The Other Side of Fear
The most important life hack you'll need: A Holistic Guide to Get You Unstuck.
Self improvement topics about mental health, trauma, limiting beliefs, mindset, spirituality, energy healing, mindfulness, entrepreneurship and purpose.
The Other Side of Fear explores thought provoking stories about the types of fears that are triggered by our individual insecurities, conditioning and past traumas. We examine the role of societal conventions and how they function as a strong determinant, in how we often choose to address our most personal struggles.
Our guests discuss how they navigate through various challenges, while taking ownership of their true desires. Giving you a gentle push, to live in a way that honors your authenticity. What does it mean to lean into fear? How can we recreate our stories and embrace the unknown? What does the other side of fear look like for you?
This is a reminder that, your fears are as big and as scary as you allow them to be. Your purpose is greater than the fear that hinders you.
The Other Side of Fear
Living In The Shadows of Your Mental Health? | with Erik DaRosa
Key Takeaways:
- The importance of rethinking society's version of "normal".
- Vulnerability is not a weakness, but perhaps it is one of our greatest strengths.
- How to recognize when someone is in a state of crisis.
Erik DaRosa paints a vivid landscape of the trials that accompany anxiety and OCD. His candid recount of the shadows that once dominated his life serves as a profound reminder of the silent battles many face while outwardly projecting normalcy. Erik's powerful narrative on authenticity's role in healing illustrates that the courage to confront our inner turmoil is not merely a choice, but an essential step towards true wellness.
Childhood sets the stage for our adult lives, a notion deeply explored in this heart-to-heart with Erik. He opened up about the "bubbling cauldron of dread" that childhood fear and anxiety brewed up for him and how such early experiences shaped his mental responses into adulthood. We touch on the effects of genetics and environment on mental health, highlighting the urgent need to validate and support the psychological well-being of children. Erik unravels how the echoes of the past influence the journey to reprogram and heal.
We wrap up with a consideration of the multifaceted landscape of mental health management. Through Erik's experience and my own revelations, we underscore that therapy and medication are mere fragments of a broader healing tapestry. Discover Erik's "equilateral triangle of healing," where Western and Eastern philosophies converge with nature's grounding embrace, illustrating a holistic path to managing mental health. Our conversation transcends the notion of a quick fix, instead championing the relentless pursuit of a balanced life amidst the ebb and flow of mental health challenges.
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I sat down recently with mental health advocate , speaker and author of Scars to Stars, and he's here to remind us that there is no cure for our mental maladies, but instead to approach healing as a journey, a journey that requires a healthy dose of honesty with ourselves and with those who are there to assist us on our individual journeys. Eric puts this into perspective by speaking about his strongly developed coping mechanism of masking. That was a trauma response to his childhood experience and he presented as a highly functioning type, a successful overachiever, known for wearing a big smile, and I know a lot of us can relate to that. So, in speaking to Eric about his mental health journey, the key takeaway here is that hiding behind the veil of our issues, deflecting and dishonesty to ourselves, is a form of self-harm.
Kertia:We are doing ourselves a huge disservice when we ignore, disregard our issues, pretending as if they don't exist, when they're often staring us right in the face.
Kertia:It is such a disservice to yourself when you're not being true to how you feel, as my wise friend Ben Oofana would say, when you suppress your authentic emotional responses by denying, disconnecting or medicating away your feelings, you are inadvertently rejecting the parts of yourself that carry fear, hurt, grief, upset and other distressing emotions, and this is what causes a lot of us to live in a state of disconnect when we've numbed ourselves to our emotions, hence losing touch with our true selves, to our authenticity, to who we are at the core, often looking outside ourselves in an attempt to find meaning, definition, direction and purpose. But of equal importance is realizing that when we fail to take account of our experiences and acknowledge the impact on our mind, body and overall well-being, we deny ourselves the validation we often need and, most importantly, we deny ourselves the opportunity to heal. , thank you for being here with me today, so excited about this conversation.
Erik DaRosa:Hi, karsha, I'm so excited to be here, so excited to see you again. We had such a fun pre-call conversation and I feel like we're already super close friends and while we're recording this, it's kind of fun. It's knowing where you are in Toronto and it's knowing quite a bit here in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. So can't think of a better place to be than in my warm, cozy office talking all things mental health.
Kertia:Yeah, I love that. Mental health is such a huge thing, such a huge topic, very, very important. So I'm really, really excited about everything that you have to share with me right now. Thank you so much. Awesome. So you have said, based on what I know so far right, you said that.
Erik DaRosa:Yeah, I always keep secrets. Yeah, in a good way nowadays. Not I don't hide things. I intentionally keep little secrets here and there from hosts so that I can surprise them on the air.
Kertia:OK, all right, I'm looking forward to that. So you said that you've always been OK, right According to society's definition, but actually you experienced debilitated anxiety from a very young age. You had issues falling asleep I guess you had a fear of sleeping, I think you said and then, also according to your words, you had terrifying obsessive thoughts during your teenage years and then you had panic attacks and paralyzing anxiety going into your early adult years. So do you know, can you tell me, or have you figured out at some point, the root cause of this issue and can you walk me through what all of that has been like for you, because I know that is a really heavy thing to experience, especially at such a young age.
