posting later about this very topic, that when I talk with people who are struggling with grief, a lot of times they've lost that sense of meaning and purpose in their lives without their beloved other, whoever that, or whatever creature that may be, a person or animal, whatever.

I really want people to realize that they have a heartbroken, but still beautiful life. I hate for people to sort of give away their life. It takes time. I'm not saying just get over it. That's not what I'm saying at all. But to take the time to realize you are going to have to build a new life, which means creating a new version of you that didn't exist before.

I mean, you didn't ask for this giant change in your life, it has happened to you, right? You've got to create something new out of that. Finding a way to give back in small ways and realizing how often you have done or other people have done to you, generous things. Whether it's paying for someone's coffee in line behind you, or just a nice word or a nice compliment that you may think is completely offhand that can make a huge difference from somebody. You never know.

There are times, years later when I'll run into somebody and they'll say, "Back in so-and-so you said this to me, and I can't tell you what a difference it makes." I'm sitting there thinking, "I said that?" I was like, "Yeah, it sounds like something I would say, but I don't even remember what they're talking about." It's so important to realize that as long as you're physically in this world and you can't help but take up space, you are going to impact others.

One of the choices you can make is to be a little more intentional about that. When you're first putting those very first feelers out from that place of grief, trying to find some ground, starting with something as simple as a compliment to somebody or some truly ... What seems like random is really not random at all act of kindness to somebody else, is going to actually make you feel pretty good. Again, it's like your 30 seconds this morning. In that space, everything was okay.

Alyssa Scolari (34:23]:

Absolutely. Absolutely. In that space everything was okay. When I woke up this morning and opened my eyes and saw a big hairy dog smiling at me, I was like, "Everything's fine. Everything's fine." I love it. Thank you. Much for sharing. Now, of course, if people would like to find your book or have questions or want to purchase your book, where's the easiest way? Is it via Amazon?

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (34:53]:

Well, of course Amazon sells about 72% of the planet's books, so yes, you'll find all versions of my books there. I also encourage people to work with their local bookseller who can order just about anything on the planet as well and you're buying local as well. I also have a website as well, website link. In fact, I set up a landing page for your listeners. My website is poetowl.com.

There's just a slash light after trauma and so they can go and they'll see your podcast cover and not feel like they're going to a stranger's house. They can click on a link and get the book there, or explore some other information that's there as well. I'm in the process of putting together a workshop. There are some other resources there that I'm building out.

Alyssa Scolari (35:38]:

Fantastic. That's so poetowl.com/lightaftertrauma.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (35:44]:

Yes.

Alyssa Scolari (35:45]:

Ooh. All right. To the listeners-

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (35:45]:

Yeah. I was like-

Alyssa Scolari (35:47]:

... I'm there now. This is, ooh, such a lovely page. What I will do, so for the listeners out there, I will be linking that in the show notes so you know where to go. Please check that out. I cannot wait to read this book because it just sounds phenomenal. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you for sharing your expertise, for being vulnerable.

I know this is tough to talk about, but you're doing the hard work. You're really doing some of the hardest work, I believe, on the planet. Thank you so much for your time.

Kimberley Pittman-Schulz (36:25]:

Thank you, Alyssa, too. Really we're all going to have to do the hard work.

Alyssa Scolari (36:30]:

So true. So true. Thanks for listening, everyone. For more information, please head over to lightaftertrauma.com or you can also follow us on social media. On Instagram we are @lightaftertrauma and on Twitter it is @lightafterpod. Lastly, please head over to patreon.com/lightaftertrauma to support our show. We are asking for $5 a month, which is the equivalent to a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Please head on over again. That's patreon.com/lightaftertrauma. Thank you we appreciate your support.

[singing]

Amy Guerrero is a trauma-informed recovery coach helping people on their journey of sobriety and healing from trauma. In this episode, she talks with Alyssa about why it can be dangerous to tell people struggling with addiction to "just quit". She also shares about her own battle with addiction and how addiction actually saved her life - at first! Tune in to hear Amy's incredible story as well as her unique approach to helping others heal via a fully somatic experience.

Amy's Website:https://www.thriveinrecoverywithamy.com

Check out the Light After Trauma website for transcripts, other episodes, Alyssa's guest appearances, and more at: www.lightaftertrauma.com

Want to get more great content and interact with the show? Check us out on Instagram: @lightaftertrauma

We need your help! We want to continue to make great content that can help countless trauma warriors on their journey to recovery. So, please help us in supporting the podcast by becoming a recurring patron of the show via Patreon. Every bit helps!

Transcript:

Alyssa Scolari [00:23]:

[singing]

Alyssa Scolari [00:23]:

Hello, everybody, welcome. On the day that we are recording this, it is Friday and I am in a really good mood. Why? I don't know, because things are hectic, but I am, so we're going with it. I am really excited for today's episode. I am really excited for our guest today. We have with us Amy Guerrero. I'm just going to tell you a little bit about Amy before we get into it.

Alyssa Scolari [00:55]:

"When we stay curious together, we can experience unimaginable freedom." I love that quote. "On a journey to heal from my trauma, I stumbled, pun intended, into a conscious sober lifestyle and my deeper purpose to support people. Today, I support sober people to heal past traumas, to feel more freedom, pleasure, and purpose, and create healthy relationships and thrive.

Alyssa Scolari [01:22]:

I was confident no single approach to healing and living a conscious sober life would work for me, so why would it work for anyone else? I got busy educating myself, training and working with people in somatic experiencing, attachment theory and other trauma-informed modalities and relating it to living a conscious sober lifestyle.

Alyssa Scolari [01:44]:

What I discover is missing for my clients, who include all adults ready to create healthier relationships, is when we unravel the root causes of the addictive escape, such as grief, trauma, and painful events from the past, they discover the safety to live with purpose and thrive in all of their relationships.

Alyssa Scolari [02:06]:

Outside of running my coaching business, Thrive in Recovery, you can find me practicing what I teach, cooking healthy, delicious food, practicing yoga, playing outdoors, and strengthening my connection to myself to serve others."

Alyssa Scolari [02:22]:

I love that. Hi, Amy. Welcome.

Amy Guerrero [02:26]:

Thank you so much. It's so delightful to be here and all of our good moodiness is jiving off of each other because I too am having a great Friday.

Alyssa Scolari [02:36]:

Oh, that makes me so happy to hear that. Amy and I are moving buddies. Amy has just moved so we were talking about the process of moving before we started recording. Yeah. We're both vibing.

Amy Guerrero [02:50]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [02:50]:

Is there anything you want to add to that bio, or can I just get rolling?

Amy Guerrero [02:56]:

It's just-

Alyssa Scolari [02:56]:

Can I just start with my 21 questions?

Amy Guerrero [02:58]:

Just get started with your 21 questions. You said it all. Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [03:04]:

Can you define, for the listeners, what is somatic experiencing? What does that mean? Because I love that technique, but I don't think a lot of people really know what that means.

Amy Guerrero [03:19]:

Absolutely. I like to put things in very user-friendly words, so I'm not going to define it as maybe the Somatic Experiencing Institute would define it. I'm going to define it as Amy Guerrero defines it.

Alyssa Scolari [03:31]:

Of course.

Amy Guerrero [03:31]:

It's really, for me, as a conscious sober woman, before I became conscious I was really feeling my way through life. I was experiencing a lot of life through all of the sensation in my body, and everyone in the world doesn't experience that, or stops the sensation from happening. Then just tries to analyze and analyze and think and think and think.

Amy Guerrero [03:57]:

What somatic experience is, is really a bottom-up approach to mental health, mental wellness, and overall wellness. It's really going into the body to allow the body to complete things that happened, whether unconscious or conscious. For instance, with traumatic events or with grief, oftentimes we stuff it down and we put it away and we promise we're going to go back for it later.

Amy Guerrero [04:26]:

Then some kind of chronic inflammation shows up and it just won't go away. Often that's the body keeping the score, as Bessel would say, or telling us like, "Hey, there's something in here." So often it's an emotional piece. The somatics that I really practice in somatic experiencing that I practice for myself and my clients is like, "Hey, let's listen to what your body wants to tell us and then listen to what your mind is telling us about that."

Amy Guerrero [04:52]:

Really slowing it down. So often people who've experienced any escapism with drugs or alcohol, or even just the behaviors that are just highly palatable on the GABA receptors and the feel-good transmitters, they don't remember that they have a body because it's been drowned out by the heavy use of other things outside of themselves. That's my story too.

Alyssa Scolari [05:18]:

Yeah. That was going to be my next question, is, this is something that I feel like many people who struggle with addiction, and I also believe eating disorders, this is something that we do. We almost, metaphorically of course, are walking around with our heads detached from our bodies when we're in our addiction. Would you agree with that?

Amy Guerrero [05:46]:

Absolutely. Our heads get very manipulative and wise at the same sense, because it's all a protective mechanism. Our brains start to create all of the story that becomes so intense and it just won't stop.

Amy Guerrero [06:03]:

When I was working in eating disorder clinics, I was always just really watching the room instead of listening to every single word, because what I could see in their bodies would tell me the story in which they had calculated such a beautiful story in which most of it their body was telling me wasn't true. Right?

Amy Guerrero [06:25]:

Their head was like, "Oh, no, this is exactly what's happening." It's so true. It's a protective mechanism. I don't think there's anything wrong or right about it. It makes sense.

Alyssa Scolari [06:39]:

Absolutely. I think that for some people that's truly where they need to be, because it's one of those things where maybe if we were fully in tune, we would lose it. It is, as you said, a protective measure. I believe it's a survival mechanism.

Amy Guerrero [06:54]:

Absolutely.

Alyssa Scolari [06:55]:

It keeps us alive.

Amy Guerrero [06:57]:

Yep.

Alyssa Scolari [06:58]:

In a way ... And this might sound like a twisted sentence, but sometimes our addiction is what keeps us alive.

Amy Guerrero [07:05]:

Oh, if I didn't start using drugs and alcohol when I did, I think I would have been suicidal much sooner in my life than when I was. I mean, my first MDMA experience was a life-changer. I believe I used it in this very beautiful way where I had journals and all of the things and just really got to the matter of what was really bothering me.

Amy Guerrero [07:27]:

I believe that those experiences, although then I would use them in ways that weren't necessarily therapeutic for me, but if I didn't use the way I did, I don't think I'd be here now. Because at the end of my using, when that coping mechanism was taken away from me, I tried to kill myself for almost 18 months.

Alyssa Scolari [07:46]:

Yes. I am so appreciative of the fact that you shared that, because not only are you speaking some really hard and wise truth about addiction, but in saying what you just said, which is drugs and alcohol essentially helped to keep me alive, you are taking the shame off of it and the guilt and the stigma as well, because there's such a stigma, right? We know about stigma.

Alyssa Scolari [08:15]:

We could talk about that all day, but when you look at it as like, "I needed this to survive." There are so many people who carry so much guilt and shame from years when they had addiction and they struggled, but when you reframe it and you look at it as what it was, which was you just trying to survive, I feel like it takes a lot of that guilt and shame away.

Amy Guerrero [08:39]:

A hundred percent. That was what I struggled with at first, because I wasn't being met where I was at. The people that were trying to support me ... I had started working on my trauma before I became physically dependent on alcohol. About halfway through my journey, I met my birth mom and then that's when my alcohol use just went up and up.

Amy Guerrero [09:04]:

My coping mechanisms, I really leaned into them, but I was on this journey to heal all my trauma by the time I was 40 and I just giggle at myself now because that's so my personality. Like, "I'm going to figure all of this out before I'm 40 because I'm going to walk into my 40 totally freaking healed and have it all figured out."

Amy Guerrero [09:24]:

Instead, I'm waking up shaking and going, "Wait, you cannot take away my favorite coping mechanism. What the actual fuck is going to happen now?" People were trying to tell me that everything that I was saying was untrue and to not trust my body and that I was powerless and all of these things. I was like, "Ah, no, I hear you. Maybe this works for some people, but please listen to me and meet me where I'm at." I wasn't really receiving that kind of support.

Alyssa Scolari [09:56]:

When you say people were telling you, do you mean professionals, healthcare professionals were telling you ... In what aspects were they telling you to not listen to your body?

Amy Guerrero [10:07]:

The first treatment center that I went to, I mean, beautiful humans that knew what they knew. They were a 12-step modeled treatment center. Everything was modeled off of the 12 steps. They really believed in everything that the book said and didn't take into account the body and the trauma and the deeper underlying things. It was like, "Oh, yeah, okay, sure, but right now you're powerless over alcohol and that's all we need to focus on."

Amy Guerrero [10:38]:

I'm like, "Maybe, but all day long I can tell you what you want to hear, but my body's still telling me, 'I'm not safe here. I'm not safe here. I'm not safe here.'" That extra ... You know? I think coping with food or by not really choosing food in the ways to nurture the body, right?

Amy Guerrero [11:00]:

That's something that's so similar where the people that are there just don't feel like they're being met where they're at and they're being told how they feel rather than actually being listened to on how they feel. I feel like that was something that was really missing.

Amy Guerrero [11:15]:

No fault of the practitioners. Just not trained in the same things that I had already been studying for a long time, because I was into my body's going to tell me what's right and what's wrong.

Alyssa Scolari [11:29]:

Yeah. Absolutely. As I think back to my eating disorder treatment days, because I had a whole host of anorexia, bulimia and then binge eating, and by the time I was in treatment, I was in full-blown binge eating. It's exactly like you said, they know what they know and they don't know what they don't know. What they didn't know was how badly I needed food to be able to survive with what I was going through.

Alyssa Scolari [12:00]:

What they didn't know was how deeply and horribly traumatized I had just been. I have a group of people sitting here telling me like, "You have to stop eating. You have to stop." Then I would get those weekly weigh-ins and they would be like, "You gained more weight this week. You're not being compliant." Ultimately they kicked me out. I got kicked out. Cue guilt and shame.

Alyssa Scolari [12:29]:

I mean, please. I mean, I understand. I feel completely what you're saying, because people are in a way telling you not to listen to your body.

Amy Guerrero [12:43]:

Yeah. I don't know about your experience and I really don't ... This is such an important conversation because I felt shame from childhood and I was really good at feeling shame. As a matter of fact, I felt more comfortable in my shame than I did in my power, so when people would tell me to not listen to my body or basically that what I was doing was wrong, again, it confirmed that I had to stay in the shame spiral.

Amy Guerrero [13:14]:

I had to ... I call it a blanket. I stayed underneath the blanket of shame and walked through my life with not good enoughness, with compromising my body with men, with work, with overworking, overdoing over everything, over, over, over, really led by my masculine energy.

Amy Guerrero [13:32]:

Because I was more comfortable feeling ashamed of who I actually was than empowered to be the confident woman that ... I exhibited all the traits of it on the outside, but inside I was like, oh, just awfully, awfully, awfully shameful of everything and always asking for permission to take up any freaking space in any room that I was in.

Alyssa Scolari [13:59]:

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's like, we have trauma that contributes to us feeling very disconnected from our bodies and then we try to seek help. Then we get this message from people who aren't meaning to give us this message, but again, they don't know what they don't know. Then we get this message that's like, "Well, yeah, you really don't. You really don't know what's going on." This is really bad.

Alyssa Scolari [14:31]:

Then we further detach from ourselves and we just sink into the shame. I mean, yeah, absolutely. I mean, to the point where I remember being a kid and if somebody ever told me ... I would get the comment a lot, because I think by nature, I'm a loud person. I do have a lot of confident energy, and if somebody would tell me like, "Shh." Just that, if you shush me, done. Done.

Alyssa Scolari [15:04]:

Shame attack, right? You call it a shame blanket. I call it shame attack. I'm done. Hiding under a rock, shame spiral into suicidality.

Amy Guerrero [15:15]:

Yeah. Oh, gosh. Yeah. I think again, it's something that we don't spend enough time naturalizing. It's just like, "Oh, it's totally a natural response based on the fact that we weren't being met where we were." No one was just looking in our eyes going, "Hey, that's okay. What you're feeling's totally natural." Instead, it was like, "Oh my God, it's my fault again." You know?

Amy Guerrero [15:42]:

I can remember even, especially with my partners, how I would just shut down, and because I have such a big presence in a room as well, when I shut down, I shut down the whole room because of my energetic [inaudible 00:15:53]. Like a manifesting generator, utilitarian. I am an energy source and a-

Alyssa Scolari [15:58]:

You're a manifesting generator?

Amy Guerrero [16:00]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [16:01]:

Okay. I'm a projector.

Amy Guerrero [16:03]:

Oh, beautiful.

Alyssa Scolari [16:04]:

To the listeners out there, look this shit up. I am telling you, your life will be changed by human design. Go to Jovianarchive.com. Find your human design. You will be forever changed. That's a side note.

Amy Guerrero [16:16]:

Yeah. Totally. My best friend is a projector as well, and so I've learned so much about projectors. Yeah. Yeah. Our energy levels are so different, and so it's so beautiful to have this information so that we can navigate our relationship in such a different way.

Alyssa Scolari [16:32]:

It's a truly beautiful thing. I think my husband is a manifesting generator and it is like reading about manifesting generators I'm like, "Wow." It's so cool. Anyway, I digress because I could talk about human design all day too. I want to ask you, what was that turning point for you?

Alyssa Scolari [16:53]:

Because you're describing the Amy who was walking around feeling detached, getting this message from treatment facilities that you shouldn't trust your body, right? Then you're trying to give up this addiction that you actually need to survive. How did you get from that Amy to the Amy who's like, "Oh, I needed this and it's okay that I needed this."

Amy Guerrero [17:20]:

Yeah. That's a great question. It took about 18 months. First it took me like just trying to take my life. I always tried to drink enough and take enough Xanax to just not be here. I was so frustrated because it just wouldn't work. Somehow some way, I would end up in the hospital and somehow I would wake up. I started writing this program, the Thrive in Recovery methodologies, I call it Regroovin', in 2014 when I was first in treatment.

Amy Guerrero [17:48]:

By 2016 I was unsuccessful again and I was just like, "Enough is enough." I went to a treatment center and I said, "Please, let me do it my way. Hold space for me. I have a plan. I just need a safe environment to get out of this. I will be the client that I need to be, if you give me space to study and do my own thing during groups." They did. I did exactly what I was told to do and got out of there.

Amy Guerrero [18:19]:

Then I chose to move into sober living. When I moved into sober living, I immediately started creating the coursework and teaching it three months later and then started my business. It's like, I knew that if I wasn't going to die, that I needed to live like I was never going to live before.

Amy Guerrero [18:38]:

Exactly like you said, I needed to go through this experience to be here now to bring this into the world. It wasn't really this super empowered decision. It was just like, "Oh, okay. I didn't die again so I'm going to live like I've never lived before."

Alyssa Scolari [18:55]:

That's realistic, right? I so appreciate that because that's what it's like. That's recovery. It's not like I think the way they make it fucking look in movies where you wake up one day and the sun shines fucking brighter and the birds are chirping. The birds are singing that you're meant to be alive. That's not the shit that happens.

Alyssa Scolari [19:22]:

It's like, we wake up and we're like, "Well ..." I know for me, it was like I had an attempt and then it didn't work and I was like ... It's very similar. I was like, "Well, fuck. I'm here. I guess I'm fucking here. What am I going to do about this shit?"

Amy Guerrero [19:43]:

Yeah. A hundred percent. It wasn't this beautiful oh. It was like, "I'm fucking here and I'm going to fucking make this decision and everyone just ..." Then I think there was a bit of like, "I'm going to prove the haters fucking wrong."

Alyssa Scolari [20:01]:

Yes. That anger that you make productive instead of self-destructive.

Amy Guerrero [20:05]:

Absolutely. Yeah. I was still really involved in the 12-step communities and the things that I knew that people told me they worked and I was like, "You know what, I'm going to study them. I'm going to go into why these things were developed and why it works. Then study SMART Recovery and then study LifeRing, and then study all of these different modalities and figure out something. What's the throughline for all of them? Why does this work?"

Amy Guerrero [20:30]:

I was. I was fucking angry at first, and so I wanted to prove everybody fucking wrong. Then I also wanted the answer to be through the body. What I first started with my gateway in was actually through nutrition and wellness and just understanding instead of eliminating things from people's diet, because we already eliminated so much, how can we add in things to support them?

Amy Guerrero [20:53]:

I started making essential oil blends and I started teaching yoga classes and just really encouraging everyone in ... Because I was working at treatment centers. Encouraging them to go to sound baths and to go into the somatics. It's like, let's just get to know that you have a body that's meant to do more than take you out in so many different ways.

Amy Guerrero [21:14]:

Because that detachment, that head that's not attached to the body, just felt like their body was in their way and then therefore abused it. All of the sex that happened in there, I was just like, "Ouch, that does not feel good for you." You know?

Alyssa Scolari [21:30]:

Yeah.

Amy Guerrero [21:30]:

For many of the women, they weren't even having orgasms, but they were sleeping with everyone at treatment. I was just like, "Let's stop that and let's add in some yummy oils and some yummy practices and let's go to the beach every day. Then let's acquaint yourself with your sensuality in a different way."

Alyssa Scolari [21:48]:

Yes. I love that. Operating from the approach of, what can we add, right? What can we add? Because you clearly are lacking, right? We're already lacking in something if we are caught up in addiction and eating disorders. It's like, let's not take anything away right now because that's not safe. Then in my private practice, I tend to be very slow with that.

Alyssa Scolari [22:20]:

I actually get a lot of ... In working with kids because I work with kids and adults, but the parents of kids are often on my ass about like, "Why is my kid still binge eating? Why? This isn't working." I'm very slow. I'm never like, "Well, why don't you just stop?" Because you don't know what's on the other side of that. Nine times out of 10, it's deep, intense suicidality.

Amy Guerrero [22:49]:

Yeah. Oh, gosh. I don't know how many times you were told that, "Oh, God, Amy you're so smart. Why don't you just stop?"

Alyssa Scolari [23:00]:

You have such a bright future. Just stop.

Amy Guerrero [23:04]:

Oh my God. I just remember when ... I mean, at one point I remember I did try to kick someone in the face when they told me that. I was just like, "It's so insulting." I was drunk but, "It's so insulting to hear that. I know I'm fucking smart. I know I've accomplished all of this shit. I know that it's not a wise decision. My prefrontal cortex is not online right now. Get the fuck out of my face. If you ever told me to just stop again." Really listen to what that means.

Alyssa Scolari [23:36]:

Right.

Amy Guerrero [23:37]:

It is so condescending.

Alyssa Scolari [23:38]:

You're only problem won't be my foot if you ever fucking tell me to stop again. We're going to have much bigger problems than my foot in your face.

Amy Guerrero [23:49]:

Yeah. I get it because the parents want to control that so badly. Then that's their unhealed emotional trauma.

Alyssa Scolari [23:57]:

Totally. Totally. A thousand percent. For you, this is the approach that you're taking and you work individually with people?

Amy Guerrero [24:08]:

And in groups. Yeah. Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [24:10]:

And in groups. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the business that you have because you've taken, what I feel is like a newer approach and a highly effective approach to recovering from addiction and trauma because, right? The biggest thing is, "Okay. Now what, right? After I'm no longer an alcoholic or I no longer am using drugs, now what do I do?"

Alyssa Scolari [24:33]:

I feel like you have found a really beautiful way of helping people through that. How do you do that? If you can answer that and in a few sentences, I don't know if you can.

Amy Guerrero [24:42]:

I can actually. I mean, that's exactly what it was. It was like, you're sober now what? Right? Now maybe for the first time we're learning how to do life, right? The first thing that I do when I'm working with people one-on-one is we usually start with something like a three-month commitment to one another and really just decide like, yes, we're in it.

Amy Guerrero [25:06]:

That first month is all about teaching regulation and really helping them understand that they have a nervous system and the three parts of the nervous system and really teaching polyvagal. Then understanding their attachment patterns and then not going too deep into the trauma, but just touching on the things that we know, what I call them they're anchors of trauma, right?

Amy Guerrero [25:28]:

Like, "Oh, that's the incident that started this and that's the incident that started this." We build that connection to take away the shame and the guilt and the blame, right? Because I believe that once we understand that we have a nervous system and we really get to know it and map it out, then we're like, "Oh, yes, it all makes sense. It wasn't my fault."

Amy Guerrero [25:51]:

Then we can start actually doing a life and setting up a plan to repair, to reconnect and to build that trust from within so that people can start to trust from without as well. Just depending ... High-level mentorship. We are talking every day and there's just a lot, a lot that happens in that one-on-one work, that most of my clients now are starting their own businesses.

Amy Guerrero [26:19]:

It's so beautiful to watch this ripple out and then they have 10 or 15 clients that are learning this work. Then those 10 or 15 clients, a couple of them start and I'm like, "Yes, this is how we're going to change the world." Right? Is the more people that understand this.

Alyssa Scolari [26:35]:

Yes.

Amy Guerrero [26:36]:

It starts with that deep one-on-one, depending on where they are in their journey. Sometimes people are coming to me with 10 or 15 years of sobriety, but not that real deeper ... As you said earlier, that real fucking recovery, right? They're still just scratching the surface and they've been sober for 10 or 15 years and they're ready to do their deeper work. They've heard something in me that they're just like, "Oh, yeah, girl, please help me get there."

Amy Guerrero [26:59]:

That's really fun because things happen so quickly because we have a lot of sober time, but we don't have a lot of time that they went into their trauma. They're often very resistant and very blocked by their 12-steppedness. Y'all, I do not have anything against 12 step at all, but there's some deconditioning that has to happen from any place that we spend a lot of time.

Alyssa Scolari [27:21]:

Oh, yeah.

Amy Guerrero [27:23]:

There's nothing right or wrong with it.

Alyssa Scolari [27:25]:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Then if I understand this correctly, you don't work with people who are active in their addiction or you-

Amy Guerrero [27:35]:

Depending. Depending.

Alyssa Scolari [27:36]:

Depending.

Amy Guerrero [27:36]:

Yeah. I have several people right now that I'm working with that are still having a little bit of going back to that coping mechanism every now and again. Safety is everything for me. If someone's really in their stuff and I know that I'm not going to be able to keep them safe because I'm not with them physically, then I will suggest that they go someplace else just because safety is so important. Again, they're not going to get well if they don't feel safe with me.

Alyssa Scolari [28:07]:

Yeah. I think that that is so important. I'm really glad you brought that up because I was going to say, "I think that we should clarify that there's a certain level here where it's simply not safe." I don't want for the listeners for it to come off as like I'm being like, "Oh, yeah, just let people run hog-wild into the arms of addiction and we just watch people waste." No, right? That's not what we're doing here.

Amy Guerrero [28:37]:

Oh, no. No, no, no, no. Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [28:38]:

It's, there's certainly a level of assessment there where we're like, "Is it safe? Is it not safe?" I've had people who come to me with an eating disorder and I'm like, "This isn't safe. I'm not trying to tell you, you have to give up the thing that's kind of keeping you alive, but now the thing that's keeping you alive is nearly killing you." That's where it's like, I feel unsafe.

Amy Guerrero [29:02]:

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, fortunately I'm usually able to tell that within the first conversation.

Alyssa Scolari [29:08]:

Absolutely.

Amy Guerrero [29:08]:

Then I'm able to make lots of recommendations in places that I really trust and that I've built relationships with, that I know that they have some of these modalities in place to keep them safe. Then we can work together after that initial ... Maybe just a little time out away from their coping mechanism and just understanding it at a higher level.

Alyssa Scolari [29:31]:

Totally. Yeah. Totally. Thrive in Recovery is your program, but you also recently have Bridge to Trust.

Amy Guerrero [29:42]:

Yeah. Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [29:43]:

Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think that's really neat.

Amy Guerrero [29:46]:

Oh, yeah. Oh, it's so neat. Yeah. What I found was that people were working with me for three months and then six months sometimes and then they just didn't know how to connect to their friends and family. They had this understanding of their nervous system. They had this understanding of their attachment system and they were just like, "Ah, no one understands me and they just keep taking me back to my old patterns and my old behaviors."

Amy Guerrero [30:10]:

The Bridge to Trust experience is all about learning to trust what you know, to come back to that intuition, to come back to that trust, and then to invite your friends and family from that place to learn with you, right? Not about the addiction, not about the recovery, but like, "Hey, how can we connect more deeply as humans here and have yummy or healthier communication with each other and really bridge this trust so that we can recover the trust that maybe was broken when we were heavily into our patterns?"

Amy Guerrero [30:44]:

Because I know for me, I broke a lot of trust out there in the world and it took time for me to build that bridge within myself. Then I felt safe to offer it to others. Like, "Oh, you can come closer to me and here's how." I can show you without guilt and shame an amends process of me going, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry." It was more like, "Hey, I get it. What can I do to make this right? How can we move on from here?"

Alyssa Scolari [31:09]:

That is a beautiful thing. I think probably hugely helpful, because one of the things that I have seen lead to relapse is a lack of those protective factors, i.e. relationships. You're not just saying, "Okay. Great. You've worked through your trauma. We've been working together. Good luck. Have fun. Catch you on the other side."

Alyssa Scolari [31:40]:

What you're doing is taking it a step further and then going, "Hey, let's also now build some really healthy and trusting relationships in your life so that you can continue on this path." Oh, that's so cool. I love that.

Amy Guerrero [31:54]:

Yeah. Because isolation and the loneliness, it's like we can learn all of this shit, but if we're not practicing it with someone that we trust, then we're not-

Alyssa Scolari [32:03]:

We fall right back into ... Yeah.

Amy Guerrero [32:06]:

Very quickly.

Alyssa Scolari [32:07]:

Yeah.

Amy Guerrero [32:08]:

It's so cool because the Bridge to Trust events have led to a community and just watching this community just grow with each other and feel that like, "Oh my gosh." And practicing with each other, and then going and practicing with their friends and their family and then going, "Oh, wait, this works." Then inviting their friends and family to come join the community and then all of a sudden we've got parents and their children and partners and their partner.

Amy Guerrero [32:36]:

Their partners are like, "Oh, shit, I need this stuff. I always thought it was them. I always thought it was their fault." You know? And I'm pointing my finger. There's a lot of that. The finger-pointing starts to go like, "Oh, shit, we're in this together. We both have nervous systems. How can we really understand this at a deeper level?" Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [32:57]:

Yes. Because it becomes so easy to blame the person with the addiction or the person with the 'mental health', right? It's them, they're sick. They're not well. I'm just like, "Man, I wish I could bring my whole family to one of these Bridge to Trust." Because I'm the outcast in my family, even doing what I do. It's like, "Oh, she's the weird one. We don't talk to her." It's like ... Right?

Alyssa Scolari [33:28]:

I'm sure in this event you have family members that then their eyes are open to, "Oh, right. Multiple nervous systems. We're all trying to regulate. I did play a part in this. I did have a role to play in this as well." I think that's really important.

Amy Guerrero [33:49]:

Yeah. Another virtual Bridge to Trust event is coming up at the end of July. It's so exciting because exactly what you said happens. I have many parents that come without their children at first and then they're like, "Oh, shit. Thank you." Because I don't make it about the coping mechanisms. It's all about the solution and the root cause of what keeps us stuck intergenerationally and that trauma. Then just some ... I like to bring fun. I call everything I do a regrooving method. We're regrooving-

Alyssa Scolari [34:24]:

I love it.

Amy Guerrero [34:24]:

... our nervous systems to just ... And I bring a lot of fun and breath, sound and movement into things. It's like, "Oh, we're not just going to sit still and learn a bunch of shit." We're going to interact and have some fun together and not take this so seriously that they're like, "Oh, she's the weird one." We're all weird together, y'all.

Alyssa Scolari [34:43]:

We're all weird. We're all a little dysregulated.

Amy Guerrero [34:46]:

Absolutely. When you learn to come back to regulation and giggle about it, then we can really embrace that dysregulation and it becomes regulated.

Alyssa Scolari [34:55]:

Yes. It's a beautiful thing.

Amy Guerrero [34:59]:

Yeah. It's freedom.

Alyssa Scolari [35:01]:

It is. It truly is. Now, if people would like to find you, because you're speaking some really innovative treatment approaches, what you're doing is so important, so important, how can people find you?

Amy Guerrero [35:16]:

Yeah. I think the easiest thing is Instagram, Facebook and my website is Thrive in Recovery with Amy. There's no secret there. It's how do you thrive in recovery and with Amy? Right? It's all there. Instagram is a great place to get to know me. There's tons of videos. I go live three times a week. I'm there for Q&As.

Alyssa Scolari [35:39]:

So cool.

Amy Guerrero [35:40]:

Facebook is the samesies, I do a weekend wellness hack every Sunday night on Facebook and I have been for years. I'm really consistent in my practices and I invite you to come closer to check it out, and then we go from there.

Alyssa Scolari [35:54]:

So cool. For the listeners out there, I will ... Well, A, I'm going to be following you myself because I really think that's ... I love what you're doing. I really, really do. B, for the listeners out there, I will link everything in the show notes. You know the deal, you by now. Head over to the show notes and you will find everything that you need. All things Amy.

Alyssa Scolari [36:20]:

Amy, thank you so much for coming on today. This has been truly a delightful conversation. You're a delightful human being and you are really kicking ass in the world, so thank you.

Amy Guerrero [36:35]:

Thank you. It's so great to be here with you today and I will talk to you soon. Good luck on the rest of your move too.

Alyssa Scolari [36:42]:

Thanks for listening, everyone. For more information, please head over to lightaftertrauma.com, or you can also follow us on social media. On Instagram, we are @lightaftertrauma and on Twitter it is @lightafterpod.

Alyssa Scolari [36:59]:

Lastly, please head over to at patreon.com/lightaftertrauma to support our show. We are asking for $5 a month, which is the equivalent to a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Please head on over again. That's patreon.com/lightaftertrauma. Thank you and we appreciate your support.

Alyssa Scolari [37:27]:

[singing]

Alyssa shares about her own battle with self harm and why we should never be writing self harm off as merely an attention-seeking behavior.

