Recovery Diaries In Depth

From Squalor and Fear to Thriving and Helping; an Interview with Psychotherapist Sheri Heller | RDID; 201

Recovery Diaries

Sheri Heller is many things. She is a psychotherapist, a coach, an interfaith minister, and a supremely talented writer. She is also a trauma survivor, having been raised in the chaos and pain of a home where her mother was suffering from chronic paranoid schizophrenia. Sheri wrote the piece, “An Orphan’s Memorial to Her Dying Mother” and sent it to us, years ago. Our filmmaker, Glenn Holsten, was so moved by the piece that he collaborated with Sheri and animators Sandra & Paul Fierlinger to create a beautiful animated short about her relationship with her mother. 

On our podcast, Sheri talks about how creative expression—writing, psychodrama, performance—can open doors to healing. She offers practical markers of readiness, why a stable witness matters, and how to pace work when somatic memory surges past your defenses.

We also dig into the broken architecture of mental health care: fragmented services, prohibitive costs, and the patchwork of county policies that make crisis responses inconsistent. Sheri recounts the plainspoken guidance NAMI gave her—advice that balanced compassion with realism—and how it reshaped her approach to caregiving and self-preservation. Her story arrives in the present with a quiet kind of hope: sobriety, a marriage rooted in mutual understanding, a steady practice in Montreal, and the capacity to regulate and re-center when old echoes return. Listen, and share.

Conversations like the ones on this podcast can sometimes be hard, but they're always necessary. If you or someone you know is struggling, please consider visiting www.wannatalkaboutit.com. If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please call, text, or chat 988.

https://oc87recoverydiaries.org/

GabeNathan:

Hello. This is Recovery Diaries in Depth. I'm your host, Gabe Nathan. Thanks so much for joining us. We're very happy to have you here. We are so grateful to have on Recovery Diaries in Depth Sherry Heller. She's a certified coach, an addiction specialist, Ericksonian hypnotist, and an interfaith minister. She's also the author of the memoir, A Clinician's Journey from Complex Trauma to Thriving. Each week, we'll bring you a Recovery Diaries contributor, folks who have shared their mental health journey with us through essay or video format. We want to see where they are on their mental health journey since initially being published on our website. Our goal is to continue supporting our diverse community by having conversations here on our podcast to follow up and see what has shifted, what has changed, and what new things have emerged. We're so happy to have you along for this journey. We want to remind you to follow our show for new and back episodes at recoverydiaries.org. There, like the podcast, you'll find stories of mental health, empowerment, and change. You can also sign up for our mailing list there so you never miss a new podcast episode, essay, or film. And you can find this podcast pretty much anywhere you get your podcasts. We appreciate your comments and feedback about our show. It helps us improve, make changes, and grow. And of course, make sure to like, share, and subscribe. I'm so, so glad to have you with us today. Sherry Heller, welcome to Recovery Diaries in Depth. Thank you for being here.

SheriHeller:

Oh, thank you. Great to be here.

GabeNathan:

Um I we have such a tremendous uh collection of human beings who are associated with this site and with this organization. And you came to us very early on in our organization's being. And it's it's so interesting because you have had a connection with Bud, our founder. Um, you have had a connection with Glenn, um, who produces and creates all of our films. Um, you have a connection with Lara, who is an editor of ours, um, and who's been with us since almost the very, very beginning. Um, but this is really my first opportunity to really connect with you. And I feel so lucky um to be able to do that through Recovery Diaries in Depth. And I I just want to hear from you kind of how you came to us. Um, and so we can kind of get the beginning of that story.

SheriHeller:

Mm-hmm. Okay. Um my mother had passed, and I had a very turbulent relationship with her. Uh, she was diagnosed as paranoid, schizophrenic. She was in and out of mental hospitals. I incurred complex trauma. Um my whole trajectory of mental health, I've also uh chronicled through my writings, and um I needed a space to really uh uh share my grief. I mean, and writing was always a vehicle for that for me, and I always loved to read as a child, and I wrote a piece to her um during this very turbulent time, and um I felt compelled to seek out a platform where I could share it with others who would understand this very singular type of experience of grief because it's very different than ordinary grief. Um and I had been warning for a very long time prior to my mother's death. That's part of the healing process from trauma. So I did I found OC87 Recovery Diaries, um, and I was really moved by a lot of the material that I found on the site, and I reached out to Bud. Um, I submitted my essay, my my piece to my mother in Orphan's Memorial. And um he curated it. He contacted me. Glenn contacted me, and they asked me if I would be willing to meet with them for an interview to do an animated short. Um and uh Glenn came to Brooklyn where I was living at that time. I now live in Canada. Um, it's a big change that's happened, and um it was an amazing, powerful um experience. I mean, I I really re-engaged with a lot of material that I had processed in therapy. Um, but it was brought to a creative level, an artistic level, which would made it all the more meaningful. And um and then I met Laura. Um, I was also putting together my book of essays, and then Laura reached out. So I I felt like the OC87 recovery team um was just such a uh powerful source of support in my recovery process. And um and then I thought and then there was the um the constellation of of uh films that Glenn had done that was aired, and I was asked if I would contribute to that. And so it's been incredibly meaningful being a part of this organization. And it's uh it's such a wonderful space for people who are struggling with mental illness, who are children of those and love, you know, have loved ones with mental illness. So it's I was so lucky to find you.

GabeNathan:

Um, well, the luck is very reciprocal, Sherry, and I want you to know that. Um thank you. Because if it were not for people like you who are making a choice to be vulnerable, to really stand naked before any the world, like you have no idea who is going to be engaging with the film, who is gonna be engaging with the essay. Um, you've no idea when you put something out into the world, something creative and something personal, it is such a fragile, vulnerable thing. Um, because people can be very cruel. I mean, uh, this isn't the news flash, right? Um and and it sometimes unintentionally so. Um, but the wound is the same, I think, um, whether it's volitional or not. And I I I just we we would be nothing if it were not for people like you who decided I want to come forward, I want to share my story, I want to let people in as opposed to shutting people out. Right. Um, and I think it's it's absolutely extraordinary. Um, and there's one more thing I want to say that we so this podcast is grant funded, and um we're funded by a grant from the Van Amoringen Foundation, and it's I mean, everything we do on the podcast is b because of them. And one of the reasons that we uh that we sought a grant to support this podcast, not because the world needs another podcast, because it does not, um, but because I was getting scared um that we were kind of uh a transactional organization, that someone would come to us, they say, I have an essay or I have a story I want to tell. We say, Okay, we edit it, we pay them a sum. Um they we publish it, there's some you know, social media activity, people read it, and then you go to the next one. And then that relationship with that person kind of ends. Um, and that was really upsetting to me that I don't want that. I don't want to be a transactional organization. I want to, and I even said this to you, I think at the beginning or before we start like being a member of our community, like that's what I want. I want a community here. And you're living proof that it's not transactional, that there is this thread over years um of initially approaching Bud with the essay. And then it's the interview with Glenn in the basement in Brooklyn and creating the the animated short and the review by Laura. And now you're back on the podcast. So for maybe for some people, it is a one and done thing, and we never hear from them again. But there are lots of examples of a of a through line. Yeah. And not to kind of hijack this interview and talk about, like, oh, you know, Pat Recovery Diary is on the back, and we're so great. But it's it's a lovely, wonderful thing to look someone in the eye and know that they're really a part of this organization. Um and I'm I'm really grateful to you for kind of talking about the through line because it helps me see it. Um because I think sometimes I lose sight of that in just the day-to-day work that we do. So thank you.

SheriHeller:

Oh, my pleasure. I mean, I think there are so many far-reaching implications of your organization. And I shared the work with my clients because I'm a psychotherapist. I work with trauma survivors, and um, they were very moved. And also, of course, that's sort of radical given that I stepped out of that neutral zone. Um, but that's the way I work um appropriately, of course, um uh with clients who inspire them or to let them know I understand their plight, because um, the plight for someone with complex trauma is very prolonged, very extensive. Um I haven't encountered that many people who are daughters of schizophrenics, which is interesting. And that's even in my fellowship um uh meetings that I would go to when I lived in New York, and um it was pretty unique, other than I think my exposure to NAMI.

GabeNathan:

Um I was just gonna ask about NAMI. Like, have you have you engaged in like NAMI family to family? I I feel like that might be a resource to connect you with individual have you encountered anybody?

SheriHeller:

Oh, yeah. Nami, NAMI helped me. My mother was homeless. Um, I went through quite an ordeal with her homelessness. I went to the Supreme Court and got a mental health petition um to try to find her. Uh, she refused to go to a mental hospital. I wanted to take her to Payne Whitney and um which was kind of captured in the short.