Erik DaRosa:Sure, great question. So sit back, relax and enjoy, because here we go. I love how you put it at the beginning and I talk about this a lot I was I'm using air quotes right? I was OK by society's definition, right? Or I was normal. So if you saw me at any point in time, from my adolescent years through the first 12 years of my career in New York City, to the outside world, I would have looked and acted just like everybody else. I had a smile on my face, carried myself with confidence, and no one and I made sure of this, no one ever knew that I was struggling and suffering on the inside. The reality is, what I presented to the outside world could not have been any different from what was actually happening to me on the inside. I wrote about this in the book and I think it's a really good description of how I felt throughout that first kind of 33 years of my life. I can only describe it as a feeling. It's a bubbling cauldron of dread paired with an impending sense of doom. So I will jump off from that point and give your listeners a bit of an insight. And so you said, yeah, from around the age of seven.
Erik DaRosa:For me it really started. The anxiety and the obsessive compulsive disorder presented itself as this incredible fear of sleeping. I wasn't able to go to sleep and fall asleep as a child, so I would often find myself during the day worrying and panicking about the very thought of going to sleep and the thought of going to sleep. And would I be able to sleep that night? And eventually I would get into bed and at some point I would get up. The house would be dark, everyone else would be asleep and I'd walk around the house, often shaking, physically shaking, crying, and that is really my first memory of what I would call both the emotional and the physical symptoms of anxiety. And, as you said, that began to worsen as I moved through into high school, and so not only was it this fear of sleeping, but that was when the intrusive thoughts really started to creep into my head, and so the OCD. I knew something was not right when I was young and I thought I was broken and I thought I was unfixable. The reality was, if I had only known the truth, I always thought I was the only one. So the intrusive thoughts really started to happen.
Erik DaRosa:And for your audience who might not be familiar with that. Intrusive thoughts are often terrifying, unwanted thoughts that are like this bright, shiny object or constantly screaming in your head. Look at me, look at me like the disco ball on a dance floor, and the more I would try to push those away, the more they would come back, and it would make it more and more challenging for me to get through the day, and so my brain would latch on to something such as a fear of sleeping or fear of getting sick, and would immediately go from fear of getting sick to I'm going to die, right. So that thread got pulled very tightly and very quickly, and along with it came the compulsion side of OCD, and so for me it presented itself in terms of counting. So everything I did had to be done in threes, and so I would turn my light switch on and off three times, I would check the lock on my door three times to make sure that the front door was closed, and if, for any reason, I felt like I had forgotten to do that, even if I had left the house, I would turn around and I would come back home and I would do it, and the reason I was doing it and I know that now is it was the only way that I or for those who suffer from OCD feel as though they have some type of control in what is otherwise an uncontrollable and irrational thought pattern. And so that continued. It continued into college and it would ebb and flow. And so I do want people to know that. You know, I wasn't living if it was a dial of one to 10. There were some times when it would all be dialed up to a 10 and there were others when it would be more of a four, of a five. But I was always struggling, and I was struggling in silence and I never let anyone know.
Erik DaRosa:And I moved to New York City in 1993 after graduating. And where better than someone with severe anxiety and OCD to end up then on Wall Street, because we all know what a relaxing world that can be? And so what I didn't realize at the time was the environment that I was in. The stress of that environment, the long hours, the lack of sleep, was pushing not only my body but pushing my brain to a place where it just wasn't sustainable. Take that and put it together with a couple of decades of pushing down all of these feelings and not telling anyone.
Erik DaRosa:And finally, in 2004,. I was 33 years old, it was the late summer and I suffered my first of two dissociative episodes. They used to go by the name of a nervous breakdown and it was at that point when I was totally exposed. I couldn't hide it from anyone anymore my wife, who was not aware all of that time. We had been together both from college through to our early 30s and I needed help. And I got that help. With her encouragement, I found an incredible therapist in New York City and I really began the healing journey.
Erik DaRosa:And it all began with me Finally having the strength and the courage to stand up on my own two feet and to tell someone.
Erik DaRosa:And from that point on, you talk about the discovery and the journey and finding out the why and where did it all come from?
Erik DaRosa:It's really been for me now kind of an 18, almost 19 year journey, with lots of twists and turns and discovering things about myself, discovering things about how I grew up and I was 50 years old in the end of November of 2021 when I was finally diagnosed with childhood emotional PTSD and that in and of itself, those four letters PTSD it really was the beginning of the answer to the question of why, and I realized what was happening all along, even during my therapy for the first call it 10 plus years, we were addressing the symptom and finally, with my therapist here in Colorado, we were actually able to say, hey, you have a thing.
Erik DaRosa:And once I realized I had a thing, it completely changed my journey for the better. And so here I am today, able to share my journey with others so that they can recognize that one. They're not alone, there's no stigma in talking about it, and that how important it is to share your feelings and to be able to tell someone because you never know who else is struggling, whether it's you or someone else in your life Wow.