Check out the Light After Trauma website for transcripts, other episodes, Alyssa's guest appearances, and more at: www.lightaftertrauma.com

Want to get more great content and interact with the show? Check us out on Instagram: @lightaftertrauma

We need your help! We want to continue to make great content that can help countless trauma warriors on their journey to recovery. So, please help us in supporting the podcast by becoming a recurring patron of the show via Patreon. Every bit helps!

Transcript:

Alyssa Scolari [00:23]:

Hey there, warriors, how's it going? We are here with a solo episode today, which I'm pretty excited for. We, on Tuesday last week ... or, no, it was Wednesday last week, was the one year anniversary of the Light After Trauma Podcast. It is amazing to me, A, how fast a year has gone; B, how much has changed in a year; and, C, the way in which this podcast took off way more than I ever expected it to. I know that I have said that so many times, and you're probably sick of me saying that at this point, so I will not bore you with my gratitude, but if it weren't for you, I wouldn't be doing this still.

Alyssa Scolari [01:16]:

This has really become like a second full-time job for me. Well, it's more of a hobby because currently we're not getting paid for it. I do want to continue to put out these episodes though, and I really love what I'm doing, so I do want to make sure that I ask you guys for your continued support. If you can give even just the amount of a cup of coffee at Wawa or Dunkin donuts or Starbucks, or wherever you get your coffee, if you are even able to give that to the podcast, I would be so grateful because I love what I'm doing and this truly has become like a second full-time job, but it's very, very difficult to continue to balance my job as a private practice therapist and my job as a podcast host. So in order to make this easier for me, and in order for me to be able to put out more high quality content for you all, it's really important to be able to have the support, so I am kindly asking for your support. If you are able to give, if you have anything to give, please head on over to lightaftertrauma.com and click the button for Support so you can find out how you can better support us here on the podcast.

Alyssa Scolari [02:42]:

So with that said, just another huge thank you for all of the support and I am so excited to have friends all around the world. Today, I'm going to talk about a topic that is really important to me, but also really important for trauma survivors and it's a bit of a taboo topic. I feel the need to talk about it now, in particular, because I'm realizing how long it's been since I've done it, and when I say it, obviously, if you haven't seen the title of this episode, you're going to know I'm referring to self-harm. A lot of people, when they will look at me, one of the first things that they notice is the tattoo that I have of two out of my three dogs on my right arm, and I also have a tattoo of my third dog, don't worry, on my leg and people often say, "Wow, your tattoo is really beautiful," but what a lot of people don't know is that I got that tattoo, not just to celebrate the animals who I firmly believed have saved my life throughout this recovery process, but also to cover up all of the scars that I have.

Alyssa Scolari [04:10]:

I am no stranger to self-harm. When I say self-harm, I want to make sure that you all understand that self-harm can come in a variety of different methods, variety of different flavors, if you will. It's not just what I think most people go to, which is cutting on the risks. It's not just an attention-seeking behavior. I think that self-harm has developed a really, really negative connotation that you're ... at least, when I was in high school, we used to call it emo, "Oh, your emo," or, "You're weird," or, "You're just doing it for attention." That's the big one, "You're just doing it for attention," and I hate that. I hate it so much to the point where I think that when people around me, regardless of whether they're people in my private practice, outside of my private practice, friends, family, when they start to go down that path of, "Oh, this person does self-harm and it's just attention. It's just for attention. It's just attention-seeking."

Alyssa Scolari [05:24]:

I actually get very upset about it because, first of all, I don't understand why we tend to criminalize needing attention. Humanity thrives off of connection. I mean, if we didn't know that before COVID, look at all of the increased rates of suicide and suicide attempts and depression and anxiety as a result of lockdown, also a result of many other things, but being in isolation for so long has been devastating for folks. Yeah, when people are hurting and are crying out for connection and are crying out for attention, we tend to criminalize them. "Oh, that person just wants attention. That person's just doing it for attention. That cut wasn't really even that deep."

Alyssa Scolari [06:18]:

This logic has always been very twisted to me because my reaction is, "Well, if that person is cutting because they need attention, why don't we give it to them?" Because somebody doesn't just decide that they're going to start harming themselves because they're going to get popular in school or because they're going to get the man, woman, person of their dreams. It doesn't really work like that. So, yes, I'm not going to sit here and argue; a lot of times, people are cutting in a very attention-seeking way, but that doesn't mean that they're terrible people and that doesn't mean that we should turn the other cheek or roll our eyes or turn to our friends and go, "Ugh, did you see his or her or their arm? God, they're so attention-seeking. It's so annoying." Like, no, we don't do that.

Alyssa Scolari [07:20]:

I'm sure you can tell that I'm very passionate about this and I'm very passionate about it because people used to say that to me all the time. For those of you who are new here, or for those of you who know my story, this is a little bit of a reminder. I am in recovery from complex PTSD, and I have a history of self-harm, and I also had repressed memories of trauma so repressed memories were sitting in my subconscious. I was not consciously aware of them, and so about a couple of years ago when things started coming to the surface. Now, for those of you who are familiar and who know what it's like to have repressed memories, you also know that the memories don't just come to the surface and then stop forever. It's a much more complicated process than that.

Alyssa Scolari [08:20]:

So while my repressed memories have definitely slowed down in terms of what keeps coming to the surface, not really flooded with flashbacks all the time like I was before, I also still have them and I'm not totally sure what triggers them. Sometimes there's no rhyme or reason, but I'll give you an example. So I really haven't had any repressed memory come to the surface for maybe like a month or two at this point, and I was standing in my bathroom a couple of weeks ago and I was combing my hair. I don't know, this might sound weird, but I actually use the same comb for my hair that I used to use when I was in high school. So, spoiler alert, I threw out the comb, don't worry, I've got a new one. Some people are like horrified that I'm still using the same comb. I clean it, don't worry. It was just in good shape so I was like, "Yeah, there's no need to get a new one."

Alyssa Scolari [09:25]:

So, whatever, I digress. I had the comb and I was combing through my hair, and I was particularly vulnerable that day because I ... for those of you who don't know, I have extensions in my hair because my hair is very, very thin and fine and I had to end up getting them taken out because my hair was just not reacting very well to them and whatever. It seems like a very minor thing, but my hair, I was so used to having thick, long hair and it had become my security blanket and I didn't even know it. So I got my extensions taken out. I was left with this like thin, very damaged hair, and I was combing through it feeling really vulnerable.

Alyssa Scolari [10:13]:

All of a sudden, I looked down at the comb and I saw that one of like the teeth of the comb was bent, and I flashed back to being in the ninth grade. I remember that that comb was the first tool that I used to try to hurt myself when I was about 14 years old. Yes, the teeth were very, very dull and it really didn't do much to me, aside from leave a few red marks on my arm. I think that if anybody had known at the time that, that was happening ... I didn't tell anybody, I hid it very well ... If anybody had known, people could have easily written it off as an attention-seeking behavior, but it wasn't. Or, I shouldn't say that; it was, it was very attention-seeking because I was hurting so badly and I didn't even have the words for it. I couldn't even tell somebody because I had no rhyme or reason for what was wrong. I couldn't tell anybody what was going on because I didn't know. I just knew that there was something so horrible inside of me and so the only thing I knew how to do was hurt myself.

Alyssa Scolari [11:48]:

Now, I actually found it of weird that I had a memory like that surface because, like I said, I'm no stranger to self-harm. I only stopped self-harming maybe a couple of years ago at this point and it's not like I've ever not remembered it. I never repressed to that part of my childhood at all. So it was a little bit weird how that memory surfaced and I found myself just thinking a lot more about it over the last couple of weeks, and I think that the reason why I'm thinking so much more about it is because it's just been on my heart to speak about it. So I've not really spoken at length about my self-harm habits, but here I am today, I'm sharing it. I've been podcasting for a year. I've been putting my journey and my struggles out there, and I have received so much love and support. I'm trusting the process that the universe or God is telling me that it's time. It's time to talk about this stuff.

Alyssa Scolari [13:04]:

So, going back to when I was in high school, that was just the beginning. When I wasn't getting any kind of relief from the self-harm, I escalated. I escalated to sharper objects, objects that actually left marks on my arm. I was caught by a teacher and she didn't do anything. She asked me about it, but I made up some terrible, horribly unbelievable kid excuse that nobody would believe and she just let me go. I was not sent to the guidance counselor's office. There was no phone call home. When I was in high school, so we're talking 2006 to 2007, was my freshman year of high school, so not that long ago. I mean, I'm really not that old; I'm 29.

Alyssa Scolari [14:17]:

So I definitely feel like ... and I don't blame this teacher. I think as teachers, teachers don't sign up to be therapists and teachers spend up having to be therapists for kids who are hurting for kids whose parents won't take them to therapists, for kids whose parents have no idea that their kids are even hurting. So I don't blame that teacher. I don't harbor any type of ill will. It just makes me so sad that I slipped through so many cracks because that was not the last time that somebody saw that I was self-harming. I know that there were multiple people in my life who knew that I was cutting and I wasn't just cutting, and I think that that's important to know.

Alyssa Scolari [15:07]:

Self-harm comes in a variety of different ways like I mentioned earlier. It doesn't always look like cutting. Sometimes it looks like hitting. Sometimes kids, or adults I should say, because self-harm does not discriminate. Sometimes we end up hitting ourselves, slapping ourselves, punching ourselves. Sometimes we put ourselves in really, really reckless situations, dangerous situations. For me, that looked like driving. Sometimes I would drive at ridiculous speeds and I'm a little nervous and feeling shame come up as I talk about this, because it was very stupid of me and I definitely put a lot of other people's lives in danger. Thank God I never hurt anybody and I was never hurt, but I did a lot of really reckless things because I was hurting so badly.

Alyssa Scolari [16:01]:

Self-harm also looks like burning. Self-harm can also look like abusing substances, not eating, over-exercising, depriving yourself of sleep. Self-help harm comes in so many different, again, flavors, for lack of a better term. So what do you do? What do you do if somebody in your life is self-harming? Well, I can tell you what not to do, and I can tell you that because I have had so many people in my life say the wrong thing to me and it started out when somebody found out, a lot of people ... It started with the horror, the absolute shock. People would gasp. They'd go, "Oh my God, why did you do that to yourself?" in exactly that tone of voice. "Why would you do that to yourself?"

Alyssa Scolari [17:12]:

Could you imagine, as a kid, what I felt? Shame, guilt; it even strengthened my core beliefs that I was defective because people were looking at me as if I was some sort of circus freak. I am the self-harmer and, no, that's not a projection. I was genuinely labeled and valued as ... or, I shouldn't say valued. I was labeled and perceived as a head case, essentially, and I don't like that term, but that's basically how I was treated. I'm not talking about by other peers, because I understand that peers my age, they can't know how to help. It's not their responsibility to help. I work with kids every day, and the number one thing I tell them when they have a friend who is self-harming is that it's not their responsibility to be that person's therapist. It's their responsibility to tell a trusted adult.

Alyssa Scolari [18:21]:

Here's the thing, though, right? I also had trusted adults in my life that knew, and I still got the, "Oh my God, don't do that to yourself. What are you doing that for? You're going to have scars all over your body. It's going to be there forever." If I could go back in time, I would tell them this one thing, which is what I think so many people who struggle with self-harm would like to say also, which is, "Look, I understand I might have scars forever, but quite frankly, I don't plan on living long enough to the point where it's going to matter." Yes, that might sound harsh, but it also rings so true for so many people who struggle with self-harm. They're not looking at their future. They're thinking of how much agony they're in and they need relief immediately.

Alyssa Scolari [19:30]:

So if you know somebody who's self-harming, don't stare at their scars; don't point out their cuts and gasp in horror and say, "Oh my God, what did you do? Instead, if you are a kid, if you are in over your head, try to find an adult, a trusted adult who can help with this. If that adult doesn't help, find another one, and another one, and another one, and another one until somebody listens, because there is an adult out there who's going to listen. If you're an adult who struggles with self-harm, or if they're an adult who loves somebody who self-harms, try to reserve judgment. Try to encourage this person to get help and try so hard to not label this person as so fragile that you also can't share your feelings about it. Because I know. I self-harmed even while I was with my now husband and it was very hard for him. It's so hard to watch somebody that you love engage in self-harm.

Alyssa Scolari [20:56]:

David, while he wasn't perfect, because how can you be? You can't expect to be perfect in a situation like this. He was so good at never making me feel judged. He was so good at never making me feel like I was just looking for attention. He was so good at understanding that the hurt that I was inflicting on myself was a reflection of how much internal pain I was in. He could say that out loud to me and he could validate that, and I truly believe that, that made all the time difference in helping me to stop.

Alyssa Scolari [21:37]:

So when people come into my office and they have a problem with self-harming, I don't sit there and make them sign a safety contract. I mean, if their life is on the line, I take measures to get them into a higher level of care. But I don't gasp in horror. I know that the self-harm is a reflection of words that this person doesn't know how to speak into existence, emotions that this person doesn't know how to sit with. I try to get to the bottom of that. I have had so many therapists, adults, friends shy away from me, not want to talk to about self-harm because it makes them uncomfortable. What I can say to that is the more we avoid it and the more we pretend like it's not there, the worse it's going to get.

Alyssa Scolari [22:31]:

Please know also that if somebody is self-harming, that doesn't automatically mean that they're actively suicidal and need to go to a hospital immediately. I've had a lot of parents come in, very panicked saying, "My child had scratches on his, her or their arm and I have to take him to the hospital. I have to take him to the hospital," and then they go and they go to the hospital and they sit in the hospital for, honestly, at least 24 hours now, because crisis centers are so jam-packed, only for the crisis center just to ask the kid, "Do you have a plan to end your life?", the kid says no, and then they get discharged. It feels very frustrating and like nothing is getting done. So just because someone is self-harming doesn't mean that they have a plan to end their lives; at the same time though, they could, and we don't know if we don't ask.

Alyssa Scolari [23:31]:

So the biggest thing that I want you to take away from this is to not shy away from self-harm, because so many people shied away from my self-harm and it only made the problem worse. It surely developed into an addiction that I struggled with well into my 20s. I feel really grateful now to be free of self-harm and I still get those bad feelings. I still get those urges. It's interesting because I woke up today knowing I was going to record this podcast episode, and ironically enough, I am struggling with some bad urges today. I will admit that because I'm human and I'm not going to give into those urges. I'm going to choose to do the opposite. I'm going to choose to drink water and I've done ... I've eaten breakfast. I've done a workout. I'm trying to get all the self-care in that I can and I'm still struggling today.

Alyssa Scolari [24:42]:

Sometimes we use every single skill and we still have urges to self-harm, and that's the moment when we have to ride it out. Whether you're somebody who struggles with self-harm, or whether you're somebody who has a loved one who struggles with self-harm, get somebody to ride out those urges with you. I'm really thankful that I'm not going to be alone today. As soon as I close down this computer, I'm going to go downstairs and I'm going to hang out with my dogs and hang out with my husband, and I'm going to find a way to ride off this urge because tomorrow's another day. I have enough scars on my body to be able to say 100% that the self-harm doesn't fix anything. Not a damn thing.

Alyssa Scolari [25:39]:

So, please, if any of this is resonating with you, have a conversation about self-harm with your loved ones. Whether you have a loved one who is hurting themselves, or you're the one hurting yourself, start speaking about it and if you feel rejected by one person, move on to the next, because somebody is going to listen to you. Somebody is going to be able to guide you to get the help that you need. Just because you are self-harming now doesn't mean you're going to be doing it for the rest of your life. I self-harmed on and off for what? Maybe 15 years, 14 years. So like about half my life and I'm free from it now. Even though I have the urges due to a lot of trauma triggers, I'm not going to follow through with that urge and you don't have to either. It's okay to need attention. It's okay to need extra help, and it's so important to talk about this stuff, because the more you talk about it, the easier it is to overcome the urge.

Alyssa Scolari [27:08]:

If you're struggling and you need support and you need resources, reach out. You all know where to find me. You can head over to my Instagram. That's probably the easiest place to find me, which is ... my handle is @lightaftertrauma. Feel free to shoot me an email with your thoughts on this, and know that if you self-harm you're not alone. I really do understand it. I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to write in and share your stories of things that helped you to overcome self-harm. I know there are a lot of things that helped me. I could talk about that in another episode, but what I really want to do today is just get the conversation started on self-harm because I have seen far too many people shy away from it and, unfortunately, the problem is growing bigger than ever before. So please remember how much you are loved. Remember that you are a warrior and remember I am holding you in the light, and I love you all so, so much. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Can't wait to be back with another episode next week. Take good care, warriors.

Alyssa Scolari [28:21]:

Thanks for listening, everyone. For more information, please head over to lightaftertrauma.com, or you can also follow us on social media. On Instagram, we are @lightaftertrauma; and on Twitter, it is @lightafterpod. Lastly, please head over to patreon.com/lightaftertrauma to support our show. We are asking for $5 a month, which is the equivalent to a cup of coffee at Starbucks. So please head on over again, that's patreon.com/lightaftertrauma. Thank you and we appreciate your support.

In this week's episode, Alyssa sits down with suicide and abuse survivor, Johnny Crowder, to talk about the seemingly "small things" that are hugely important to have in trauma recovery. Johnny opens up about his own journey from abuse survivor to now hosting his own podcast and being the CEO and founder of an app designed to help mitigate trauma symptoms. Johnny is an amazing warrior with so much love to give!

Check out the Light After Trauma website for transcripts, other episodes, Alyssa's guest appearances, and more at: www.lightaftertrauma.com

Want to get more great content and interact with the show? Check us out on Instagram: @lightaftertrauma

We need your help! We want to continue to make great content that can help countless trauma warriors on their journey to recovery. So, please help us in supporting the podcast by becoming a recurring patron of the show via Patreon. Every bit helps!

Transcript:

Alyssa Scolari [00:23]:

Hello, hello Friends. How are we doing today? I am trying to get back into the podcast swing of things. I have had a couple of weeks break from recording. We went on vacation. We bought a house. We have been packing and getting ready to move and all those good things and it's been really busy but all good stuff. Really, really excited. Of course, the moving process is like triggering trauma symptoms out of the wazoo but that's a conversation for another podcast because today, we have very special guest. I am looking forward to this episode. We have with us Johnny Crowder. Now, Johnny is amazing. He is a 28 year old suicide and abuse survivor. He is a TEDx speaker, a touring musician, mental health and sobriety advocate and the founder and CEO of Cope Notes.

Cope Notes is a text based mental health platform that provides daily support to users in nearly 100 countries around the world, which is awesome. I love that. I can't wait to talk more about that. Armed with 10 years of clinical treatment, a psychology degree from the University of Central Florida and a decade of peer support and public advocacy through the National Alliance of Mental Illness, Johnny's youthful vigor for mental health has impacted millions of lives across the globe. Since his first keynote in 2011, Johnny's refreshingly candid perspective has attracted praise from hundreds of outlets, including Upworthy, CNN, and Forbes.

Even when commanding a virtual stage or touring with his metal band, Prison, his infectious positivity and firsthand experience with multiple mental illnesses, ranging from bipolar disorder and OCD to schizophrenia, uniquely equipped him to provide realistic yet hopeful insight into the pains of hardship with authenticity, levity, and unconventional wit. So that was quite a bio. So hello, Johnny, welcome.

Johnny Crowder [02:48]:

Howdy.

Alyssa Scolari [02:50]:

You're a rock star. I mean, holy smokes, everything that you've been through ... I've really been looking forward to this conversation, even though it's taken us a little while to schedule and to get here, just because of the things that you're doing and the resiliency that you have. So can you take us back, how did you get to be the person that you are today?

Johnny Crowder [03:17]:

Lots of-

Alyssa Scolari [03:19]:

That's a loaded question, I know.

Johnny Crowder [03:20]:

Yeah. I'm trying to think lots of music. Lots of exercise, I'm looking back and I just think like, we all like to ... we all wish life was simple enough and binary enough to point to one thing and be like, "Oh, that was the thing that defined me," but I'm a pretty outspoken proponent of the fact that all of the little things make a big difference too, so it's interesting when I do interviews, and people want to talk about like the few big things, like tell us about your suicide attempts or tell us about being raped. I'm like, there were thousands of little moments in between, that shaped me, that I don't always get to talk about. So whenever someone is like, "How did you become who you are?" My brain runs like an infinite inventory of all of these tiny little decisions that I've made, but ultimately, an easy way to describe it is every time I experienced some kind of pain, I stubbornly decided there had to be a way to justify it.

I had to use the pain or else the pain would have been for nothing, so that's why I think my life has progressed in the way that it has, is every time I hurt myself like I stubbed my toe and I think, man, I'm going to start a committee that's going to look at every corner in my house so that people don't stub their toes anymore. I just think that way.

Alyssa Scolari [04:42]:

Yeah. So basically, what you do is you have chosen to find meaning from the pain, take it and do something with it.

Johnny Crowder [04:56]:

Yeah, and there's a blurry line there too. When I was growing up, if someone would have said like, "Search for purpose and your pain," I'd be like, "Shove off. I don't want to talk about that," because I was caught up on the fact that it wasn't fair that I was experiencing pain, but once you can get past that hurdle, which is much easier said than done, you've kind of realize you do have a choice. Either I experienced that pain for no reason, and it will benefit no one and I learned nothing or I can leverage that so that there's some type of fruits, so that when I look back on my life, I don't wish I was hurt more so that I could have learned more, produce more good things. It's a way of like retroactively justifying the pain that you've experienced. I think anybody can do it, it just takes some pretty heavy mental lifting.

Alyssa Scolari [05:44]:

Absolutely and I think there's a lot in what you said, I think you're right. It's one of those things where would we prefer to live without our abuse?

Johnny Crowder [05:55]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [05:56]:

Yeah, that would be pretty fucking awesome. Please, I'll take that. I think so many people struggle, myself included at times with the mentality of it's not fair. It's not fair. This isn't fair. How did you ... and this is also a loaded question, so I understand that it's more complex than just a simple question, but how did you get into that mindset, because I think so many of us stay stuck in, "Well, this isn't fair." Especially living in a world where there's no justice.

Johnny Crowder [06:39]:

Yeah. I'm trying to think it wasn't like .... I think the way people envision people who are resilient is like, they wake up every day and they're like, "Oh, I'm just going to climb this mountain every day." I was talking to a buddy of mine, who I really admire, her name is Kristen. She's been doing this like advocacy for a lot longer than I have, so I asked her a lot of questions and she mentioned something like ... something along the lines of you can't be courageous, if you don't experience fear. Courage is overcoming fear. So if you're not afraid, then there's like a synapse, not firing in your brain. You should experience fear at some point, some things are scary and I kind of view my story so far that way like, it wasn't about training myself to think it is fair and I do deserve this.

That would have been really unhealthy, right? Much like not experiencing fear is really unhealthy. So, the first thing you have to do is kind of either speak with someone who has been through something that you have, like talk to a peer about it and kind of validate that it's not your fault, and you didn't attract ... you didn't like law of attraction your way into being abused or something like that. There's a lot of that nonsense going around. So once you get past that piece, where you can just look straight at it, and you say, "That's not fair," then it's almost like that issue is put to rest. You're not wrestling with whether or not you deserved it anymore. Once you can lay that down, you can use all of that energy you were using on that problem for something more productive.

Alyssa Scolari [08:30]:

Right, it's about overcoming like it's not fair, but all the energy that you're taking, sitting in this almost ... I almost see it as a sense of denial, right? Because the more we sit in that spot of, "This is unfair, how could this have happened? I didn't deserve this." It's like, yes, yes, yes to all of it but we get stuck there, and when we get stuck there, then we're not using the energy that we have to push forward and create light for ourselves.

Johnny Crowder [09:05]:

We're also ... In talking about it, we're like skipping the step that is most crucial, which is like understanding that ... some people might not agree, but for me, it was understanding that I was right about not deserving the abuse.

Alyssa Scolari [09:23]:

Absolutely.

Johnny Crowder [09:23]:

Think about it ... most people never actually hear that they're right in feeling that they were hurt. A lot of it is like, "Well, what exactly happened and what did you do and what were you wearing and how long did you know that person," and if you let them in, maybe they didn't mean it like that. There's lots of like, it's whatever the opposite of victim blaming is. It's like, aggressor excusing. So, people experience a lot of that where they say, "Well think about it from his perspective," and even, these friends are trying to help too, so don't get it twisted, like they're trying to comfort you and help it not sting as much. Without someone who's experienced trauma, just hearing, "You know what, you're right."

No, it's not fair at all and nobody deserves that. Without actually hearing that, it's so tough to get to the point where you can do something with it because you're too busy wrestling with the idea that it could have been your fault or maybe it was fair and maybe that pain was justified. You can only lay that down once you realize like, "Wow, I am right," and you feel validated in that frustration.

Alyssa Scolari [10:38]:

Yeah, you're 1,000% correct and I think back to the one time in my life that I reported one of my abusers, there was a full investigation, multiple victims and at the end, of course, there was not enough to try this man and the police officer said to me ... and I laugh about it, because that's just what I do, that's how I cope, but the police officer said to me, "Well, you kind of have to see it from his perspective." If you ... would you want your entire career ruined by people accusing you of this when there's no evidence? I mean, you're right, if it's not blaming you directly, right, then we're saying, "Well, you have to look at things from his perspective and not necessarily always a he," right? I want to be clear, there are women and non-binary folks who also can be abusers.

We spend a lot of time doing that and we also spend a lot of time where I get a lot of ... and I don't know if you've had an experience with us, like, well, you have to just move on with your life.

Johnny Crowder [12:03]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [12:04]:

That comes before the, "You're justified in feeling what you feel," right? We don't get that.

Johnny Crowder [12:04]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [12:09]:

People skip right to like, "Well, you got to move on with your life."

Johnny Crowder [12:12]:

Dude, I love you describing it that way because I'm ... Do you remember PEMDAS from school?

Alyssa Scolari [12:19]:

Yeah, Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally.

Johnny Crowder [12:21]:

Parentheses, exponents, multiply, divide, addition, subtraction.

Alyssa Scolari [12:21]:

Subtraction.

Johnny Crowder [12:29]:

I didn't use the correct form of each of those words, but yeah, PEMDAS. So if you wind up doing the addition part of the equation first, it screws up the whole answer, you get the wrong answer every time unless you go in the order of operations and I'm viewing this like healing and coping process as exactly that. If you jump straight to, "Hey, buddy, you got a job to do. You got a life to live. Get back out there and experience it without the validation part," or without even feeling like you were justified in bringing it up to somebody. That's another step that I think a lot of people skip, is they don't ... like friends and family who try to help, someone who has been through something traumatic.

We don't often like applaud people for saying something about it in the first place and that's almost always like, in the top three hardest parts of experiencing something traumatic is like mentioning it to someone and we forget to congratulate that person, which sounds like a weird word but to commend them for the strength that took to bring it up because we're too busy trying to help them get out of the mud, I do this all the time too, even with little innocuous stuff, like my buddy is like, "Dude, my boss is such a jerk," and I'm like, "Well, the job market is really fluid right now and you might be able to find something great." I'm like, "What did I say that? Why did I skip straight past my friend's pain point into a potential solution that they didn't ask for?"

I do that all the time and I think it's ... in a weird way, it's how we care for each other. I don't want to hear that you're hurting, I want to fast forward to when you're not hurting anymore because I love you, and we forget that a lot of steps are being neglected when we do that.

Alyssa Scolari [14:14]:

Yeah. Yes. I feel like that is part of what makes trauma, right, because not everybody who experience this abuse can develop PTSD and not everybody becomes traumatized, but sometimes I feel when the support system doesn't kind of slow down and be with people in that pain and rushes people to recover or, what's the word that I'm looking for? Negates its significance and negates the importance of even speaking about it, which really has been my entire life growing up, right? I would say ... I remember the first time I told somebody in my family I had an eating disorder and the response was like, "No you don't."

Johnny Crowder [14:59]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [14:59]:

I was like, "Okay, all right. Here we go." So I think that that just continues to traumatize people. That's how people end up even more traumatized.

Johnny Crowder [15:12]:

Dude and think about it too, you just made me realize something, the opposite of validating someone and being like, "Wow, that is ... you are experiencing disordered eating." I'm like, "Man, what's been going on and tell me about it, and I want to understand it." The opposite of validating it is like gaslighting you into saying that it's not happening, and I picture like all of this ... I mean, I don't know your story, but I picture all of the courage and effort and mentally weighing the pros and cons of bringing it up in the first place and what does this mean and do I have to ... Am I going to have to go to treatment or are people going to look at me differently? Then is my behavior even going to change or is my disordered ... is my eating even that disordered, other people have much more disordered eating than me?

So all these thoughts raced through your head for ... and Lord knows how long you struggle with this and then you finally bring it up, and it's kind of like a fireworks finale or whatever, where it just like ... and then like, doesn't even shoot, like the mortar doesn't even shoot off the ground. You're like, "What the heck?"

Alyssa Scolari [16:21]:

Those just happens.

Johnny Crowder [16:23]:

I think people forget the lead up to saying something like that, like it's not just someone casually mentioning it like at least in my personal experience, before I mentioned stuff like this to people. There's like a whole ... I mean, I'm writing like a mental dissertation about ... it's like a term paper in my mind, where I'm like, weighing out all of the potential ... and I'm so anxious about the outcome I'm bringing up, that it's exacerbating what I'm experiencing in the first place. So to mention it and have someone go, "Well, I mean, other people will have a lot more disordered eating than you." You just are like, "Oh, did I just waste five semesters on a paper that no one is going to read?"

Alyssa Scolari [17:12]:

I may just go burn this paper.

Johnny Crowder [17:14]:

Yeah. That's tough.

Alyssa Scolari [17:16]:

Right, figuratively speaking. So, for you, did you have that support from your family? I know that you had mentioned that you're a sexual abuse survivor and a suicide attempt survivor. So did you have that support growing up with your family, friends?

Johnny Crowder [17:41]:

So all my family is still alive, so I do my very best to speak kindly of everybody.

Alyssa Scolari [17:48]:

Understood.

Johnny Crowder [17:49]:

I grew up in a family that was not necessarily conducive to healthy mental and emotional patterns.

Alyssa Scolari [17:59]:

Understood.

Johnny Crowder [17:59]:

When I was ... I'll just say this, but you can kind of extrapolate out the type of family that I grew up in, when I was younger. So I had really debilitating OCD and it was getting to the point where I couldn't function normally. I couldn't get dressed, I couldn't make food, I couldn't leave my house sometimes. I couldn't touch doorknobs or people or step on cracks. There were like, hundreds of things that I couldn't do. It was really interfering with my daily life to the point where I couldn't function. My brothers, while, we didn't really talk about this, they knew that something was up with me and they knew what bothered me. So there was this one time we went to subway and they took my sandwich and licked it.

The entire sandwich, like a foot long sandwich, they licked it because they knew that I couldn't eat it. To them, it was hilarious. They're like, "Oh, look, he just got this sandwich and now, he can't have it," and there were kids in school who would lick their hands and put it on me or spin on me and because they knew it would bother me so much to the point where I would have a behavioral outburst and be sent to the principal's office and I would get in trouble every time, because I was the one who had a behavioral outburst. So, it was tough with my family because I think there was a level of denial from my parents where they were like no son of mine, whatever. My mom just told me recently that my dad didn't believe that I had asthma.

When I was a kid I had to use like the nebulizer like the huge thing. I use preventative medicine. I had to use like a Diskus every day and take medication and albuterol like it was really, really debilitating asthma. My dad was like, "No, he doesn't." So the family that I grew up in was kind of like a rub some dirt in it kind of family and my mom ... What's really cool is my mom in recent years, so she does, like stenography for students like for live events and stuff. So like if a student, a deaf student is attending classes at a college, my mom will attend the class and type on a stenograph everything that's being spoken. So it's like closed captioning for students.

Alyssa Scolari [20:19]:

Right.

Johnny Crowder [20:19]:

We wound up having to take psychology courses, because students were taking those courses. So now she's learning about like social work and about abnormal psychology. In this point in my life, I think she's like, "Oh, crap, we got to do something about this." So my mom has been kind of like the success story of beginning to ... especially in my teens and 20s, wrapping her head around, or at least making a conscious effort to ditch that denial pattern and try to understand what I was going through.

Alyssa Scolari [20:53]:

Yeah, which is awesome.

Johnny Crowder [20:53]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [20:54]:

I mean, right. It can't change the past, but that certainly is like, awesome, moving forward for you.

Johnny Crowder [21:02]:

Yeah. In my opinion, she's like the Most Improved Player, like how you get that trophy or whatever.

Alyssa Scolari [21:09]:

Yes.

Johnny Crowder [21:11]:

She'll come to my band's shows now and she tells her friends like, "Oh, my son runs a mental health technology company." So it's cool to see like the growth and change. She literally texted me today, and growing up, I never thought that I would really talk to my family, like moving forward after I moved out and it's cool to like ... I literally saw her this weekend and it's cool that we can maintain contact now in a way that we couldn't before.

Alyssa Scolari [21:38]:

Yeah, huge improvements.

Johnny Crowder [21:41]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [21:42]:

Does that also help you through the recovery process?

Johnny Crowder [21:47]:

I think yes, because I know a lot of people in my life, very close friends and family members who have kind of kept me at arm's length, because especially when you're younger, everything is viewed as like, you're a freak-

Alyssa Scolari [22:05]:

1000%

Johnny Crowder [22:06]:

If you're experiencing these mental health issues, and people don't really dig any deeper, they don't take seriously what you are saying to them. I had lost hope in a lot of interpersonal relationships. I figured, I'm a lot healthier now than I was 10, 15 years ago but there are people who will never talk to me again, maybe because of my behavior when I was really sick and for the rest of my life, I will feel somewhat penalized for behavior that I was not ... I wasn't even sentient through some of that. I was in like, full blown psychosis and it's a challenge to know that I've lost some very close friends because of behavior patterns that I had no control over.

Seeing my relationship with my mom slowly repair itself over the course of several years, it gives me hope that maybe some of the people who I lost through my psychosis I might wind up reconnecting with in the future, because now I'm capable of maintaining relationship in a way that I wasn't when I was younger.