Speaker 02:

Yes.

SheriHeller:

But they were amazing, Nami. Um, I spoke, they had attorneys, psychiatrists who spoke to me relentlessly. They said, listen, um, and I was surprised by their position, and I so am so grateful for it. They said, you cannot take her in. She will become your legal responsibility, and she needs a treatment team. Um, you will ruin your life. Um, but I was caught in that place of feeling so bereft um with guilt and torn about how to manage the situation. And uh, but I took their advice, which I'm very glad I did. Eventually, she did end up in a shelter system. She ended up in community access, which no longer exists. They didn't have funding, and but that was kind of short-lived. It was an unfortunate trajectory. Um, that was a very powerful time. And NAMI, I don't know, if NAMI wasn't available, that would have been exceedingly more difficult for me to navigate.

GabeNathan:

And I'm not sure of the timing of when you when you became a psychotherapist, or um, so but I'm assuming that you were navigating this as someone who had pretty significant knowledge of the mental health system. And yeah, so that and that's something that has come up in other interviews that I've done and other people whom I've spoken to. And I mean, I used to work in a locked inpatient crisis facility. And, you know, so navigating, I I mean, I have my own mental health challenges. And even for someone who is in the system and knows the system, it's so fucking hard to to and that's the word. I mean, that's the word for it, right? Yeah. Um, to get help, to get to know resources, to navigate the insurance system, um, laws, regulations, the uh, the very, very fractured nature of the mental health system. Oh, well, this varies by this county, and that county is does it this way, and this county has mobile crisis, and this county doesn't. And oh, well, this they have a ride along with the police, but that it's I don't even know where I'm going with this, but I guess I guess where I'm going with it is I'm kind of fishing for that like that statement of like, yeah, even how do how do normal, just regular, everyday people who don't have this knowledge do this, do any of this with a loved one, um who's who's really, really ill.

SheriHeller:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And right now it's worse than ever. I mean, there are no resources available, at least at the time. And when I I don't know um how I would have even encountered treatment for myself, you know, in this day and age, because I was 18 when I had to live on my own. Um, I was working three jobs. I was able to connect with a therapist at uh I went through an interview at Bellevue, and then they referred me to someone who at NYU Langoni, who was doing his internship. He's now a very well-known clinician, wonderful man. He was like a father to me, and I worked with him for over a decade. Um, but um those resources were available then. I could uh avail myself of health insurance, you know, being a student, working part-time. You don't have these benefits anymore.

GabeNathan:

So um or if you do, you're paying through the nose for them.

SheriHeller:

Yes, it's cost prohibitive. Absolutely. Absolutely. And even when I I've worked, I've done some probono work with I did a theater project I brought to underserved girls and worked in foster care, um and girls from Phoenix House, and um that I had to apply for grants and fellowships, and it was an unbelievable amount of work, copious paperwork, um, having to try to raise funds for that. So um I was fortunate. I was fortunate that there was access to resources, mental health resources. Um, and even when my mother needed to be hospitalized, I mean there were some improvements because her early experiences are really heinous in mental health. She had electric shock without any kind of sedation, um, and she was petrified. Um so trying to get her into treatment became an impossibility. And I think there was also assault that happened to her when she was at Pilgrim State, which is one of the worst asylums. So there is a really dark underbelly of psychiatry, as we know. And um I feel like you have to be very intelligently guarded navigating the system. You have to know what to look for. I often I'm very proactive with my clients in doing resourcing for that reason, um, and helping them to try to navigate a very difficult system and to know what to look for. And um yeah, I'm kind of I'm kind of astounded also a lot of people just come out of graduate school and put a shingle out and don't work in the public sector. They don't do the necessary work to uh cultivate their acumen, their ability as a clinician. And I have so many clients who come to me who are in treatment for years and didn't do um any deep work. I mean, we're just sort of skinning the surface for a long time. So um it it can be disheartening. You know, I think you have to be very creative, which is why I looked for OC87 Recovery Diaries, because I felt there's gotta be a place where people can share their stories, you know, and um have some kind of uh healing through creative expression and through community.