Kertia:Like you came like right out with it all. And when you said bubbling cauldron of dread, that really hit because I'm just like I can only imagine what experience in that in your mind, in your body, as a child. I can only imagine how terrified you always were, how stressed you always were and what that did to your little brain at the time. You know your psyche and you're still developing. That was such. You were seven years old. That was like a significant stage of development that you were in at that time and for I don't know like how do you think have an experience is, because you know you just said that my part of this was from childhood emotional PTSD. How do you think that kind of like weighed on your life moving forward, because then there was the OCD. Was the OCD kind of like a co-morbidity with that? Was it already there or did that kind of come along with that PTSD?
Erik DaRosa:Yeah, it's a really, really great question and it's a little bit of both. There was clearly a predisposition to mental health challenges going way back in my family, but a key part of it was, as you said, during my developmental years, when we know that the prefrontal cortex in the human being is, if it does become fully developed which, you can argue, in most of us it never becomes fully developed. It's usually not until around the age of 25 or 26. And so as a child, we're still really developing all of those patterns right, and what we see and what we learn from an early age is often becomes the default mechanisms for how our amygdala which in our younger years is what I like to refer to as the CEO of the brain at that time and over time, in a properly forming brain, the CEO moves offices and he moves to the front of the brain where he has an amazing or she has an amazing view and can look out and you can live in a world of responses and well thought out responses, Whereas growing up in a world where you're ruled by what's called it severe anxiety, it's as though you're in fight or flight mode 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As you begin to get older. That is the training. It's like going to the gym. You've now trained yourself to behave in a way where you're not able to respond, but your brain just simply reacts. And it reacts based on what it's learned and what it's seen.
Erik DaRosa:And I was super prone to anger, sometimes rage. A lot of it stems from me not feeling as though I had a voice when I was younger and it was often a way for I would act out and it was a way for me to be able to be seen and feel like I was heard. And then I was constantly being kind of shut down and stifled and the more that would happen, the more I would turn that dial from zero up to 100. And it was just full out anger and lashing out at those around me, those close to me, and I could never really understand why. I couldn't explain why and I used to just think that's who I was. And I realize now all of that self destructive behavior was built upon this lack of foundation of feeling safe and secure in my younger years and so I developed attachment syndromes and for me it was anxious attachment syndrome and I never really wanted to let anyone get close to me out of fear that those people were going to leave. So that was kind of what ruled my life and when I thought of that description for it, it kind of popped into my head.
Erik DaRosa:And even now, when I talk about kind of this bubbling cauldron of dread, I get this visual image of a series of witches standing around in the woods with this big black kettle and a giant stick and they're stirring the pot and all of this mist and smoke is coming out of it.
Erik DaRosa:It's almost as though they each and every day were kind of concocting what the recipe of my anxiety and OCD was going to be like. And for any of your listeners who may know someone or have experienced that feeling of anxiety themselves, it's really that it's that sense of impending doom. You're constantly worried about something that's going to happen in the future, and for me it was constantly worrying about something terrible often death or harm that was going to happen and it gets to the level of not only terrifying, but you just freeze, you don't have the ability to move and you don't feel safe and secure anywhere. That was how my life was being run and we'll talk about it more. It's taken a very long time and a long journey to be able to work and reprogram that and to become the person that I am sitting talking on the podcast today.
Kertia:That is tremendous and I was thinking as you're speaking. By the way, your description of the witches in the woods, that's exactly what I was thinking. I was just thinking like there is this huge cauldron, the smoke, the witches, and you're just thinking about everything that they could do to just like mess with you.
Erik DaRosa:Yes, and they're like cackling, and they're like we're going to throw in a little bit of this today because Eric might have thought that this part of what he was obsessing over was gone, but we're going to add a little extra today just to remind him that, hey, we're still here.
Kertia:Yeah, that's exactly what I thought about, and you were talking about your childhood and the environment that you were surrounded by. And I'm just like, as a parent myself I have two girls and I'm like, if they were exhibiting these behaviors, you know, like these stress behaviors, anxious behaviors, I would like to think that I would catch on at some point and I'm just like, well, if you're in that type of environment and you don't feel safe even if, whether or not you could conceptualize the thought or concept of safety and being safe, your environment being safer, feeling safe subconsciously you have already kind of absorbed that, that you're not safe there is no way that you would have been able to even rely on the people around you to kind of help you navigate those feelings, those emotions and the triggers right. Yes, I can only imagine having to deal with that for so long.
