Beyond Well With Sheila Hamilton

Narcissistic Personality Disorder or NPD is a condition characterized by an overwhelming need for attention and admiration, a heightened sense of self-importance, and a lack of empathy toward others. It is difficult enough to encounter a partner or business associate with NPD, but Liz Scott grew up with narcissists as parents. Like an archaeological dig, Liz Scott’s memoir This Never Happened goes in search of the answers to the mysteries of her family. In her relentless quest to uncover the truth, she mines photographs and letters, leaving no one, including herself, unexamined.  In the end, Liz's struggle clears decades of familial pain to make room for compassion.

Storm Large: musician, actor, playwright, author, awesome. She shot to national prominence in 2006 as a finalist on the CBS show Rock Star: Supernova, where despite having been eliminated in the week before the finale, Storm built a fan base that follows her around the world to this day. Storm joins us to talk about growing up with a severely mentally disturbed mother and the message she received from her mother's doctor, "Oh yeah, you will absolutely end up like your Mother. It's hereditary." But, this conversation is not about Storm's efforts to outrun a diagnosis, it's an artist's journey back to herself. Storm's autobiographical musical memoir, Crazy Enough, played to packed houses in 2009 during its unprecedented 21-week sold-out run in Portland. She's back for the ten-year reunion stronger, wiser, and larger in spirit than ever before. (Don't miss the after the show conversation about cancel culture and what really goes on in therapy.)

Skye Fitzgerald is an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker whose work on issues of social justice takes him to the epicenters of suffering. We talk with Skye about how he maintains his sense of self while covering brutally difficult topics.  Skye's most recent film, Lifeboat, forced this choice: "When you see someone drowning after falling or being pushed from a boat filled with refugees, do you get the shot or do you pull someone to safety? I put down the camera and grabbed people from the water. It was the decision I made so that I could live with myself." 

     Today’s show with Nyna Giles exposes the good and bad news about psychological suffering. Let’s start with the bad news first… Psychological suffering doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care who you are, how wealthy your friends are, how beautiful you are, or what circles you run it. Psychological suffering can and will affect us all. Of course, privileges give certain people access to resources that may help those people cope more effectively with the suffering life deals them, but the suffering will happen all the same.   Nyna’s mother had all the trappings of the “perfect” life: she transcended her humble beginnings to become one of the “beautiful people,” hobnobbing with the rich and famous, including Grace Kelly, who she counted as her closest friend. And yet, psychological suffering, this time in the form of psychosis, came crashing down on that beautiful picture. As her mother’s world shrank, Nyna did what any child would do; she tried her very best to “save” her mom. But, of course, even our best a

Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Without proper treatment, binge-eating disorder and bulimia can also bring misery and death. Robyn Cruz struggled with food throughout much of her adolescent and adult life, most notably, an eating disorder that crippled her spirit. Now, Robyn is traveling the country with her husband and two daughters, determined to raise awareness about the deadly nature of eating disorders and the long journey she traveled to make peace with her body, her food, and herself.  A well-known published author, public speaker and coach, Robyn Cruze, MA, is Eating Recovery Center’s National Recovery Advocate. Robyn participates in national media events and conferences exclusively for Eating Recovery Center and its Partner Programs. She also serves as a crucial source of support and knowledge to alumni, families and professionals on behalf of Eating Recovery Center and the Eating Recovery Center Foundation. 

Sophia Shalmiyev was eleven when she immigrated to New York City from Leningrad, motherless, displaced, and terrified. Shalmiyev is clear-eyed and unsentimental about the trauma and poverty she endured as a child and how it shaped the woman she is today as a feminist, artist, and mother. Shalmiyev is fiery and unapologetic in her views of what it takes to raise a feminist son. Her opinion of her newly adopted country is equally as compelling.  "I love America," she says, "It's broken, like me."  Shalmiyev is the author of Mother Winter, an MFA graduate of Portland State University, and a visual artist. She lives with her two children in Portland, Oregon. 

  Anna Debenham is the founder of the Insight Alliance, an organization that works with men and women in prison and in the community sharing two simple, but profoundly life-changing ideas: We have everything we need inside ourselves to lead a good life Our experience of life is being created moment to moment from the insight out by our thoughts. At the heart of much of our suffering is our experience of life as something that is happening to us, rather than moving through us. As Anna puts it “We are feeling our thinking, not feeling the world around us.” Our minds create a virtual reality of the world that is so convincing that we usually can’t tell the difference between the world and the world as experienced through our thoughts. And it’s that world as experienced through thoughts that we become beholden to and, in that, lose the freedom to choose our path.  

For the last few years, Laurel Braitman, has been teaching writing and communications skills to medical students and doctors at Stanford University, helping healthcare professionals connect more meaningfully with their patients, their peers, and themselves. Nearly 30% of American medical students are depressed and one in ten have thoughts about suicide. Practicing physicians are even worse off with some of the highest suicide rates in the nation. It's how we learn to communicate with one another that matters most. The most important thing we can do in the time we have here is connect with other people  and ideally, make them feel less alone. Laurel also studies we can learn from the emotional lives of non-human animals, including her New York Times bestselling book, Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves helped us see how we can learn a lot from our non-human animal counterparts.  

Nate Botsford says he grew up with mental illness in his home, unable to comprehend until much later who much it shaped who he is as a singer/songwriter. Nate began writing music at the age of thirteen and recognized how much of his songwriting was influenced by the dysfunction of growing up in a household where depression, sadness, and malaise was part of the norm. Today, Nate writes directly to the source of the negative voices he hears in his head. Listen in to the extraordinary sound and artistry of Nate Botsford.  