GabeNathan:

So there's there's a lot that is is swimming in my brain as you were as you were talking, but there's there's one thing that I I've been wanting to ask you related to kind of the last thing that you said here about healing through creative expression. And so obviously that's a cornerstone of who we are and what we do and and why we do what we do the way we do it. Um but I I don't want to be um ignorant of the fact or or misleading to say that like every time you explore something related to your mental illness in a creative way, it's going to be healing. Uh it's going to be solely healing. I know that there's a risk there. And that anytime you're quote, going there, um, you're opening yourself up to the risk of retraumatization. No. Uh, you're you're potentially stepping foot into something that you may not know how it's going to affect you. And our editors, uh, I mean, I'm a former mental health provider, um, but we are not therapists. And we, you know, we are here to help you tell your story uh in as safe as possible, empathic way. Um but uh we are not with you in your physical space to help take care of you and and and all of that. And our work is done remotely. So we don't, we only know what we hear from you via email. Yeah. Um, so we don't have the full story of what's going on. And I understand also that a uh a component of recovery is personal responsibility and that, right? It's it's your personal responsibility to really look into yourself, engage. Am I ready to engage in this creative process? Um, do I take responsibility for what may happen? Um, you know, I get that.

Speaker 02:

Yeah.

GabeNathan:

But can you just talk a little bit about that risk and your own personal evaluation about, okay, you know, am I ready to go here? Um what could this be like for me? If you can just talk about that, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts about that.

SheriHeller:

Okay. Um, I do think you have to do adequate work to be able to know you have the tools to regulate yourself, um, to be in your body to deal with what's called abreaction, which is, you know, uh catharsis that is very prevalent when you do artistic work. And I work with some people who um have multiplicity and who have very, very severe trauma. And when they do art, that is typically when they regress or parts come out, altars may emerge. And um, art in itself, because it speaks to metaphorical language, you know, that bypasses our cognition, and we're so good to as survivors with soldiering through life and relying on our cognition, intellectualizing, minimizing, rationalizing all the ego defenses. So when you engage with art, and for me, I really love performance art doing um psychodrama, which is very powerful. Um you do have to consider the consequences of that kind of work. Um, so when I did the theater project and workshop with women, I had to, we had to do a lot of debriefing. There had to be a lot of pacing. Um, I think you know that you're ready to do the work when you have access to your grief, when you are connected to your feeling faculties, um, when you've done an ample amount of work to re-engage in an embodied way with yourself. Um, I would not do art therapy alone. Um, I think you could do some of it on your own, but there needs to be a witness, there needs to be some kind of guidance through it. Um, because it can be very um regressive. You know, can really, I mean, like when I look at this piece for me that I wrote years ago, I already feel it in my body. I feel the sadness, I feel the history with my mother. Um and it's uh actually feeling it tells me I'm ready to engage with it. Right? I'm not so afraid that I have to disappear. Um but this is why I I see creative expression as so integral to recovery and healing, um, because it uh allows us to engage with those parts of ourselves we had to disown to survive.

GabeNathan:

Um thank you very much for for sharing that. Um it's really helpful for me to hear as someone who runs a mental health publication and to remind myself um of those things. And I think uh it's going to be very helpful for listeners who are contemplating creative exploration related to something about their mental health. Um because I think so often we we go into something because we feel an itch or an impulse. And you know, it may not be the right time or the right environment. And I I just love what you said about feeling, really feeling and knowing that that's that's a signal that it's right. Um that there's there isn't that need to detach um in order to get through it, that you can actually be present um with those feelings. Um that's that's so helpful to hear because I think some people might say, oh God, you know, I'm feeling so much, it means I'm not I'm not ready. Um but actually feeling is is such a positive indicator. You're you're there, you're present. Um I when I when I think back to working at the hospital, particularly with individuals um with chronic paranoid schizophrenia, one of the things that that struck me was like visiting hours. Um there was hardly ever anybody there for these people. Um the patients who, you know, there was a suicide attempt or there was major depression, or um, you know, there were visitors, there were family. Um a lot of times the the folks with schizophrenia um you know, they would be in their rooms or in the hallway and there just weren't people there. And I I was realizing over time there that the illness is so destructive and it is so relentless, and it is so uh, you know, frequently not responsive to treatment, or you know, there's treatment and then the patient goes off treatment, and then there's recidivism and there's in in and out, and hundredth admission, 111th admission, and on and on and on. And that you know, bridges get burned and families are like it's it's like what Nami is telling you, like it will eat you alive.

