ATHE_Transcript_Ep 519_Dr. Sherry Walling
JJ Virgin: [00:00:00] Hey, this is JJ Virgin. Welcome and thanks so much for joining me. This is Ask the Health Expert here. I put the Power of Health in your hands and give you access to the top people in health and wellness. In each episode, I share safe ways to get healthy, lose weight, heal your gut detox and lots more. So if you wanna get healthy and get off the dieting for life merry-go-round, I'll give you strategies that will help you look and feel better fast.
So, We talk so much on the show about food, go figure, and you know, exercise and supplements. But it's interesting. Over the course of the last 18 months, I've been very much focused on healing my nervous system and just kind of [00:01:00] what the effect of, of some grief and trauma has done to me and the results.
Profound. So much so that my team for one of my companies was like, Hey, we noticed, you know, in the last 18 months we've noticed this shift and we want you to keep doing that. I'm like, okay. So I'm really excited about our guest today. I've known her now for, gosh, I think three or four years, and she came out with a book recently, just a courageous, powerful book called Touching Two Worlds.
A guide to finding hope in the landscape of loss, and she wrote this book after going through some serious loss on her own. I'm gonna let her explain this. During the interview, but really she started to look at, you know, how do we navigate grief? And you know, the answer is we navigate grief probably with wine and movies and ignoring it, which as if you're navigating any, you know, doesn't work.
And you [00:02:00] know, you probably heard your body keeps score. And if you don't learn for ways to release these things, it can end up doing anything from cancer, heart disease. Weight loss resistance on down. So I'm really excited to, to delve into this. You're probably gonna get more of this on our show because I think we really need to start looking at how.
We can heal, balance reprogram, reset our nervous system. So I have Dr. Sherry Walling with me. She's a clinical psychologist, a speaker, podcaster, author, and mental health advocate. She is the founder of Zen Founder and she where she helps entrepreneurs and leaders navigate complex human experiences.
She also is a Zen Founder podcast, which has been called a Must Listen by both Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine. And again, she is now the author of Touching Two Worlds. This is her second book. She and her husband Rob live in Minneapolis and they , they said, spends a [00:03:00] lot of time driving her kids to music lessons.
Haha. But also she is a, Circus aerialist, which is super cool, and she'll explain how she got into that and how it helped her move through of some of this stuff. So I'm, I'm really excited to just explore this subject. And as you're listening, you probably start to realize what this has done in your life.
But, but here's the cool thing, what you can do to help move through it. So without further ado, I will be right back with Sherry.
I am super excited to talk to you about your book, cause I've been kind of behind the scenes on your book because Sherry and I are in a group together and Sherry, I really like I'm so impressed with everything that you've been doing, but we are gonna unpack this today, [00:04:00] so I just wanna say hello.
Welcome to the show first. ,
Dr. Sherry Walling: so great to be with you and have this kind of conversation in addition to the behind the scenes conversations
JJ Virgin: we have have, yes. . So yeah, we are gonna be digging into grief on the show and a little bit more of, of just who Sherry is because she's just super interesting, fascinating woman.
But I'd love to start first with just even unpacking the book itself because you recently came out with the book. Touching two worlds. And so the obvious question would be, well, what? What would those two worlds be?
Dr. Sherry Walling: Yeah. So the title of the book came from, well, the book is about grief, which is an important introduction, but this sense.
That I was having as someone who was living in this wonderful full life, building a company, taking care of my patients and clients, raising children, you know, just having a sense of like, oh my God, I'm so alive, and at the same time [00:05:00] that that's happening, I am. Kind of catapulted it into this world of illness and grief with my dad and with my brother, my dad who was struggling with esophageal cancer, my brother who was really battling alcohol addiction and depression.
And so I was also immersed in this other world of, of illness and of darkness and of. People who eventually lost their lives. So this world of grief and of death. So I needed to find a way to be in both places at once, right, to honor the grief and the loss, and also to stay in the fullness and beauty of the life that I was also offered.