Alyssa Scolari [23:17]:

Yeah, yeah. The things that you're saying are really speaking to me. I think part of the place where I'm at in my recovery is, I think acknowledging that I will forever feel penalized for things that I did 10 years ago and I was very, very sick. There are people and family members who still like exactly like you said, keep me at arm's length, right? I'm the freak of the family. I don't get invited to things. People don't ask me anything about the work that I do. People don't really know.

Johnny Crowder [23:59]:

Yeah, really, I don't want to open up a can of worms.

Alyssa Scolari [24:01]:

Yeah. You don't want to know.

Johnny Crowder [24:03]:

Don't even ask for how she is. I don't want to ...

Alyssa Scolari [24:05]:

No, I don't even want to know, right?

Johnny Crowder [24:06]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [24:07]:

They don't ask they don't call and for me, it's been one of those like coming to terms of like this also, the way other people choose to react and I think that a lot of trauma survivors need to hear this, is also not our fault and it's not fair. That too is not fair. It's not fair that we were traumatized but it's also not fair, the way other people reacted,

Johnny Crowder [24:33]:

Dude, this is real. It's tough like I-

Alyssa Scolari [24:37]:

This is the hard stuff.

Johnny Crowder [24:38]:

I look back and I know I had some very close friends that when I was hallucinating very severely, I was essentially living in just a completely different reality than my friends were. Those friends that I was very close with, especially in high school, I've tried reaching out to, talking to mutual friends to see if I could like try to see them again. They're just not willing to see me because in their mind, they have a very distinct vision of how I behave and I remember not too long ago, this is several years ago, but still pretty recent, I met up with a friend from high school who had that opinion of me still. It was just by chance, we both wound up being at our mutual friend's house at the same time.

Alyssa Scolari [25:26]:

So this was not planned.

Johnny Crowder [25:27]:

Yeah, and we spoke, and at the end, she was saying goodbye to everybody and stuff. She gave me a hug and she was like crying a little bit and I was like, "What's going on?" She was like, "I know, people who didn't come, because you're here, because they thought that you are today, like you were in high school and they didn't get to see the version of you that exists today. They have to live with that old version, and that's sad, to me." That's what she said and when she left, I was like, not only was it incredibly kind of her to acknowledge the work that I've done, and that I am different now, but for her to view it like that, not like, "Oh, you need to get out there and prove to them that you're different, like giving me a task."

She said, "It's sad for them, that they don't get to see the progress you've made," and there was something so sweet and genuine about that, that I try to cling to whenever I feel left out or excluded. I think, I'm sad that those people don't get to know the version of me that exists today. The true version of me.

Alyssa Scolari [26:50]:

There absolutely, I think is a level of grief there. Also, even just hearing, right, I don't know this person who said that to you. I will probably never know this person, but even just knowing too, that there are people out there that will say things like that is hugely comforting.

Johnny Crowder [27:10]:

Yeah, we were never close too, me and this person, we just always ran in similar circles and had mutual friends, but we never were like close enough for her to be that heartfelt with me. I think it made it mean so much more because she wasn't doing it to be nice or to blow smoke or because she was my friend. It was like her genuine-

Alyssa Scolari [27:30]:

It was her genuine reaction. So, today, right, because I want to go back to something that we were talking about earlier, just so we can clarify, right, because we were talking about getting to a certain point in our recovery, where we can say like, this wasn't my fault and I didn't deserve it and I'm justified in feeling the way that I feel. I am justified in all of these emotions. Once you get to that point like today, where you're at today, right, hugely successful human being doing incredible things affecting millions of people for the better, changing lives. Do you still have moments where you struggle with that or is that like something you've completely like, come to terms with and are at peace with?

Johnny Crowder [28:25]:

Dude, I am ... Maybe it's because I'm cynical or skeptical or whatever word you want to use, but every time I hear someone say that they're fully past everything, it's not that I doubt the human minds ability to overcome, right? I doubt a perfect record. I doubt anyone having 100%. If you're at 99, you're a superhero but 100, you're a robot. So at least for me, personally, I shouldn't be speaking about other people's records. I'll say for me, it is not 100%. It is not a 90%. It's a pretty common ... I mean, it brings me back to what my buddy Kristen said about fear. It's like to be courageous, you face fear on a daily basis and I do that regularly and there's ... I mean, even people who have experienced trauma, like when you go out, you meet someone with your abuser's name or something. Keep in mind, what are they supposed to do about it, right?

It's not their responsibility to address that. There's so many little individual things that you have to carry on a personal level, like you hear a song come on the radio and you're like, "That song was playing when we were driving to ..." It throws you back into something and you just build the rock climbing muscles you need over time to like climb out of that hole and I heard this really cool phrase, I'm going to butcher it but it's something along the lines of building the ability to bridge the gap between being thrown into that head space and recovering. So, let's say you hear a song and it triggers you and then, you spend 18 hours in this place where you're just overwhelmed by emotion.

Then, after a couple of years of hearing that song every once in a while and being triggered another ways, then that gap goes from 18 hours to 45 minutes. Then, a couple of years later, you experience some other stuff and then, maybe that goes to three hours and seven minutes. It's not going to be linear but over time, there will be a general trend, if you consciously work at it where you can bridge that gap so I'm constantly experiencing stimulus that is extremely mentally and emotionally taxing and I don't task myself with avoiding that stimulus or with immediately overcoming every time that pops up. I do task myself with improving my recovery time.

Alyssa Scolari [31:13]:

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love the way you put it and importantly, very importantly it's not linear, right? Sometimes it is going to be that you're lost for 18 hours after you get triggered. Sometimes, it's going to be 45 minutes. It really is sometimes about muscle, building up ... like you would be building up a muscle, like your training muscles at the gym but also life is hard and even after we are abused, there are still things that can leave us triggered and traumatized, right? Just because we've experienced childhood abuse does not exempt us from the other painful things that life brings.

Johnny Crowder [31:54]:

Yeah, dude, I picture it a lot like a sunburn. If you've ever had a real bad sunburn and then someone comes and gives you a hug and pats you on the back and you're like ... I think there's a misconception around trauma where it's like, well, only things related to your trauma are really going to be harder for you, everything else is going to be normal. That's like saying, well, only the sun can hurt your sunburn. No, lots of different stuff. I mean, my shirt rubbing against my back hurts my sunburn.

Alyssa Scolari [32:26]:

Everything. Right, when you have sunburn, everything hurts it.

Johnny Crowder [32:29]:

Yeah. So it's difficult to describe to someone who hasn't experienced that, it's not just things in that specific category, that might exacerbate what I'm feeling. Basically, anything that touches that thing, I'm just already sore. I'm pre-sore. So if you go out into the world, and you wear a shirt or you lean against a chair or something, and it doesn't hurt your back, probably because you don't have a sunburn. I have a sunburn, so you might not be able to see it because it's covered by my shirt, but I might not be able to wear a backpack, even though you can and I will be able to later, because I won't be as sunburned and it won't hurt as bad, but right now, it's tough to explain to someone that something as seemingly innocuous and not related to your pain as a backpack could exacerbate the pain that they can't even see.

Alyssa Scolari [33:28]:

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a beautiful way of putting it. A really, really beautiful way of putting it and it really drives home exactly what it feels like. It's brilliant. I'm going to have to marinate on that, actually because I think it's ...

Johnny Crowder [33:44]:

Me too. I just said it right now and I'm like, "Dang, that kind of works." So, I immediately thought it too.

Alyssa Scolari [33:48]:

You just came up with that.

Johnny Crowder [33:49]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [33:51]:

I have been here to witness this brilliance, because it is an incredible way of putting it. It really truly is and even for non-trauma survivors, I think it's a wonderful way to help people to understand what it can be like, so thank you for that. So, I want to ask you about what you're doing now, tell me what you're doing? So I read about it in your bio. Tell me more about Cope Notes because I love this idea.

Johnny Crowder [34:18]:

I appreciate the kind words. They are not lost on me and I don't want to fast forward into this part without saying thank you for being so supportive. Cope Notes is, in just a sentence or two, we use daily text messages to improve mental and emotional health. Then every text that we send is written by a peer with lived experience. It's reviewed by mental health professionals and then, delivered at random times to train your brain to think in healthier patterns. So, you're going through your day and you're sitting at a stoplight or your boss is yelling at you or whatever, and your phone buzzes and it's an interruption to a negative thought pattern, so an exercise or adrenaline pump or a psychology fact and it breaks that pattern of negative thought, negative emotion.

Provides a catalyst for positive thoughts so that as the weeks and months and years pass, with that consistent positive stimulus, your brain starts to prioritize new neural pathways associated with those coping strategies. So that might have sounded a little tech and psychology heavy but really, we just use text messages to help you cope with anxiety, loneliness, stress, fear, depression, you name it.

Alyssa Scolari [35:32]:

Right, you're rewiring the brain, which all the listeners out there ... you all know this is my candy. I love talking about this stuff.

Johnny Crowder [35:43]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [35:45]:

Because right, what you're doing is A, you're providing support in the moment for people who often feel very, very alone but I think on a long term goal, what you're doing is you're rewiring that brain, you're forming new neural pathways, which helps hugely in trauma recovery, because as we know, trauma literally changes the brain.

Johnny Crowder [36:09]:

Yup. That's the coolest part that I don't think a lot of people know. You've done your readings. So you know this stuff, but I bet maybe half the listeners have, and they already know this and half of this is going to be new information. We don't say change your brain as in this like ephemeral metaphorical thing. It's like literally, physical parts of your brain are moving and rearranging themselves physically, like you can observe it and that's what's always fascinates ... so, I went to school for psych. It's always fascinated me that the brain doesn't metaphorically change or figuratively change, like literally the folds and the synapses and stuff, it's like this living breathing organism and that's me.

Alyssa Scolari [36:55]:

Yeah. I think that's one of the first things that I teach my clients who step into my office for help with trauma is like, "Okay, well, first, let's validate this and let's talk about what's happening in your brain," because this isn't like ... right, because then it becomes, if not, people then go into like, "Well, what's wrong with me? Why am I acting like this?" It's like, "Well, this is what's happening in your brain right now."

Johnny Crowder [37:17]:

Yup.

Alyssa Scolari [37:17]:

It gets a real thing. Your brain has literally changed itself.

Johnny Crowder [37:22]:

That's so awesome.

Alyssa Scolari [37:23]:

Yes. I love all brain stuff. So then, Cope Notes is also a podcast, right?

Johnny Crowder [37:31]:

Yeah, so there's the Cope Notes podcast and we are between seasons at this current moment at the time of recording, but there's like 40 episodes that are already up, that listeners can go check out and basically, we created the podcast to give people who don't commonly have a voice in the mental health conversation and opportunity to speak. So if like every ... and trust me, I work with a lot of clinicians, I love clinicians. Clinicians have changed my life but pretty much every podcast, mental health podcast I listened to is like doctor this and doctor that and researcher this and researcher that. I'm like, let's hear from the tattoo artists and the barbers, and the janitors-

Alyssa Scolari [38:12]:

The people who have been in it. Yes.

Johnny Crowder [38:13]:

Yeah, what are their experiences with mental health, because the longer we relegate mental health to be this, like clinical phenomenon and not like very much a lifestyle conversation, the longer stigma will prevail?

Alyssa Scolari [38:28]:

Absolutely, because it's not ... mental health doesn't just stop at Dr. John Smith, right, who has this PhD. Again, not that that's not a wonderful thing, right? I'm a therapist. Great, we like clinicians, but we normalize mental health and when we start hearing from people who are typically ... sent messages that they're not allowed to talk about this stuff, so when we start asking them to use their voice, that's affecting real change and real fight against stigma.

Johnny Crowder [39:03]:

Dude, and think about this too, how many people have experienced something related to mental health, which is literally everybody who then feel like, "Well, my opinion isn't really valid, like, I'm only a nanny or I'm only a graphic designer," and that's what we're trying to really attack is you don't need a doctorate to share your opinions and thoughts and experiences and your coping strategies with people. Your voice is valid in the mental health conversation, regardless of whether or not you think it's valid.

Alyssa Scolari [39:37]:

Yes, and nobody ... right, regardless of who is speaking and whatever degree they may have, nobody can tell you how to navigate your journey better than you.

Johnny Crowder [39:52]:

That's honestly ... to speak candidly, that is such annoying advice. I'm picturing myself when I was younger. So, I saw a number of different care providers and I was seeing therapists and psychiatrists and stuff, that was like a common theme where it was like, I had to take responsibility and I was like, "No, no, make it someone else's job." I so didn't want to hear it, but it's kind of like what we were talking about earlier, there is this very bizarre sense of freedom in that too, where if you can shift it from ... there's lots of this like, obligation talk like, "Well, no one else is going to do it for you, you got to do it," and it feels very drill-sergeanty.

That doesn't really resonate with me. I know, it works for some people, but the way that ... the framing that helps me is I don't have an obligation to help myself, I have an opportunity to help myself and that feels to me so much more hopeful and positive and less like incriminating. It's not making it my fault. It's like, "Hey, dude, you don't have to wait for somebody else to do this. You can start doing stuff today." I'm like, "Oh, for real?" There's like an empowering sentiment to it, that it took me maybe a decade to wrap my head around.

Alyssa Scolari [41:13]:

Yeah, I think that it's much more empowering to phrase it like that and I think, I like changing the wording of that kind of stuff. I'm a big fan of that, but also in like, every day, right? The people who will like come into my office and be like, "I have to go to work." It's like, you don't have to do anything. You actually don't, right? I work with teenagers, right?

Johnny Crowder [41:37]:

That's awesome.

Alyssa Scolari [41:38]:

I work with teenagers, and they come in and they're like, "I have to empty your fucking dishwasher tonight." I'm like, "You actually don't. You don't have to. Just because somebody told you to, doesn't mean you have to. You get to, you choose to," right? That doesn't mean that we're exempt from consequences but you don't have to do anything because none of us like being told what to do. So the second we switch that from, "This is your responsibility. This is your obligation," right? To like, "No, this is what you can do. You can get up and go to work today or you can call out, right? You can do whatever you want to do."

Johnny Crowder [42:16]:

Dude, that line is so hard to find. I'm looking back on my early days in OCD treatment. There's a difference ... a lot of people say, "You can do it, you can do it," because I would say like, "Oh, I can't step on cracks." If someone says, you can step on cracks, it's negating what I say but if you say it exactly like you said it, you said, "You can step on cracks. You don't have to, you can choose not to step on cracks," but don't say that you can't because you and I both know that if you had to, you could step on a crack. So you ... like once you remind somebody that they're making the choice, because like, "Oh, well, my OCD says I can't step on the cracks," and my doctor is like, "Well, that's not you. That's your OCD."

Alyssa Scolari [43:02]:

That's not you, yeah.

Johnny Crowder [43:04]:

So you can choose to say, "Yes, OCD, I will avoid cracks," or you can say, "You know what, today I'm going to step on a crack because I choose what I do, not you." It's a crazy, empowering feeling.

Alyssa Scolari [43:18]:

It is. It's the best. No, I think that shift, right, it's subtle but it packs a punch in terms of treatment and recovery and all that good stuff. So I know I have ... I've kept you on here for a while. Thank you. There's so many good things for us to talk about. I feel like we have only barely scratched the surface. So, if people want to find you, they can ... because you have the Cope Notes app, right? It's an app that you offer.

Johnny Crowder [43:49]:

No, it's actually not an app.

Alyssa Scolari [43:50]:

It's not an app, what is-

Johnny Crowder [43:52]:

It's just, you go to copenotes.com and you type in your phone number. So nothing to download, no appointments or anything like that. No software updates. You just go to the website, copenotes.com and you type in your number and voila.

Alyssa Scolari [44:05]:

Beautiful and then, people also ... your podcast, people can find you basically wherever.

Johnny Crowder [44:12]:

Yeah, the Cope Notes podcast is wherever you listen to podcasts and then also a couple shameless plugs, I did get a head talk about Cope Notes and about some of the neuroscience stuff that we talked about today. So if there are any nerds listening like us right now, definitely go on YouTube and just search Johnny Crowder TED talk and you'll find. Then also, I do a fair amount of music still. Music has been a part of my life. It's like my primary coping mechanism. So if anyone enjoys rock or metal, or even if you don't, please go look up the band, Prison. We have a record called still alive. We talk a lot about suicide prevention. We have literally have a song called mental illness.

Definitely go check out the band, because we talk about a lot of the stuff that we've discussed here, but maybe in a little more aggressive package, but it's still pretty cool.

Alyssa Scolari [45:13]:

I love it. Now, if I ... so the link where I read your bio, can I just ... if I link that in the show notes, people will be able to find all that, right, because I'm checking it out now and it has a link for Prison. It has the Cope Notes. It has your TED Talk all that good stuff.

Johnny Crowder [45:31]:

Yeah, you share whatever you think makes the most sense.

Alyssa Scolari [45:35]:

Perfect. So for the listeners out there, there will be a link in the show notes, so go check that out and then you will have access all in one page to everything that Johnny is talking about today. Johnny, thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate it. This is my first episode back after taking a couple weeks off. So it was a good one. Thank you so much for your vulnerability.

Johnny Crowder [46:03]:

Absolutely and thanks for having me, but also for people listening. I just don't want any listener to overlook the fact that they just spent 45 minutes listening to a conversation like this that speaks about your character, just like my friend who mentioned that thing to me in confidence, that made me feel like, "Wow, I didn't even know she thought on that level." The fact that you've spent 45 minutes listening to this and engaging with this conversation speaks volumes about the type of person you are and the work that you're doing in your life. So don't just turn this off or listen to another podcast straight away, like stew in this for a minute or two after this finishes playing and realize like you're doing really important work and making a huge difference by spending your time this way and we both applaud you.

Alyssa Scolari [46:53]:

1,000%. I agree with that you, as the listeners are phenomenal human beings fighting every day to make life a little bit lighter, and that is what this podcast is all about. So thank you, we appreciate all of you and take good care. I will be holding everybody in the light, and until next week. Thank you, Johnny. Thanks for listening everyone. For more information please head over to lightaftertrauma.com or you can also follow us on social media, on Instagram, we are @lightaftertrauma and on Twitter it is @lightafterpod. Lastly, please head over to patreon.com/lightaftertrauma to support our show. We are asking for $5 a month, which is the equivalent to a cup of coffee at Starbucks. So please head on over again, that's patreon.com/lightaftertrauma. Thank you and we appreciate your support.

When her world was turned upside after receiving a phone call that her son was in jail, Jolyn Armstrong set out to learn techniques and tools to cope with the shock, trauma, and grief. More recently, Jolyn has felt called to utilize her coaching business to help others who have been traumatized as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tune in to listen to Jolyn teach us about some of her reframing techniques that can help us to navigate life in the post-pandemic world.

Jolyn's Special Gift for the Listeners

Check out the Light After Trauma website for transcripts, other episodes, Alyssa's guest appearances, and more at: www.lightaftertrauma.com

Want to get more great content and interact with the show? Check us out on Instagram: @lightaftertrauma

We need your help! We want to continue to make great content that can help countless trauma warriors on their journey to recovery. So, please help us in supporting the podcast by becoming a recurring patron of the show via Patreon. Every bit helps!

Transcript:

Alyssa Scolari [00:23]:

[singing]. Hello world. How are we doing today? I hope well. I am doing well myself. I am loving life right now, rolling with the podcast life. It has been fun. Yeah, there's a lot going on, but I'll save it for another episode. We're going to dive right in today. One of the things I do want to talk about before we go into our guest speaker is, just my love for podcasting. I am so happy and thrilled and honored to have connected with people from all over the world and I love doing this. And I really want to do more of this, but in order to do so, obviously, this is something that, it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money.

And so I am asking you, if you are enjoying what you are hearing, if you like what you are hearing, please go to my website. It is lightaftertrauma.com. You can go to the support link, and you can become a patron to the podcast. Even if you're able to give $3, even $5 a month, or even if it's just a one-off donation to the podcast, that would help me greatly in being able to continue to put out incredible content for all of you. I value each and every single one of you and I want to keep doing this, but in order to do so, it is important to be able to have the funds there to continue to keep this content rolling and coming out for all of you. So please do that.

Again, that is lightaftertrauma.com, go click on the support button and whatever you can give would be greatly appreciated. So on that note, our guest today is Jolyn Armstrong. Now, when her son was arrested, Jolyn Armstrong discovered that even an idyllic life can be turned upside down in an instant by crisis. That's why she launched Grapevine Mindware, a coaching program designed to help men and women in crisis to overcome the trauma and the pain, find peace and get their lives back. Jolyn's mission is to empower those impacted by COVID to live their best lives now, regardless of outside circumstances. So, hello Jolyn. It is Jolyn, right? Am I...

Jolyn Armstrong [02:54]:

You are saying it right, not many people do. How are you Alyssa?

Alyssa Scolari [02:58]:

Yes. Listen, I have butchered my fair share of names, so-

Jolyn Armstrong [02:58]:

Me too. Me too.

Alyssa Scolari [03:02]:

... I'm going to pat myself on the back for that one. That is a beautiful name by the way. I absolutely love it.

Jolyn Armstrong [03:08]:

Oh thank you. Thanks.

Alyssa Scolari [03:10]:

So welcome to the podcast.

Jolyn Armstrong [03:12]:

Thank you. Yes, it's such a pleasure to be here.

Alyssa Scolari [03:16]:

I'm so happy to have you. I am very fascinated by your story. I think you have such an inspirational story. Can you kind of start with, I guess, start with your story? What is your story? How did you get into this niche, this area of life, where you are just helping other people?

Jolyn Armstrong [03:38]:

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. It's not a fun story to tell for sure, but I can't imagine that anyone who comes here after experiencing trauma has a fun story to tell, right?

Alyssa Scolari [03:49]:

It's, yeah, certainly not puppies and rainbows that's for sure.

Jolyn Armstrong [03:54]:

Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Well, and yeah, what I learned from this too, is trauma is not choosy about who it knocks over. None of us are safe, now you know what I mean?

Alyssa Scolari [04:03]:

None of us. None of us are safe.

Jolyn Armstrong [04:06]:

None of us are safe. It can come out of the blue like it did for me, or it can come in a long stretch of time like it does for so many others. But for me, it was an all of a sudden kind of blow from left field. So, I'll tell you a little bit about what was going on with me before trauma happened and where I was at when it knocked me over, because that part, I think is kind of important as well. So, I own a marketing company with my husband. We do a lot of marketing and business coaching for small businesses. A lot of service industry businesses, or home service industry businesses, so painters and floor dealers and things like that. So, lots of coaching, lots of education and then we do some done-for-you services as well in the marketing space. And we run our business online, so it's super easy to be wherever we want to be at any time. I always tell people we used Zoom before it was cool, so yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [05:06]:

Yes. Yeah. You knew telehealth before telehealth was cool.

Jolyn Armstrong [05:09]:

I did. I did. And so one winter we had chosen to live in California for the winter and we'll usually do a season here and a season there, whatever. So we were in California and just wrapping up a normal work day. I was actually preparing for a two-day intensive we were doing with about a dozen-ish of our top clients. With those folks, we met with them monthly on Zoom and did a mastermind group. And then a few times a year we would meet in different cities around the country and these folks were all over North America would come in. So, we were planning on going to Las Vegas in about 10 days. I'm neck-deep in travel plans, dinner arrangements and car arrangements and things like that, making sure everyone was set. And I see my phone at the end of the day, like four missed calls on my cell phone and why my cell phone didn't ring that day, I freaking don't know.It's so irritating.

But, four missed calls from a number I didn't recognize in Colorado and I thought, what the heck. And I play the first voicemail and it is one of those automated messages saying, "You're receiving a collect phone call from an inmate in a county jail in Colorado." And I went, "Oh no." And then I hear my son's voice saying his name and I thought, oh, holy cow. And I knew, I knew in that minute, my life will never be the same. My son had been a soldier in the military, a respected soldier in the military. My biggest fear for him was always being deployed. I'm like, oh no. When I first saw those missed calls from the Colorado number, I thought that's what it was. They're allowing him to call me and tell me that he's being shipped off. But it was even worse, in my opinion, at that time, it was where I'm like, I wish he was being deployed because...

Alyssa Scolari [06:59]:

Right, right. That would be the preferable option at that point.

Jolyn Armstrong [07:02]:

Oh yeah. And it took me a little while because it was the end of the day and you can't just call somebody up in a county jail. I learned they don't do that. They just don't do that there.

Alyssa Scolari [07:14]:

They don't do that, right.

Jolyn Armstrong [07:15]:

Yeah, no. There're not secretaries or personal assistants there at the county jail. So, it took me almost a day to even talk to him and find out what was going on and to hear the charges that were so serious. I thought, oh my gosh, I'm losing my son. I will lose my son through this no matter what. I'm going to lose him. And so all of the things surrounding that, just the shame and the isolation and I can't even tell people what's going on and oh my gosh. And oh, by the way, it's too late to cancel this two-day intensive I've got coming up with these clients in 10 days. I can't do that either. What is going on here? I've got to figure out-

Alyssa Scolari [07:15]:

Yeah.

Jolyn Armstrong [08:00]:

Yeah. I knew nothing about how any of the criminal justice system worked. And boy, my eyes were opened through that. That's a topic for another time, but...

Alyssa Scolari [08:09]:

I was going to say, we could probably have an entire podcast episode on the stigma and the shame and the failures of the criminal justice system.

Jolyn Armstrong [08:16]:

Yes.

Alyssa Scolari [08:17]:

But we digress.

Jolyn Armstrong [08:19]:

I know.

Alyssa Scolari [08:19]:

Maybe we'll have a part two.

Jolyn Armstrong [08:20]:

Sometime, yes, yes. But yeah, so I flew to Colorado immediately and thank goodness my husband was right there. He's like, "Okay, I'll make the travel arrangements. Let's go there. We've got like five days we can devote to getting him out of jail, getting him set back up with the military, finding him an attorney, and then we got to get to Vegas." And so that's what we did.

Alyssa Scolari [08:41]:

Jeez.

Jolyn Armstrong [08:42]:

I know, right? Oh my gosh. So, in that-

Alyssa Scolari [08:45]:

It's interesting because you wrote, when I was reading part of your bio, not on the podcast, but the one that we had exchanged through email, you had written in there specifically, "I felt like I had been hit by a hurricane."

Jolyn Armstrong [09:00]:

Oh, totally.

Alyssa Scolari [09:00]:

And I'm just like, "Oh yes, this is full on category five."

Jolyn Armstrong [09:06]:

Yeah, I think it's category five is the top, whatever is above that, that's what it was.

Alyssa Scolari [09:10]:

That's what it was, oh yeah.

Jolyn Armstrong [09:12]:

Yeah. Yeah and so that's what hit me and it was. There was no other way, still, no other way to describe that besides just this hurricane around me. I can't stop what's going on out there. I cannot stop it. And this is my life now. This is where I'm at. It took me, I'm almost embarrassed now to say it because I realize how much better things could have been for me, how much quicker they could have been maybe, but it took me months to first admit that I was even traumatized. I thought, listen, I am an intelligent, healthy, mentally strong person. Well, and it also didn't help that I was going to hearings, seeing other people in the courtroom, like they're not traumatized. They're just sitting there like this is a normal thing and so I'm seeing other people not being affected the way I was being affected.

And I didn't see that it was actually trauma for months. And during that time, I allowed, I say I allowed, but trauma really was allowed to trash many aspects of my life. It hurt my business. It hurt my relationships. It hurt me and my son. It hurt so many different areas in so many different ways. I feel like, had I admitted it earlier, had I sought some help earlier, some things would probably have looked differently for me at the time. So that was one thing I was like, man, I've got to look at, as I'm coming through this, I've got to look at helping, number one, let's remove the stigma of trauma in a lot of situations. And help folks realize what trauma is and that there is, and I love the name of your podcast, Light After Trauma, like really, you can come out of this better than you even entered.

Alyssa Scolari [11:16]:

You certainly can.

Jolyn Armstrong [11:18]:

Yeah. I never would have even thought that. But yeah, through finally ... well, it was my husband, actually, who pointed it out to me, which is another super important thing, trust those around you, who tell you, "Hey, maybe you need to talk to somebody or maybe can we look at getting you some help?" Because that's what my husband did for a couple of months before I finally said, "Okay, all right. Yeah. Maybe I do need some help here."

Alyssa Scolari [11:43]:

Now, if you don't mind me asking what year was this?

Jolyn Armstrong [11:48]:

This was in 2017.

Alyssa Scolari [11:51]:

Okay, so this is 2017. Okay. So, this all happened and then it took you, as is the case for I think so many people, I don't think you're alone in that, where it's like, I think it's less, not less, but it's not simply about stigma. I also think, and you can tell me if you agree with this, that it's part of a general misunderstanding of what trauma is, where it's like when we hear that word and I know for myself when I looked at this piece of paper that my therapist handed me one day and it said, "Diagnosis, PTSD." I was like, "What the hell is this shit?"

Jolyn Armstrong [12:33]:

Right.

Alyssa Scolari [12:34]:

Trauma?

Jolyn Armstrong [12:35]:

I hadn't been to war, that was my thought.

Alyssa Scolari [12:37]:

Yes.

Jolyn Armstrong [12:38]:

I am not going to dishonor those people who really have faced trauma with this thing, like come on. Nothing even happened to me directly was my other misunderstanding. So, it took me diving into really what trauma is and for me, I'm a researcher, I'm going to dig in and see what's up with this. And so, I'm glad I did and tell me if my definition fits your understanding as well because when I realized this, I'm like, oh yeah, I get it. I get it now. Okay. So trauma happens when an outside circumstance or situation that you have no control over, overwhelms your ability to deal with it, that's trauma.

Alyssa Scolari [13:29]:

Yes, exactly. It is anything that overwhelms your brain's ability to cope. That's point blank is exactly what it is in its simplest form. We could talk for a days and hours about all the nitty-gritty details, but that's exactly what it is, which means there are a lot of people that don't go to war that have trauma.

Jolyn Armstrong [13:49]:

Exactly, exactly. And the other thing too, what I realized through the research that I did in that next six or eight months, well, I guess all since then, because I continue. It's always continuing.

Alyssa Scolari [14:04]:

Right, it's a lifelong process.

Jolyn Armstrong [14:06]:

It totally is. But one thing that I realized was, if we are... and I think our society is getting a little bit better at this now, but we still got a lot of work to do, I think. But if I had been in a serious car accident and been physically traumatized, I would never have hesitated to seek medical help. I wouldn't have thought that anyone's going to think that I'm weak for having been injured in a car wreck. I would have just gone in and sought help and healed from it.

And so if I was in that same car wreck and I had walked away from it, miraculously without being hurt, I wouldn't have been thought of as, oh, I did that because I'm stronger. I did that because I'm somehow better than the person that got hurt. It's not that either, but when we experience emotional trauma, we look at it in such a different way. And I'm happy to see us moving away from some of those opinions because for me, it was like, this knocked me down and it's not my fault. And I didn't ask for it and I'm not weak for having had that happen. It's just what happened to me.

Alyssa Scolari [15:21]:

Yes, yes.

Jolyn Armstrong [15:22]:

Yeah, yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [15:24]:

Absolutely. You're speaking so many truths that I'm sure the listeners are like, "Amen."

Jolyn Armstrong [15:24]:

Right?

Alyssa Scolari [15:31]:

It's like, amen, because there's so many people who can relate. You didn't ask for it. You didn't want it. You didn't expect it. You didn't set yourself up for this. This just happened.

Jolyn Armstrong [15:46]:

It just happened. And I mean the truth so often is that, even if I did something to cause this, did I expect for this to traumatize me in this way? It's nobody asks for trauma, nobody asks for this to happen.

Alyssa Scolari [15:46]:

Hell no.

Jolyn Armstrong [16:06]:

Yeah. And so I know that a lot of... I work with some people who have family members in the military, who also say, "Man, I encouraged him to join the military and now this has happened." I did have a part in that but the reality is, no, whatever actions you took, you didn't ask for any bad thing to happen.

Alyssa Scolari [16:27]:

Exactly.

Jolyn Armstrong [16:28]:

Yeah. Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [16:29]:

That's a hard thing for trauma survivors. That's a very hard thing.

Jolyn Armstrong [16:33]:

Trauma is so insidious. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. But the other thing too, I've learned, tell me if this resonates with you, is that it seems like trauma acts a bit like a kiln. You know what that is? What pottery people use, that oven, that super hot oven that just solidifies their creation.

Alyssa Scolari [16:54]:

Oh yes.

Jolyn Armstrong [16:54]:

So the positive things that we learn in trauma, that coping mechanisms, all of the things that we do to feel better, get solidified and they become lifelong, great habits that we have, which is why I love that light after trauma. We can come out of this, if we do some work and make sure that our coping mechanisms are healthy. We come out of this in such a better way.

Alyssa Scolari [17:23]:

We do.

Jolyn Armstrong [17:24]:

Yeah, yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [17:25]:

And regardless of what you've been through you, we can, and you have and you are. So how did you do that? And then land in this place where you're like, "Well, now I'm going to help other people," because that's incredible.

Jolyn Armstrong [17:43]:

Well, thank you, yeah. I realized, in large part thanks to my husband who kept saying, "Jolyn, you have got to find some help here, you're sinking."

Alyssa Scolari [17:53]:

Good for him.

Jolyn Armstrong [17:54]:

Yeah, yeah, oh my gosh. I've got the best husband in the whole world.

Alyssa Scolari [17:58]:

That's awesome that he has that level of respect that when your loved ones in your life, the safe people in your life I should say, tell you that, I think it's awesome.

Jolyn Armstrong [18:11]:

Yeah, I was so fortunate to have him during this time and since then, but so what I realized at that time was, I'm spending so much time spinning in this fear and this isolation and all of the things. I'm spinning off here. And for me, because I'm just like a practical... I compartmentalize things and I want to do whatever research that I need to do, whatever. I'm like, I can spend the same amount of time researching helpful things for me to do to recover from this. And I did seek the help of a professional and she pointed me to CBT and DBT exercises, which were phenomenal for me, right?

Alyssa Scolari [18:59]:

Yes.