Erik DaRosa:You're absolutely right and to give some context for your audience. So I grew up. I was born in 1971, before we had two zero before the date and so I grew up in the 70s and 80s and it was a time where the topic of mental health was never spoken about, not in the home, not outside the home. So one I had no idea that what was happening within me. I also joke that, looking back, I could have won multiple Oscar awards for the acting job that I did. It was so good that no one knew. So if you combine the acting job and me, hiding it and never letting people see the physical manifestations of what anxiety and OCD look like for me, as I always made sure if I was crying or if I was upset or if I was doing my compulsive behavior, no one was around Couple that with mental health not being something that was spoken about or even something that was well known about by parents. In those days, people were not looking for the signs and the symptoms, things like. When mental health was thought about in those days, it was always thought about schizophrenia, multiple personalities, movies like one flew over the cuckoo's nest. People thought that was the definition of mental illness, and so if it didn't reach to that threshold, no one would be looking out for those signs.
Erik DaRosa:As you said, what I'm so thankful for nowadays is we're in an environment where the discussions around mental health are starting to become more and more front and center, as you said, more front and center within homes and especially for people who have experienced it themselves being more aware of it and being able to have those discussions with friends. It's much easier to be able to spot that in your own children. It's easier to start to have those conversations with your children. Once your children know that you're there for them and that you support them, it's so much easier for them to be able to open up and to share their feelings and what's happening, and so it's great to see in the last 40 or 50 years, where the direction of mental health conversations have gone. We still have a tremendous amount of work to do, but I'm so hopeful that we are on this path where it will become more and more the norm to talk about our struggles and to talk about our feelings and to show people that vulnerability isn't a weakness, but vulnerability is actually a strength.
Kertia:Yeah, exactly. And when you said to me that your wife you were with her since college and she had no idea, it was just like holy smokes, the kind of energy that you spend to kind of lie to others. You know what I mean? Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Erik DaRosa:It's a lot. So you just hit on something amazing that I'd love to talk about. Is this idea of the energy a waste? Yeah, and it's something that I really only started to reflect on in the past couple of years. I had no idea at the time how much energy I was actually burning up trying to be two completely different characters. So there was the Eric that people saw on the outside. It was very often the smiling person joking and laughing. I know now that was my defense mechanism. I always felt if I was kind of the life of the party, if I was the jokester often very sarcastic and then smiling people would never be tipped off that there was something wrong or that I was struggling. At the same time I was playing this second character and that character was one of me just deeply, deeply struggling on the inside. It was a tremendous time sink for me.
Kertia:Yeah, it takes so much energy out of you. When you do that. You kind of like you have different personas and you have to manage those personas in every single environment that you enter. I get why you did what you did. The stigma attached to mental health is ridiculous, but it's still attached. But back then in the 70s and 80s it was bad. Even when I was growing up in the 80s it was really disgusting the things that people would say. So I can only imagine what you were going through, because it's just like you needed a help but you couldn't even seek the help and at some point I don't even think you realized how much help you probably needed. Because mental health, as you said, no one spoke about it back then. It's now a recent thing that we're really starting to talk about these things and be more open about it.
Erik DaRosa:So I just want to say, first off, thank you for those words and the way that you said it, and that I can understand exactly why you did what you did. I've been on a lot of podcasts and I've done a lot of my own and that's the first time I've heard someone put it in those terms to me. So thank you very much for that. I appreciate that Absolutely. And yeah, it's one of those things where we don't know what we need, when we don't know what's available and when we don't know what's wrong. And I just think back sitting here now through all those different phases of my life and there were often times when for me, the baseline was the baseline was never zero anxiety or zero obsessive thoughts, the baseline was more like a four. And so that for me, if, when I would get back to that place and my head would be somewhat quieter and my anxiety would be somewhat lower, I often would think to myself, wow, it's over, I'm cured. And that was another kind of mistake that I had even into my early thirties. Was that just because I was feeling a certain way didn't in any way mean that all those symptoms were gone and that there was, that I was kind of magically cured from whatever was was happening to me. And you know it's taken me a very long time along my journey to be able to go back and discover that and I think this is really important for your audience. It is a journey and there were times in the early days of me working with my therapist and being on medication where I thought that just by going in to talk and by being on medication that was enough and that was going to be a cure. And then I would have setbacks and I would beat myself up over those setbacks and think why did this happen again? Why did this happen to me? I was still living in that victim mode or you know, as I talk about on my podcast the name you know I was surviving, I was still surviving.
Erik DaRosa:And then I learned through the help of therapy and through the help of my wife and friends and just reading and finding out more. That was only part of the work. The real work had to come from inside of me and I really had to open up and I had to be honest and I had to share everything that was happening. I couldn't tell little pieces and parts. That was something I was doing in therapy in my early days is I would think, well, I'm not going to share this because this is just way too right out there for me to tell my therapist. So I would really kind of dice up what I was going to have in terms of a conversation and I realized, you know, after a few setbacks that it was only hurting me If I really wanted to get better.
Erik DaRosa:It was like going to your regular physician for your checkup. If you go in and they ask questions and you just say, yep, everything's fine, everything's bothering me and there are things, then at some point down the road it becomes a much bigger problem. And I'm glad that you know I'm here today and I'm able to speak about it. But I can't stress enough the importance of, if you feel something, if something's not right, or you notice something in someone else and something just doesn't seem right, you know, have that conversation. It will most definitely change the trajectory of somebody's life and in many cases it might even save that person's life.