JJ Virgin: You know, as I was listening to that, I, I just, we always do this, we reflect on our own lives, right? And, and thinking so much of the things that, that we've all gone through our griefs grief processes, and then usually there's, there are some, like, there's some sunshine somewhere, and I just wonder if it's difficult to see the sunshine because you might even [00:06:00] feel guilty experiencing any pleasure and joy when things are so grim.
Dr. Sherry Walling: I think a lot of people feel like that, right? If you're in this phase of life where there's a lot of struggle or you're in some pain, or you're losing people that you love, you, you kind of feel like you're supposed to play this role of the grieving mother or daughter or wife or whatever. And I think that my big aha in my own experience is that it really is both.
Like I can be in deep joy and then 10 minutes later. Be really in touch with the deep grief and that that is actually a more normative, natural course for our emotional existence than the categories that we're supposed to be in grief for like. Six weeks and then everything's fine again. Like that's not how our emotions work.
JJ Virgin: Yeah. And you, you just even think about like you know, when someone passes and what people have set up as, you know, think in the Jewish religion. One of my girlfriends died of breast cancer and we sat [00:07:00] Shiva. Yeah. For like a, I think, I don't know how long that was. Was it a month? Was it like, cuz every day I went over there to do this and then it's.
Yeah, I'm like that. That doesn't quite seem like that worked that way. You know , right?
Dr. Sherry Walling: But even that is more than many traditions have, right? If you're not from that Jewish tradition, there isn't even like a script of how you go and visit or how you show up for the people that you love in their loss.
Maybe you send some flowers, maybe you send a meal, maybe you stop. Or tend to service, but we don't have these like rituals that help us know how to grieve well alongside other people,
JJ Virgin: which I can tell you, having gone through this with my son and when he was first in the hospital and watching who would show up and who didn't show up and first being upset by the people who didn't show up, instead of focusing on the people who did show up, like, which was like, what?
Why, what am I doing? But just realizing that some people just didn't have the skillset. They just had no clue what to do. Cuz [00:08:00] you're right, we are never trained on this. And you look at this last couple years of just the grief and the trauma. So much stuff has gone on and I know that you, is this, is this all fitting into this, this paradigm shift that you're trying to make of that?
We've just, we've just been handling this all wrong.
Dr. Sherry Walling: Yeah. We have to grieve better. You know, we grieve by ignoring it. You know, we grieve by keep going. We grieve by stuff it and just get up the next day. Or we grieve by, you know, sitting in front of Netflix or drinking that third glass of wine. I mean, none of these things are wrong in isolation, but we're ignoring the depth of grief and.
Therefore some of the richness that it has to offer us. So we see people leaving their jobs, leaving their families. We see implosion, we see addiction. We see this sort of misplaced searching for something that helps us to soothe. When I might say it's just much easier, like [00:09:00] let's just grieve it. Let's just go right into the heart of what hurts and let it hurt for a
JJ Virgin: while.
If you don't do that. . I mean, it, it, you know, you know how they say time heals all wounds. I don't believe that. Especially with like things that are super traumatic. . Yeah. I don't believe that either. . Yeah, I was gonna say you're the psychologist. So . You know, if someone just decides they're gonna stuff this one drink more wine, watch Netflix, whatever, and, and we now really don't believe time heals all wounds.
What happens then with those people? Does this just become a shift in their whole physiology? ,
Dr. Sherry Walling: I would argue. Yeah. I mean that's where we see chronic health problems. We see the, the breakdown of the body because the body is working so hard to manage this sort of latent emotional power. So you know, we see people who are then Putting that emotional energy into other behaviors in an attempt to suppress or or numb.
And so we see both a shift in health behavior, [00:10:00] but then in just the body's ability to fight disease and to be well, a well-balanced system. So if we don't actively grieve, we're going to passively grieve. And that creates a lot of complication for us in our, in our body's systems.
JJ Virgin: So what types of things by not actively grieving, and then we're gonna go up and talk a little bit about how one could do that, but what, what types of, of effects could that have on the body?
Dr. Sherry Walling: Well, I think anything that we commonly associate with chronic stress, so decreased immune function. Difficulty in metabolism regulation, you know, weight gain, even the, the early phases of heart disease can be linked back to this sense of the body working really difficult, like very hard to try to metabolize something difficult.