Jolyn Armstrong [19:00]:

Yes. And then the healing began because now I've got something, when my mind is just off spinning, I've got a way to bring it back home. And to find that, what I call the eye of the storm, because I was in a hurricane, no joke. And through these exercises, through this research and these practices, I was able to... that storm is still out there, but I've got this bubble of peace around me. The eye of the storm that I can just take a breath in. And I did` that repeatedly over time and just kept, okay, things are going crazy, I'm coming back into the eye of the storm. I got to calm myself back down.

And then through practices in these exercises, researching more of these exercises, I spent thousands of hours looking through all of the DBT exercises I could find and testing them all and trying them all. And a lot of them didn't work. And a lot of them did and I threw out what didn't work and repeated what did work. And so through all of that time, I went, you know what? If I can find an eye in this storm, where I've... all of the things that I have been going through, not just, oh my gosh, my son's going through this, but I'm losing my son. He was facing a life sentence. I'm like, I'll never have another birthday with him. I'll never... the loss and all of those things.

Alyssa Scolari [20:24]:

Yes.

Jolyn Armstrong [20:25]:

If I can find the eye of this storm and come out better for having been through this, I need to help others do that too, because there's a lot of us. When I saw that definition of trauma, I'm like, our world needs some help here. You know what I mean?

Alyssa Scolari [20:40]:

Yes, the world needs some support. Totally.

Jolyn Armstrong [20:44]:

Yes, yes. And so, if I can help as many people as I can and make a tiny, tiny dent in the trauma that we're all experiencing, great, I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that because what else is there? At this point, what else is there? This had to happen to me for a reason. And that also gave me that kind of reason to move forward, so...

Alyssa Scolari [21:07]:

So that was the inspiration for the... because it's Grapevine Mindware.

Jolyn Armstrong [21:13]:

Yes, yes.

Alyssa Scolari [21:14]:

Which I love. Can you explain to me where you got that from?Grapevine Mindware.

Jolyn Armstrong [21:21]:

Yeah, so Grapevine is kind of an umbrella business that I had already, but Mindware, yeah it's that time to update your mindware, a play on the software term, because I always love using technology and things like that, so it's just my technology play.

Alyssa Scolari [21:39]:

Well, you know what's so funny? I actually, I thought to myself when I saw it, I thought, I saw Mindware and my brain went to Tupperware.

Jolyn Armstrong [21:39]:

Oh that's funny.

Alyssa Scolari [21:47]:

But I had the same thought process of, time to throw out that old, nasty Tupperware.

Jolyn Armstrong [21:48]:

Oh, there you go, yeah. It is like an update thing, but yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [21:59]:

I love it.

Jolyn Armstrong [22:00]:

Mindware, yeah. Instead of software, I used, yeah, so...

Alyssa Scolari [22:03]:

I love it. I love it. So what is your business look like now?

Jolyn Armstrong [22:09]:

Right, so I started initially... the folks that came to me initially, were a lot of people that I would communicate with in the prison space because holy cow, those folks. Oh my gosh, my heart goes out to them so much. And yeah, just because of that, I found a couple of support groups. I'm now running a few national support groups as well, with a group, well, COVID has helped us with that. So I joined up with a few people who had small groups in their cities, support groups for families of people who are involved in the criminal justice system. And COVID forced them to go online and then meet each other and we've all kind of met across the country.

And so now we collaborate and run some support groups there. But, more so now with COVID, a lot of folks are coming to me with just trauma around all of the different aspects of COVID. And initially it was, "I lost my business, I lost my job. I didn't even do anything to lose my job, but now I can't feed my kids." And now things are opening up and there's a whole nother wave of trauma around that. And it's just yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot in a lot of different ways, but it's all trauma.

Alyssa Scolari [23:31]:

It's all trauma. I mean, as a whole, as a collective, we have been traumatized by this pandemic and I love the help that you're giving specifically related to that, because I think, A, there's not nearly enough of it. I don't know how there could ever possibly be enough of it because so many people were impacted. And now we're in this phase of the second... I think it's like the second wave of trauma, where first it was, people are getting sick and dying and this is horrifying and we don't know what to do and we're scared. But now it's the aftermath of, well, it was kind of like, all right, it's okay to go out and play again. Well, how? How do we do that?

Jolyn Armstrong [24:14]:

Right. Right. I've been fearful for the whole last year and a half now and yeah. Is it safe to send my kids out? Is it safe for me? I'm standing in line here and all of a sudden now it's okay, to be like... the plexiglass is coming down and masks are coming off and yeah, how do we deal with that? And trusting each other, I think, has been hugely impacted, how do I trust that this other person is what they say they are? Are they safe?

Alyssa Scolari [24:44]:

We've been taught to fear each other for so long and now, yeah. I mean, so much of my private practice is like... well, a lot of the discussions are centered around, well, "I'm afraid to take my mask off. I'm afraid," and it's like-

Jolyn Armstrong [25:05]:

This has become this safety for us, right?

Alyssa Scolari [25:10]:

Yeah.

Jolyn Armstrong [25:11]:

And yeah, it's not... oh my gosh, so much.

Alyssa Scolari [25:16]:

So much and so traumatizing but I think the thing that you focus on the most, which is fascinating to me, is perspective. So how does perspective play a role in all of this?

Jolyn Armstrong [25:29]:

Right. Right. Well, and especially like you mentioned where we've been taught not to trust each other, over the past 18 months, it's like we've been... so what is my perspective of this other person? I see a person coming towards me with no mask, or I'm approaching a counter and now there's no protective glass between us and what is my perspective of this situation? How can I come into this situation and be okay with it, when 18 months ago I was, but now I'm not? And os yeah, I look at... Tell me if you're experiencing this too, but one thing that happens to me with folks coming to me is, they'll say, "Here's my understanding of this situation, however right or wrong or whatever it is, this is their belief of this situation. And this is where I'm at, this person probably isn't vaccinated and they're probably going to try... you know what I mean? I may get sick, or I may take this home to an elderly parent or whatever. And here's my perception of this situation. This is it. This is the room I'm in, this is it."

Alyssa Scolari [26:46]:

This is it. This is my reality.

Jolyn Armstrong [26:47]:

Yeah. And we are... because fear really cements that in for us, it's how do we take a step back and look at the real picture and maybe look at some other perspectives around why this has been so traumatizing for us? Why maybe the perspective I have is so difficult for me to deal with? And one exercise that I work with my clients with is called, I don't even know why it's called this, but it's a six pack exercise. Do you know that exercise?

Alyssa Scolari [27:24]:

I have not heard of that. I am so ready to learn that. What is this six pack exercise?

Jolyn Armstrong [27:29]:

I don't know how it got its name, because it has nothing to do with alcohol or anything like that, but here we go. It's a really, really effective reframing tool that I use often. So, when you're facing a situation and your belief is what it is. This person is coming at me without a mask because they don't care about me, because they are irresponsible and whatever I've been believing for the past 18 months. Let's come up with six reasons that that other person... that the situation is what it is. Six other reasons that that person may be coming at you without a mask on, or six other reasons why that plexiglass is coming down and here's the situation that you're in. And in coming up with six reasons, because there's six of them, it's okay, let's get ridiculous with some of them. Maybe extra points for one of them being super ridiculous, right?

Alyssa Scolari [28:28]:

Yes.

Jolyn Armstrong [28:29]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [28:29]:

I love it.

Jolyn Armstrong [28:29]:

Yeah. But let's at least have some in there that can be true. Let's make sure they're true. And then let's look at the reason that is most helpful for you because we're all living in our own reality. We're living in our own set of beliefs. So, let's look at one of the six reasons that we've come up with and find which one brings you the most peace, which one is the most helpful for you, which one makes the most sense to you and will allow you to now move into that situation in a much more comfortable, calm way. As long as it's true because you can't be one of your ridiculous things.

Alyssa Scolari [29:10]:

[inaudible 00:29:10].

Jolyn Armstrong [29:09]:

So yeah, yeah. So it's really just reframing our view on a situation in a kinder way, that is more helpful to us and let's work on adopting one of those reasons. So I'll give you an example. Yeah, I'll give you an example and this has nothing to do with COVID, but for me, driving gives me a lot of opportunity to use the six pack exercise. And so for me, when somebody does something just really obnoxious on the roadways that is dangerous or whatever, I'm going to come up with some reasons why they may have done that thing. So, I'm driving down a road, the speed limit is 35, double yellow line and a person flies past me, around me and speeds off down the road way over the speed limit, way unsafe situation. What in the world was that jerk doing? And all the things that I can come up with to... right?

Alyssa Scolari [30:11]:

Oh, yes. All the choice words.

Jolyn Armstrong [30:13]:

Oh my goodness.

Alyssa Scolari [30:15]:

I'm like, this happens to me everyday of the week driving in New Jersey.

Jolyn Armstrong [30:18]:

Right, yeah. So let's come over with some reasons why that person may have done that, okay? Maybe they have to use the bathroom really, really bad and they need to get home to their bathroom.

Alyssa Scolari [30:31]:

We've all been there.

Jolyn Armstrong [30:33]:

Yes. Maybe they have a woman in labor in their car and they need to get to the ER. Maybe they are speeding home to a child who has been hurt. The babysitter's called them and said, "Your child's bleeding. They need you right now." "Oh my gosh. Go for it. I'll pull over. You go ahead," right?

Alyssa Scolari [30:54]:

Right.

Jolyn Armstrong [30:56]:

So that's just some examples of some mindsets that are less obnoxious that the other person may have. And let's just adopt one of those because we've adopted the one that we think they're just a jerk and have no value of life. And don't care if they kill themselves or everyone else on the road.

Alyssa Scolari [31:19]:

Yes. Yes. And that's so often what we jump to, which is, myself included and when I say we-

Jolyn Armstrong [31:27]:

We all do it.

Alyssa Scolari [31:28]:

... I mean we because I am right there with you going... especially for me, my big trigger is motorcyclists. No offense to any of the safe motorcycle drivers out there. If you are a safe one, I appreciate you. But I get so triggered by motorcycle drivers, who just swerve in and out of lanes. And my husband and I were driving home from, we went out to eat yesterday and we were driving home and there were these two just really obnoxious... the loud engine. And first of all, that's a trigger for me, the noise itself puts me on edge. But then when they're swerving in and out of traffic, driving on the side of the road, that actually is illegal to drive on, I'm over here in the passenger seat, like...

Jolyn Armstrong [32:18]:

Aah, losing your mind, right?

Alyssa Scolari [32:21]:

Losing my goddamn shit going, "You know what's going to happen? They're going to get themselves killed. And then they're going to traumatize the person that ends up hitting them because they're being irresponsible on the road." But, that said, what does that do? Does that help them to slow down? No. You know what it does? Raises my blood pressure and makes me feel traumatized.

Jolyn Armstrong [32:47]:

Exactly. Exactly. So let's come up with a reason for those freaking motorcyclists. You know what? What if those were two brothers who had just lost their mother and who were just feeling like, oh my gosh, there is no reason to be careful anymore. We've lost this person, the only person maybe, who loves us in the whole wide world and life just isn't even worth it. And I'm going, I'm just going to go.

Alyssa Scolari [33:17]:

Right. "Let's go on a reckless drive. Let's just be gone," like two grieving people-

Jolyn Armstrong [33:21]:

"I just can't deal with it."

Alyssa Scolari [33:22]:

... totally changes the perspective, therefore regulates your stress levels much more because you will look at them with a sense of empathy.

Jolyn Armstrong [33:33]:

Empathy, right, right. And maybe it's not true, but who cares if it's not true because your first assumption may not be true either.

Alyssa Scolari [33:43]:

Exactly.

Jolyn Armstrong [33:43]:

So it can be true. It's possible to be true. So that passes our reality test. Could it be true? Yes, it can be true. Is it helpful for me? Yes, it is helpful for me. So I'm adopting that, I'm feeling empathy for them and I'm able to go on with my life. So that's the six pack exercise.

Alyssa Scolari [34:07]:

I love it. I love it. And I love the cognitive, behavioral, the CBT approach that you have, because I think it's so helpful. And I wonder, I don't know if you recommend this, but I think for me, sometimes even instead of just saying it in my head, I need to either speak it out loud because I think speaking it solidifies it more. Or I need to write it down, instead of just going through it in my head because when I have these thoughts in my head, I just let them go. But when I speak them out loud or write them into existence, I think that helps even more.

Jolyn Armstrong [34:46]:

Totally, totally, yes. And in the car situation, of course, you're going to speak it to whoever you're in the car with. You can have a conversation about it. I've had so much fun conversation about making up excuses for people in this six pack exercise. So that part, I mean, we just have fun with it, my poor husband. But yeah, you're right. So in other situations, definitely writing out, "What are six reasons why, in COVID, I lost my business? Why was my business forced to shut down? And now other people are opening back up and I don't have the finances to open back up.

What is the reason behind this? Because it's not... I feel like it's all just this insidious attack on small business. But let's look at maybe some other reasons for it." So that's where you can use a six pack exercise in another situation and really write out those reasons and explore them and do all six of them. Even if it's difficult to come up with, we came up with a few right off the top of our heads, but come up with six solid reasons. A couple of them maybe can be ridiculous, but others need to pass that reality test too.

Alyssa Scolari [36:05]:

I love it. I love it. And I think that it's very important, especially for the times that we are entering where the world is opening up after a year and a half of nobody trusting anybody and everybody's defenses are up and we are primed to hate one another, fear one another. I mean that is, it's invaluable what you're offering to people.

Jolyn Armstrong [36:36]:

Oh thank you, Alyssa. Yeah. It's important. It really is important to also to have another person guide you through working through some of these exercises and helping to look at perspective. And it's so important.

Alyssa Scolari [36:51]:

Yes. Thank you for saying that because it truly is not something... as much as we've been primed to distrust one another, none of us were meant to go through this life alone. So yes, you can certainly try to do some of the stuff on your own and some of it will be effective. But also part of what's effective, I believe even more so, is making that connection with somebody who can help you along that path of reframing, changing your perspective.

Jolyn Armstrong [37:24]:

Yes, totally, totally. Especially in a world where we've been isolated for so long, so we need that. We totally need that.

Alyssa Scolari [37:31]:

Oh God. We need it so much.

Jolyn Armstrong [37:34]:

So much, yes, yes.

Alyssa Scolari [37:36]:

As scared as we all may be of it, it's what we need.

Jolyn Armstrong [37:40]:

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

Alyssa Scolari [37:43]:

Now, if people want to work with you, are you working with people individually, or are you doing more just the support groups right now?

Jolyn Armstrong [37:52]:

Yeah. So what I've done, so past the, or in addition to the work with families of people in the criminal justice system and especially through COVID, so many folks have come to me with trauma around those things too, the support groups are free, larger groups. For me, I feel like the connection is way more effective one-on-one, especially initially.

Alyssa Scolari [38:19]:

Absolutely.

Jolyn Armstrong [38:20]:

So I work one-on-one with folks all the time in a Zoom setting, just like this. So no matter where they are, no matter where I am, we can work together and form that connection and work through some of these exercises together. I also work in a small group setting. The small groups I work with are super curated people who have, either initially worked with me one-on-one, or who are very familiar with CBT and DBT exercises because we work through in those groups, a lot of those exercises together. So, I like to meet people where they're at and some people feel way more comfortable in a small group setting.

Alyssa Scolari [39:01]:

Totally.

Jolyn Armstrong [39:01]:

Yeah. So, yep, one-on-one, small groups and then the larger support groups, if that's necessary as well. I also have created for those people who just really aren't ready yet, are taking the baby steps in the beginning, I've created some just email series as a reminder, like every single day for 21 days, you'll get an email with a different DBT exercise to help prompt you to start that habit.

Alyssa Scolari [39:29]:

I love that.

Jolyn Armstrong [39:30]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [39:31]:

Yay DBT.

Jolyn Armstrong [39:32]:

Yeah. So for those that aren't really ready yet to totally plunge in, but want to dip their toe in, sign up for that free email series, it's on my website and you can just get those prompts every single day and practice them on your own, before diving in with a guide or anyone, so...

Alyssa Scolari [39:53]:

I love that because I think it's a great stepping stone for, like you said, people who maybe aren't quite ready to dive right in, but just want to dip their toes in.

Jolyn Armstrong [40:02]:

Yeah, yeah. For sure, for sure.

Alyssa Scolari [40:05]:

And then for the listeners, we are so VIP status right now, we have our own landing page.

Jolyn Armstrong [40:15]:

That's right. I had some special gifts I wanted to give just to your listeners. So I created a landing page for you. It's grapevinemindware.com/lightaftertrauma. And there's some goodies there for ya and all of the connections, all the goodies there. Email and social media and whatever, you can find all of that right there on that page.

Alyssa Scolari [40:39]:

Yes. I love it. On that landing page, just as a little sneak peek, you have access to a free e-series.

Jolyn Armstrong [40:51]:

Yes.

Alyssa Scolari [40:51]:

So, this is already linked in the show notes for you all. Hop to it, go check that out because seriously, this stuff that we are talking about today, is crucial when it comes to not just navigating a post-pandemic world, but truly navigating all aspects of recovery from trauma. When we have PTSD, our brains are wired for survival, they're wired for protection. And that is where this new perspective and the ability to reframe and ultimately rewire your brain, is crucial for recovery. So this is really important and it's free, which is quite frankly unheard of in this world. So, I highly encourage you all to go check that out. Jolyn, thank you so, so much for being vulnerable today, for sharing your story, for truly embodying what this podcast is all about, which is finding the light in what can feel like overwhelming and endless darkness. So thank you so, so much.

Jolyn Armstrong [42:02]:

Thank you for having me, Alyssa. I really, really enjoyed our conversation.

Alyssa Scolari [42:06]:

Thanks for listening everyone. For more information, please head over to lightaftertrauma.com, or you can also follow us on social media. On Instagram, we are @lightaftertrauma and on Twitter, it is @lightafterpod. Lastly, please head over to patreon.com/lightaftertrauma. To support our show, we are asking for $5 a month, which is the equivalent to a cup of coffee at Starbucks. So please head on over again, that's patreon.com/lightaftertrauma. Thank you and we appreciate your support. [singing].

Dr. Jan Canty is a homicide survivor who seeks to spread awareness and garner more support for other homicide survivors. In this week's episode, Dr. Canty explores the traumatic moment when she went from living a "normal" life to finding out that her husband was missing, then murdered. She explains her experience with traumatic loss and helps us to understand why so much more support is needed for those who are survivors (but still victims nonetheless) of homicide.

Dr. Canty's Domino Effect of Murder Podcast

What to Do When the Police Leave: A Guide to the First Days of Traumatic Loss

A Life Divided: A Psychologist's Memoir About the Double Life and Murder of Her Husband - and Her Road To Recovery

Check out the Light After Trauma website for transcripts, other episodes, Alyssa's guest appearances, and more at: www.lightaftertrauma.com

Want to get more great content and interact with the show? Check us out on Instagram: @lightaftertrauma

We need your help! We want to continue to make great content that can help countless trauma warriors on their journey to recovery. So, please help us in supporting the podcast by becoming a recurring patron of the show via Patreon. Every bit helps!

Transcript:

Alyssa Scolari [00:23]:

Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Light After Trauma podcast. I'm your host, Alyssa Scolari. And today we have with us a very special guest, Dr. Jan Canty. Dr. Canty was born, raised and educated and widowed in Detroit. Two months shy of completing her postdoctoral fellowship, her husband of 11 years went missing. Two weeks later, he was found murdered. That event separated her life into before and after segments. Due to media pressure, she moved, changed her name, and did not speak of it for 30 years. When she came out of the shadows, she wrote a book called A Life Divided, and started a podcast for other so-called homicide survivors called Domino Effect of Murder. So this is quite the harrowing story that we have today. So, with all of that said, I am going to turn it over to Dr. Canty herself. Hello. How are you?

Jan Canty [01:33]:

I'm fine. How are you doing?

Alyssa Scolari [01:35]:

I'm good. I'm really glad we connected, happy to have you on the show, happy to have you hear. I know we're talking about some tough stuff today.

Jan Canty [01:45]:

Yes.

Alyssa Scolari [01:46]:

Even reading your bio alone was just like oh, man, there's so, so much here. I guess I'll start with take me through your journey. How long were you married for?

Jan Canty [02:07]:

I was married to Al for 11 years before he went missing.

Alyssa Scolari [02:11]:

Okay. And what was life like prior to that?

Jan Canty [02:16]:

I would say pretty steady. He was very supportive of my career aspirations, and we were doing okay financially. He was 18 years older than me, and the reason I mention that is because when he began, at the very end of that 11-year period to seem more removed or tired or pre-occupied, I attributed it wrongly to his health, thinking well he's older, he needs a physical, but instead he was up to his eyebrows in trouble and not telling me. Because he had befriended two people in downtown Detroit that he allowed them, encouraged them in fact, to take advantage of him financially. And he did this for 18 months, and when he ran out of money they murdered him.

Alyssa Scolari [03:06]:

So here you are, you're married, you're going to, it looks like, you were in graduate school going for your PhD?

Jan Canty [03:16]:

I'd completed my PhD at that point, and I was going through my two-year postdoctoral fellowship. I was in the last two months of it when it all happened.

Alyssa Scolari [03:24]:

Okay. So all this time you're thinking, well, it's just that Al is really, his health is declining because of his age?

Jan Canty [03:35]:

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Alyssa Scolari [03:36]:

When really what was happening is he essentially had like another life where he was-

Jan Canty [03:41]:

Yes. He was pretending to be a physician by the name of Dr. Miller. I found this all out in talking with the chief inspector of homicide the day they called me down to interview me. I had no knowledge of anything that he'd been up to. And one of the many things that he said to me was go home and look at your finances, and you're probably broke, and that was kind. I mean, when I looked into our finances, this is in 1985 dollars, I was $30,000 in debt. So that translates into about $90,000 today.

Alyssa Scolari [04:14]:

Oh my gosh.

Jan Canty [04:17]:

We were behind on taxes, rent at the office, mortgage payments, health insurance, you name it. It was way overdue, because he'd been giving these two people all of our money and more. He'd even bought cars for them, he paid their rent. He even gave them a scrapbook or a photo album that I assembled for insurance purposes of the interior of our house, with the estimated value of each of the larger items in the house. And in case there was a fire, I could just grab it and I'd have evidence of what we owned, and it would be easy to turn into the insurance company. He even gave that to them, so they had the knowledge of what was in the house, as well as the layout.

Alyssa Scolari [05:00]:

So your whole world, every aspect of your world, got turned upside down in a matter of a week?

Jan Canty [05:11]:

He was missing a week. So between the time he didn't come home and the time I met with Inspector Gil Hill, I was just pacing and worrying and trying to figure out what happened. And then he called me down a week later after he'd been missing, and told me that he suspected he had been murdered, but he didn't have a body yet. And then back in '85 you needed that to have a prosecution, but he had a fair idea what had happened. I now know he had a whole lot more evidence than he was telling me.

But then it was the following week, almost to the day that he called me down, and said that they had unearthed his shallow grave in Northern Michigan. He had been killed by the way of a baseball bat and then dismembered. So they had buried his identifiable body parts in a bog in Northern Michigan called the University of Michigan Biologic Station. It's an area where they do scientific research on mosquitoes, and to do that they have road kill dumped there, so it was a perfect camouflage for where they buried him. And I really believe that had an informant, an accomplice, in the burial not come forward, they would have never figured it out.

Alyssa Scolari [06:20]:

Yeah. So that's what happened, somebody came forward with that tip?

Jan Canty [06:25]:

Yep. Yep, to escape prosecution. He wanted immunity from prosecution in order to give the information. And they made a deal with him saying yes, if you can lead us to the body parts, you will be off the hook, and you will have to testify in court though against the two defendants, which was John Carl Fry and Dawn Marie Spens. And he agreed to all of it, and they held up their bargain as well, so that's what happened.

Alyssa Scolari [06:50]:

Wow. And in the months after, well, because I'm sure a trial took place?

Jan Canty [07:00]:

Yes.

Alyssa Scolari [07:00]:

Are these people now in jail?

Jan Canty [07:02]:

They were at the time. And on that point, I'll say that only 5% of murders go to trial, 95% are plea bargains. So that was a concern that I had, is if they all plea bargained to more information that the police wanted, and it could've ended in something minor, because there was evidence that he knew a lot more about other murders in Detroit. But they didn't plea bargain. He did go to trial, and they were convicted. John Carl Fry was convicted of first-degree murder, and convicted to life without parole, which was the maximum in Michigan at the time. I think it's still the same. However, his accomplice, Dawn Marie Spens, was given a very light sentence, and she was out before I could even sell my house.

Alyssa Scolari [07:47]:

What?

Jan Canty [07:48]:

Yeah, because she didn't do the actual killing. She just helped transport the body parts. So they charged her and convicted her of, I think the wording is something like mutilation of a dead body or something like that, and so she was off pretty quickly. I think she served two years, maybe 18 months. It was really brief. And then he died in prison after five years of Hep C, so he's no longer around, she still is. Since she's been out, she went back to school and she's alive and well.

Alyssa Scolari [08:29]:

That makes me want to throw up, it truly does.

Jan Canty [08:33]:

There was a public outcry when the public became aware of her light sentence, but it's a done deal. You can't make a judge change his mind.

Alyssa Scolari [08:42]:

Right. Right. So then for you, after all of that, between having to grieve and being in shock, I'm sure, you made that decision to change your name, move completely out of the area?

Jan Canty [08:58]:

Eventually, because I tried moving locally and the media would not leave me alone. I had to change my phone number so often I had to write it down to make sense of it. And they were coming to my work place, people were driving by my house. It was always in the press, any little thing, like John Carl Fry escaped one time while he was incarcerated.

Alyssa Scolari [09:18]:

What?

Jan Canty [09:19]:

So it drummed it all up again. And when he died, it drummed it all up, and I just thought I'm leaving. I've had it. This isn't my swan song. I don't want to forever be known as the widow. This isn't how I want my life to unfold at this point. It was hard. I loved living where I did. My practice was taking off, it was something, a goal, I'd worked for for over a decade. And it was working, but I wasn't happy, and I was on edge all the time. And I was tired of people pointing at me in public, and finally I just said enough.

And so to your point about grief, because of all the drama, the media, my health risks, I was told I had to get an HIV test because of his infidelity with prostitutes, there were so many irons in the fire at any given time that grief was totally postponed for a long time. That was a luxury. I didn't have time to process it. I was constantly putting out fires. If it wasn't the media, it was bills. If it wasn't the bills, it was my health. If it wasn't that, it was moving. If it wasn't that, it was something else. So it kept getting postponed. It was one of those things that I thought later, I can deal with that later. Right now I've got to figure out, I mean, in the early weeks frankly, I had to figure out how I was going to eat and how I was going to keep the lights on, because he'd given away all our money and we were in debt. And I had just started my practice, so my income was very low.

Alyssa Scolari [10:49]:

Right.

Jan Canty [10:50]:

So I started selling things that I owned to not only prepare to move to a smaller place, but to survive. And winter was setting in, and I was worried about the heat bill, because it was a really old house and it sucked up energy. So my mind was consumed with survival for a long time.

Alyssa Scolari [11:09]:

Right. It's as you were talking about you couldn't really even go anywhere or do anything without the media, of course I think to myself there's no way you even had two seconds to grieve.

Jan Canty [11:21]:

No.

Alyssa Scolari [11:21]:

As you said, that's a luxury, right?

Jan Canty [11:21]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [11:24]:

I'm in survival mode. There's no time to process any of this.

Jan Canty [11:29]:

No. I postponed what I could postpone, and that was one of them. I had to prioritize. I had to make my bills, I had to eat, I had to figure out how I was going to heat the house, I had to try to sell the house. And that was an issue, because Michigan law, even to this day, states that if there is a serious crime in which the owner of the house is involved, even if it does not take place on the property, you have to divulge that information to the potential buyer in case they are superstitious. If you fail to do that, they can rescind the offer at any time in the future, so that devalued the house.

Alyssa Scolari [12:06]:

What?

Jan Canty [12:06]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [12:07]:

Is that just me, or does that seem like an absolutely ...

Jan Canty [12:11]:

It was like one thing on top of another, like I said. It made no sense to me, because it didn't occur in the house. So I didn't think it, but everybody knew anyway.

Alyssa Scolari [12:19]:

It made no sense.

Jan Canty [12:19]:

Because the media published pictures of our house, and even a map to get to our house, so it really wasn't a secret in the sense. But the people that ended up buying the house came from England, so they would not have known anything about this, but they still had to be told about it. And so as a consequence, the house was probably valued by a third less of what it was worth, and then I used a lot of that money just to pay off bills.

Alyssa Scolari [12:43]:

Right. I feel like I've been shaking my head so much throughout this interview already that my head might actually spin off. I'm just, I'm baffled that a law like that even exists, like it-

Jan Canty [12:56]:

Yeah. I checked recently, and it's still there.

Alyssa Scolari [12:59]:

Unbelievable, right? As if things weren't, it's like you had everything working against you all at the same time.

Jan Canty [13:07]:

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Alyssa Scolari [13:08]:

How did you stay sane?

Jan Canty [13:11]:

I attribute a lot of my coping skills, number one, to how my parents raised me. They were never, ever one to allow me to escape responsibility. And if I complained, they'd always point out somebody has it worse than you, come on, get on with life, you don't have it so bad. That was a factor, my childhood. My parents flew in from Phoenix to be with me, and they were immense help. Once they arrived, which was a week into his disappearance, my dad took charge of the front door and the phone. My mom took charge of laundry and cooking, because I hadn't eaten, and in fact, the dinner that I had prepared for Al and I the night he was to come home, I'd left it on the stove for a week. I hadn't even noticed it. That's how out of it I was. It was hamburger. We were going to have hamburgers that night, and it just was sitting in the summer heat for a week and I didn't even notice it. So the minute she walked in the house, she's like, "What in the God's name is that odor? That stinks."

Alyssa Scolari [14:10]:

And you didn't even notice it.

Jan Canty [14:11]:

And I hadn't had a shower, because it wasn't like a week, it was like one very long day. That's how it felt to me. There was no morning, noon and night, 24-hour cycles. It was like the next hour or the next minute, the next hour, and it just kept going, and I was getting by on cat naps for a long time. So it didn't seem like a week until that they came. It seemed like one very long day. Morning, noon and night had no meaning at all.

Alyssa Scolari [14:39]:

I think that that's a deeply accurate description of the traumatic loss, like what that trauma is like in the initial phases. That's what it is. A week went by and it felt like a day. I think that's a perfect way of describing it, and-

Jan Canty [15:04]:

Well, I think you're so into your own skin, those external benchmarks are gone. You don't know the date, you don't know the hour.

Alyssa Scolari [15:04]:

None of that even matters.

Jan Canty [15:11]:

You don't know if it's morning, noon or night, you don't. It's you're so inside your own skin, and thinking about what's happened and what needs to happen, that that's all very external, very removed, and meaningless at the time.

Alyssa Scolari [15:26]:

Yeah. It's like none of that even matters, the date, the day, the time. It's all, right, none of, like you said-

Jan Canty [15:26]:

Right.

Alyssa Scolari [15:36]:

The external just doesn't matter. Now for you, when did the grieving process, like when did you transition, was it when you moved, from that shock to the grief?

Jan Canty [15:54]:

Well, I would say in earnest, it was after I left Michigan. It was probably a year and a half later.

Alyssa Scolari [16:02]:

Okay. And what-

Jan Canty [16:02]:

Because up to that point I was just treading water. And finally, when I got away from everybody I knew, all the reporters, the media, the police, and I could sit and think. Even at the funeral I couldn't think, because the media were there. I mean, they were so intrusive, so invasive, and impersonal and in my face. And I couldn't even grieve at the, all I could think about at the funeral was getting out of there and getting home. They had cameras and microphones, and it was like a circus. I felt like all that was missing was popcorn.

Alyssa Scolari [16:36]:

A circus you don't want to be at.

Jan Canty [16:38]:

No. No.

Alyssa Scolari [16:39]:

Not at all.

Jan Canty [16:40]:

So it was a long time, and I was pretty removed from it all by then. And I did not have a name for the kind of grief that I was experiencing at the time, but now looking back, I know that it's a unique kind of, well, maybe it's more common than we think. It's called conflicted grief, where there is relief in your grief, where there is some element of, oh, I'm glad that's over. I know I wouldn't want him back, because of all the deceit, all the infidelity, endangering my life, let alone his own. There was this anger like I had never experienced in my life.

You still have the other typical parts of grief, the sadness and the feeling empty and remembering the good times. That's still all there, but in addition to that there's this other layer of how dare you? How dare you have done what you did to your life and my life and our life? What was wrong with you? And so that conflicted grief, for me, and I'm not saying this is everybody, but for me made it easier. Because you don't go to that depth of soul searching and mourning, because your anger is it bottoms you out. It's at a point where if he had lived, if he had survived, I would have left him in a heartbeat. I mean, I wouldn't have put up with that.

Alyssa Scolari [18:04]:

Right. Right.

Jan Canty [18:05]:

So it made it easier for me, and I took it a day at a time. Again, when that happened, I wish I'd had a name for it then. All I know is I felt terribly guilty for not feeling more sad, more mournful than I did, but I was able to start sleeping soon. And you go in the Hallmark section of a card area and you'll see they're still with you in your thoughts, and you'll be together one day. None of that applied to me. It was like I don't want to walk with him again. I don't want to be with him at some future time.

Alyssa Scolari [18:38]:

Yeah, you were mad as hell.

Jan Canty [18:39]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [18:39]:

You were mad as hell.

Jan Canty [18:40]:

And there's no place to discharge it, because he's not here.

Alyssa Scolari [18:43]:

Right. You can't even scream at him.

Jan Canty [18:45]:

No. And his mother really was in denial. He was an only child, and so my mother-in-law was like feeding it, like I bet ... She even sent me an anniversary card after he had-

Alyssa Scolari [18:59]:

What?

Jan Canty [18:59]:

Yeah. A few after he left, after he died. And she was not in touch with what was going on. She refused to believe his role in his own demise, and always said he'd been blackmailed, there was another explanation. But she would not go to court, she would not go to the police station, she would not face any of the facts as we knew them, so she could continue to live in that sense of denial. And at her age, I thought let her. What's the difference? It's her only child. She's entitled to see it how she needs to see it, if that makes her sleep, but I don't want to be a part of it. And so there's an old saying that murder kills not just victims, it kills families too, and that's a good example of that.