Kertia:Absolutely, absolutely, and I was just thinking as you were speaking. You spoke about your disassociated episodes that you experienced, and this was in. You said 2004 and 2006. Was that enough for you to kind of seek help, to kind of figure out what's going on with you and like, or did you start seeking help before and then? Because, as you said, the healing is never done. You kind of just learn how to manage it. It never goes away. You learn how to manage it better so that you can function better and more efficiently in your day to day life. But what was that thing that catapulted you into like really saying like I need help. You know what I mean I need help, or else.
Erik DaRosa:So 2004 was when I broke, and the way I can describe it is I shattered, not just broken. You know, if you take a plate and you drop it on the ground, maybe it breaks into two or three pieces, like for me. The description was, you know, I had been broken several times in a couple of pieces, and over time I was able to put myself back together on my own. This time I shattered, and that was the first associate of episode in 2004. And that was when I first reached out for help and I started with therapy. Now, your audience out there is probably thinking this is great, eric's going to therapy, he's now starting to talk about what's happening with him, and so his journey probably started to get much, much better from there. And so, yes, my journey did begin to get better. And then I made the mistake that I cautioned everyone against nowadays is I decided I was my own best doctor and I marked myself as cured Again. I thought there was a cure for this and said I'm good, let's call it good, and I stopped going to therapy and I stopped taking my medication.
Erik DaRosa:And so, in 2006, not only did I shatter again, but some of those fragments actually disappeared, and so the way I talk about it now is I had to completely and totally shatter and lose fragments of that person who I was in order to become what I call a much better version of my former self.
Erik DaRosa:It's always fun when people ask me who know me personally and know about my struggles, and will sometimes know if I'm having an off couple of days, and then they'll ask me do you feel like yourself?
Erik DaRosa:Are you feeling like yourself? And I always say thank you so much for asking, but I now feel like a much better version of my former self, because my former self living at a baseline anxiety level and OCD level of a four that's no way to go through living life, and so from 2006 onward was really this slow march towards becoming a much better version of myself, and the biggest change really happened in 2011. My wife and I left our jobs in New York City and we moved here to Colorado, where a big part of our lives was being able to be outside in nature, and so anyone who knows me knows that skiing is one of my favorite things in the entire world, and so I get to do that in one of the most amazing settings here almost six months out of the year and then I get to be outside in the warmer months mountain biking and enjoying time outside with friends, and it's been such an amazing help and has helped me heal so much along the way on my journey.
Kertia:Being in nature is very healing and extremely grounded, so I love that for you. When I read about the anxiety attack, or the disassociated event as you refer to it, as in 2004 and 2006, you saying that you had gaps in your memory, it all falls in line with what you just said about you literally just losing fragments of yourself, right? Yes, like that is very telling, because people lose their memory when they have something that's physically traumatizing. You know what I mean. Yes, like in a car accident or, god forbid, any type of accident. That is expected. But when you have something that comes out of your anxiety, that is huge for you to actually lose your memory, suffer memory loss from that event alone. That to me is extremely telling of how much this kind of like weighed on your psyche, weighed on you mentally, like you literally did disassociate.
Erik DaRosa:Yes, yes, and I did. And what ends up happening in a disassociative episode is your brain and your body separating from one another.
Kertia:It splits it literally splits.
Erik DaRosa:It literally splits so your physical body. You are still there and I can attest that. The second one, which lasted over the course of a long three day weekend, I moved around my apartment and I did things. I don't remember doing them. My wife, amy, was there to attest that I was doing things, but I, to this day I have no memory of it and the way I describe a disassociative episode. As a friend of mine at the time she was a psychiatrist she said it's as though your brain is doing a control, alt, delete, and so your brain has gone into such overload that the only way that it can protect itself is it has to shut itself down and it has to reboot and it has to defragment and clean up the hard drive. And the incredible thing about that is when you finally come to I'm going to call it described as coming back to the present, there's this period of elation and almost like a mania.
Erik DaRosa:I remember the first time in 2004,. We had just gotten back to the city, we had been away and I was sitting in the diner with my wife and I had just sort of come back to reality a few minutes earlier and I hadn't been eating that weekend I hadn't been sleeping. Those are all signs, by the way, for your audiences out there listening when you move from just anxiety or depression to what I would call crisis. Like crisis is if you're you or you are seeing people around you who are not eating, who are not sleeping, they don't have the ability to concentrate, communication is difficult, they don't seem motivated. That's when you've crossed into crisis mode and immediate action is needed. And so that's where I was. And when I came out, we were sitting in the diner and I just remember, like I've never been so hungry in my life. I couldn't stop talking. I was eating, eating, eating. I couldn't eat fast enough and I could only imagine, like what Amy was thinking to herself, like will you please just stop talking? I know you haven't talked for like a while, but can you please just stop talking for now and again.