I don't know if you are familiar with [00:11:00] Gabor Mate's I think newer book when the Body says No and you know the link between various types of cancer and. Different emotional or personality patterns that I think in some ways could be traced back to
JJ Virgin: grief. Yeah. I'm thinking about, you know, some of my friends who've been diagnosed with breast cancer, one's husband, you know, they had the most beautiful relationship.
This was the couple, everyone would aspire to have their relationship, and then the husband got devastating like, Disease that there's no cure for it, and he's just disintegrating and bam. Mm-hmm. , you know, and then another one who just was so unhappy with her body and always unhappy with her breasts, like talked about all the time.
And I'm like, you know, so, yeah. And those have been the people I've known that have, have, have gotten breast cancer. Like, you know, just,
Dr. Sherry Walling: and you see the part of the story that. Is emotional. Mm-hmm. . [00:12:00]
JJ Virgin: So if, if we know then that grief and I did a, I did a podcast with Dr. Amy Apigian who was talking about trauma and it's just such fascinating stuff and you just wish that, you know, we could somehow, Do a really specific nervous system test because I always believe tests, don't guess.
And you know, you can go, oh, look at your blood sugar, look at this, you know,
Dr. Sherry Walling: but, but you can point to a number in a thing and say, Hey, this is what this
JJ Virgin: means for you. I know we need like a nervous system test. Like you could go through a scan, it would give you this score. I mean, the only thing I can think of that you can even see right now is H R V and we just don't really even know.
that like, you know, right. It's all over the board. And I, that's sort of a frustrating thing is you go, okay, well I'm okay. I'll just shake this off. You know, . Yeah. So, . If we now know that grief and trauma, if you don't address them, are stored and can have profound effects on your health, how do we [00:13:00] back it up then and do something about it from the con?
You know, it's conception when people, because gosh, I think the one. Thing we know to be true in life is that we are gonna face hard challenging times and Yeah. You know, if anything, it's celebrated in our culture to, you know, get back up, dust up, you know, beat dust off, be especially for men. Mm-hmm. , you know mm-hmm.
And so how do we shift that and what do we do if we, and I don't really know who hasn't been subjected to some kind of grief or trauma in. Two years especially, but just sure in life, in the course of their lifetime. Right? I mean, multiple upon multiple. And I would assume that it's, it's a cumulative, since your body's a history book, it's a cumulative effect.
So what do we, what do we do? What do we do initially and how do we deal with the, like all the stuff we now currently have?
Dr. Sherry Walling: So it's a multi-layered question for sure. But I think the simplest place to start [00:14:00] is with this deep sense of the importance of expression. That we don't move around these experiences.
We have to move in and through them. And so expression comes in many forms. It comes in talking about it. It comes in seeing a therapist. It comes in really taking the time to talk with the people around you about what's happened and how it feels inside of you so that you can come to feel or think or hold it differently.
Expression can come into writing. Expression can come in our bodies, right? The physical expression. Of letting some of these big emotions move through us, whether that's with an expressive art like dance or a fine art like painting, or even just going to the gym and beating the hell out of the floor with the battle ropes, or just really using your emotional life to move weight around.
So there are lots of layers to the question, like I said, but I feel like expression is the piece that we're missing because it's the piece that we most quickly wanna run through. We don't wanna talk [00:15:00] about it, we don't wanna dwell on it. We don't wanna, you know, have a pity party. And I'm not talking about a pity party, I'm talking about the intentional decision to walk toward the things that are hard, give them a little life and space until that wound begins to heal, rather than to sort of like cover it up and shut it.
JJ Virgin: Yeah, I mean, you just look at animals and when they get scared, what they do, they shake. They shake, you
Dr. Sherry Walling: know, they shake
JJ Virgin: it out, they shake, they shake it out, they shake it off me through and boom, they go. They go on out. So and I know that one of the techniques we've been working on some different ones for my son after going through such trauma.
It was a traumatic experience. It's like, all right, now, now how do we get this out? And you know, one of them is just a shaking, shaking therapy. Absolutely. Yeah.