Alyssa Scolari [19:39]:

It's so true, so, so true. Now, but for you, it didn't kill you.

Jan Canty [19:46]:

No.

Alyssa Scolari [19:47]:

And it sounds like it's partially because it's, like you said, that type of conflict grief, right? You have all this rage, this anger, because there's this sense of betrayal.

Jan Canty [19:58]:

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Alyssa Scolari [19:59]:

But you also, even just reading your bio and seeing where you're at now, you've now kind of incorporated the past and what happened to you into the work that you do now.

Jan Canty [20:13]:

Yes, I do. It took me 30 years to speak of it. I did not talk about it for a long, long time after I moved, but there was specific events that happened that made me come out of the shadows. And when it did, I had enough objectivity there, the dust had settled. I had gotten my ducks in a row. I'd deliberately done things to get myself back on track, because back in 1985, you're alone. There is no internet. There's no way to search out, I didn't even know the name homicide survivor then. All I knew is I didn't know a soul who'd been through what I'd been through, so it was up to me to deal with it as best I could and figure out how I was going to heal myself.

So I fell back on a very old model that I was taught in my training, which is you look at biopsychosocial dimensions of behavior. And I thought I've got to address each of those. I've got to look at what I'm doing biologically, so I started doing triathlons. I started looking at things socially. I traveled around the world and went to remote villages, and visited and helped communities in very remote places who didn't even have drinking water, let alone a spouse. Women had no rights, and it was bug infested, and I tried to throw myself into helping other people who were less fortunate, in some ways, than myself. That put it in perspective.

And I tried to heal myself psychologically by trying to read up on it. Once the internet came into being, and I could get resources, I started researching a little bit more about homicide survivors. And even now there's not a ton of information, but it's better than it used to be. And so that was my focus, was to say life, strangely, has prepared me for this. I've got my formal training, and I have my life training, and my goal now is to help other homicide survivors, and people close to homicide survivors, like perhaps a close friend of somebody who's lost someone to homicide.

My goal is to help that population deal with their experience, because there's very little out there now. There's no parades in our honor. There's no national day that people are aware of for homicide survivors, and we're misrepresented in movies, if we're represented at all, because most of the time the focus is on the crime and the perpetrator, and maybe a trial, which is a myth, because like I said, most of the time it's a plea bargain. But as for the family of the deceased, they're just in the background. They're this fleeting people that are dissolved into tears, and then they lead them off stage and that's it. And that's where the story starts, that's not where it ends. So my goal has been to try to fan the flames of that, and create better understanding and a pool of resources for people in that situation.

Alyssa Scolari [23:07]:

And is that largely what you book is about, A Life Divided?

Jan Canty [23:14]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [23:14]:

Or is that more of a memoir?

Jan Canty [23:16]:

It's both. It's both.

Alyssa Scolari [23:16]:

Okay.

Jan Canty [23:17]:

It's a true crime memoir, but my deliberate intent was to segue at the end towards speaking to trauma survivors in general, so that you can use my story as a springboard to understand what goes on with trauma, so that other people can use it for their own benefit. Like, for example, I talk about nightmares as not something to fear. That's a part of the healing process, and it's natural and it's inevitable, and it's your mind trying to reset itself, and just as one silly example. But there's that, and then also the podcast. It was actually suggested to me by a relative in South Carolina who owns a crime scene cleanup business, and it was her idea to say you'd be a perfect person to have a podcast. And I'm thinking I don't know anything about podcasts, the technology, pop filter, the whole there's a lot as an uphill of information you have to gather.

Alyssa Scolari [24:21]:

It's a lot, right.

Jan Canty [24:22]:

But as you probably know, Alyssa, other podcasters are very helpful. It's like a nice community.

Alyssa Scolari [24:28]:

It's a nice community. It is.

Jan Canty [24:29]:

They're not competitive, they're helpful.

Alyssa Scolari [24:31]:

Yes.

Jan Canty [24:31]:

And they really helped me get on my feet, so that's how The Domino Effect of Murder was born. And that was two years ago, and it's now heard in 11 countries.

Alyssa Scolari [24:39]:

Wow. That's incredible. It's incredible.

Jan Canty [24:44]:

And I've met the most remarkable people. That's been so enjoyable. It's like my tribe. That's what I think of them as. These are people that went through, every homicide is unique, they're all different, but these are people that somehow figured out a way to make lemonade out of lemons, and I admire them. They're resilient. They're creative. They're compassionate. They're passionate and articulate, and willing to talk about their histories. And I've just admired them, and I enjoy speaking with them.

Alyssa Scolari [25:19]:

Yes, and you are one of those people. I mean, you truly are, and it's the kind of grief, and the kind of traumatic loss that you have been through. I think the grief expert, David Kessler, who is just one of my all-time-favorite people on the planet, he wrote the book called Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief, and I believe he has an entire chapter dedicated to homicide, and it is because it is a much different type of grief.

Jan Canty [25:59]:

And it's a grief that one of the sad things about it is that when you start to knit together, when you start to pull yourself out of this, that's about the time the trial happens, or the court proceedings, and it just opens it up again. And anytime you see somebody in the news who died under very similar circumstances as your loved one, it opens it up, so that's another part that makes it hard. When I hear of somebody who's lost a loved one, they're missing and then they're found murdered, it's just, ah, it just rips at me.

Alyssa Scolari [26:38]:

Yeah. It's like this wound that just you can't get medical attention for.

Jan Canty [26:38]:

Right.

Alyssa Scolari [26:44]:

It's just this wound that weeps.

Jan Canty [26:46]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [26:47]:

And there's no healing. And one of the questions that I'm very curious to ask your opinion on this, there has been such a trend toward true crime, and I don't know if it's specifically in this country, or if it's worldwide. People are obsessed with true crime, myself included, right? Myself included. I listen to many, many, many true crime podcasts, and I think that there's been a lot of criticism that people are obsessed with it in a way that almost minimizes the tragedy. Do you feel that that's the case? Have you noticed that, that people more so are all about the drama of it, and less aware of like, no, this is homicide, this is devastating and life altering?

Jan Canty [27:49]:

I think you see an array. There are some podcasts which make light of it. My favorite podcasts, one is Wine and Crime, and they even laugh, and it trivializes it.

Alyssa Scolari [28:04]:

Yes.

Jan Canty [28:06]:

And in addition to that, it doesn't focus on the aftermath, it focuses on the crime itself.

Alyssa Scolari [28:11]:

The crime itself.

Jan Canty [28:12]:

Which is very common. But there are a handful out there that do bring up, and do try to address, the victims who are living. They're in a minority, but they're there, and I don't think they were even there five years ago, so that's refreshing.

Alyssa Scolari [28:28]:

Yes.

Jan Canty [28:28]:

What I find equally upsetting, for me, is the lack of interest in scholarly research on homicide survivors, because here's a for instance. When I do my episodes, I guess it's the researcher in me, but I always try to research the topic I'm going to be specifically addressing in that episode. One week I was going to be speaking with a young woman, she was like in her mid-twenties, maybe late-twenties at the most, who was a filicide survivor, meaning that her mother murdered her brother. Filicide is the murdering of one's child. She survived it.

Alyssa Scolari [29:06]:

I didn't know it.

Jan Canty [29:08]:

And so I thought, okay, I want to research filicide, and particularly what's the impact on the surviving child? Because it's not like the Watt's case. They're not always where all the children are killed. It's unique, it's there's differences. I could not find one shred of data, one study anywhere in the world that talked about this. And that's just one example, but it's not unique. And so but if you look up serial killers, oh my God, you don't have enough room to read all the articles. So academia is following that same mode. It's like can't you get off the subject of serial killers and the homicide itself and look at the aftermath? There's so much we need to know. What's the impact on development of children who witness a homicide? Or what's the impact of an older child if he sees his parent murder a younger child? We don't know, because nobody's researching these things. So that's one thing.

And movies, they don't show the reality of it very often either. There's only a very few, few films out there that start with the trial, and then proceed to show the people's life afterwards. They're definitely in the minority, which I don't totally blame the academicians and the producers and the podcast hosts for this, because homicide survivors tend to run and hide. We don't like the spotlight. We don't want to talk about it. It took me 30 years to talk about it. So it's not just them not giving us a thought, but we run from the spotlight too, and so you put the two together and there's this big unknown.

But I will tell you this, that it's an equal-opportunity club, and that at any moment anybody can join us. You just never know. Whether it's a mass homicide or an individual homicide, you don't know until it happens to you.

Alyssa Scolari [31:06]:

Exactly. Exactly. I thank you for that, and I thank you for your honesty, because I see that and I open my eyes to it. And listen, I am no angel in this. I, myself, am reading about The Stranger Beside Me, about Ted Bundy, Original Night Stalker or Golden State Killer. They recently caught him, but what are there books about-

Jan Canty [31:32]:

But the thing that I think we need to underscore here is that I believe, and the research supports this, that many women in particular who follow true crime do so as a learning tool for their own safety. What do I need to know to avoid this happening to me? So it's not always a gossipy kind of mystery-intrigue angle that they have, it's self-protection.

Alyssa Scolari [31:57]:

Absolutely, but I think that self-protection also can be extended to looking at the impact of the survivors, because as easily as we could be a victim of homicide, that's as easily as we could be a survivor of homicide, right?

Jan Canty [32:14]:

I wish more people would see that.

Alyssa Scolari [32:16]:

Yeah. And it's, you know, there are no books on, like you said, like I ...

Jan Canty [32:21]:

One book, if I can plug it, and I learned about it from my podcast.

Alyssa Scolari [32:24]:

Oh yeah?

Jan Canty [32:24]:

The one about [inaudible 00:32:25], and it's a wonderful book. If you are a police officer listening, get this book in your department to hand out at crime scenes of homicides. It's called What to Do When the Police Leave, and it's exactly what it's about. It's almost like a manual, like Step A, Step B.

Alyssa Scolari [32:44]:

Wow.

Jan Canty [32:44]:

And it's been printed over 40,000 copies, but it's I think it should be, and especially with the uptick in homicides in the last year. Homicides have nationally gone from an average of 18,000 annually to now 20,000 since COVID has hit.

Alyssa Scolari [33:00]:

Oh my gosh.

Jan Canty [33:00]:

It's still rare. It doesn't mean it's frequent. It's like if you picture a football stadium, we're now talking about ten people in that football stadium, as opposed to maybe seven before, but still it happens.

Alyssa Scolari [33:13]:

Still significant, yeah.

Jan Canty [33:14]:

And that doesn't include always the bigger-scale homicides, the mass tragedies. But I think that there are books like that out there, but this is it, the public doesn't know about this safety net. They don't know the resources that are out there. I'm still learning about them, and it's so darn hard to find them. And I wish there was a clearinghouse or public, I don't know, a nationwide conference, or something we could pull these resources together, police, victims and attorneys and so on, and learn from one another, to get a boost going so that the safety net is there and in place. The closest one I can find is through Arizona. The Arizona Homicide Inc is what they call it, I-N-C, Homicide Inc. It's-

Alyssa Scolari [34:02]:

And that's a conference?

Jan Canty [34:03]:

It's an organization within Arizona. They have support groups, they have pamphlets, they have speakers. And they are probably, and from where I sit, it looks like the most organized, and probably one of the earliest. The other one is Parents of Murdered Children. They're both in the United States and Canada. They are very organized. And despite what the name sounds like, they are open to speaking with people other than parents. But there aren't many. There's very, very few.

Alyssa Scolari [34:32]:

Very few.

Jan Canty [34:33]:

And so I'm hoping that through your podcast, and people listening here as well as my own, that people will become more aware of resources out there.

Alyssa Scolari [34:44]:

Yes. And I will absolutely link your book, your podcast, as well as the What to Do When the Police Leave book in the show notes for the listeners.

Jan Canty [34:57]:

It's written by Bill Jenkins, J-E-N-

Alyssa Scolari [34:59]:

Bill Jenkins? Okay.

Jan Canty [35:00]:

Whose son was murdered. One thing also, if I could just touch on quickly. I know we're running out of time, but-

Alyssa Scolari [35:06]:

Oh yeah, go ahead.

Jan Canty [35:07]:

If I could speak to some of the other myths surrounding, one I've already mentioned, that frequently murders end in trial. That's like CSI stuff on TV.

Alyssa Scolari [35:17]:

Yeah.

Jan Canty [35:17]:

That isn't the case.

Alyssa Scolari [35:17]:

Law and Order.

Jan Canty [35:19]:

95% of them end up in a plea bargain, so be prepared for the murderer of your loved one to get a lesser offense charge. The other one is that once a homicide occurs, that the grieving people who are going through it, that they receive a lot of support. And that doesn't usually happen, except at the time of the funeral, and maybe at the time of the trial, but it quickly falls off. And therefore, one of the recommendations I would make is if you knew somebody that had had this happen to, and you're close to them, stay in touch with them over the next few months. They're going to need you to be there for them month five, month six, and the year anniversary of the murder.

The other misperception is that once people are convicted of homicide that they serve very long sentences, and that too is false. Nationally, if you are convicted of a first-degree premeditated murder, the national average, and it does vary by jurisdiction, is 17 years. If you are convicted of second-degree impulsive murder, the national average is only five years nine months. That's involuntary manslaughter 9.2 years, so it's really not what you think. We don't have these life sentences. About 2% of murder convictions are false convictions, that is an innocent person has been railroaded into giving a false confession and put behind bars. And there's a man I met, he was a guest on my episode, called Deskovic is his last name, Jeffrey Deskovic. He was a teenager who was interrogated over many hours and just given caffeine, finally falsely confessed to a murder of his classmate, and served 16 years before he was released. He's now an attorney himself and helps other exonerees get their day in court.

Alyssa Scolari [37:15]:

Wow.

Jan Canty [37:17]:

Another myth is that women are at greatest risk when they are alone outside after dark. And what the data shows is that the most common place for women to be murdered is their own home, and the most common perpetrator is someone close to them. It could be an ex-boyfriend, could be a neighbor, but it's somebody known to them. It's not the stranger pulling them into a van and dumping them into the woods. That happens, but that's not the biggest risk. Most women are murdered in their home.

And about 65% of murders are by people who know each other well, so family members, friends, coworkers are the 65% of all homicides are perpetrated by that group versus strangers, which is not how it's portrayed in the media very often.

Alyssa Scolari [38:02]:

No.

Jan Canty [38:04]:

So there are other myths, but those are just the ones I wanted to throw out.

Alyssa Scolari [38:07]:

Wow. Thank you.

Jan Canty [38:10]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [38:10]:

Thank you for what you do. You truly embody, I think, the word resiliency. You embody what this podcast is really all about.

Jan Canty [38:23]:

And if I can do it, other people can do it.

Alyssa Scolari [38:26]:

Yes.

Jan Canty [38:26]:

You need to surround yourself with strong people. You need to pay attention to your biology, get your rest, get your hydration. You don't have to do marathons and triathlons.

Alyssa Scolari [38:26]:

Could though, right?

Jan Canty [38:37]:

But you do have to get off your chair and go walk at least. So pay attention to your diet, ratchet down the cigarettes and the pop and the bad stuff. Take care of yourself biologically. In fact, I would recommend you see a physician within the first weeks of a homicide.

Take care of yourself socially. Don't become a hermit. I did that, it doesn't work well. Surround yourself with at least one or two close allies. They don't have to have been through what you've been through, but just to have them sit there and listen. They don't have to throw out any recommendations, there's no magic words they need to come up with, but just to sit there non-judgmentally and listen to you, whether it's 3:00 am or whatever it is, and listen to them is very, very helpful. The other thing that friends can do which is very helpful, especially in the early weeks, is do not say call me if you need something, because people don't know what they need. And instead, say-

Alyssa Scolari [39:30]:

Right, so they won't call you.

Jan Canty [39:31]:

Right. Instead, say I noticed you need to take your car in to get your tires rotated. I'm going to do that for you. Or you need to get your cat into the vet. I'll get that done for you. Or I'm going to grocery shop. I'm going to bring your groceries to you. Do something specific and concrete that you know they will benefit by. I had a friend whose husband suicided, and I know she was very worried, she kept talking about how am I going to get my grass cut, because she was not physically well. And so I purchased landscaping for that summer for her, and you'd think I'd given her a million dollars. If I had said to her call me if you need something, that would have never happened.

Alyssa Scolari [40:04]:

No. I have almost felt, I hate that phrase so much. I have always seen it as a cop out, and it might just be a personal thing. It might be I think sometimes people feel uncomfortable, they don't know what to say, so then they say just let me know if you need anything, and I feel like that's a cop out.

Jan Canty [40:04]:

Right.

Alyssa Scolari [40:20]:

It's like, no, that person will not be able to tell you what they need.

Jan Canty [40:23]:

Nope. Nope.

Alyssa Scolari [40:23]:

There are no words for this.

Jan Canty [40:25]:

No.

Alyssa Scolari [40:25]:

Just look and go into action.

Jan Canty [40:28]:

Yep.

Alyssa Scolari [40:29]:

And that's how you can be the best help.

Jan Canty [40:31]:

Yep.

Alyssa Scolari [40:32]:

I mean, that's my spiel on that. And that phrase always just frustrates me when there's grief or loss. It's like, no, because that puts more pressure on the victim.

Jan Canty [40:44]:

It does. You can't even make a decision.

Alyssa Scolari [40:45]:

Right, like what am I, the CEO of-

Jan Canty [40:47]:

And you're not looking at your life objectively.

Alyssa Scolari [40:49]:

Right.

Jan Canty [40:49]:

I mean, my mother comes in and sees the week-old, rotten hamburger. I mean, obviously I needed somebody to clean my kitchen, but I didn't notice.

Alyssa Scolari [40:56]:

Right. Exactly. Exactly. So ...

Jan Canty [41:00]:

But because of people like you reaching out and allowing me to speak, I do feel more optimistic that more people will be helped.

Alyssa Scolari [41:07]:

Yes. Even just today, right, or the week I'm having, listening to this, A, puts things into, I think, very serious perspective for me, but also helps me to know that people out there, myself included, can do very hard things, and can take so much pain, pain that we did not deserve. You did not deserve it, you didn't need it, you didn't ask for it, you didn't want it, you never saw it coming.

Jan Canty [41:41]:

No.

Alyssa Scolari [41:41]:

But you took it, after many, many years, as hard as it was, and now you are using it to help other people.

Jan Canty [41:48]:

I think people are more capable of doing things than they even think they are.

Alyssa Scolari [41:52]:

Agreed. Agreed.

Jan Canty [41:53]:

You don't know until it happens, what you're capable of.

Alyssa Scolari [41:57]:

1,010% So I thank you so much for your vulnerability, for sharing your story. Everything will be linked in the bio for the listeners, so you can check all of that stuff out, and thank you.

Jan Canty [42:14]:

Thank you, Alyssa, for having me on.

Alyssa Scolari [42:16]:

Thanks for listening, everyone. For more information, please head over to lightaftertrauma.com, or you can also follow us on social media. On Instagram, we are at lightaftertrauma, and on Twitter it is @lightafterpod. Lastly, please head over to patreon.com/lightaftertrauma to support our show. We are asking for $5.00 a month, which is the equivalent to a cup of coffee at Starbucks, so please head on over. Again, that's patreon.com/lightaftertrauma. Thank you, and we appreciate your support.

singing

In this week's episode, Alyssa sits down with veteran, PTSD survivor, and comedian Michael "CQ" Carrasquillo. Michael provides an in-depth perspective on his time serving in the military, from the moment he enlisted until the very moment in Afghanistan when he was shot 5 times in an ambush. Following two years of being in the hospital, Michael talks about his battle with PTSD, the survivor's guilt he struggles with, and how he came to find joy and laughter in life again. He is truly a hero, an inspiration, and resilient beyond belief. Read more about Michael's story:

How One Veteran is Using Standup to Heal the Wounds of War

Michael at Wounded Warrior Project

Michael's Radio Show

Check out the Light After Trauma website for transcripts, other episodes, Alyssa's guest appearances, and more at: www.lightaftertrauma.com

Want to get more great content and interact with the show? Check us out on Instagram: @lightaftertrauma

We need your help! We want to continue to make great content that can help countless trauma warriors on their journey to recovery. So, please help us in supporting the podcast by becoming a recurring patron of the show via Patreon. Every bit helps!

Transcript:

Alyssa Scolari [00:23]:

Hi everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Light After Trauma podcast. Welcome, welcome. Hope everybody is doing well. We have a really special episode happening for us today, a really special guest speaker. This was quite an emotional episode. It's a lot of tough stuff. But this episode is truly the epitome of finding light after trauma. So I am really looking forward to diving in. I know it's going to be a tough one, but it's an incredible story and I am really looking forward to hearing all of the details and just being able to bear witness to the strength that our guest speaker has today, to be able to bear witness to the strength that our guest speaker has.

So today we are meeting with Michael CQ Carrasquillo. Now, Michael is a combat wounded army airborne infantry man. He served in both Iraq and Afghanistan at the height of combat operations in the early 2000s. He spent two years in an army hospital recovering from his injuries, underwent 40 plus surgeries, actually died twice and was eventually medically retired from service. Since then, he has tried just about everything from skydiving, golf, scuba diving, hunting, et cetera. Eventually, he found himself performing stand up comedy and loving it. That paved the way to hosting a weekly live internet radio pop culture talk show on WTF nation radio called POP Culture Warrior. All right, so with that being said, also, side note, I just want to incorporate in there that I sort of did the Spanglish version of Michael's name, during the introduction. So it is not the way that I first pronounced it. We're going to be as American with this pronunciation as possible, and it's going to be Carrasquillo, right?

Michael Carrasquillo [00:23]:

That's right, that's right.

Alyssa Scolari [02:39]:

That just feels wrong.

Michael Carrasquillo [02:41]:

Well, yeah, if you want to go Spanish, it's Carrasquillo.

Alyssa Scolari [02:44]:

Carrasquillo, that feels right. That feels right to me.

Michael Carrasquillo [02:44]:

Spanish Italian.

Alyssa Scolari [02:51]:

So hello, Michael, how are you?

Michael Carrasquillo [02:54]:

I'm good. I'm good. And for the simplest simplicity of it all, everyone refers to me as CQ. So feel free, CQ, a lot less formal. And got to-

Alyssa Scolari [02:54]:

Cool-

Michael Carrasquillo [03:05]:

... respect the brand.

Alyssa Scolari [03:07]:

Oh, oh, my God, your hat.

Michael Carrasquillo [03:09]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [03:11]:

Dude, that's so cool. Okay, so everybody calls you CQ. That's just-

Michael Carrasquillo [03:11]:

Yep-

Alyssa Scolari [03:16]:

... All right, all right. So we're rolling with it. So we've got CQ with us today. I have read about your story in the articles that you linked, and then obviously in the short description that you sent me.

Michael Carrasquillo [03:33]:

Sure.

Alyssa Scolari [03:34]:

Holy, Holy Mother of God.

Michael Carrasquillo [03:39]:

Am I what you expected? I'm just curious.

Alyssa Scolari [03:43]:

Well, when I was reading the articles, I thought to myself, this is somebody who has taken everything that he's been through, and he's really... I mean, I'm a big fan of humor therapy. Because it's like, if we don't laugh about it, we're just going to sob about it. So I have a very dark sense of humor. And I got that, that it's almost like you have been able to find the humor in all of this, which is just incredibly powerful. So is it what I would expect? No, I mean, to the listeners out there, I've got, like the background that I'm looking at, he's super into Marvel, we've got the Iron Man fist, the Iron Man, helmet, [inaudible 00:04:24] Man, some Funko Pop figures, which is like, as many of you know who are listening, right up my alley.

So as soon as I saw the background, I was like, ooh, tell me what you have. Let's talk about all the toys you have. So yeah, and I mean, I guess, my first question, just to be able to inform the listeners so they can get on the same level as us is, can you talk just a little bit about what happened to you? I mean, first and foremost, just from my introduction alone, they know of your service, I know of your service. So I, and the listeners, thank you for your service.

Michael Carrasquillo [05:04]:

I appreciate it.

Alyssa Scolari [05:06]:

And could you talk to us about, how did you even end up enlisting in the first place?

Michael Carrasquillo [05:14]:

Yeah, from a 40,000 foot view, it's such a big, large chunk of story. And I really don't want to bore anybody with all the minutiae of little details. But kind of just from a high level, I was born and raised in New York City. Very poor upbringing. Literally kind of the ghetto, Spanish Harlem, upper Eastside. Teenage mom, dad not in the picture. So starting out in not the greatest of places. And I was a senior in high school when 9/11 happened. And so at that point, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I was kind of lost, college wasn't for me. It was looking like just getting a job and working. And then when that happened, that kind of just... the military had never been a thing to me. It had never been like, oh, something I'm considering. Guys like me didn't join the military.

Alyssa Scolari [06:12]:

It wasn't even your radar.

Michael Carrasquillo [06:14]:

Yeah, if I'm being 100% honest, I think at that point in my life, I didn't know we still had military. You know what I mean? I'm 16, 17 years old, whatever. I'm like, wars aren't a thing anymore?

Alyssa Scolari [06:26]:

Right, it's old school. You have that kid mentality of like, that's not even a thing anymore.

Michael Carrasquillo [06:31]:

Exactly. Pre 9/11, this wasn't for those that weren't around, it had been a while since there had been any conflicts in my lifetime. And so when that happened, obviously it felt personal, even though obviously they're attacking the country, they literally attacked my home. Places that I roamed very frequently, my school wasn't that far from ground zero. And so obviously there was big uptake in commercials for the military and things, as the [inaudible 00:07:02] went on. And it just became this idea of, yeah, get some payback, like very immature. But at the same time, it was also, as I looked at it as more of a thing that was possible, it became this thing that was, I can get out. This is my way out. I come from a poor background, I come from nothing... I don't know, it was a way for me to kind of escape what was going on in my own life, and get away and do my own thing. And a way to be successful, I guess, on my own.

I saw kids I grew up with that were into drugs and to gangs, they were either getting arrested or ended up in dead end jobs. And I was just like, there's got to be more to life. And yeah, so I enlisted, basically, almost right out of high school. I graduated, and then there were so many people enlisting at that time. They had thing called the Delayed Entry Program, since there were just so many people coming through and wanting to join that, you just basically signed in, you're sweared in, and you did all this stuff. But so I did that in the summer, I graduated, but it wasn't until January of 2003 that I actually officially entered into the army, went to basic training and did all that. So yeah, I joined the infantry, for those that don't know, when you think army, those are your guys. Those are the ground level combat troops. You're not a mechanic, you're not a cook, your whole job is fighting. You do nothing but train with weapons and explosives and things and conduct raids and all the things you would think about typical army guy stuff.

Alyssa Scolari [08:44]:

Did you have a choice in that or that was just kind of what you were given?

Michael Carrasquillo [08:50]:

Yeah, so basically, when you join the military, you'll take what's called the ASVAB, it's an aptitude test. And based on your scores, will be what jobs are available to you to sign up. Now, of course, you could score really well, and then, but I don't want to be a, I don't know, X-ray technician, and you scored well enough for it. But then there's things like needs of the army, where if there's too many people in that job, they're not going to keep accepting those people in the job. So there's facets of how you get into certain jobs. I scored well enough that I think out of the 240 odd jobs available, I qualified for 238 of them.

Alyssa Scolari [09:30]:

Wow-

Michael Carrasquillo [09:30]:

I think the only one was like something to do with nuclear technology or something like that, I didn't qualify for. But I scored really well on my test. Luckier brains, I don't know, a little bit of both. But at that time, silly me, I didn't think about a job, I didn't think about a career, I didn't think about what would help me when I leave the military. I thought about like, I want to shoot guns, I want to blow shit up. I want to do that stuff. And so I joined the infantry. And also, airborne, so the idea of jumping out of planes and directly engaging enemy combatants, to me, that was like, yeah, this is what I want to do.

Alyssa Scolari [10:06]:

That was like an adrenaline rush for you. You were like, absolutely.

Michael Carrasquillo [10:09]:

Oh, yeah. And so yeah, so I joined in January 2003, I started. And I went to Fort Benning, Georgia, did my basic training there, airborne school there. And then straight out of there, was sent to the Vicenza, Italy. I was stationed with the 1/73rd Airborne in Vicenza, Italy. It's an American-based, it's not Italian in any way. It's a quick reaction force, so the idea being, in a time of peace, we have a unit there overseas, where if something happens, we're able to react to that much faster than anyone in the states can. We're the tip of the spear, so to speak. We're halfway there. And so it's one of those things that, it was exciting, because this is really like the first time I'd left the country. Just turned 19 at that point, and green behind the ears and was like, oh, my God, I'm this infantry guy now, I'm this airborne guy now. And now I'm being stationed in Italy.

And then right out the gate, they're like, oh, by the way, we're jumping into Iraq, we're invading Iraq. So I went from basic training and just getting into the military, to being in combat within a few weeks.

Alyssa Scolari [11:19]:

Oh, my gosh.

Michael Carrasquillo [11:21]:

Yeah, a lot to process, a lot to process.

Alyssa Scolari [11:25]:

Right, and zero time to do so. Because it's just like, hey, here we go.

Michael Carrasquillo [11:30]:

Yeah, pretty much.

Alyssa Scolari [11:32]:

Wow, so did things change for you in that moment of like, when it became clear to you that you were going to invade Iraq? Or were you still in that mindset of like, yeah, let's do this.

Michael Carrasquillo [11:48]:

I was terrified, I was absolutely terrified. It becomes real, real fast. Signing up for it, and doing the training, super gung ho, and then you get there. And honestly, it might have just been the fact that being a literal new guy, like somebody who, I'd just got there, I didn't feel very prepared. Because as much as you... basic training, they teach you to march and salute. It's why it's called basic training, you learn the basic things of being in the military. How to make a bed, how to dress in uniform. But as far as how to fight, we spent days at the range learning how to shoot, how to communicate with the team, but I really knew nothing. I mean, I knew nothing. I'd never been in a Humvee, the military vehicle. I'd never been in a Humvee before. Outside of the range, I'd never handled live ammunition. Like these are guys that, when they got the word, they had about six months. I mean, obviously, we train as part of our day-to-day, but this specific deployment, they had trained for six months to really gear up and be ready for it.

And here I am, I show up like three weeks before the event. And at that point, it's not about training, it's about saying goodbye to your families and packing up rooms and getting the gear ready to go. And then going. So I really had no training leading up to that deployment with those guys. And so it was really difficult, really difficult at first. And a lot of these guys were, they had known each other for a long time and they trained together. And I'm this X factor that just shows up, that literally knows nothing. And it was difficult. The first six to eight months, it was not... I messed up a lot. I'd love to say I was this amazing, excellent soldier, but I messed up a lot. And it was just because I didn't know any better.

Alyssa Scolari [13:46]:

Right, how could you not? How could you not? The world is frantic, coming off the heels of 9/11, how could you know any differently?

Michael Carrasquillo [13:57]:

Yeah, pretty much. But I made it through the deployment and I found my way and kind of gained the respect of the guys by the end of the deployment. We were supposed to be there only three weeks, that's what we were told. We jump in, we secure some airfields, they bring in the rest of the army, and then they pull us out. And that's what the families had heard, that's what the wives and the kids and everybody. That's what we packed for, was three weeks. The unit was there a total of 15 months, continuously. And so yeah, about a year and some odd change. And finally, they pulled us out. And at that point, obviously we're a cohesive team and we're clicking on all levels. And I remember we get back from Iraq, and literally we touched down a couple different stops and then our final destination is in Italy, is in Aviano, Italy.

And they're going to put us on a bus to go back to our base in Vicenza. And they say, hey, get it, we're back, enjoy this, celebrate it, spend time with the families. But just know, we just got word we're going back in a year. So this year is going to be all about training. We got to get better, we got to be better than we were before. And we find out quickly after that, that we weren't going back to Iraq, we were actually going to Afghanistan, the next one. And they said, as hard as you thought Iraq was, Afghanistan is going to be worse. And so that was kind of a buzzkill, as we got down. But that started the clock, that gave us an idea that in one year's time, we had to be ready to go back and do it again.

This time, knowing from the start, that we were going to spend a year there. They told us, look, it's going to be a year. And so, it's a lot to ask of a person, of a man, a boy, really, barely.

Alyssa Scolari [15:52]:

A kid, right. You're barely an adult.

Michael Carrasquillo [15:56]:

Yeah. But that was tough. But we spent that year training hard. Spent a couple months in Germany, training in the mountains and really getting ready for it. And obviously, I felt much more prepared by the time that deployment came around. I was leading a team at that time. And yeah, I made it six months through that deployment. And then during a mission, I got ambushed. And I ended up getting wounded. I ended up getting shots. Another guy went down first, and I was kind of dragging him out of the situation. And I got shot twice. And then through the continued fighting, got shot three more times. And then my body was like, you know what, we're done. We're taking a timeout. And I kind of just collapsed. And yeah, was fortunate to survive. And I'm here now.

Alyssa Scolari [16:49]:

No, I was reading, you had what's called, is it the life saving, a type of specific training?

Michael Carrasquillo [16:55]:

Combat Lifesaver.

Alyssa Scolari [16:57]:

Combat Lifesaver, okay. So you had that specific training, so you were actually able, for a little while there, to kind of tell somebody how to care for your wounds immediately.

Michael Carrasquillo [17:09]:

Yeah. So what happens is, the way we did things. Because I'm sure every division, every company, everybody does things differently. But the way we did, you have a four-man team, two teams make a squad. So in your four-man team, there'd always be one guy who went through this course, Combat Lifesaver. You're not a medic, I never claimed to be a medic. They just teach you very, very important skills of how to splint the leg, how to start an IV, how to put on a tourniquet, how to treat a sucking chest wound. The things that like, these are things that are time critical. Because it could take a medic, who knows how long, to get to somebody. So the idea being, if you just know just enough to keep them stable for a medic to get to them, it increases their chances of survival.