Erik DaRosa:At that moment I thought well, what just happened to me? This is almost if it was a fantasy novel, like I crossed over into that other world and came back and I was cured Like it's over. I'm done, I'm great, I feel great. And what I've learned is the brain as it reboots and those feel good chemicals flood the brain. You feel good, but after a while you start to feel yourself drift back into that spiral. And what's very important is that in those moments, hopefully you don't allow them to get to that crisis, but if they do, and by getting immediate care able to help halt that slide so that you don't fall back into that deep, dark well, without a way out, but you have people around you that are able to help support and are able to help stabilize.
Erik DaRosa:And so now one of the things I'm very well aware of in my own life, in the lives of others who are close to me, are those warning signs. And so I do a lot. I'll check in with myself a lot. Am I sleeping, am I eating? Am I taking care of myself? How am I feeling today? I call it, you know, checking in with yourself, meeting yourself where you're at, and I'll do the same. And friends know, like friend, friends of mine will call me and say, hey, I'm not doing great and I'll go through those questions. If any of those boxes are checked, it lets immediately go to see somebody, because we can't let this go on any further.
Kertia:Yeah, and thank you so much for mentioning some of the physical and cognitive manifestations of anxious, of anxiety, and I want to know is there anything else that we can look for? Because I know, like I know, you've listed the ones that are specific to you and your case, but what are the other manifestations of anxiety Would you point to? I guess maybe generalized anxiety? I know you're not a physician and stuff like that I know, but just from your experience and like you just haven't gone through such a huge, amazing transition and haven't done the therapy and still doing the healing work on yourself. What else can you tell us about this?
Erik DaRosa:Sure. So speaking from kind, of the inside, and yes, I'm not a professional, I'm not a doctor. I have spent plenty of time looking and reading and researching in the DSM five. So typically general anxiety disorder is for people who are experiencing let's call it anxiety and again I'm not speaking from a professional standpoint, my own lived experience but are suffering from anxiety not related to some severe or small T stacking up traumatic events.
Erik DaRosa:In my case the anxiety was a manifestation, symptom of a much larger PTSD and so it far surpassed just general anxiety. And often there's also this misconception between kind of a panic attack and a dissociative episode, and the two are very different and panic attacks and anxiety will often present themselves. Sometimes a severe headache, not the migraine type, but really resonating kind of from behind the head. It's as though your head is in a vice it's the only way I can describe it and the vice is getting tighter and tighter and tighter and that headache just won't go away. There's often a pit in your stomach, and that's where I talk about that impending sense of doom.
Erik DaRosa:It's this pit in it and you can feel it. It almost feels like there's something in your stomach weighing you down and sweating and shaking, things that come on and present themselves very suddenly. You're like what is happening. I know a lot of people who have described to me panic attacks. For them have felt as though they're having a heart attack. A lot of the signs and the symptoms are very much the same. You can also, with panic attacks, anxiety, you can get a lot of pain in your chest, feeling this heaviness, feeling this weight in your chest, and for me I remember it would just suddenly spiral into not feeling safe anywhere and I would end up huddling up on a couch under a blanket and I couldn't find the physical to be able to move myself. And so some people talk about ending up on the floor, on the floor of the house, on the floor of the bathroom, not being able to move. It's almost as though you have this temporary paralysis. And, yeah, a lot of people talk about like I thought I was having a heart attack and it's a terrible feeling and I hope that nobody out there listening would ever have to go through that. But if you have, or you do, just know that there's help available to speak up about it. And it does.
Erik DaRosa:It does get better. It absolutely does get better. There are ways to live with it. There are ways to treat it and manage it. Over time, the more work you do, the further and further and further between episodes something like that becomes and I can say 2006 was the last dissociative episode that I had. I have not gone that deep down into the hole ever since and I credit a lot of that to my support team and to my therapist, who is a part of that support team, and also them really helping me to understand what those signs and symptoms are, so that I have the ability to check in on myself. They also, from the outside now, can check in. It makes it a whole lot easier to be able to go through each and every day.
Kertia:I'm so happy for you, I'm so happy to hear that and you saying that the fact that you got help it also enables you to get in tune with what's happening with yourself. You can see the signs coming on, because, of course, this is something that now it doesn't go away. And, as you said, this is one of the mistakes that people often make that they go to therapy or they take some medication and they think that they're okay and some people might stop taking their medication or stop going to therapy or what have you, but it never goes away. It's something that you kind of learn how to manage and the more you do it and the more you pay attention to it, the better you get at managing it, so that your symptoms don't present as often. And that is one of the most important aspects of seeking help not only to kind of detach yourself from the stigma of getting that help in the first place, but also to kind of alert yourself, to begin noticing what's happening within your body, within your mind, to notice how to recognize the signs that you're about to have one of those events again. Sometimes it comes in really slowly and you kind of don't notice that it's even happening, and before you know it you're far down the dark hole and you have no idea how you got there.
Kertia:Not everyone has someone around them to kind of notice when the behavior the behavior will change or the change in the emotional state of the person changing the attitude, the change in your responses and your reactions to your environment around you and to people around you.