Dr. Sherry Walling: So, so I know, shaking, shaking, yelling, crying, .
JJ Virgin: Yeah, we it, it, it's all the stuff that honestly feels so unnatural.
Dr. Sherry Walling: It feels [00:16:00] so unadult, right?
Yeah. We've told ourselves a story about what it means to be a put together grownup human, and it doesn't involve shaking. It doesn't involve vocalization, right? It, you know, it involves this like very prefrontal cortex, dominant articulation of words and thoughts and feelings, but that's not the fullness of who we are.
That's a piece of. So getting to some of these deeper layers through shaking, through dancing through movement can be incredibly powerful in tapping into those like base level emotions.
JJ Virgin: And you just wonder like, you know, you look at school and all the schools have now pretty much taken the movement out of the school when this was probably the single most important thing that the kids could actually learn is how to, you know, release their bodies.
You know, I've been going to these meditation retreats and the first time I went, the first like two days, people were shaking. There was some [00:17:00] yelling and I'm. whole, like, you know, who are the first two days, what's going on? I look at those people go, man, that's like, I'm not gonna do that, blah, blah. By the end of the week I'm going, gosh, I really wanna do that.
You know, , I'm like, I really could that happen for me? You know, cuz you realize what they're shedding and that they're just shedding and then they have amazing shifts in their health cuz they shed all that stored trauma. But yeah, initially, like, you know, our adult little, our adult brain just judges and goes, I'm not, I'm not gonna.
I look at what that is.
Dr. Sherry Walling: Well, we're really committed to this story of we are in control, and what grief and trauma teach you is that you aren't in control, right? It's things that happen to you against your consent and against your will that are the most traumatizing experiences. And so when we maintain.
Sort of our clenched fist attachment to being in control or the illusion of our control. We stay in that very [00:18:00] prefrontal cortex kind of mind. But when we come to a place where we're, we're loosening control, we're letting our voices make sounds, we're letting our bodies move and, and we're like sort of submitting to the fact that there's a story beyond.
The grownup totally put together version of us. Then I think that's where we get to work through some of that sort of existential dilemma or lack of controllability in a way that's freeing. It's not scary or terrible. It's actually freeing.
JJ Virgin: So is that what got you to take up , your circus act, so, but one thing that I thought was so fun, I've never.
Heard this one done is, you know, I'm always looking for fun ways people launch their books. And you launched your book by doing a circus show.
Dr. Sherry Walling: Yeah. A circus show about suicide. . . Yeah. So I, the in the midst, my book is written. as a psychologist, but it's also a deep reflection on my own personal grief.
And those griefs are the loss of my dad's cancer and [00:19:00] my brother to suicide within a six month period. So, like I said, it's sort of this immersion into this world of, of darkness and sadness and. Right around that time, I had taken up a new hobby of aerial arts, of using the flying trapeze and using the aerial fabric to kind of express some of what was hope happening in my body.
And it ended up being just a really, really powerful tool for me for expression. So, because it had been so core, I I wanted to try to integrate it into the story of this book because for me, I can't really talk about my experience of grief without talking about my experience of being in the circus, which is, you know, somewhat of an unusual pairing.
So I worked with my aerial coach, who herself has the experience of having lost a brother to suicide, and we put together a show that depicted someone's experience of really losing their footing to a mental health [00:20:00] struggle and struggling with addiction, and then ultimately becoming isolated and losing their lives.
So we told the story of this kind of, Through aerial arts. And I gotta say, jj, it's one of the, it's one of the best things I've ever been involved with. It's such an integrative practice of expression and words and beauty and fearfulness. Mm-hmm. It really felt like the full human story.
JJ Virgin: Well, having done trapeze. because you've been to my girlfriend's house who has a trapeze in her backyard. Yes, . And it is, it's such a metaphor. And you look at it and go, oh, I can do that. And then you get up there and you go, this is the scariest thing. And you, it, it involves, you cannot do this so much. Yeah. I mean, for anyone who's ever watched this, it doesn't look anywhere near as
scary from below as it does when you stand up there on that platform and you have to lean forward. . Yep. Yep. And then they tell you to jump. I remember the first time they told me to [00:21:00] jump and nothing happened, and I, and I'm, I'm standing there and I'm. . Oh wait a minute. Like my body just went, Nope, not doing that.