So in my team, my four-man team, I was the combat lifesaver. And it was a squad of us. So there was another team and they had a combat lifesaver guy as well. So when I got wounded, which, that's technically why, to explain why I was dragging a guy through gunfire, it's because we were doing an air assault mission. So as we landed, as we exited the helicopter, we got ambushed. They had the high ground, they started shooting at us. I look up the leaves, one of my guys got shot through the leg. But before I knew he had been shot, what had happened was, I had already exited the aircraft. And I was looking back and I just see him on the ground grabbing his leg, and I'm thinking, crap, he stumbled out the plane, he rolled his ankle-

Alyssa Scolari [18:45]:

Right, he sprained his ankle or something.

Michael Carrasquillo [18:47]:

Yeah, something. He's grabbing his leg, something, and I could see that he was kind of, I don't want to say screaming, but I could see he was yelling. And I'm like, ah, maybe he broke something. And so in my head I'm thinking, all right, I'm going to have to splint this leg, I'm going to have to fill out a report. We're going to have call in a 9-line MedEvac and get him out of here. I'm thinking, ugh, this is great. I'm just like, ugh, Jesus Christ, another thing I've got to deal with.

Alyssa Scolari [19:07]:

Right, one more thing I got to do.

Michael Carrasquillo [19:08]:

And then when the helicopter took away, because it's very loud, that's when I heard the gunshots, and I hear him screaming, "I'm hit, I'm hit, I'm hit." And so in that moment, I had to like, I just did what I did. I ran out, grabbed him and started dragging him to what I thought would be safety, a big rock with boulders, trying to drag him back to that. And as soon as I drag him back, my thought was all right, I'm going to have to check his wounds and everything. But as a team leader, you have to assess the situation and you have to coordinate with the guys, and make sure everybody's doing what they're doing, what they should be doing. And luckily, we trained so much. And this was, like I said, we're six months in, we're used to this kind of stuff. Everybody's doing what they needed to do. Nobody needed direction. We all know how to react to this.

And so as I was trying to assess the situation and everything, that's when I got shot again, and I was down. The other team had kind of rotated towards, and that's when the other combat lifesaver guy saw me, and ran over to me. And he started working on me. Now, obviously, bullets are flying, explosions are happening. So it's a very intense situation. And like, we're talking to each other. Because at this point, I'm out of the fight. It's not that I don't want to be in the fight, my body was just like, you're done. You're taking the time out. And so I'm walking through him, like in my mind, I'm talking to him, and I'm like, "Hey, I think I'm in shock. I can't move." And first thing, I'm like, "I hope I didn't get hit in the spine." I don't feel anything, but I'm like maybe I severed my spine, and now I'm quadriplegic. And I'm telling him, "Hey, check my back, do you see anything?" And we're just talking it out.

And he's like, "I see blood." I'm like, "Where?" He's like, "Everywhere." I'm like, "That's not good. Check my spine." I mean, I could kind of move my neck, I could kind of move my chest, but I was having trouble breathing. And what had happened was I had took two rounds to the chest, which my armor had stopped the rounds. But it had shattered all my ribs on one side and collapsed my lung. So I was having trouble breathing. And I'm just like, "Okay, check this, check this, check this." And as the adrenaline was starting to come down, I'm like, "Hey, something's wrong with my shoulder." And so he slid his hand in my vest, and he immediately pulled it out, and it's just drenched in blood. And he's like, "Dude, there's a hole in there." And I'm like, okay.

And I know, again, for my training, entry holes, where the bullet goes in, typically very small, exit holes, very large. The larger the caliber, the larger the hole, it's a very, very big hole. And typically, when someone bleeds out and dies, that's the cause, is the exit hole. And so once he told me, there was a big hole in my back, I said, "Well, how big is it?" And he just kind of held up his fist to me, and he's like, "It's about that big." "All right, well, we need to... You got to get..." I'm recalling all my training, I'm like, "All right, we have these bandages, they're called Kerlix, they're tight packaged." Usually you unfurl it, unroll it and wrap it around somebody. I was like, "Dude, just pop it open, shove the whole thing in there. And just keep packing it as much as you can."

So he starts doing that. And the whole time, luckily the other guys are doing what they have to do. They're repelling the enemy. And we had air support on standby. So Apache helicopters coming in and doing gun runs. It was crazy. And at one point, someone screamed, "Grenade!" And he immediately stopped what he was doing and he just threw his body over me, and covered me. And there was an explosion nearby. And just yeah, it was an intense little bit. I remember he, I think he was a private at the time, a low rank guy, and he started screaming at our platoon sergeant. And he's like, "You got to call those effing birds back in here. We got to get him out of here." And I hear the platoon sergeant screaming back like, "Nope, it's too hot. We can't risk it. Birds come in, they shoot it down or something, then we're really screwed."

And so this guy, he starts, very low rank guy screaming at a very high rank guy like, "You get those [inaudible 00:23:04] effing birds back in here now, or he's going to die. It's going to be on you." And I immediately flashback to Combat Lifesaver training, stage one, reassure the victim, let them know it's going to be all right, he's going to be okay. And this guy is screaming, "He's going to die!"

Alyssa Scolari [23:21]:

He's literally going to die, like he's about to die. Gee, oh, my God-

Michael Carrasquillo [23:26]:

I'm like, oh, man, your bedside manner's not great, bruh.

Alyssa Scolari [23:28]:

Right, we got to work on that.

Michael Carrasquillo [23:29]:

Yeah. But to his credit, he put the fear of God in this man, and they called in the birds. And what they did was, we were on a mountainside, so they just kind of landed like a mile away down this mountainside. Because I remember seeing it land and they're like, "All right, the birds are here, we're going to get you there." And it looked like an ant. It was so tiny, this big Black Hawk helicopter was so tiny. And I'm just like, oh, God, I'm going to die before I get there. And their idea was, they were going to, because, again there's still gunfire and stuff, they wanted to drag me down the mountainside to keep me low. And I was like, "Dude, if you drag me down this mountainside, I will die before we ever get to this thing." I told him, I said, "Hey, man, pick me up, we just run." I have just the same amount of chance, if you pick me up and we run.

And at this point, they had to strip my body armor off, I wasn't wearing my helmet. And I was just like, "We got to go, we got to go." And so they called over another guy, they pick me up. At this point, I was starting to get feeling back in my feet, and I couldn't move anything upper body. I had been shot through the bicep of my left arm, which severed all the muscles. And then I had been shot through my shoulder, I didn't have a shoulder anymore. So at this point, they just picked me up and we hauled ass. We ran down this mountain as fast as we could, and got me to the helicopter. And yeah, they got me out of there. And somehow, I stayed conscious the whole time.

Alyssa Scolari [24:58]:

Oh, my God.

Michael Carrasquillo [25:00]:

Got back to our base. They immediately rushed us into surgery, or me into surgery. And they knocked me out. I woke up three days later at the main base in Afghanistan, which was Bagram. And then from there, got sent to Germany. I was in Germany, at the main hospital in Germany for about a week, which they basically said, "There's nothing we can do for you." They're like, "You're too messed up." From Germany, I was there for a few days. And then they packaged me up and shipped me out. I ended up in Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. And I spent the next two years recovering at the hospital. I spent six weeks in ICU. I actually died twice during this process, that they had to bring me back. But six weeks in ICU, and then about six months, I was an inpatient in the hospital, in the orthopedic ward, where they were rebuilding my body piece-by-piece.

And I should have been in the hospital longer, but at about six months, they were like, "Look, you're good enough that you can kind of get up and walk around." And at this point, there were thousands of guys coming in every day. There were busloads of dudes coming into the hospital. And so they were like, "Look, we need the bed." So if you were able to walk, they put you in a building next door to the hospital. And basically, you would just kind of come in, spend the whole day in the hospital and then go back. It was like a hotel for the overflow. So I was good enough... if not for the so many people, I'd have been in the hospital proper for the whole two years. But about six months inpatient, and then about a year and a half of recovery, where I was just kind of coming in and out for surgeries. Coming in and out for physical therapy, occupational therapy, things like that.

So yeah, and at the end of the two years, I medically retired. I was 22 years old and a disabled veteran, with two combat tours, and a Purple Heart and all these medals, and yada, yada, yada. So it was an intense couple of years.

Alyssa Scolari [27:05]:

And then you're kind of just on your own. And at this point, because I know you mentioned you have a wife, so at this point, you're not married, haven't met your wife yet?

Michael Carrasquillo [27:14]:

No, no. I actually, funny enough, I met my wife while I was at the hospital. She just happened to be someone who lived nearby. Well, actually, she didn't even live nearby. She was visiting family nearby. And it was on one of my kind of excursions out, because you get crazy in the hospital. So once in a while, once I was healthy enough, I would go out and just go to the mall or go, just to get out and do something. And I met her, yeah, I met her at the mall at a CD store. That tells you how long ago this was. Met her at a CD store at the mall. And yeah, that was a whole 'nother thing. But yeah, that's where we met. That's how we met. And then we just-

Alyssa Scolari [27:58]:

So you met her while on the process of recovery?

Michael Carrasquillo [28:02]:

Oh, yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [28:03]:

Fresh off of some of the most intense trauma anybody could ever possibly experience. You're still essentially a kid at 22 years old. At what point, for you, would you say, did the PTSD symptoms start? Because I read that there was like a point in your life where you shifted, like your mood shifted completely. When did that start to happen for you?

Michael Carrasquillo [28:32]:

Yeah, no, that's a fair question. I think the big change came, because for two years, the focus was on my physical health. And as it should be, I was literally dying. And I was literally being stitched back together.

Alyssa Scolari [28:51]:

I mean, right, we can't worry about your mental health, if you're not physically around to be able to get better.

Michael Carrasquillo [28:56]:

Right. And that was the case. And now, let me also specify, it's much different now. This is 2000, let's see, I got wounded in 2005. And it was kind of wild west back then, so many people, they were not prepared for this. And now, mental health is such a much more bigger part of the holistic healing process. So this isn't the case now, but at that time, the sole focus was on my physical health. And once, after two years, once I got the green thumb that like, hey, you're as good as you're going to get. It was like, sign here, you're not in the military anymore. Good luck! And I walked out the door. I never took classes on transitioning back into civilian life, or what to do next. Now-

Alyssa Scolari [28:56]:

No, none of that was even a thing-

Michael Carrasquillo [29:44]:

... you're a disabled veteran-

Alyssa Scolari [29:46]:

... right?

Michael Carrasquillo [29:47]:

Yeah. So I kind of got tossed out. And I did the only thing I could think of, I bought a house in the mountains of Pennsylvania, the Pocono Mountains to just hide away. And I just wanted to be left alone, I'm getting this retirement pay, which is not enough, you're not rich by any means, but it's enough to pay the bills, and I can just live a nice, quiet life. And it's all I needed. And for a couple years, I did that. What I didn't realize was the slow kind of descent into this, this darkness. I mean, physically, even today, I'm not all there. I have severe nerve damage, and I have limitations in my mobility and things like that. But for the most part, I had my health. But there's so much that goes on with survivor's guilt of the guys that didn't make it. The why me? I didn't have a word for it, back then. PTSD wasn't as widely known.

Alyssa Scolari [30:46]:

Yeah.

Michael Carrasquillo [30:47]:

And so I was going through these depressions spouts, I was suffering from severe anxiety. I wouldn't go out. There could be a whole week, I didn't step foot outside my house. And yet, I'm up all night. I'm patrolling my own... which, again, we lived out in the woods. We're a mile from our nearest neighbor. But I'm like doing patrols in my house, triple checking doors and windows and just all these things that I just, I took them as, oh, this is normal. And my wife, God bless her, she didn't know what I was dealing with.

And how could she? And she would ask me, "Hey, are you all right? Is everything..." I'm like, "Yeah, I'm fine. Fine, sure, yeah, cool." But yeah, I was going through a lot, I was going through a lot. And I'm just very fortunate that I had some people kind of get involved in my life, and organizations and people and met the right... Yeah, I got very lucky. because the path I was headed down was not good. And it took me a long, long time to kind of really get to a good place. Because it's a process, but it was good, it was good.

Alyssa Scolari [32:03]:

Yeah, it's a long and arduous process I can only fathom. It's PTSD and survivor's guilt, and also just not even understanding it. And you go from being okay, one minute, to then feeling intensely suicidal. And you feel like you're going out of your mind at some points, I would imagine.

Michael Carrasquillo [32:26]:

Yeah, yeah. No, it was a lot. Over the course of a couple years, so many changes in my life. I mean, I went from being this poor kid who didn't know any better, and then being in the infantry and airborne. We're trained and bred to be the cockiest, SOBs out there. We're invincible, we're untouchable, you have to be, you have to be. We have to believe that. I really, not really, but I really believed that I was unbreakable, I was untouchable.

Alyssa Scolari [32:58]:

You have to, if not, I think the fear of even doing it would be too much.

Michael Carrasquillo [33:03]:

Yeah, yeah. I've explained to people, I'm like, I have to go out on a mission, watch one of my friends die, go back, and then be like, all right, tomorrow, we're going back out. You have to have this mentality of, that can't be me. You have to have this kind of dark sense of humor too, to just kind of mask the pain and the hurt that you're going through. And so then to get injured and survive, it messes with your mental state, it messes with your psyche. I went from the pinnacle of physical health. I was solid muscle, I was fast, I was lethal. Now, I can't wipe my own butt. I couldn't, like if somebody rolled me into a closet, well, that's just where I live now. Because I couldn't use my hands. Both arms were completely encased. If I had an itch on my nose, I had to ask for help.

And so to be 22 years old, and feel that this is the rest of your life, you're going to be this potato that's just sitting here and having the world happen around you, it was devastating to my mental state. And fortunate enough for me, I was able to regain the majority use of my arms and hands. Again, still not perfect, but to what it could be, they were considering cutting off my arms. They really were considering saying, look, the damage is so extensive that you're going to be better if you just cut them off now and learn to use the prosthetics. The sooner you get that started, the better. And I was like, let's give it a little bit.

Alyssa Scolari [34:38]:

Right, let's hold off on that.

Michael Carrasquillo [34:39]:

Yeah, I was stubborn that way.

Alyssa Scolari [34:42]:

Well, for good reason.

Michael Carrasquillo [34:45]:

Yeah, it really played into my mental state, because I felt like I was on the top of the mountain, and now just fell off and rolled all the way to the bottom. And I felt broken and defeated. And again, not having people to talk about, understand and feeling like you're the only one in the world going through this. Obviously, that's ridiculous. But...

Alyssa Scolari [35:09]:

Not when you're in it, it's very real. That's your reality, when you're in it.

Michael Carrasquillo [35:14]:

Yeah, absolutely. And really feeling as if I'm the only person going through this, no one's going to understand me. Because we're trained, suck it up, drive on, rub some dirt in it, get up and keep going, like, you try. And you can fake it for so long, but it wears you down. If you're not able to talk about it and get the help that you need, whether it's counseling or medication or whatever, it will take you down, man. I've seen some really strong guys really, really tumble down. And not even need to be physically injured to go through this kind of stuff. I had the excuse of, oh, yeah, I was physically injured. But I know guys who came out perfectly fine and just spiraled out of control. And I can understand, in talking to some of them, I can understand, you're like, oh, what do I have to complain about? I survived. I came out without a scratch. And it's like, well, that's not the point. It's not that I have an excuse to have PTSD, the fact that it's... Yeah, it's a whole thing.

Alyssa Scolari [36:20]:

It is, it is. And that's, I think to me, is an element of survivor's guilt, which is like, well, what do I have to be upset about? I survived, there are people who are mourning the loss of their loved ones. But I think you make a fantastic point, which is that PTSD truly doesn't discriminate. Not even just being in the army, but even right down to, before I was in private practice and was a trauma therapist, I worked with the police department. And did a lot of work with police. And just the sheer number of police suicides, and people who were not injured, who were never injured in the line of duty, nothing of that nature. The suicide attempts, because of the untreated trauma, the noise in your brain that you simply can't shut off, it doesn't discriminate.

Michael Carrasquillo [37:18]:

Yeah, I mean, sexual trauma survivors, I had a good friend of mine who got into a pretty bad car accident, and came out of in fine, little shaken up, but fine. And she couldn't drive for a while. And I'm like, well, that's PTSD. That's a snapshot, you went through a traumatic event, and it is now affecting your life moving forward. It's affecting you to act, I don't want to say normal, because what is normal?

Alyssa Scolari [37:46]:

Right, what does that mean?-

Michael Carrasquillo [37:48]:

But acting in a way that you weren't before. I once gave a talk at an elementary school, which I thought it was going to be older kids, and it turned out to be much younger kids, which I'm like, I don't think they're prepared to hear this kind of stuff. But I had this little kid ask me, "What is PTSD?" And I had to stop, and really, how can I explain this in a way that such a small child could understand? And so basically what I came up with on the spot, is I said, "When you learn things, when you do things, your brain is changing. You're learning how to do things. When you go through a trauma event, something scary, something happens, your brain is trying to protect itself. It's trying to teach itself, to learn from it." And I said that, "Sometimes you go through this event, and your brain decides, I don't want to do that again. And so we develop certain ways to handle that. It's a normal reaction, it's the way the brain is trying to protect itself. And sometimes that doesn't help us. As much as the brain is intending to help us, it actually makes things more difficult."

I've talked about how, why do I get so anxious when I'm at a market or outside and I feel like I'm being watched, and I feel... It's like, oh, well, because years ago, when I'd be out in the market, I'm worrying about someone blowing me up or shooting me, or a sniper. And even though I know I'm not in that place right now, my brain is correlating the idea of feeling exposed. And so it is triggering a response to say, be on alert. Be on the lookout. Something can happen right now. I was driving one day and a piece of trash kind of blew across the road. And I swerved wildly, and my wife was like, "What the hell?" And I was like, "It surprised me." And she goes, "It was just like a paper bag or whatever." And I'm like, "Yeah, but I don't know, it just..."

I used to drive in Iraq. I used to drive in Afghanistan, I was the driver. And something like that could be, it could be an explosive, bag of garbage or something, it could be an explosive. It could be a guy popping out with an RPG that was hiding behind something. The brain, it's something we can't consciously control. And it's correlating these things that I went through. I remember somebody telling me something about how the way the brain, certain repetitive actions, or certain being at a high level of adrenaline or on edge for a certain amount, changes your brain chemistry. And the idea is, when you're in combat, that is you, you are at 100% all the time. You are on high alert all the time.

Alyssa Scolari [40:39]:

You never shut it off.

Michael Carrasquillo [40:40]:

It's never shut off. I wake up, and it might be different for combat specialty guys who are like... we're sleeping out in the wilderness, we're out where the enemy is. We're not maybe in a big safe base or whatever. But you're on high alert all the time. You're listening for sounds, listening for the slightest change in anything. So you're on this constant level of the highest level of alert. It's equated to a guy who's a defensive lineman in football, where he's watching the movements. He's watching the eyes of the quarterback, he's watching all these things. But he's doing that for 30 seconds of a play. And then he takes a break, then he comes back. But it's like doing that all day, every day, for a year without getting a break. And that fundamentally changes the way your brain operates.

Alyssa Scolari [41:28]:

Absolutely.

Michael Carrasquillo [41:29]:

It's not something you walk away from and go, well, I'm not in combat anymore.

Alyssa Scolari [41:33]:

Right, your brain is still wired for protection. And your brain doesn't stop doing that even when you're home. The hyper vigilance just doesn't go away. For you, what would you say, because you went from being traumatized, having survivor's guilt, which I think PTSD, I think recovery is a lifelong journey. What was the most helpful for you? Because now you're a comedian, you find the joy in life. How did you get to that spot? What was the most helpful for you?

Michael Carrasquillo [42:14]:

Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head in that it's a journey. It's a long road. I still struggle, I still have lots of struggles. I have a service dog, which helps me when I'm out and about in the world, it gives me just a sense of comfort. But for years before I had the dog, I don't like being in crowds. I don't like being outside. I surround myself in my little bubble. I'm happy in my bubble. But no, it's a long process. It's understanding that, for me, and this is for me, because not everybody is the same. For me, it was opening up about it. And being okay to talk about it. And this is something that took years, years, this is not an easy solution.

But I had a really great guy come into my life, became my mentor. And I would watch him talk to people, and just open up about all these things. And I'm like, oh, my God, they're going to think you're crazy. They're going to think you're a psycho, you can't admit to having those thoughts. You can admit to having those feelings. And he always did it so easily. It fascinated me. And I started studying him like, how can you do that? How do you do that? I remember one day he told me, "We all carry this baggage with us, different types, different sizes, all that. And if you can equate it to, when I tell my story, when I share what I'm going through, I'm extending out some of that baggage. And I'm saying, hey, can you help me carry this? And the load gets lighter." And I called BS. And I was like, "That's ridiculous, that's not how it goes."

Alyssa Scolari [43:45]:

That's a bunch of shit, yeah.

Michael Carrasquillo [43:48]:

But I started, little by little. "How are you doing?" Instead of just the, "I'm good, I'm good." "It's good days and bad days." Little by little.

Alyssa Scolari [43:58]:

Even that little shift, that little, subtle shift makes such a difference.

Michael Carrasquillo [44:03]:

It does. And over time, I was able to kind of open up more and more with my wife, with my family, with my friends. And once that started to lift some of the burden, I realized, oh, I like this feeling, I want more. And so opening up more and sharing more, and started seeing therapy. And because therapy is such a bad, dirty word...

Alyssa Scolari [44:24]:

So stigmatized, yeah.

Michael Carrasquillo [44:25]:

Yeah, but it helped so much. For a little while, I was on medication just to help with some of the anxiety, help with sleeping and things like that. But pretty soon, over the course of a long time and creating relationships and understanding I'm not alone, and accepting that this isn't unique, this isn't something only I've gone through. And I can talk about and I can share with it and connect with people, opening up my circle more and more. Yeah, it helped over time. I got to a pretty good place when people started coming to me and letting things off their plate, and I could be there. It's being there for someone else. And starting to get out of my own head of, my own problems are the worst thing in the world. And being able to share that. And then hear what someone else is going through and empathize with them and sympathize with them. And go through it with them and give them advice and listen to them.

So once I was starting to give of myself, that was a big game changer. It was all in steps. First, it was admitting that I'm not okay, then it was opening up, then it was being there for others. I started doing volunteer work and just getting out of my own head. And being a positive influence. And then that changed things. And then eventually, I got into a place where I was okay, as physically as good as I'm going to get, mentally, pretty darn good. And then, okay, what can I start to do to challenge myself? I've grown to the edges of these boundaries, now how can I break those boundaries? How can I extend past them? And so for one thing, comedy came into my life.

And basically, I heard about this program for veterans, like, oh, they teach the arts, they teach writing and music, all these different things. But one of the things that caught my eye was this comedy stand up class. And for someone who doesn't like being the attention, I don't like being the center of attention. I don't like everyone looking at me, I don't like everybody waiting for me to say something. I don't like that feeling. I figured, wow, this is the way to literally, it's the sensory training where you put yourself in that situation and learn to be okay with it. And really, when I started it, [inaudible 00:46:43] it's a six-week class, once a week, do a little performance at the end, and you're done. And I was like, cool, this will be my, I'm just going to go through it, I'm going to check it off the list, I did it. I've learned something and I'm going to move on.

But in the process of going through it, I fell in love. It was so, for me, therapeutic to put my thoughts on paper, and to make the decision to take traumatic things in my life and massage them a little bit, to make them funny, and to find the joy and laughter. I talk about being shot in my standup. I talk about that day. I talk about my recovery and some of the things that I went through. But always in the vein of like, hey, let's laugh together about this. How ridiculous is this?

Alyssa Scolari [47:33]:

Right, like, this is so surreal, and so unbelievable.

Michael Carrasquillo [47:36]:

Right, exactly. And so that was a big step forward for me, in being able to make light of it and control the narrative in a way. It was weird, because with comedy, you want it to be based in reality, but the fact is, you've got to punch it up a little bit to make it funny. And so having, in essence, having this paintbrush to paint the story the way I wanted to, and to make it my own, it was kind of therapeutic. And nothing like getting a laugh, I was addicted to making the audience laugh, and it was such a good time.

I did it for a while, I did it for a couple years. And then my son came around and I took a step back, because I wanted to be good dad, and I'm not going to be some traveling comedian that's on the road 50 weeks out of the year. And so I took a step back with that. And then like a year later, pandemic hits. So just as I was about, all right, I'm ready to start getting back out there and doing comedy, and then the pandemic hit.

Alyssa Scolari [48:34]:

Of course.

Michael Carrasquillo [48:35]:

But that's how I ended up falling into doing a weekly live show online. And it's been awesome, because I can do it from home and I can get all that fun stuff out, and do what I'm passionate about, but still be around part of my family.

Alyssa Scolari [48:51]:

Here's what's also really, really beautiful to me, as I hear you talk. It's like, I think back, as you're telling me, to the bio that I read, where it's like since everything that you've gone through, you have also done other things like skydiving, scuba diving. And then I think back to what you were telling me about how you were truly an adrenaline lover, addicted to adrenaline. And for people who develop PTSD, it's very, very tough to get that love for adrenaline, because typically, our brains compute that as like, oh, this is danger. So to me, you stepped back into yourself truly. And that is, I think, the most beautiful thing. You are that person again. You have been able to get back in touch with yourself when PTSD pulls you so far away from yourself.

Michael Carrasquillo [49:50]:

No, it's true. It's absolutely true. I rarely pat myself on the back, but something I do feel is true, is that I'm a better version of myself now than before I got shot. As awesome as I was, I'm a better version of myself now. I'm much more humble and have humility and appreciative and want to give back of myself. And all those adventures came from a time when, like I said, as I was trying to expand this bubble and grow past myself, I realized I had opportunities in front of me, if I would just be open to them. And so it became anything that gets put in front of me, I'm going to say yes to. And so being a disabled veteran, especially at that time, there was all these organizations like, hey, we'll take you fishing. Hey, we'll do this. And hey, we'll do that.

And I wasn't broke, but I wasn't made of money. So I was like, I can't do those things. But oh, no, no, we'll pay for you. Travel included and equipment included. And so I said yes to scuba diving, I said yes to skydiving. I did a veteran exchange program where I went to Israel for a week. And they sent Israelis to the States. And so I did that. And I traveled, I went to Germany, went to Venezuela. And my wife's from El Salvador, so I traveled to El Salvador. I just started trying to challenge myself and just say yes, be open to opportunities. Not everything's going to click, I did a golf program where you learn to play golf. And they even get you these really nice clubs and everything. I absolutely hated it, hated it, hated it with a passion. The clubs are still sitting in a closet somewhere.

But there are things that, I really enjoyed the scuba diving, I really enjoyed the skydiving. I played racquetball for a little while. There is professional racquetball out there, I helped the professional Racquetball Association create its first division for disabled people. Because I was like, look, I can't be the only one that's enjoying it. There's no way I'm going to compete with these guys that are full abled, full bodied, whatever you want to call it.

Alyssa Scolari [52:06]:

Right, with people who haven't been shot.

Michael Carrasquillo [52:08]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [52:09]:

It's not right.

Michael Carrasquillo [52:10]:

But we created a division and got guys with, amputees that are playing, we got a wheelchair division, things that... It's been an awesome ride. And then it eventually, after a couple years, it went full circle where I hadn't been working, I hadn't been doing anything other than charity work and all these adventures and things like that. And I got to a point where I was like, you know what, I think I'm ready to get back to work and do something. Not just do stuff, but have a vision, have a goal. And I wanted us to have, we had a small little house, and I felt at a place where like, I want more, I can do more. And I got a job and started working and doing stuff. And obviously the service dog helped with that a lot. To be able to tolerate certain things. But then yeah, my son came around. And it's been an adventure. It's been something.

Alyssa Scolari [53:08]:

And with every word that you speak, all I can think to myself is, you are rewriting the narrative and actively changing those patterns in your brain that tell you that every single thing is a danger. You're getting out there and you're proving yourself and your brain otherwise.

Michael Carrasquillo [53:27]:

Yeah, it's not easy. It's not easy.

Alyssa Scolari [53:30]:

No, no, oh, God, no.

Michael Carrasquillo [53:32]:

I still deal with a lot of self doubt, I question myself constantly, anxiety. If I send out an email, I'm like, did that make sense? Are they going to think I'm weird? All these things, but I have to constantly just not let those voices take over and just like, no, do it. Trust in yourself, you've done it, you've been okay, just keep going. And I slip up, I make mistakes. Something me and my wife have developed a long time ago is, being comfortable not being comfortable. And so I have days where nothing necessarily needed to happen, I just wake up and I'm in a mood. And so we've coined the term, I'm blue. That's just our thing. And so if she spots it, or if I spot it myself, I'll be the first to tell her, "Listen, it's one of those days, I'm blue. I just need..." And she knows, okay, he needs some space, he needs some time. I'm here, he knows I'm here.

Or if I'm struggling with something and I'm having a lot of anxiety, my wife will be like, "Do you need some time? How are you doing?" And we just check in with each other. Check in with myself and check in with her and it's been helpful to have that support, it's an effort. It takes a village. But good days and bad days, but more good than bad. So that's a good a thing.

Alyssa Scolari [54:52]:

Yeah, yes. Wow. So this show, can you just remind, I know I said it in the intro, but can you just remind the listeners, where can they find you if they want to hear more?

Michael Carrasquillo [55:08]:

Sure, sure.

Alyssa Scolari [55:09]:

And by listeners, I mean me, because I want to hear more.

Michael Carrasquillo [55:12]:

No, yeah. So POP Culture Warrior, which is my show. It's a weekly live show, so we do in front of a live audience, live virtual audience. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. The places that we go live are Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter actually has, Periscope as its live thing and then our website. But yeah, it's a fun show. I have a passion, obviously, for comic books and movies and video games and things. So each episode, I'll just talk about what you know what's happening this week in those categories. And then we started doing celebrity interviews, believe it or not, it. I had a couple people I knew from my travels, who hopped on. And we did a call and we talked. I've had Clark Gregg, who was Agent Coulson in The Avengers. Louie Anderson, who's a legendary comedian, Matt Iseman, the host of American Ninja Warrior. So I had a couple friends of friends who came onto the show, and it was obviously well received.

And so we just kind of made it a thing. And now, I mean, we've had amazing people; actors. We just had, literally when was it, today's Wednesday, so yesterday, I was talking with Efren Ramirez, who was Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite.

Alyssa Scolari [56:24]:

Oh, that's so cool.

Michael Carrasquillo [56:27]:

Yeah, we had a great conversation yesterday. And it's awesome, because it's very interactive. The audience can participate, ask questions. It's all super interactive. Actually, right now. I mean, if you can get to the page, I don't know when this is getting released. But we're doing a giveaway. We hit one of our goals. And so like, I'll send out care packages full of pop culture swag, and things. I've been given autographs from different events and different things. And so I give away celebrity autographs and it's just a fun thing to thank the audience for hanging out and being part of it. So yeah, it's POP Culture Warrior, like I said, Twitter, Instagram, or wherever. One of my nephew's made me start a TikTok, I'm not going to be putting up TikTok videos, but-

Alyssa Scolari [57:10]:

Ha, you have a TikTok, me too.

Michael Carrasquillo [57:12]:

I mean, for the show, I might post some stuff. But anywhere you can find social media, look up POP Culture Warrior.

Alyssa Scolari [57:20]:

POP Culture Warrior.

Michael Carrasquillo [57:21]:

Yeah, we're around. And it's a fun show. It's Tuesdays 8:00 PM until usually question mark, but the first hour we do the headlines, and in the second hour, we'll have a celebrity guest or some type of guest. And yeah, it's been really fun. We're at 57 episodes and going strong.

Alyssa Scolari [57:41]:

Awesome.

Michael Carrasquillo [57:41]:

This fall is going to be intense, I've already had some conversation with some pretty big stars, talking like the leads of movies that are coming out this fall-

Alyssa Scolari [57:51]:

Nice-

Michael Carrasquillo [57:51]:

... will be [crosstalk 00:57:52]. So yeah, it's going to be pretty cool. We're building to something awesome, so I'm excited.

Alyssa Scolari [57:57]:

Oh, that's so cool. I will link that, I'm also going to link the articles that you had shared with me in the show notes for the listeners. So you all can check out those articles. That is POP Culture Warrior, POP Culture Warrior, we'll be putting that in the show notes as well. Thank you isn't honestly even fitting. I don't want to thank you, because it doesn't feel like it would do it justice. But I just am expressing sincere, genuine and overwhelming gratitude for your vulnerability, your strength and just the way that you are humanizing this process. Because I think a lot of people can see wounded veterans as just... I feel like we don't humanize them enough. And you're doing that, you're doing that. And you are fighting the good fight. And I am so thankful you're here.

Michael Carrasquillo [58:59]:

I appreciate it. Thank you. And thank you for carrying some of my baggage for me. I appreciate you and what you're doing. So yeah, this has been fun.

Alyssa Scolari [59:09]:

Thanks for listening, everyone. For more information, please head over to lightaftertrauma.com, or you can also follow us on social media. On Instagram, we are @lightaftertrauma, and on Twitter, it is @lightafterpod. Lastly, please head over to patreon.com/lightaftertrauma to support our show. We are asking for $5 a month, which is the equivalent to a cup of coffee at Starbucks. So please head on over. Again, that's patreon.com/lightaftertrauma. Thank you and we appreciate your support.

In this unique episode of Survived & Thrived Stories, Alyssa breaks her silence about escaping from an abusive relationship. Almost 8 years to the day after her escape, Alyssa opens up about how she came to know and love a man who hurt her in unimaginable ways.

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE

Check out the Light After Trauma website for transcripts, other episodes, Alyssa's guest appearances, and more at: www.lightaftertrauma.com

Want to get more great content and interact with the show? Check us out on Instagram: @lightaftertrauma

We need your help! We want to continue to make great content that can help countless trauma warriors on their journey to recovery. So, please help us in supporting the podcast by becoming a recurring patron of the show via Patreon. Every bit helps!