Kertia:Not everyone kind of have people around them to kind of be close enough to them to notice these changes For you, for someone who maybe have a wife, a children or maybe close family members that can kind of help to sometimes to mitigate it, whereby someone can bring to your attention like hey, eric, I noticed that you did this, are you feeling okay? Or I noticed that you reacted this way, are you feeling okay? Right, some of us don't have that social capital to rely on getting that help speaking to someone else. A professional specializes in mental health and you know the healing modalities that goes along with that. It's so important and so vital because then it teaches you also how to take care of yourself and how to better manage yourself and your symptoms and everything that's happening. So, resting on that, I want to talk a little bit about the type of health that you receive, because you said that you relied on both Western and Eastern treatment modalities.
Erik DaRosa:So I call it my equilateral triangle of healing. I think that's the road you were going down, and the reason I call it that is we often talk about a toolbox. So when we've been through therapy and we've sought professional help, one of the things that, as you were just describing, that we do is not only treat the symptoms as they're occurring, but we actually learn. It's like studying at university. There's a difference between the professor giving a lecture and writing down the notes and then actually going home and doing the reading and asking questions and becoming curious, and that's a very big part of it is learning yourself what are the triggers. You become, in many ways, like a forensic psychiatrist, where, if something happens, you're now able to look back over days or weeks and say, aha, this happened, then this happened, then this happened and so therefore, this is why I'm feeling the way that I do, and anyone who's a really good professional will help their patients be able to do that, and it's so very important in the individual healing journey to be able to figure out what are the things that I might want to stay away from more in my life and what are some of the things that I need more in my life, and so for me, the equilateral triangle is. It's comprised of three different I'll call it healing modalities, and I call it the equilateral triangle because each part of the triangle is equally as important as the other, and all the corners are equal. The sides are equal. If you pull one of the sides away, the whole triangle collapsed, and so for me it's Western, so it's traditional talk therapy. I have both a psychologist and a psychiatrist.
Erik DaRosa:I've been on medication now since 2004. I went off for a year. I decided to go off for a year. Big mistake went back on in 2006 and haven't come off since. We do change the dosages and the amounts and the medications, so that's been extremely helpful.
Erik DaRosa:What I added in the last couple of years has been the Eastern side, and it was something that I had never explored before. But I thought there's more to healing than just doing this one thing. I want it to be as comprehensive as possible, and so for me, that became a finding a Reiki master. So Reiki has been a huge part of my life, and I did something extremely unorthodox. I actually put my Reiki master in touch with my therapist so that she could explain some of the things that I was experiencing or working through in energy healing, and then I'd have a better way to be able to verbalize and talk about it.
Erik DaRosa:In therapy there's mindfulness and meditation, and so I do that in both the traditional sense of sitting, either listening to music or just being in a quiet space and focusing on my breathing, or I take it and I combine it with the third part of the triangle, which is nature.
Erik DaRosa:So for me that again it's skiing and mountain biking and being outside, and a lot of times, whether I'm on a chairlift or in a gondola, or if I'm out skiing in the trees somewhere, I might stop and just take a few moments to breathe or to look around, to put myself in the present. And those last two the nature and the Eastern it's all about how do we bring ourselves into the present. So for me it becomes how do I stop focusing on and worrying about what's going to happen in the future, which is the anxiety, and how do I bring my mind back to the present so that I can live in the now? And the more often that we do it, science has proven that with neuroplasticity, that we can actually change what used to be reactions and we can make those become responses and I'm living proof that, through hard work and dedication and being honest, that you can get better. And you, as you said very, very accurately, it goes from this managing your life to just something that you live with. Yeah.
Kertia:I love that you highlighted so many things that kind of helped you, because I think a lot of people everything is not for everyone, right, you know that and there are people that would completely write off therapy, like ugh, that doesn't work or I don't want to talk to someone about my problems, and you know what I mean. Like outside of the shame and the stigma and everything else that's attached that goes along with that. Everything is not for everyone, but it does help to try different things and I like that you spoke about the way that you kind of put your Reiki master and your therapist in contact with each other so that they can kind of bounce off each other and kind of help you better. So there are so many different types of healing modalities and ways that you can get help and those two like even when you spoke about mindfulness, meditation, being in touch with nature and stuff like that when you have a mental illness that kind of takes over your life and takes over the way that you operate, for me I think that you need that professional help, but I think that when you can combine that, as you do, with mindfulness and being in nature and having a Reiki healer, that just takes it over the edge and makes it so much more effective and so much better. I'm a huge supporter of combining different modalities to kind of help you to get to where you need to be.
Kertia:I know we're getting up to time, but I just wanted to ask you one more thing, because this is something that's been weighing on my mind. When it comes to dealing with anxiety or depressive disorders, any type of mental illness that kind of affects your ability to function on a day to day basis, what I've noticed sometimes is that people kind of substitute or some people substitute it and some others kind of do both but using substances like, maybe, alcohol, drugs, mushrooms, things of the sort. Right, they may substitute it with along with whatever help they're already getting, or maybe they might completely forego the help, professional help. Can you tell me what you think about this? What do you think about the effects of what? Because for me I think that long time it kind of just makes it worse. But I want to know from your experience what do you think about that?