Speaker 02:

Yeah.

GabeNathan:

Um I I'm just wondering from the perspective of the family member, like can you just talk about the the toll and the living in that environment, um, you know, with your mother having delusions and and paranoia and just the the I know it's indescribable, but if you can just talk briefly about that impact on you uh as a child.

SheriHeller:

Okay, well, I almost died from the abuse when I was about between two and three. I had sepsis. I wasn't allowed to go to the bathroom. My sister and I were malnourished. Um, my mother kept us hostage in the house. My mother also had some character pathology, that's important to say, um, which I could not detect until many, many, many years later in my own therapy because the schizophrenia obfuscates the personality. Um, but for my, I mean, there was a lot of domestic violence. My father was also mentally ill. Um, and then he was out of the house. My mother was too PC'd. We were sleeping in a park. Um, and I remember that. I remember being on the swing. I remember my mother being taken away. Um, and there were two psychiatrists being two PC'd, it means she had to the state um intervened at that point. Um, my sister and I were to be wards of state. I went to live with my grandmother. Thankfully, there was kinship foster care. I met with people I never knew, I never met before. My grandmother took care of me. Um, and that's when I was told by a doctor that I was dying. And uh a lot of doctors did not see, they thought it was emotional because I was in shock. I didn't speak. So my early development was very um turbulent. You know, I was had a lot of developmental disasters, and uh thankfully I did bond with my grandma. Um and I found my voice, you know, I found I loved animals. I remember seeing my grandmother had friends next door who had a dog named Queenie, and I would go visit her, and I started coming out of my shell. Um I read a lot. My father was an artist. I gravitated towards the arts, music. Um was very internal. And I guess, you know, that really shaped me. And um then my parents reconvened and it was just a disaster. My mother came out of the hospital and it became exponentially worse. Um, by the time I was in adolescence, I was using drugs and alcohol to function. Um I had always done really well in school, and school was a respite for me, but once I hit adolescence, I was not interested in academia. And uh that was a very difficult time for me. I was couch surfing. I talked about this in the short. I lived at friends' houses. We sometimes, if I was with my mother, we didn't have food, we didn't have utilities, there were always eviction notices. My father was the same, he was also uh lived in squalor. So I latched on to friends. I latched on to at one point, I think I was really at a low point, and I and I knew that if I didn't take radical action, I was going to die. I was about 17, so I enrolled in college, uh, CUNY, City University. And I I don't know how I did it. I got a place to live through the university, and I worked three jobs, and I remember my first night lying in my twin bed on the floor at a lone towel, and I thought, I have to make this work because I have nothing else. It's a lot to remember.

GabeNathan:

It's uh it's absolutely extraordinary. And I I don't it's one of those things that I don't think people can really understand unless it's happened to them or something similar has happened to them. Um I certainly can't understand or even uh begin to fathom what that must have been like for you, for your sister. Um I incident, I mean, speaking of which, can you talk a little bit about her and what her trajectory was like?

SheriHeller:

Yeah, uh my sister actually died recently. I'm sorry, Sherry. Thank you. She was an addict. Um, we were estranged. She was a brilliant young woman, a great pianist, had a faculty with languages. Um, but she was the parentified one in the uh in the family, and um she tried to do some work on herself. She was in treatment for a few years, but with this kind of damage that we incurred, I mean, my I'm still I still work with a mentor, a therapist, a psychodramatist who I who I trust and love. And um, but my um history has spanned over 30 years, and I feel like uh that's what it required. Um, so my sister became very abusive, unfortunately. We were very close. She she and I would try to sneak out of the house to um have some exposure um and socialization, and she was seven years older than I. Um, but she never got sober. She had emphysema, she was still smoking, and um she did have a daughter. Um, there was a lot of uh uh turbulence in our relationship that is painful to uh to examine because uh we tried at certain points to try to reconvene, but there was always this rage that I experienced from her, and I wanted to go into treatment with her, but I also understood she had to have a degree of sobriety in order for anything to be effective. So um I walked away from everyone. I eventually I had to walk away from everyone, including my mother, and I had to talk with my mother in a restaurant about that because the the character pathology in the family negated my existence. I was to conform to the roles and to the uh include in the lunacy of um, which meant I was to be the scapegoat, I was to be silenced, and unfortunately, no one else wanted to join me on a path of healing. So I had to leave. Um and it was a terrible loss with my sister. I actually have a cousin that I'm becoming close to who, and we talk about this, the only one I think in my extended family who has really reached out and has expressed regret that they couldn't do more. But she was also a child. Um but being alone, not being, and that's why I called this piece an orphan's memorial to her dying mother, um that was the most debilitating part of my experience, the traumatic loneliness. And it catalyzed in me a lot of acting out, um a lot of desperation. I needed intimacy, I needed closeness, I was terrified of it, but I was insatiable. Um there was no mirroring, there was no family to rely on. Um, but I did find people along the way, you know, for good or bad. Um it was a mixed bag. Uh, but my sister and I parted ways. So, and that was that was a tremendous loss and something that I could not anticipate when I started out with my recovery.