Transcript:

Alyssa Scolari [00:23]:

Hi friends. How are we doing? Welcome to episode number two of the mini series, Survived and Thrived stories. I apologize that it has taken so long to come out with the second episode. There's been a lot going on, as you all know, I just moved to a new state. So things have been a little hectic. We were in the process of like selling our old house and decorating our new one. And it's just been a lot. So, thank you so much for your patience. I know that the first one was really popular. A lot of you reached out and a lot of you really were grateful that I started a series like this where you can write in and share however much or however little of your trauma journey and recovery journey as you want.

As for myself, I think we're going to do this episode a little bit differently today. For those who have written in, I am going to get to your story, absolutely. But I also know that I have been promising that I would create a podcast episode where I would share a little bit more about my journey of recovering and escaping from my abusive relationship. On July 14th. I shared on my social media that it had been eight years since I left. And I got a lot of messages asking if I could share more or people telling me that it was really helpful to hear that I was in an abusive relationship. So I thought I would create a podcast episode where I talk more about it. Not necessarily in such detail, because I do want to be mindful. This is a very triggering subject.

So just a trigger warning, we are talking about domestic violence. We are talking about an abusive relationship, and I'm going to share a little bit more about what that process was like for me in as much time as I can. I think I could talk for days, but I will try to condense it. So this is really going to be my own story, my own survived and thrived story. So essentially, I'm writing into myself for second episode. And then in the third episode, I promise you, I will get back to the letters. Again, I know I've taken a long break as the first one launched in May and it is now July, but thank you so much for your patience and understanding.

I feel nervous about this, actually. Excited, but a little nervous because one of the first things that people had said when I shared that it was eight years since I left his house, was that, "Oh, I have no idea". And I think there's a reason for that, it's because I did my best to keep it hidden. I think aside from my family members and my husband, I only have one person in my life who really knows what it was like to be with him. She saw me through the process and that's one of my best friends, Irvashee, who was also on the podcast, I think episode 27, I think, where we talk about cultural whiplash. So she helped save my life. I will say no more, no less, because that's pretty much exactly what happened. So if we take it back eight and a half years ago, actually even more than that, right? Let's take it back to like 15 years ago, because that is when I first met this guy. He was/is significantly older than me and I met him and was just enamored.

So it was a little weird because as much as I liked him back then, it was literally illegal to be in a relationship with him. So we just stayed friends. And I had a feeling that he liked me, but lots of things that like made me feel like he liked me. He would pick me up in the middle of the night and I would sneak out of the house and looking back now, I'm like, oh, that is so creepy. But I was a kid, I was a teenager. And I truly thought that I was head over heels in love with this older guy who's paying attention to me. So fast-forward, I guess maybe five-ish years, five or six years, and then we started dating. I was an adult. He was still significantly older than me. And there was a lot that happened that I won't go into, we were on again off again. And there were certainly red flags in the beginning of the relationship.

He would tell me he wanted to hang out with me. I was in college. So I would come home from college and he would tell me that he wanted to hang out with me Friday, Saturday, Sunday don't make any plans. So I wouldn't because I was young, dumb and in love. And he would tell me we were going to hang out and then he would come pick me up. Friday night would come and I would maybe get a text from him around like 8:30, nine o'clock. And he would be like, "Oh, I decided to go out with my friends instead". And then I would sit at home alone, "But I'll see you tomorrow". Saturday would come. I would be waiting for him to pick me up. Same thing. "Oh, sorry. My other friend needed me". Okay.

I spent so many weekends on my couch sobbing because he told me he would come get me, come pick me up, we would hang out, told me not to make plans so I wouldn't make plans with anybody. And then he would just not come get me. And I didn't realize this back then, but looking back on it now, I see that's part of his grooming process. It's part of what he does. It's part of how he isolated me. I ended up not talking to any of my friends, not seeing my family. And he would say all the things I wanted to hear, but then would choose his friends if a better opportunity came up, but I would be sitting by myself at home on the weekends.

So time went by and we got closer and closer. And then something happened in my home. Things were tough back then, and I was really desperately seeking a way out. And I was in a lot of pain. I was really hurting. I was looking for somebody who would listen to me, believe me, hold me, tell me that everything was going to be okay. And he was exactly that. He knew I was hurting. He knew what was happening. And he told me that I should move in with him. And at 21 years old, I thought that that was the best idea ever, because I'd get to escape from all of the terrible things that are going on in my life and I get to move in with this guy that I thought loved me. So I moved in and I didn't tell anybody. I told people that I was still living at college. I was living a double life. I was going to school full-time. I was telling my family I was staying at school. I was telling my friends that I was staying at home because I had people that I lived with.

I had six people that I lived with. And that's how it went. And things really started to change maybe a month or so after I moved in. It definitely wasn't all fun and games. My mental health started to really deteriorate because of the manipulation that I was experiencing. The, I want you, and I want to keep you close, but I also want to keep you hidden. So we're not going to tell anybody that we're together and we're not going to tell anybody about this and we're going to hang out during the week, but I'm going to go out by myself on the weekends. And you're not really allowed to go anywhere. At one point, I had my keys and my phone and ... Well, not my phone, but my cell phone charger taken away from me so that I couldn't charge my phone. I had a tracker on my phone and it happened fast. I don't even have a timeline for it really because one minute I was like, oh, yay. I'm moving in with this guy. And the next minute, all of my privileges were gone.

And he manipulated me into wanting certain things and thinking a certain way about those around me. He manipulated me into feeling like nobody else in the world loved me and supported me. And he made me feel like I was just better off as a secret than as anyone else of importance. And I went with it because I felt like even though this might not be the perfect love, any love is better than no love, right? Wrong, spoiler alert, very, very, very wrong. But that's how I felt at the time. I was desperate to be heard and seen and loved. So I waited. I waited for him to come home at the end of the day. I couldn't wait to talk to him.

Sometimes he would give me the time of day and sometimes he could not be bothered with me. And all of that psychological manipulation and abuse caused me to further deteriorate. I began self-harming, which scared him. And I became angry, very angry. And he also didn't like that. I was more to be seen and not heard. And he really made me feel that I was broken and there was something wrong with me for having the feelings that I had. At one point, I tried to get away in the middle of the night. And I remember that he ended up literally falling asleep on top of me so that I could not leave without him knowing. I couldn't even get up to go to the bathroom.

And it went on like this for months and it got worse and it got worse and worse. My mental health got worse. My self-harm got worse. And eventually, I started to fight back and I started to question things and talk back to him. And he hated that. And he got so sick of me. He got sick of me really fast. And eventually, my family found out where I was staying and they tried to get me home. I wouldn't come home. I couldn't really pick up the phone. I couldn't answer the phone. Didn't have my phone most of the time. And even if I did, I wouldn't have picked up because even though I hated where I was, I didn't want to go home. And for reasons that truly are not for this podcast, but I wasn't going home.

My family told my friends, my friends found out, and my friends completely disowned me. They, I believe at one point actually told me I was crazy. They had an intervention with me and they did their best. They were working with the tools that they had at the time, but they essentially shut me out. And pretty much kicked me out and friends that I had gone to high school with, friends that I had known since middle school, people that I had known for years, totally iced me out. Right? Which is something that doesn't get talked enough about, is this idea that when you're in an abusive relationship, the people around you lose patience with you, they ice you out, they shut you out because they're like, "I'm sick of telling you, this guy is bad for you" or "You're crazy", or "You're unhinged for being with somebody like this".

And people just go away. People don't step in and say, "What do you need?" Instead, people get mad, like I did something personally to them by being in this type of relationship. And they were so offended that I lied to them and should I have lied? No, absolutely not. But I did what I had to do in that moment to survive. And sadly, they felt that me lying to them was just unforgivable and I get it. It happens. So we don't talk anymore. So I lost my friends, lost a lot of my family at the time and was very, very isolated. And I had people calling me, leaving me messages, telling me I needed to come home. And I just couldn't. I got to a place where I was so stuck. I didn't want to stay with him, but I couldn't leave. I literally couldn't leave.

When I tried to leave, I got a lecture about how the world is a dangerous place and I will never be able to make it out there. In fact, I wasn't even allowed to drive to my classes. At one point, he started driving me to my classes. So a lot took place over the course of six months. I was traumatized in ways that truthfully, I still can't really talk about. Things happened that I'm still not comfortable sharing. Some of those things include physical altercations. I was hurt pretty badly, nothing permanent, but still physical altercations. And just a loss of privileges that every human should have and a loss of autonomy over my own body. So I didn't get to choose whether or not we were together, whether or not we were intimate, it was his choice. And if it was his choice, then I wasn't allowed to talk about it. I wasn't allowed to speak about it with anybody. I had to keep that to myself.

It was really hard and it left a ripple effect on my life that I don't have words for. I got out and I talk a little bit about how I got out in the blog post that I recently wrote that you can find on lightaftertrauma.com. It's titled, I Escaped With My Life because I truly did. The day that I left, I still don't really know why he let me go. I think that he was so sick of my crap. So sick of me needing to go to a crisis center because I felt really suicidal. So sick of the self-harm, just so sick of feeling like he had to take care of me because I had deteriorated so quickly that he just was over it and I was able to escape. And I can't say that I never looked back because just because I knew I had to leave didn't mean that I didn't love him anymore because truthfully I did, I really did.

And I share that because I think that a lot of people feel a lot of shame about this. Even though people have abused us, we can still love them. Yes, that is very common. That happens a lot. And that was the case with me. It took me a long time to fall out of love, to even figure out what had happened. I didn't even start realizing that it was trauma until I was about six, maybe five or six years after it happened. For the first five years, I told myself that it was my fault. I told myself that I was the one who was the bad person. I somehow on my head and made it all my fault, my responsibility, and carried immense guilt, wherever I went. It wasn't until a couple years ago that I really am able to see the situation for what it was. And it's not until now that I'm able to share some parts of it. You got a very brief description of what was months and months of brutality.

But what I want you to know, is that I got out and you can get out too, if you're in this situation or if you were in the situation and you got out, I want you to celebrate because so many of us don't celebrate. I got out and just felt terrible about myself. But the thing is, that some people don't ever get out. Some people don't make it out with their lives. And like I said in the blog post, there's no way of telling which of us will get out with our lives and which of us won't. And there's nothing special about me that caused me to get out. I'm not so strong because I got out. I just did. I just got lucky, I guess I don't really know, but I know I got out and I know that with the years left that I have to live, I've made a very, very intentional decision to speak out about things like this and to help other people and to be who I needed back then, because I think I would have done a lot better if I had somebody like me back then.

So if you've been there, if you're in it, if you're afraid you might be getting into it, know that you're supported, know that there's a home for you in this podcast, in this space. Know that I really do understand and know that you can get out. It's scary and it's dangerous and it's not something you should ever do on your own. There are so many resources out there for you. I've had Forever Your Overwatch, who I think is now Safe Way NJ, on the podcast episode and they are the podcast and we did a whole episode about how they have a program, a nonprofit program, that is helping survivors of domestic violence to get out of their situation safely.

There are lots of non-profit organizations that help. There's also the domestic violence hotline. For those of you that may need it, I am just going to list that number here, which is it is 1-800-799-SAFE. Again, that's 1-800-799-7233. Or you can text "start" to 88788. That is the National Domestic Violence Hotline. I do believe that is only in the United States, but please don't quote me on that.

So if that is needed, please call. I wish that I had known about hotlines like this. I didn't even know at the time that what I was in was domestic violence. I didn't know that it was abusive, but I'm here now. And I'm so grateful for this podcast. And I am so grateful to be sharing my story. Every year around this time, it always hits me pretty hard and I get pretty depressed and I have flashbacks. And this year, I think was the hardest. And I think it's because something shifted within me that told me that it's time to share my story, which is why I'm here today, talking about this, shedding light on this. And that's it, really. This isn't a podcast episode where I've got 10 great tips for getting out. This is just me sharing my story because it feels like it's time.

And I know I'm not alone. I know I'm not the only one. I have worked my rear end off to be in therapy, to look at the reasons why I ended up in that relationship in the first place, not to say that it was my fault because I did not ask for what happened. It was not my fault and it's not your fault. But I was able to really reflect on reasons why I ended up with him and why I was so attracted to him. And therapy was really helpful for that. And fast forward eight years later, I am with somebody who is truly the kindest man I've ever met. And I say that even if he wasn't my husband, I would say that because he is so safe and I feel lucky, but at the same time, I also know how hard I have fought to be able to have somebody like him in my life.

So I want you all to know it's possible. And I want you all to know how much you are loved. And if you have listened to this far, I want to thank you for tuning in. This is going to be a wrap on episode two of the mini series, Survived and Thrived. I am done talking for now, but I will be back with more solo episodes because I like this. I like chatting. It feels like I'm talking to some of my closest friends. So thank you again for your love and your support. If you haven't done so already, please subscribe and leave a rating for the podcast. If you can leave a review, that would be fantastic. But if not, please leave a rating. I would very much appreciate that. Also, head over to lightaftertrauma.com for additional episodes, if you are looking and if you would like to in your story, because we are still doing the Survived and Thrived stories.

As I said earlier, this is just a little bit of a different take where I am getting to share one of my stories. So I will be reading more of your letters. I've got them in my inbox. Please write into [email protected]. This doesn't have to be somebody who has it all figured out because let's be honest, that's unrealistic. Recovery is a lifelong journey. So if you feel compelled to write in and share where you're at in your journey, I would love to hear from you. And it would be so helpful for everyone else as well. So I look forward to hearing from you and to connecting. Have a wonderful day. I am holding you all in the light.

Thanks for listening everyone. For more information, please head over to lightaftertrauma.com or you can also follow us on social media. On Instagram, we are @lightaftertrauma and on Twitter, it is @lightafterpod. Lastly, please head over to at patrion.com/lightaftertrauma to support our show. We are asking for $5 a month, which is the equivalent to a cup of coffee at Starbucks. So please head on over. Again, that's patrion.com/lightaftertrauma. Thank you and we appreciate your support.

This week brings us part 2 of a two-part episode with friend and spiritual guide, Drew Assini. Drew shares his recent experience with working in an inpatient facility in Tennessee. As trauma survivors, we tend to spend a lot of time getting wrapped up in our own thoughts. In this week's episode, Drew and Alyssa get into the importance of sometimes turning down the noise in your head so that you can also tune into your intuition, or gut feelings. Drew shares how his intuition is ultimately what propelled him to leave Tennessee and head back to his home state before preparing for his next adventure to Guatemala.

Drew's Website

Check out the Light After Trauma website for transcripts, other episodes, Alyssa's guest appearances, and more at: www.lightaftertrauma.com

Want to get more great content and interact with the show? Check us out on Instagram: @lightaftertrauma

We need your help! We want to continue to make great content that can help countless trauma warriors on their journey to recovery. So, please help us in supporting the podcast by becoming a recurring patron of the show via Patreon. Every bit helps!

Transcript:

Alyssa Scolari [00:24]:

[inaudible 00:00:24]. It's so hard. It's so, so hard. So when you say, "I'm really glad that I was able to hold that space and hang out in that space for a little while," how was that helpful for you? How was that rewarding for you in your journey?

Drew Assini [00:44]:

I mean, so through grad school and then teaching a couple of years later for a couple of years, yeah, I mean, I got the whole DSM therapy skillset, which yeah, I mean, there's a lot of similarities that I find in the different approaches in modern counseling and modern psycho-therapeutic approach and interventions to other healing modalities and other understandings of the human experience. Yeah. So I felt like that was cool. And then also, as much as I got to see cool things, I also got to see stuff I didn't want to [inaudible 00:01:24]. So I definitely didn't want to be the super cognitive, no feelings involved kind of guy. I didn't want to be the super blank slate where everything that a person says is just projecting on you. In that world, we would say, I come from a more humanist type perspective.

Yeah. It was just cool. And then it allows me to have conversations with other healers who currently identify as counselors within the current paradigm. Because we don't have a healing profession. You're coming of age in modern society in America and there's no avenue for ... Well, I guess now maybe a little bit more as far as a holistic or alternative approach to healing or medicine, but it's not as clearly defined as say, okay, be a counselor or be a mental health counselor or a drug counselor. And so for me, that's where I went. And then as a result of my own journey professionally, personally, I blossomed into whatever it is that I am now. So it feels cool to be able to then have conversations with you or with other therapists or with other mental health professionals. And it's like, yep. Yep. I know about that. Yeah. That was cool. That wasn't cool.

Alyssa Scolari [02:45]:

The good, the bad and the ugly, man. But you're right. There really isn't kind of a direction you can go to be more sort of holistic and I think really experiential. It's like, all right, counselor, therapist, psychologist, et cetera. Now I think what I see now popping up more is a lot more people who are going into what is called coaching. And I don't know specifically the regulations on it, but I speak with some of these people who are coaches and I actually get so pissed. And you want to know why I get so pissed? Because they do shit that I would lose my license for. And I'm not talking bad shit. I'm not talking bad stuff. But they're like, yeah. So with my clients, I'm hosting this retreat. This retreat, we're all going to meet here. It's going to be a weekend of X, Y, yoga, healing, meditation, what have you. I would be in jail. I mean, okay. I probably wouldn't be in jail. But I would get in so much trouble because that's considered a boundary violation. I am pretty good friends with this person who is a coach and she's like, "Can't you have some of your clients on a retreat?" I was like, "No. Absolutely not." I get so jealous because I'm like, I should've just been a coach because in the coaching industry, there's room for a lot more of that stuff.

Drew Assini [04:23]:

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Also, I don't know, I feel blessed where I'm at now because I have the very specific and in-depth training that we're afforded as licensed mental health professionals.

Alyssa Scolari [04:36]:

Totally.

Drew Assini [04:36]:

But now I've stepped through and beyond that to where I can work in more of utilizing a coaching framework, more so than the traditional clinical kind of model. But I mean, there's benefits. My brain keeps going to I don't know that I need to sing kumbaya and roast s'mores with my heart surgeon. Just go do the thing and then we don't have to hang out anymore. So for some people, it might be way cooler to be able to go and see a professional like yourself without any of the extras, to just really be able to hit some specific, deep thing that they don't want to deal with anymore and they don't want reminders of. And so, yeah, I guess I can see the value of it. It's also cool to grow into a place where it's like, all right, that isn't necessarily how I want to show up or how I'm most effective, and so now I'm going to step into this non traditional kind of do what feels right vibe. But again, I mean, I have the varying ethics also drilled into my brain. So I'm aware when there's a gray zone or there's like, oh, okay, that's a boundary. How do we want to handle that?

The other thing too, I would throw out is that coaching is a different way to work than counseling. But even within the clinical world now, I got to see a lot of the more experiential stuff that's starting to become more accepted, more empirically supported, as far as psychodrama, sociometry and a lot of the more experiential stuff. So it feels like psychology is figuring some stuff out, but they're not the only game on the block.

Alyssa Scolari [06:21]:

Yeah. No. I think the psychology world is definitely making steps in the right direction. I think we're trying to break down just the symptom management because I think for a while there, it really was just about symptom management. My passion is always to go beyond that. I just always want to dive so much deeper than symptom management.

Drew Assini [06:44]:

Yes. I'm with you. The other thing that's dinging in the back of my head is also just if somebody's come in with trauma, like if we have acute trauma or active trauma in our system and we're looking for support, or help, or we want to do some work, or we want to find some relief, we should do our homework. Because while the coach might be really cool, like, oh, I want a coach and a lifestyle coach, and I want to go on retreats, that might not be the most appropriate individual or that individual might not have the education or the training or the experience to be able to go to the depths, to be able to hold the space, to be able to go through protocols like EMDR. So yeah. It just felt like an important thing to throw out there.

Alyssa Scolari [07:24]:

Yeah. Absolutely. Have you ever done any EMDR?

Drew Assini [07:27]:

I personally have not, no.

Alyssa Scolari [07:29]:

I have not either.

Drew Assini [07:31]:

I'm just an old school exposure guy when I do that stuff. Listen, you got to feel it. Let's create the containers and provide the skills, everything that we go through. But ultimately, at the end of the day, you got to lean in to the thing that you're running from if you want your experience to change.

Alyssa Scolari [07:48]:

Can you expand on that, the word that you just said, container? Because I think that's really important too, when it comes to trauma work.

Drew Assini [07:56]:

Oh yeah. You got to have a super firm, super solid container to be able to go deep. When I was working at the treatment center in Nashville, I was very clear with the guys. I'm like, "Look, I'm going to be soft. I'm going to be present with you. We're going to do a lot of mushy, emotional related stuff. And we can do that work because there is a very firm, solid container around it. And if anybody comes to challenge that container, you're going to get a whole different version of Drew that shows up," because being the threshold guardian is a much different role than being the facilitator of [inaudible 00:08:28]. And so, yeah, I mean, that's why, I don't know, residential settings in some ways are the most ideal environment to go as deep as possible because there's a lot of outside noise that's turned down and a lot of support that's turned way up.

Alyssa Scolari [08:45]:

Absolutely. I think that's one of the biggest appeals for a residential. Is that right? All that stuff can come to the surface and you're safe. You have all the support. You have as much support as you can possibly get. Yeah. I like the idea of being able to do the work outside of residential, but I also acknowledge that with some types of trauma ... Sometimes I feel like my healing would have catapulted itself, I would have healed a lot faster if I had just gone to residential.

Drew Assini [09:17]:

Yeah. I mean, again, my most recent experiences are at that level of care, so I'm a little biased. But yeah. I mean, there's a way to make a lot of progress and improvement in a short time period when the person doesn't have to deal with all of the life responsibilities and go in and out of the treatment setting or in and out of that supportive container, when they're just in it. It's like I watched a slow cook happen. And then when it was time to go a little bit deeper, it was much easier to get there when folks were spending a week or two weeks or six weeks in a controlled environment with supportive staff around the clock and a community vibe.

The work we did in Nashville was really, really cool. I was just going to say, before I had gone there, I was always a little gun shy about working with trauma. Because I got trained mental health, but most of my background was with addiction. And so I was good at doing the addiction flavor. And as I continued in my own journey and also working with folks, it's like, oh shit, this addiction stuff is the surface; underneath is the trauma. And so yeah, going to do the work in Nashville was the first time I'm like, all right, I'm going to go do trauma work. And I was a little scared at first because I'm like, all right. But it was so cool, man, and so amazing to be a part of that. Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [10:48]:

It's absolutely beautiful. I love that experience for you. To me, that shows the growth, and it's kind of like what we said right in the very beginning, which is, even when you think you've got it all, you don't. There's always something else that comes up. And I think even you, like you said, at 40, you're still having these moments of, I think, significant growth, significant turning points.

Drew Assini [11:15]:

Totally.

Alyssa Scolari [11:16]:

And I love that because the journey, I think, is never ending, which is not a bad thing. I don't see that as a bad thing.

Drew Assini [11:25]:

No. I mean, yeah. It just keeps getting cooler and weirder and more fun.

Alyssa Scolari [11:31]:

Right. Cooler, weirder, more unexpected. You're like, all right. I never saw myself doing this, but here I go.

Drew Assini [11:38]:

No. Yeah. My life is definitely not the result of me figuring it out or picking what I would want. And it feels like the most recent shift has been one of now honoring my heart and my gut over my head with some stuff. So working down there in Nashville, I mean, six months working acute trauma, it takes a toll. As rewarding as it is to see all this beautiful growth and change, transformation, it still takes a toll to be in that space and to be supporting folks.

Alyssa Scolari [12:22]:

Yeah, hugely.

Drew Assini [12:24]:

So my heart and my gut were kind of like, all right. There was a natural lull in the census. The census dipped a little bit. And my heart and my gut were like, all right. Now's the time to take a break, go to something new. But my head was still trying to figure out why everybody should do their jobs better and why management didn't know what they were doing, and I need to figure this out. And I was still caught up in dramas in my head, but my heart and my gut were exiting the building. And it felt like one of the first times in my life where I didn't let my mind or my brain or my thoughts be the final gavel on a decision. I just leaned in with the heart and the gut and put in my notice and started to look at plane tickets. And it's weird, man. It's so weird. But it's cool. It seems like it's the next chapter, so I'll roll with it.

Alyssa Scolari [13:23]:

It feels like it's how we're meant to live. How much more peaceful would we be if we just followed our heart and our gut wherever they took us and turned off the noise in our head and was just like .... Would any of us choose to do the same thing for the next 40, 50 years of our lives? Would any of us? Who knows? I get we're creatures of habit, but if we turned off the noise in our head, what level of experience could we turn this up to, the human experience?

Drew Assini [14:03]:

It's a cool question.

Alyssa Scolari [14:05]:

I mean, the moment I started doing that was the moment I started loving life so much more. It was like, I'm getting out of my head and just doing what I want. For the longest time, I had this pool right in my head of I have to say in New Jersey. I have to say in New Jersey. It makes sense to stay in New Jersey. I was born and raised here. But my heart and my gut were like, you need to get out. You need to get out of New Jersey. And I think I just got to a point, and this was actually fairly recently, over the last couple of months, where I was like, fuck this. I can't be in the space of my head is telling me it makes more sense to do this, but my heart is, no. You are meant to do this shit instead. And I've just been rolling with it. And I'm like, all right. We're leaving Jersey. Goodbye, New Jersey. I'm changing things up with my career because it's just what my gut is telling me. So yeah. I feel like that's the best nugget of advice is to try to turn the noise off in your head.

Drew Assini [15:12]:

And I would offer that maybe it's not turning the noise off, if that doesn't resonate for somebody. If you can do that, do that.

Alyssa Scolari [15:20]:

We're just turning it down.

Drew Assini [15:22]:

Or just not giving it the same credit. If you were going to do a play or you were going to make a movie or whatever, certain people's opinions about your movie, you would value more than others. And so part of stepping out of systems that no longer support us or dynamics that are dysfunctional or toxic is learning how to reprioritize what perspective we value or what truths we're actually going to align with. And I think if we can do that internally as well, where it's like, okay, okay, mind. You're cool and you keep me safe a lot, but also, I want to live so maybe when it comes to this part of my life, you're going to be number two or number three behind my heart and my gut.

Alyssa Scolari [16:08]:

Yeah. Kind of changing the pecking order, so to speak.

Drew Assini [16:12]:

Yeah. Yeah. Just playing with the relationship dynamics and how we value them. Yeah. Easier said than done, of course.

Alyssa Scolari [16:24]:

Easier said than done. Absolutely. But you know what I noticed? When you really start to tune into your gut, I think I have a better relationship with myself than I ever did before. I can truly feel when things are and aren't right for me. Whereas before, I might be like, all right, let me think about it, and then I would stress about it for six months and never make a decision. Whereas now, if somebody's saying something to me, my stomach immediately is like, nah. I could physically feel the changes happening in my gut. It's letting me know. And I'm more in tune with that now that I've, kind of like you said, I've reprioritized what I'm listening to in my body, and now I'm more in tune with my gut than I've ever been before, which actually has truthfully made me physically healthier too.

Drew Assini [17:23]:

Sure.

Alyssa Scolari [17:24]:

When you're tuning into your gut. Because I mean, it also is the same thing with how am I going to nourish this body? How am I going to take care of this body today? I feel like my gut just speaks to me. Is that a weird statement? It probably is. Whatever.

Drew Assini [17:36]:

I think it's awesome.

Alyssa Scolari [17:41]:

Whatever.

Drew Assini [17:41]:

So good. So good.

Alyssa Scolari [17:48]:

So you're out of here in a few days.

Drew Assini [17:51]:

Yep. Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [17:52]:

Guatemala.

Drew Assini [17:53]:

Yeah. For a little bit. And then who knows?

Alyssa Scolari [17:57]:

Are you going to be producing any new episodes of The Driveabout Podcast?

Drew Assini [18:02]:

That's on the radar. Yes. Yeah. I tried to get the season finale, the long overdue season finale, to season three done while I was in Nashville. But yeah, I wound up getting a piece of food stuck in my esophagus and had to go to the hospital.

Alyssa Scolari [18:22]:

Oh God.

Drew Assini [18:22]:

Oh yeah. It was a whole thing.

Alyssa Scolari [18:24]:

Oh shit.

Drew Assini [18:27]:

So maybe I could get the third season done finally while I'm here in Jersey and then maybe season four can be a Guatemala experience.

Alyssa Scolari [18:37]:

So you were choking to death? You said, "I got a piece of food," very casually, "Got a piece of food stuck in my esophagus, had to go to the hospital." What?

Drew Assini [18:48]:

No. It's apparently a thing that's super common that I did not know about. But yeah. I've noticed for me that I sometimes am not super mindful when I'm eating, especially when I'm eating with other people. So if we're in conversation, I get all fired up and then I forget to chew things. It also doesn't help that I've gotten a bunch of molars taken out over the last couple of years. But yeah, so this piece of pulled pork was delicious and apparently I didn't chew it well enough and so it got stuck in my esophagus. Now, I could still breathe, but it couldn't clear. And so without being too graphic, I spent three hours, my body trying to purge and clear this piece of food that was stuck in the folds of the esophagus before finally having to go to the hospital. And then they knocked me out and threw a tube down my throat.

Alyssa Scolari [19:39]:

I didn't even think that was a thing.

Drew Assini [19:43]:

Apparently it's a really common thing. So I did not know about it either, but yeah, it was not pleasant or a lot of fun.

Alyssa Scolari [19:52]:

No. Holy crap. Yeah. So were you literally about to record the finale? Your plan was to do that?

Drew Assini [20:03]:

My plan was to record the finale, and then a day or two before, that happened. So then I was trying to record the finale, but I still had med head, I was all wonky and my throat was still scratchy because they put a tube down it. Sometimes it's actually really challenging for me to record an episode because the inner critic gets real loud and nitpicky.

Alyssa Scolari [20:27]:

Well, I was just going to say to myself, look at that symbolism. I was going to record the season finale and I literally got something stuck in my throat. Look at that symbolism.

Drew Assini [20:43]:

Apparently I should have been shutting up, so that's what I did.

Alyssa Scolari [20:51]:

Yeah. Not the right time. You aren't quite ready for it. You were like, I pick the hospital.

Drew Assini [21:00]:

No, I didn't pick the hospital. Life picked the hospital and I just tried not to freak out about it. I was happy though because I didn't get shitty with the personnel there. A lot of times when I'm in physical pain, because I have some recurrent physical stuff, like I've gotten kidney stones in the past, and when I'm in physical pain, I get mean, and I don't know, and just the less than my best. And I prefer not to treat people like that. So I was very proud of myself that despite the hours of anguishing pain, I wasn't too cranky or [crosstalk 00:21:34].

Alyssa Scolari [21:33]:

Yeah. Because that sounds terrible. Although, as an aside, I can't imagine an angry you. I can't.

Drew Assini [21:39]:

Oh, well that there is such a thing. Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [21:45]:

I just can't fathom an angry Drew. It's not-

Drew Assini [21:50]:

Well, it's just another thing that's been a part of the journey. Because as a younger being, I would cry a lot and I was sensitive a lot. And then being in the environment family system, I was not having necessarily healthy coping taught or modeled, then that sadness turns into anger. And so then as a teenager and in my early 20s, I had some white, hot rage that would come out of me. But then I also was there for what happened when the rage came through, and so that became part of the wisdom cycle to then help me start to move differently. But yeah, I still like to cuss and throw shit sometimes.

Alyssa Scolari [22:31]:

Sometimes you need to.

Drew Assini [22:31]:

Absolutely.

Alyssa Scolari [22:32]:

Yeah. That's the point that I think that I've been battling with over the last I think maybe six months or so it was just the white, hot rage. That's where it's. At all the shit I couldn't feel. And now, I mean, it is exactly, as you said, a white, hot rage. I'm much, much, much better now. But catch me three months ago, I was like ... Well, it wasn't good. It just wasn't good. But it is what it is. I survived and I have a much better handle on it. I think I never let myself feel anger for largely all of my life. And then 20 plus years worth of anger just sort of hit me when I turned 29. It was like, hey. I was just a bear for months until I figured out how to just be with it.

Drew Assini [23:32]:

Yeah. Yeah. Beautifully. Yeah. Because some family systems, anger is not an emotion that's allowed.

Alyssa Scolari [23:39]:

That was my family. Yeah. I mean, my dad was the rager, so it's like, he's angry so none of us were allowed to be angry. So yeah. Yeah. Even that though in itself, it's a beautiful experience. Not in the moment, but to be able to look back on it and be like, I was there and now I see that rage and I feel it, yeah, sometimes I get mad and throw shit, but not the uncontrolled rage I used to have just a few months ago.

Drew Assini [24:14]:

That's beautiful. And then when we don't have the shame and the judgment on the backend, it doesn't keep that cycle spinning. Like you said, if I can get angry, and maybe it's not the best thing, but I don't beat myself up, I don't judge myself, I don't shame, then there's an opportunity for something new. It feels like shame and guilt and judgment are things that really just keep funkiness in a spiral.

Alyssa Scolari [24:44]:

They keep you stuck. Yeah. They're the defenses that keep you from healing. They're the defenses that keep you from feeling the shit that you really need to be feeling. Absolutely. That's another thing is I feel like I've really kicked shame, not so much judgment, working on that one, but shame to the curb, where I'm just like, yeah, no, I threw some shit last night. It is what it is.

Drew Assini [25:09]:

Nice.

Alyssa Scolari [25:10]:

I'm not in jail, nobody's dead. And you know what? I didn't hurt myself. Whereas before, when I had mismanaged rage or rage that I was always taught not to feel, well, what was I doing? I was hurting myself. I was cutting myself. I was taking it out on myself. I stopped doing that. And when I stopped doing that, then I started to really feel the rage. But you know what? I would have rather go through that to get to a point where I no longer feel like I have to cut myself or I no longer feel suicidal because I'm angry.

Drew Assini [25:10]:

It's where it's all about.

Alyssa Scolari [25:44]:

It's a good place to be.

Drew Assini [25:46]:

Hell yes.

Alyssa Scolari [25:50]:

So are you still working with people?

Drew Assini [25:55]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [25:56]:

Okay. So you still have, it's Helping Folks Remember?

Drew Assini [26:03]:

Yes, ma'am.

Alyssa Scolari [26:03]:

My favorite. That's the best website ever.