My brain just jump. I'm gonna stay right here. Yeah. Cause I was like, why am I not flying? Because cuz he said jump, but nothing happened. , . The circuitry didn't work. It's so funny. I have the greatest video of that. Of just, okay. And then the next time I did find, and the next time he had us put our legs up and we were just gonna you know, swing back and forth on our legs.
Except for some reason I decided that time what I was gonna do is swing out and I just went flying. I just took my legs off bar. You just let go. I just let go of everything. Thank God I was on a you know, a course . He's, he's like, what were you doing? I'm like, I was flying. I was flying. But. . Holy smokes.
It is, you know, you look at these things and I just wonder like, how would that help someone, you know, how did that help you with your grief? Mm-hmm. , because I can look at it and go, okay, it helped me [00:22:00] overcome some, you know, limiting beliefs for sure. But how does something like that help someone who's gone through grief or trauma to get to the other side?
I think
Dr. Sherry Walling: it helps you find a sense of congruence. So when you are in grief and trauma, you're in turmoil, you're in a sense of like, everything is turned up. Maybe you're feeling under threat, but there's, there's some sense of sort of disorganization within your body and it feels very like keyed up. And so when you find a physical activity, Brings you through that disorientation to the other side.
It creates some congruence between your inner state and your external reality. So in the worst of my grief, I felt afraid all the time. I felt like I was living in like. An alternative universe, like nothing was real. [00:23:00] And those are really dark, scary ways to feel. And it kind of feels like that when you're standing on a trapeze platform.
Like this is an alternative reality. Like it definitely feels that way. I'm doing this what's happening. But when you do hold on tight and when you do jump from the platform and your, your body carries you through the whole story, you go. Disorganization to reintegration. That's what our, that's what we're sort of seeking in our grief and in our trauma process.
But we get stuck in the middle of the story. And so when we can give our body these cues, these practice experiences of moving back into reintegration I think that holds a lot of power. I dunno if that makes sense, but it's the sense of like, everything's sort of taken apart and dismantled and then you help your body practice putting it together on the fly.
JJ Virgin: Yeah. I'm just trying to figure out for the, for those who are not gonna go get on a trapeze , [00:24:00] what, what would be a similar type of experience someone could put themselves into? Because it definitely. made a shift for me. Mm-hmm. um, You know, it's one that I still, I, I remember climbing up climbing up the rope.
Yeah. Standing on the platform, freaking out, wondering if they like strapped me in already, you know, just the entire thing. But the feeling that it felt when you actually did it. And so I'm assuming most people won't have this opportunity. Right. But something could be similar to that.
Dr. Sherry Walling: Yeah. And it is some of.
Sort of process that underlies the effectiveness of psychedelic medicines when they're applied to mental health. You know, that sense of being in an alternative world and then being able to kind of come back to your own self post journey. So that's where, you know, I think it will be interesting to see as those.
Interventions become more widely available. They are really indicated for use [00:25:00] with trauma and grief because of that sense of like, oh, I'm losing ground. I'm losing myself, I'm losing my footing. But then there's an integration or a return at the end that mirrors that.
JJ Virgin: We have not talked about that at all on the show.
And since you're here Mm. And I know you have some experience and have been researching this, what have you seen like in terms of that some of those. , different modalities for trauma and grief, like can that create. You know, a quicker shift in, say someone doing talk therapy, I'm assuming you could do a lot of talk therapy or go through something like this and help facilitate you to get to the other side much more quickly.
Is that the case? Yeah.
Dr. Sherry Walling: There is a very robust body of research specifically with the way that M D M A is effective in treating P T S D or trauma related disruption in the body and. The simplest explanation is that one of the mechanisms at play there [00:26:00] is that M D M A inhibits the functioning of the amygdala for a short period of time.