Erik DaRosa:Sure, that's a great question and I'm going to take it from kind of the addiction side. So I, thankfully have not had any substance addictions in my life. I had other awful coping mechanisms that I developed that we talked about and others that I'm more than happy to share. I'll come back on the show. What ends up happening is and I talk about this a lot with friends who are in recovery, or recovered, as I like to say, and other people who have battled with different addictions it's not the substance, there's some underlying issue, trauma, whatever we want to call it the substance becomes the coping mechanism and in many instances whether it's alcohol or, in too many unfortunate cases now, opiates, which often lead to heroin addiction, cocaine I'm just thinking of, especially being here in a ski town in the West, a lot of the things that I see People, rather than addressing the underlying issue, find that the substance is able to numb out whatever that pain happens to be for whatever period of time it is. And once the brain discovers that that pain or that trauma or that underlying mental health issue could be numbed out for a period of time, the brain goes well. If it works for a short period of time, it must be really good in big quantities for a long period of time, and that's when the crossover into addiction happens. And a couple of really good friends who have been on my show and we've talked a lot about this and they've said that it wasn't until they really decided to address their underlying mental health issues, trauma issues, that they were truly able to find a way into recovery.
Erik DaRosa:So many people think that if I just go into rehab it'll fix itself, and again what we're dealing with is we're just treating symptoms. We're not treating, again, the underlying issue. And so recovery is amazing, but it needs to be combined with what you said a little bit earlier, kershia, is this idea of there is absolutely no substitute for professional help, and over time we can begin to combine lots of things in lots of different ways, but we need a professional to help us on that very first part of our healing journey. And so when we combine professionals who are trained in the mental health field, I can tell you there have been so many advancements in terms of professionals specializing in different aspects of mental health. And so there are professionals out there who specialize now in anxiety, they specialize in obsessive compulsive disorder, they specialize in trauma, and so they treat trauma in a completely different way.
Erik DaRosa:And so once you begin doing that, combining that with other types of resources in the recovery space, you start to realize that it's easier to begin recovery and it's easier to kick the addiction, because the whole reason that you've done that you're now figuring out and that is starting to go away.
Erik DaRosa:And then the whole weekend and get on again another show and talk about like psilocybin and there are some amazing uses for things like psilocybin, mushrooms and MDMA and the treatment of PTSD and the treatment of depression and anxiety but it needs to be used and I think this is getting to your point again it needs to be used in a controlled environment with a professional. Getting out and eating a bag of mushrooms in the woods is not going to cure all of your ills. In fact, there's an equal likelihood that the trip that you go on is even more terrifying than what you're dealing with at the time. And so I would say anyone who is thinking about doing those types of things in terms of treatment which, it's incredible, including ketamine as well doing it under the care of a professional and being able to process it and talk through that experience I know so many people who have found so much healing and so much recovery in using those things.
Kertia:Amazing. Thank you so much. That's exactly the point that I was trying to get at, eric, that there are these things that can help but get professional help and when you're using those things, do it in a controlled environment. It should never be a substitute for seeking professional help and for actually addressing the root cause of the issue that you have. So I'm so grateful for you to point in that out so important. Thank you so much. I also want to ask you about Survivor to Thriver, because you are the host of Survivor to Thriver. Could you quickly talk about Survivor to Thriver and kind of just wrap up by letting the audience know how they can reach out to you or support you in everything that you do?
Erik DaRosa:Absolutely. Thanks for asking so. From Survivor to Thriver is our mental health podcast that I founded in January of 2021. We were still in the height of that pandemic thing, right, and I was struggling with my own mental health. I realized that if I was struggling and I had been on this really long journey and I had the resources available and I had the tools available, that I was struggling, that I could only imagine the other 7 billion people around the globe who may not have been some, may not have been predisposed to some of these issues, and I could only imagine what other people were going through. And so my co-host, mark, and I launched the From Survivor to Thriver podcast, and it'll be three years old in January.
Erik DaRosa:It's all about shattering the stigma around having mental health conversations, building community, empowering voices and, most importantly, letting other people know that they're not alone on their own journeys and that there's hope and there's help and there's a way through. And so, each and every Tuesday morning, we have a new episode and we have a new guest from somewhere around the world who comes on and they share their story of what it took to go from however they describe surviving to, however they describe what thriving is and, most importantly, the arc of what they did to be able to move through that particular issue for them. And so you can find us. The podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts, and you can go directly to our website from survivor to thrivercom, where you can access the podcast, the book that I was a contributor in called Scars to Stars, which was published in September of 2023. You can reach out to us directly if you have questions, comments, if you want to be on the show. We'd love to hear from you. So, again, it's from survivor to thrivercom.
Kertia:Thank you so much for hanging out with me thus far. If you'd like to support our work, join our Patreon community and share this podcast with your friends and family. Until next time.