Drew Assini [26:10]:

I just tried to make it as accessible from as many approaches as possible.

Alyssa Scolari [26:16]:

I mean, it is. It's perfect. It's perfectly Drew.

Drew Assini [26:21]:

And that's been part of my struggle is, okay, what am I? What's the title or the label? Am I a counselor, am I a coach, am I a teacher, am I a this or that or the other? And then the other thing that's been challenging is, okay, what do I actually do? And what I've discovered recently is that part of the difficulty for me is that I actually do different things with different people. So some folks I can do almost a reading with them where they show up and it's like, all right, just tell me stuff and I'm going to give you insights into yourself and then you can go have fun with that and we're done. It's just a one-off. But then with other folks, I might be support through a certain experience, through a certain time in their life. And then for other folks, I'm literally taking them step by step and introducing them to themselves and teaching them how to ground in a more mindful, more kind of aware experience. Yeah, so it's always been tough. I see these coaches and counselors on the interwebs and they're like, you have to brand yourself and come up with a fancy label and a logo and this is what I do.

Alyssa Scolari [26:21]:

So much pressure.

Drew Assini [27:31]:

Yeah. And it's like, well, shit. I do a couple of different things.

Alyssa Scolari [27:34]:

Right. It depends. It depends on the energy that's between you and that person.

Drew Assini [27:41]:

100%.

Alyssa Scolari [27:41]:

The interaction. It totally depends. But I love that because I think that makes you more versatile and I think it's also about self-preservation. You're able to honor what feels right for you, which is good. It's very hard, I think, for some therapists who feel like they have to be mainstream, like I'm CBT. Well, what if you have something that doesn't feel like it's the CBT type of case? You're able to honor that. So right. Whether it's spiritual guide, coach, facilitator, whatever it is, it works and it's beautiful.

Drew Assini [28:24]:

Yeah. It is cool to settle more into just a self-acceptance, where it's like, oh, okay. This is sort of what I am. Not clearly defined because it's all fluid.

Alyssa Scolari [28:38]:

It's all fluid. It could change tomorrow.

Drew Assini [28:42]:

But I feel like I spent a lot of time in the past trying to invest in being something a certain way so that it was more digestible or receivable for others, and that's just never felt authentic. And so it's like, yeah, here I am. I do what I do. If you want to hang out, let's go. I'm pretty decent at being able to point at some things or supports and stuff. And if we vibe, then we vibe. Yeah, I mean, I even think back to the private practice days where it was like, especially if you're accepting insurance, it's like you have to do a billion sessions a particular way with certain documentation in order to get a couple of monies, and just that whole grind. Yeah. It's just like, nah, no thanks. I'm good on that.

Alyssa Scolari [29:34]:

That grind is yeah, no, it's not something I could ever ... I mean, I don't take insurance for that reason because I need that freedom and flexibility for my own sake. And I don't want to have to see 95 people because you do all this work. It's the grind for sometimes I think can be very little money and then you end up having to see lots and lots of people to kind of make ends meet, and then you just burn out. To be at the hands of insurance companies is not a good feeling.

Drew Assini [30:14]:

Yeah. Yeah. I always liked the idea of doing it private pay and then like, hey, we can charge you your copay rate so you feel like you're getting whatever, but I don't want to deal with all the paperwork.

Alyssa Scolari [30:28]:

Right. It's way too much work. It's way too much work and it makes the process, I think, less experiential because it's just more about, sign this thing and I got to sign that thing and I got to submit this thing and I got to call this company. Then you feel like an admin. I'm like, I didn't sign up for this shit.

Drew Assini [30:48]:

Right. I got to hire an administrative assistant or a clerical guy.

Alyssa Scolari [30:52]:

Right. I can't do this shit.

Drew Assini [30:56]:

The coolest work that I feel like that I've gotten involved in is when folks were willing to put a couple monies down ahead of time. And I don't usually have a number for it, but I've just been like, all right. What's the number that'll keep you honest? And put all that down and now we're going to work together for a period of time. Yeah. Because the monies is one level. But the way our current society works is if I invest a certain amount of money, I'm going to invest also some effort and some attention along with that.

Alyssa Scolari [31:29]:

Exactly.

Drew Assini [31:32]:

And I'm looking for people who want to invest time and effort and energy. And when shit starts to get weird or the feelings start to get uncomfortable, are you going to be willing to lean into that, because that's where the healing is going to happen. And if you're only paying 25 bucks and you can just write it off, that's when a lot of people disappear from the process too.

Alyssa Scolari [31:51]:

Right. People aren't nearly as committed.

Drew Assini [31:55]:

Yeah. They go find somebody else who promises them 100% self acceptance in 20 days with no bad feelings. That's total horseshit.

Alyssa Scolari [32:05]:

Right. They dive into a game, a fucking board game of Candy Land, and they're just like, here we go.

Drew Assini [32:13]:

But I mean, yeah, I guess I get it too, because if I'm already struggling, I don't want to struggle anymore. I want a happy ending promised with a bow tied on it. But the reality of healing is that we're going to get to a good place, but we got to do some work. We've got to feel some stuff and go through some stuff.

Alyssa Scolari [32:36]:

Right. We're not just putting a bandaid over this. We're going to rip out the core, we're getting to the source of the infection and we're treating it. And it gets ugly before it gets better. It gets way worse before it gets better sometimes. But the better is, it's incredible. It's a much more fulfilling life.

Drew Assini [33:00]:

Which is why I feel like rushing folks to be ready for stuff, whether it's the healing, forgiveness or whatever, it's going to take what it's going to take and that's going to be as much time or as much energy and as much pain as each of us individually needs. But then when we're ready, we'll bring it and then we'll be able to really honor our goal and our intention.

Alyssa Scolari [33:24]:

Absolutely. I often get people that ask me the question of, well, how many sessions do you do? And I don't have an answer to that. The answer to that question could change, honestly, every hour. It depends. It all depends.

Drew Assini [33:43]:

Even at residential, the guys would come in, and I was working with mostly men's population, they would come in and they're like, "All right, how long am I going to be here?" And I'm like, "Do you just want to check boxes on a calendar or do you want to do the work?"

Alyssa Scolari [33:55]:

Exactly.

Drew Assini [33:55]:

"Because the work has no timeline. And it could be three weeks, it could be four weeks, it could be eight weeks. But if you're here to do the work, the time is totally secondary."

Alyssa Scolari [34:06]:

Right. That's the least important thing here is the amount of time. It's the fact that this is what you're doing. That is the most important thing is just be here. Don't be worried about an end date to this because you'll get there. I think that goes back to, I think, the major theme of this discussion, which is what we were talking about earlier is maybe reprioritizing, maybe turning down the noise in your head a little bit or shifting it because I think that's a lot of people in their head. All right. How long is this going to take? All right. I know I'm going to be back on May 24th and then I'll make sure that I contact so-and-so, let them know I'm going to be back. You know what I mean? It's like, all right. Let's take that and let's put that on the back burner. Let's go grab your heart, your gut, and let's bring them up to the forefront here.

Drew Assini [34:56]:

Nice.

Alyssa Scolari [34:58]:

So yeah, no, I hear ya. I hear ya. Well, I'm so happy for you. I can't wait to see what the journey brings you. You're home now. I feel like there's even been so much change in the last six months. It's been awesome to hear about your experiences. I can't wait to see where you're at when I talk to you next.

Drew Assini [35:21]:

Yeah. I'll try to be somewhere else fancy or exotic.

Alyssa Scolari [35:25]:

Somewhere fancy shmancy.

Drew Assini [35:27]:

Yeah. I can't promise.

Alyssa Scolari [35:29]:

I'm going to request under a waterfall somewhere.

Drew Assini [35:34]:

All right. It might make for poor audio quality though when we do the call.

Alyssa Scolari [35:41]:

You're right. I didn't think that one through. You could just be petting a tiger in a jungle somewhere. I'd prefer that.

Drew Assini [35:52]:

I'm open.

Alyssa Scolari [35:55]:

So thank you so, so much for coming on. Of course, for the listeners out there, I'm going to link Drew's a website so you can check him out. Helping Folks Remember. Of course, there's also his podcast, which is The Driveabout Podcast, which is good. It's, what do you call them? Drewisms. You call them all types of things.

Drew Assini [35:55]:

I don't call them that. Other people-

Alyssa Scolari [36:18]:

I think I made that up. I think I made that up.

Drew Assini [36:24]:

I just call them things I say.

Alyssa Scolari [36:29]:

I have coined them Drewisms.

Drew Assini [36:29]:

Nice.

Alyssa Scolari [36:33]:

So I will link all of that. Thank you kindly.

Drew Assini [36:39]:

Yeah, this was fun. Thanks. Yeah. I look forward to chatting again whenever we do it again.

Alyssa Scolari [36:47]:

I know. Me too. Me too.

Thanks for listening, everyone. For more information, please head over to lightaftertrauma.com or you can also follow us on social media. On Instagram we are @lightaftertrauma and on Twitter it is @lightafterpod. Lastly, please head over to at patreon.com/lightaftertrauma to support our show. We are asking for $5 a month, which is the equivalent to a cup of coffee at Starbucks. So please head on over. Again, that's patreon.com/lightaftertrauma. Thank you, and we appreciate your support.

[Singing].

The spiritual friend and guide that we know and love, Drew Assini, is back with a two-part episode! During his last appearance on the podcast, Drew shared about his journey from addiction to world traveler and spiritual guide. On this week's episode, Drew and Alyssa dive deep into the feelings that are coming up for him as he finds himself back in his home state. You'll love this candid conversation about the importance of holding space for all of the trauma-related emotions and doing so can be incredibly beneficial for the healing and recovery process.

Drew's website: www.helpingfolksremember.org Drew's Instagram: @helpingfolksremember The Driveabout Podcast

Check out the Light After Trauma website for transcripts, other episodes, Alyssa's guest appearances, and more at: www.lightaftertrauma.com

Want to get more great content and interact with the show? Check us out on Instagram: @lightaftertrauma

We need your help! We want to continue to make great content that can help countless trauma warriors on their journey to recovery. So, please help us in supporting the podcast by becoming a recurring patron of the show via Patreon. Every bit helps!

Transcript:

Alyssa Scolari [00:23]:

Hello, friends. How are we doing today? Welcome back, you know what time it is. This is the Light After Trauma podcast, I am your host, Alyssa Scolari. Welcome to another episode. We have a special guest with us who has been on the podcast before, you all love him, I love him, he is the greatest. It is Drew Assini. He was on one of the earlier episodes. We talked about, I believe the title was remembering what we seem to have forgotten, which is... It's an awesome episode. If you haven't listened to it, make sure you go check it out and he's back because why wouldn't we have him back? He is amazing. So like I was saying, we are catching up with Drew, I guess it's maybe been six or seven months since we recorded the episode. And the last time we talked with him, he was in Thailand, right? You were, I'm pretty sure.

Drew Assini [01:30]:

I think so.

Alyssa Scolari [01:33]:

He was somewhere. Pretty sure it was Thailand, and we talked about a lot of good stuff. So in terms of what we're talking about today, we don't have a specific plan because that's just how we roll. When guests sign up for once something on the podcast, there's always a little note where. It's like, please share anything that you feel will help prepare for our meeting. And the one thing that Drew shared was three words, buckle your seatbelt, and I have done so, and I am ready. So we have with us guide, facilitator, fellow traveler on this wild ride called Life, Drew Assini. Hello.

Drew Assini [02:24]:

Hello.

Alyssa Scolari [02:26]:

Welcome back.

Drew Assini [02:28]:

Yeah. Thanks. It's an honor.

Alyssa Scolari [02:30]:

So you're in Jersey now.

Drew Assini [02:35]:

Yes. I think the last time we spoke, I was in Thailand and then I spent about the last six months in Nashville, Tennessee, Music city, USA.

Alyssa Scolari [02:46]:

That's right. I saw on Facebook that you were in Nashville, which is actually one of my favorite places to be. What made your decision to go from Thailand to Nashville?

Drew Assini [03:02]:

So I connected with some folks there in Nashville who were doing, I want to call it more like healing than counseling or treatment, but it was a treatment organization that had multiple levels of care. But the focus was on a much broader holistic and comprehensive approach to healing and working at the root level, and also working experientially as much as just a talk therapy. So I don't know. I've struggled with what the heck I am, or who I am. You know what my role is. And I stepped out of the formal clinical counseling space, but then this was an opportunity to step back in, but to remain true to how I'm understanding healing, and awakening and be able to work. Yeah, to be able to work on at that Fringer at that connection, and it was really cool.

Alyssa Scolari [03:58]:

Yeah, because I know when we talked last time on the episode we did a couple of months ago, you were actually just getting ready to let your license expire, your license to be a clinician. But in a way you have become an expert on things that are different types of healing I think, rather than your traditional talk therapy?

Drew Assini [04:27]:

Oh, yeah. I'm always tentative with that expert word. Because as we think we know stuff, we get a little weird but yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [04:37]:

Right. Not in the sense that you're all like, "Oh, I'm Drew and I know everything about holistic healing." Not that type of expert, but this is just your wheelhouse-

Drew Assini [04:49]:

Okay, yeah. That feels good.

Alyssa Scolari [04:51]:

In all the years that I've known you, it just feels this is where you thrive. I think you fit into the healing world and the healing process, but not into the clinician. Like that may be just isn't your jive. You go where life takes you.

Drew Assini [05:20]:

Yeah. which is at times dutiful, and freedom, and at other times completely terrifying and you don't know what's next.

Alyssa Scolari [05:30]:

Do you get terrified because you... I'm just going to add a little side note here. So I talked to my therapist about you and the work that you do. But just for the listeners out there, there was like one time, and I want to say it was maybe a month or two after we recorded the first podcast. That I reached out to Drew and I asked him a question about some shit that I was dealing with, with one of my clients that I was bugging out about. And one of the things that he said to me, that honestly it was really I think life-changing for me, was to don't get lost in the chaos. And I think that's a perfect... That is who you are. You are somebody who I think exists and brings so much healing just by being, but you do not get lost in the chaos of the world and other people. I don't know, does it feel like that for you?

Drew Assini [06:35]:

No.

Alyssa Scolari [06:35]:

No?

Drew Assini [06:37]:

Yeah.

Drew Assini [06:38]:

All right. How does it feel for you? Because when you said that to me, and there were a couple of other things that you said to me, it hit me really, really hard. And it has truly fundamentally changed the way that I... Some of the ways that I operate in my practice, I have much less stress, I'm much more laid back, and just exactly what you said, I don't get lost in the chaos. I stand outside of it, or even if there is a hurricane. If I am dealing with a case where there feels like a hurricane or even a hurricane in my own life, I try to step into the eye of that hurricane. Where everything is calm and peaceful. Which I don't know if I would have done if you didn't really give me that reality check of, you're in the chaos right now come back down. I don't even know if you remember us having a conversation about that?

Drew Assini [07:35]:

Yeah, I remember us connecting to chatting. Yeah, that's beautiful. That's awesome, babe.

Alyssa Scolari [07:39]:

It truly was altering for me on a personal and professional level. But you don't see yourself like that, you feel like you're in the chaos.

Drew Assini [07:51]:

I think it's hard to see ourselves, I guess, the way other people see us sometimes. And yeah, there's definitely periods of time where I have less internal noise, and less stories and dramas and Drew flavored shenanigans. And then there's other times, we're sort of kind of, right? Now actually, as I'm back home visiting family members in New Jersey, there's just a lot more invitations to chaos and drama that show up. I feel they're always there, it's just do we have the calm, or the perspective, or the discipline to be able to resist what feels like a tasty little morsel, but really turns into a whole shit show. And that just comes with some pain and some wisdom, it's an experience too.

Alyssa Scolari [08:49]:

It's like trial and error type of shit.

Drew Assini [08:52]:

100%, yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [08:56]:

So how is it for you, and if I'm asking too much, of course, tell me to back off, but what does-

Drew Assini [09:04]:

No, we good.

Alyssa Scolari [09:05]:

... Feel like for you to be traveling and out and about on your own and having all of these incredible experiences. But is going home like walking back in, like are there lots of flashbacks? What is your experience being back home?

Drew Assini [09:25]:

It's weird. I feel to a certain degree I stepped out of my immediate family system a couple of years back. And that was terrifying, and I had a million reasons why I shouldn't, but it was just like my heart and my gut were moving and I went with it. And so then to come back and spend a little bit of time here, and buy a little bit I mean nine days. Like that's it.

Alyssa Scolari [09:51]:

Oh, you're only there for nine days?

Drew Assini [09:53]:

Yeah. The last time I came home was for five days and now this time it's nine, we'll see how that works. Because I'm just not the same dude, or the same being, or the same whatever, that used to fit into this family system into this dynamic. And so now I'm home and I get to visit with my mom, and my dad, and my sister, and her family, and the little nuggets, niece and nephews. But it's weird because the system has re-regulated a little bit with me not as a main character. It's like they rewrote the story and I'm no longer a starring role, which comes with a variety of feelings. Now it's a little sad but I mean, it's also what I've come to discover is, I'll take the peace and the ease that I have as whatever I am on a regular basis over the concessions that I was making on a regular basis to be a part of a family system where I couldn't show up fully. So some are with it, but there's feelings there.

Alyssa Scolari [11:06]:

Yeah. And this is honestly coming off the heels of, although I guess it's not even coming off the heels. But after an interaction with some of my own family members a while back, this is resonating with me very, very, very deeply. As you're speaking, I'm like I got that feeling going in my gut, I'm like, "Oh shit I know exactly what he's talking about." But I think it's important. I actually think this is a really, really painful, but important thing to talk about when it comes to, especially complex PTSD and interactions with family members.

Alyssa Scolari [11:47]:

So what I hear you saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know if I'm projecting. But it's like your not that same guy that fit into that role to be able to continue the dysfunctional system. You've changed. And when you changed, you stepped away. You removed yourself from the dysfunction. So the whole system, the systems either it's going to change for the worst, for the better, differently, but you're not in it. And what I hear is that your system, the family system has shifted, so that you're not as much a part of it. Which is, I think the situation for a lot of people is that. Am I understanding that correctly?

Drew Assini [12:33]:

Yeah, like I said.

Alyssa Scolari [12:35]:

I feel that way so strongly with a lot of my family members where now that I have changed so much, and I'm no longer perpetuating the dysfunction. I've removed myself from the dysfunction, I remove myself from the gossip, the this, the that, the he said, she said drama, et cetera. When I come back and I experience when I'm in a setting with my family, I'm very clearly written out. Which is sad, it's very, very sad. But I love what you said about the peace that I get from not being a part of that on a daily basis, I will choose that over the discomfort I get from a temporary interaction in which it's very, very obvious to me that I don't belong.

Drew Assini [13:33]:

Yeah. It feels I now get to star in a different TV show, and this one's cooler, or this one feels more like the role or the character I would like to play. Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [13:45]:

How are you dealing with the... Because it is better, but it still brings up terrible feelings. How do you deal with that? Because I struggle with that too. There are things that I have witnessed in the last couple of months and I'm just like, "Yeah, no. No, this clearly is not my path anymore."

Drew Assini [14:12]:

Yeah. I think in general healing has added it's core, or could have added it's core reworking of the relationship with feelings in general. So the last six months in Nashville I was working with folks, and at a core of that work was like, listen, we have to normalize all the feelings, and we got to get used to feeling all of them. Because as long as we play the game of I want these feelings, but not those feelings, we're at the mercy of a lot of the stories we make up around certain feelings or certain situations. So I think through mindfulness and meditation and yoga and community, and a lot of the things that are a part of my regular experience now, a wider variety of emotions are okay. And so then I'm able to step into different situations or more challenging situations, and the feelings that come with that. And it's never one feeling, it's a weird combo, like the image-

Alyssa Scolari [15:25]:

Caught in the web.

Drew Assini [15:28]:

... Well, the thing I'm seeing is, you know the movie Inside Out?

Alyssa Scolari [15:31]:

Yeah.

Drew Assini [15:33]:

So in the beginning of that movie, there's all the different colored emotions. But by the end, they're having multiple colors in one memory. So it's like this-

Alyssa Scolari [15:42]:

Right. The marbles rise to the marbles, [crosstalk 00:15:46] a memory. And by the end, you have more marbles that are blended, right?

Drew Assini [15:51]:

Yes.

Alyssa Scolari [15:52]:

... Dual colors, triple colors, then you have marbles that are just solid.

Drew Assini [15:58]:

Yes. And so as we mature, as we develop, ideally we're having experiences that we're able to acknowledge have multiple facets to it, multiple feelings to it. And so today at 40, versus me at 30, versus me at 20, versus prior versions of me, I'm more cool or more okay with a wider variety of those combinations and those slavers. And that then... The way I understand it, that directly translates into my ability to have peace in the present with whatever might show up.

Alyssa Scolari [16:34]:

Yes, because you're allowing space for all of it to it.

Drew Assini [16:37]:

Yeah. Cool.

Alyssa Scolari [16:37]:

That's what I hear, right? Is that I'm making space for by not just saying, well, this is all good, this is all bad, or this is all... If we're going with the inside out, we're going to make this marble blokes, this is all just sadness. It's no, there's... It's very complex, hence complex trauma. It's very complex, then there's space for all of it. And I think that's when you allow yourself to have space for all of it, is what helps the most with managing it. I don't know, am I making sense? I'm trying to think of an example-

Drew Assini [17:18]:

Yeah. And when we say, oh yeah, and when we say it, we mean life and all of the life happenings.

Alyssa Scolari [17:28]:

All the life, happenings. And I think it especially rings true for any trauma survivors who struggle with family stuff. It's like, "Well, my family has X, Y, and Z toxic trait, and they did X, Y, and Z." And people struggle over like, "I can't just cut them off and say that they're dead to me." And it's like, no, you don't have to do that. It's okay for all of that to exist.

Drew Assini [17:55]:

Look, I worked with folks recently where it's like, "Okay, my specific parent is responsible for some of the trauma for some of the abuse, but also I love him." And it's how to both of those things show up. That's hard. Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [18:14]:

That's where it gets [bleep] complex. It's like, yes, I have a parent, or this family member, or this person who was directly responsible for, even like for me, eating disordered stuff. I know part of what contributed to my eating disorder was just watching every single person in my family talk about how fat they were, talk about how disgusted they were with themselves beyond diet, after diet, after diet. So I know that part of where my eat part of it, where my eating disorder stuff comes from is directly related to some of my family members. But damn, I still love them. That's where it's so hard.

Drew Assini [19:03]:

And can that just be okay? Do we have to do something about that, or can that be something that we're able to sit with and notice, and feel into? And yeah, it's hard. That space... I mean, that' also the space where, beautiful changes and transformations happen.

Alyssa Scolari [19:29]:

That is the space where the magic happens so to speak. That's the space that I think a lot of people, most people have a lot of trouble. Most people are like, well, I know my dad did this, but I still love him, but I can't... And people are tormented by it. They are tormented by having the black and white thinking, is what torments us. It's like, well, I still love him, but he did all this stuff to me, but I still love him. And so many hours of torture and torment and pain and suffering, I think could be saved if we were able to tolerate space for all of it, and let it all be true, and let it all be okay.

Drew Assini [20:14]:

Yeah. And I think it's related. It's important to acknowledge that part of the brain and the nervous system, the threat assessment system, whatever you want to call it, is all about safe or not safe, danger, not dangerous. So there's this push towards categories and defining that's a part of us that actually probably saves our [bleep] on a lot of situations. But if we get a little bit deeper into our healing process and we start to see what's actually present within us, there's another faculty. There's another paintbrush in the set that can allow us to just be with something and feel, as opposed to name and categorize, trying to make the rights and wrongs. There's a more spacious, softer seeing that can become available, which is really instrumental in and I would offer into healing, and changing, and awakening, and letting stuff go and stepping into something new.

Alyssa Scolari [21:14]:

Yeah. I think you make a good point that our brains really, we truly are wired at times to see things in black and white, safer not safe, in danger not in danger. So it's having to separate out like, is there or there are going to be sometimes for the black and white thinking is necessary, but I think in this situation it can be prolonging our suffering.

Drew Assini [21:42]:

Totally.

Alyssa Scolari [21:45]:

So what day are you on being at home?

Drew Assini [21:49]:

I just spent the weekend. I don't know, four maybe.

Alyssa Scolari [21:53]:

Okay. So where are you headed after this?

Drew Assini [21:58]:

So after this, next stop is Guatemala. I'm going to go hang out in, I think it's central Guatemala. There's a really cool lake and culture and some towns around the lake there, like a Teton. Yeah, so I'll go hang out there next.

Alyssa Scolari [22:13]:

How long will you be there for?

Drew Assini [22:14]:

I don't know. I bought a one way ticket and I'm committed for like a month. And then, yeah. I don't know, let's see.

Alyssa Scolari [22:25]:

Have you ever been to Guatemala before?

Drew Assini [22:28]:

No.

Alyssa Scolari [22:30]:

All right. I've got to ask you this. How do you decide where you're going next? Do you do one of those maps dartboard, boom, wherever the dart lands?

Drew Assini [22:41]:

No. So when I was in Thailand, the second half of my time in Thailand I was staying on an island, that had a spiritual vibe to it, or at least the one side of the island did. And so when Thailand was doing weird stuff, as far as what would happen with Corona and people staying people going, then I started looking for other spots. And then this was one of those places on the inter webs that people said had a similar vibe to where I was in Thailand, so yeah.

Drew Assini [23:18]:

I prefer personally to live in places where the wavelength isn't the 2021 modern capitalist, materialist American flavor. So here in places like this and it can get a little lofty. Because some people go to spirituality is like escapism and the Buddhism and all that. But for the most part, there's a little bit of a different wavelength that's available as a baseline, which I find more agreeable for just my own daily experience, so yeah. I mean I'm from Jersey, so there's a certain stink and [bleep] that I don't know that I'll ever see. But I'll have to stay in Jersey.

Alyssa Scolari [24:09]:

Yeah. And I mean, you haven't. You've been traveling around for, how many years has it been now?

Drew Assini [24:16]:

A couple of years. I went out to Oregon and taught for a little bit and then that turned into the-

Alyssa Scolari [24:21]:

Right.

Drew Assini [24:22]:

... RV and the drive about stuff. And then that led to Thailand for a bit, and then to Nashville, and now to Guatemala so.

Alyssa Scolari [24:33]:

Now when you, because you said this earlier and I want to come back to it. I can't remember exactly what you said, but almost like I'm struggling with where I fit into the whole healing thing. Can you expand more on that? Is there some residual feelings about letting your license expire and stuff like that?

Drew Assini [25:01]:

Well, no. So I let my letters go when I started to drive about and then went to Thailand. Because it felt like the clinical counselor therapist paradigm is cool and is totally the exact lane or approach for a lot of folks. And I think that there's going to be a lot of people after this summer of fun ends, and everyone gets back in touch with their Corona arisen issues. There's going to be a huge, huge demand for counseling and therapy and I think that's beautiful, folks should feel super comfortable leaning into that. For me personally, the way I move and how I understand stuff, I'm super grateful that I learned the CBT counseling clinical approach. I feel like that's a tool in my belt, let's say bigger than that, but just my understanding is maybe different or I guess I would say like wider, to include perspectives that are not just mental health America, 2021.

Alyssa Scolari [26:11]:

Yeah. I think your spectrum of healing is wider than what mainstream American counseling would even allow for. There are some types of, I think it sounds like lots of the types of healing that you feel the most connected to, or the most aligned with, is more based on Eastern philosophies.

Drew Assini [26:37]:

That would be one way to say it. The further... The more this opens up, the perspective isn't, let's see how do we say this. Respective that I feel I'm moving from, isn't limited to any culture at any time in place. It's just a certain way of seeing ourselves and understanding the world and moving in it. But yeah, I definitely got introduced to this as much through Eastern spirituality, and wisdom traditions, and native traditions, and practices as anything else. Yeah, totally.

Alyssa Scolari [27:13]:

And I love that. Because I often feel, I think as a therapist, having to abide by. And I don't just abide by certain rules because it's what I'm supposed to. For the listeners out there, there are certain things I have to abide by because I could lose my license. But I am very much interested in the broader spectrum of healing that other countries are incorporating and using. And I think it is very frustrating to be a clinician in this country. I don't know about other countries, but it can be frustrating because we're very limited in what we can offer due to ethical boundaries, and risks, and liabilities, and all that stuff that we have a whole [bleep] smorgasbord of things we can't do or say. And if we sneeze the wrong way, we could be in trouble.

Drew Assini [28:08]:

Which I think is super cool, and appropriate, and helpful for a particular approach to health, and wellbeing, and treating symptoms, and having a functioning life. So like that stuff's cool, but I've come to my own understanding where it's like, "Oh, normal in our society, is really like symptom management and it's not healthy." And so I'm not interested in playing a certain role according to a bunch of imposed limits and restrictions, to help people just function better in society that I think is lost in all the sideways. I would rather help beings awaken from their own BS and their own stories and their own traumas, and then learn how to honor and walk in a way that honors themselves, and their own truth, or their heart. And that's yeah. That's not usually on the disclosure statement or the consent statement when you first start, you're eight sessions of insurance paid for counseling.

Alyssa Scolari [29:14]:

Right. A lot of it is symptom management you are much interested in the deeper fullest aspect of the human experience that you can get your hands on.

Drew Assini [29:26]:

Right. It feels more... I used the word healing a lot because I feel that's close to what we do with counseling, but not always. Healing and then for me it's also like awakening, or sometimes I'll say spiritual awakening, but I mean, I don't know. Sometimes I think spiritual awakenings are weird because, if we just awaken we'll realize what we are and the words don't matter as much. So then spiritual awakening is then people like go chase, you know what? "Oh, I need to have dreadlocks and be a hippie and not shower." And it's like, "No, bro, that's not-

Alyssa Scolari [30:02]:

You got it wrong.

Drew Assini [30:04]:

Yeah, come back. So yeah, I like awakening, healing, and then I feel like my role in that is just guiding and supporting folks in their own recognition, and then their own development of an ability to move from a place that's less chaos, a little more peace.

Alyssa Scolari [30:27]:

That's what it is, it's less chaos. Less chaos, more peace. And that's something you've always been about. I know we haven't talked about it on this episode, but for the listeners out there as a reminder, I met Drew when I was in grad school, and you were of part-time faculty member?

Drew Assini [30:50]:

Three-quarter time, whatever that means. I had an office and they put my name on the other wall, so I felt bored.

Alyssa Scolari [30:59]:

What the hell is a three-quarter time faculty member?

Drew Assini [31:02]:

That's what academia does when they don't want to pay for full.

Alyssa Scolari [31:07]:

Right. Exactly. We're not going to give you the whole package, but we'll make you a three-fourths of a faculty member.

Drew Assini [31:16]:

But I never would have been able to serve like that if it wasn't for that position, because I only have my master's degree in order to be the full-time professor. I mean, you can get an instructor gig with a master's, but I don't know. I also feel like super blessed that, that weird position was there, because then it allowed me to hang out in that space with those folks and gain those experiences and that wisdom.

Alyssa Scolari [31:40]:

And so many of those folks, myself included being in like the most stressful time of their lives. You get to grad school and I feel the first thing anybody does in grad school is, they try to prove how difficult it's going to be because they try to weed out the weak ones. So they are like, "If you came here to make money, to think you're going to get a job where you make money, drop out. If you think you're going to coast, drop out. If you think you might get a cold in six months drop out." It's like the scare tactic and then you've got Drew. Who's like, I have a meditation place right down the street, and we were all like, "Yeah, well let's go find Drew."

Drew Assini [32:29]:

Yeah. It was a challenge trying to fit into that culture.

Alyssa Scolari [32:34]:

It's very cutthroat.

Drew Assini [32:38]:

My struggle with it is that academia, a lot of times is a lot of folks who have never actually, we'll say worked in the real world. So they're like folks that have been in school their whole life. So they just went to school, to go to school, to go to school, to then teach school. And I don't know. I don't feel like you should have to work for tips at some point in your life or... Do some actual service work for minimum wage at some point or...

Alyssa Scolari [33:06]:

Right. That actually teaches you more about the human experience than I think a lot of just researchers can.

Drew Assini [33:14]:

Yeah.

Alyssa Scolari [33:15]:

Not to say that researchers are not brilliant, we've learned so much from them, but that culture is. It's like you work and work and work to then teach, but you don't actually, like what you're studying are humans, but in none of that time are you getting experience with humans.

Drew Assini [33:35]:

Yes. That's the potential, not everybody's like that, but there is that potential. Yeah, it's a very like heady. It can be very heady and not a lot of heart party. I mean it's funny because that's what happens with trauma too, right? Is that we like go to our heads to live there, to be more safe than in the fields or the emotion?

Alyssa Scolari [33:59]:

Yeah. Even in grad school, you got to turn off your feelings, man.

Drew Assini [34:04]:

Hey, we're going to teach you how to help people get in touch with themselves. In order to learn this though, you have to turn off your own feelings to succeed.

Alyssa Scolari [34:13]:

Cause we're about to rip you to shreds.

Drew Assini [34:20]:

Right. It makes no sense. None.

Alyssa Scolari [34:13]:

Alrighty, I think we are going to stop there for this week. Drew and I had a pretty extensive conversation. So I thought it might be helpful to break it up into two parts similar to what I did with the Rebecca episode. So we are going to wrap up there because we change topics for next week, and next week is just as important, I love having Drew on the show. So please go check out his podcast. He actually just launched season four of the drive about podcast, or at least I believe the first half of it. So go check that out, it is the Drive About podcast, and then we will pick back up with this awesome discussion next week. Have a great week, everybody.

Alyssa Scolari [34:49]:

Thanks for listening everyone. For more information, please head over to lightaftertrauma.com, or you can also follow us on social media. On Instagram, we are @lightaftertrauma and on Twitter, it is @lightafterpod. Lastly, please head over to at patrion.com/lightaftertrauma. To support our show, we are asking for $5 a month, which is the equivalent to a cup of coffee at Starbucks. So please head on over again, that's patrion.com/lightaftertrauma. Thank you, and we appreciate your support. [singing]