If you've ever felt like giving up or wondered what the point of life is, Scott Erickson wants you to know you're not alone. Through performance art, story-teaching, participation, and image curation Scott talks about the overwhelming voices he encountered that told him three things--nothing new will ever happen, you are sick and ugly, and dying is better than living. Then, Scott got curious about his interior life. And by examining his own existential crisis, Scott began to see this moment not as an ending but as a doorway into a much deeper invitation to understanding our hopes, vocation, and our existence itself. His live presentations are beyond the beyond.    #suicide #depression #anxiety #performance #art #storytelling #hope#existential #crisis #faith    

Meet Eleven-year-old Heather, whose quote book carries these bits of wisdom. "Don't judge by the outside. Dig deeper."  "I was an easy target. Now I'm not." And "I was bullied when I was younger and I've never been the same since." Heather was recently diagnosed as autistic, but, for a long time, kids just called her weird or different. She was bullied and terrorized for much of her elementary school experience. Finally receiving a diagnosis allowed Heather and her Mom access to tools to understand the unique nature of Heather's brain and how she might help others understand what it is like to be neurodivergent Now, Heather is reclaiming the word "weird" for herself and teaching other kids about what it means to be empathetic, open-hearted and hopeful. 

This is truly one of the most beautiful conversations we've had about the experience of psychosis and what it means to lose touch with reality. Sarah Townsend tenderly examines the terrifying experience of postpartum psychosis through art, film, psychology and explains why love and connection is key to finding ground again. Sarah C. Townshend, Author, Therapist, Mother. Setting the Wire, a Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis available at www.SarahTownsendwriter.com    

Jen Pastiloff speaks with clarity and honesty about the sometimes rocky path to becoming human. She battled an eating disorder, she abandoned a brilliant path as a writer to become a waitress, and finally, she did something remarkable. She asked for help and willed herself toward health. Jen's honest assessment of who she is andwhat she has to offer the world is mother-effing awesome.

The CDC estimates that for every one person who dies by suicide, eight people are profoundly affected. The  grief, shock and sadness is shared by friends, coaches, church members and community members. 48,000 people died by suicide in 2018, leaving behind hundreds and thousands of people asking the question "WHY?" Leslie Abraham's husband died by suicide after a perplexing descent into depression. Her interaction with the psychiatric system is not uncommon--medicine didn't seem to help and her husband's shame over his condition forced the family into isolation. In this revealing and intimate interview, Leslie discusses what it means to be a suicide loss survivor and to rebuild her own view of mental health in the wake of such a significant loss.

I've been talking to experts about mental health, psychology and wellness for more than a decade. But, when I finally met Dr. Brian Goff and Dr. Jenna LeJeune, I knew they were my kind of people.  In this episode of Beyond Well, Brian and Jenna talk with Sheila Hamilton about their careers, and what brought them to be interested in a particular type of therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.  Dr. LeJeune: "So much of the conversation around psychological suffering is pathologizing it. If you are experiencing pain, you've got to fix it. But if you are experiencing pain, that doesn't mean something is wrong with you. We have these tools that can help you develop psychological flexibility to deal more effectively with pain in the moment of your suffering."  Dr. Brian Goff: "I don't want people to fix themselves. I want someone to listen to this and feel like they're in good company with other humans and learn to reduce the pain they feel about their pain. How can I experience it in a way that even when my bo

Reema Zaman is the first born child of a Bangledishi family, whose parents moved to Thailand and Hawaii before Reema turned six. In other words, she became used to being considered different. Reema's experience as a young woman growing up in cultures where women were not regarded as equal humans created a litany of problems--anorexia and sexually and emotionally abusive relationships with men.  Reema has wrestled free from those nightmarish experiences to not only tell her story, but rewrite her own path forward as a woman, a feminist, and an actress. Her memoir, I am Yours, tells the story of how Reema wrestled free of her past to become an inspiration for millions of other young women.     

Mitchell S. Jackson grew up in Portland, Oregon, one of the whitest cities in America. He dealt drugs, he spent time in prison, and then he went on to become a critically acclaimed author and teacher. His book, Survival Math is one of the most anticipated works on racism and the conditions that shape young black men.    In this episode of Beyond Well, Sheila, Brian and Jenna talk with Mitchell about why empathy may be the first step toward repairing America's fractures.   

We're thrilled to welcome Lidia Yuknavitch, author of nine books, including The Chronology of Water, The Small Backs of Children, The book of Joan, and the Misfits Manifesto. Lidia's Ted Talk, The Beauty of Being a Misfit has been viewed 2,862,000 times. We think she has something to share about how telling and retelling your story can help re-frame traumatic experience.

Angela Schellenberg was at home watching television with her mother when the news described a vicious murder. Angela watched in horror as she realized the yet-to-be-named victim's car belonged to her Father. For weeks, Angela dealt with the fear and uncertainty of a killer on the loose, a trauma that ultimately contributed to her mother's mental breakdown. In this riveting interview, Angela talks about rebuilding her life in the wake of trauma and become a licensed therapist who helps other people finding their way after violence.

Dr. Stuart Ablon is Director of THINKKIDS/Psychiatry at Massachusetts General and the co-inventor of Collaborative Problem Solving. In this interview with Sheila Hamilton and Dr.'s Brian Goff and Jenna LeJeune, Dr. Ablon talks about parenting explosive children. The well-researched truth, "They Do As Well As They Can" may change the way you think about discipline forever.