And of course, our listeners will be well aware that the amygdala is this sort of fear and upset center of the brain. So if we can turn that down. Then we can do talk therapy much faster, much more efficient. So in these sort of treatment protocols, you're using psychedelic supported psychotherapy. So you're doing all the talk work mm-hmm.
about the trauma material or your trauma experiences, but you are doing it with. Without any fear or without any upset, and instead a chemically induced infusion of deep empathy. So you're creating within the body these conditions at which therapy can be super effective, much faster than you know, the years of talk therapy that it may take to build the kind of relational foundation where you're amygdala is that.
calm [00:27:00] and you have that much empathy present.
JJ Virgin: Are there like the US. Legal now, or is it still all just research projects? It's
Dr. Sherry Walling: very close. With the we're in the final or the phase three of F D A approval for M D M A, for P T S D psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms is on a similar trajectory.
Things like ketamine, which are psychedelic ish, are already legal and widely used, so I think this will be something that's rolled out in the next. You know, it'll be f d a approved in the next year to 18 months, and then what the rollout looks like nationally will be sort of anybody's guess given all of that.
Well,
JJ Virgin: I mean, a lot of training is gonna need to happen for that one. Yeah. Yeah. So that'll be interesting. Yeah, that's that's exciting stuff though, that that'll be available. Having, you know, gone through stuff where I have. You know, one son with ex, well, both sons with big ptsd. Yeah. You know, we're always looking for all those options out there.
So [00:28:00] hopeful. Hopeful,
Dr. Sherry Walling: hopefully. And I'm excited to see them more
JJ Virgin: available. Yeah, I think it would be helpful. You look at like, especially in the psych med field that just, just some of these horrific medications and it's like if you could do something like this research I've read is like, you know, basically.
someone's shifting and not needing antidepressants anymore. I mean, just a dramatic, dramatic thing to get them off of these medications that, yeah, the side effects quite often are worse than the original problem. Yeah, so very cool. Okay, so for someone listening, what would you say like next best step? get your book obviously, because you can really just kind of go through the process with you and the journey.
What would you leave as a parting, parting thoughts for someone who right now might be experiencing some grief or just possibly just realizing how much grief they've been stuffing for a long period of time? Yeah,
Dr. Sherry Walling: I think I just wanna affirm that all of us are carrying quite a lot of [00:29:00] grief, even if it's not grief related to death.
grief is the emotional reaction to any kind of loss. And so there's grief within all of us, and I think taking some time to kind of do a little inner exploration around where that grief may lie, and being curious about what that grief is asking of you, whether it's writing it's expression, it's a physical.
Activity that sort of gives space to that grief. But I think the simple invitation is to notice and to listen and to not ignore those signals as weakness or unhelpful, but to see them as as deeply valuable.
JJ Virgin: Now I'm hopeful. I'm gonna send everybody to a link that right now you'll be able to get your favorite soothing playlist.
I'm hopeful that you'll also at some point have. that video from the talk, cuz that sounds amazing. I'm dying to see it. So your circus [00:30:00] show, I'm kind, well they're circus video up. I'm just, just putting, I'm putting that out there. Just hinty hint to you that you'll do that. So I'm gonna put all of this at jjvirgin.com/sherry, s h e r r y.
And I'm saying all of this because right now it's going to be the music. and let's just cross our fingers on the other. Let's just make it, we'll get it done. We'll get it done. We'll just make it so we'll make it so and I think the most important thing is like, I, I, I love the line Dr. Joe Dispenza says, is have compassion and care.
You know, it's like have compassion and care and give yourself the time that you need, and then the space and grace to go through these things because we're all going through them. Yeah. Be gentle. Yes. Thank you.
Okay. And a reminder about Dr. Sherry Walling, you can get that beautiful, soothing musical track by going to jjvirgin.com/sherry, s h [00:31:00] e r r y. And I'm sure by then she'll put her, her circus show on there too. So when you grab the book, touching two worlds, you can also then watch the show she did as the launch to walk you through it.
Her circus act, which I am really, I haven't seen it yet either, so I'm really looking forward to seeing it. All right, I will see you next time. If you have not yet subscribed super easy to do, just go to subscribetojj.com. See you next time.