GabeNathan:

And and and one of many losses, and I think it's so it's so tragic, and it's it reminds me of the there's a statistic about suicide that every suicide, for every suicide, there's 126 people, I think is the number that are profoundly impacted. You know, there's the inner circle, and then there's the friends and acquaintances and the former classmates and the colleagues, and the the circle goes out. And I think the same is true for serious and persistent mental illness. Um, the the ripple effect of that and the relationships that are impacted and sometimes destroyed or altered. Um, and there's such collateral damage. Um and I think, you know, we as human beings want to control so much. And I think we work so hard and um to try to do that, and there's so much out of our control in the relationship with your sister, you know, for whatever you wanted, like wanting to go into treatment with her and wanting her sobriety and wanting all of these things. But there are some things that we just can't control. And so choices have to be made, profoundly difficult choices. Um and and you know, uh here we are, and here you are. Um and you know, it's very possible that if you hadn't made those choices, you would be in a very, very different place. And I I know you know that. Um and you know, the idea of orphaning, um you can have both parents living and be an orphan. Um I think there's probably a lot of people listening who are nodding their heads and know that um and feel that profoundly. Um mental illness or no, or character pathology or no. Um but I think if you're if you're okay at this point, I would love to hear um the piece if you're ready.

SheriHeller:

Okay, wonderful. I am ready.

GabeNathan:

Wonderful.

SheriHeller:

Mother, you are dying a horrible death, a finale consistent with a tragic life. Plagued by paranoid schizophrenia prior to and subsequent to my birth. The nature of our relationship remains unfathomable and immeasurably heartbreaking. Your imminent loss is disorienting. I find myself floundering, still fearful of you, still enraged, and yet also inextricably tied to you in inconceivably baffling ways. After decades of pointless effort, I walked away from you. That pivotal but necessary decision cut me to the core. I could no longer pretend. To this day, you deny and refuse to acknowledge our harrowing history. It's understood that we are to never approach what occurred between you and I. Oddly, that I could handle. What I could no longer permit was your blatant rejection of who I am. The inferred contract to shield you from ever being burdened by my needs, my traumas, my losses had to end. So on that night, over eight years ago, I dared to be authentic with you. I laid bare the truth about my life, my sorrow, my triumphs, my struggles. Silence ensued. You retreated into psychotic rubery, deserting me, shutting me out, and punishing me for daring to be real. That regrettable moment offered agonizing transparency. I saw the volition in your purposeful retreat, shielding yourself behind your cloak of insanity to obliterate me in the most pernicious way. Mother, in spite of it all, I am haunted by your suffering. I cry for you now as I did as a child, but I refuse to be shackled by agreements that snuff out my spirit. I will not capitulate, even though it means parting forever, devoid of the prescribed ceremonial rituals devised to honor one's passing. Innumerable complex losses and intangible sources of grief permeate our connection. Persistent yearnings for the love and normalcy I never had clash with the reality of prolonged abuse, neglect, and trauma. I was robbed of my birthright, and I paid a staggering price. To my dismay, I am instinctively revisiting the past, returning to my vulnerable formative years when you were at the peak of your illness. It's when the worst of the abuse occurred. I remember that house permeated with filth, infested with bugs and garbage. There were so many fucking cockroaches that I thought the walls were alive. My body was a toxic wasteland. I was malnourished, slowly dying from an impacted rectum, flooded by despair. By three years old, I wanted life to be over. It only got worse. Throughout adolescence, I resorted to violence to escape your grip. You would barricade the door, struggling to take me hostage, as you were able to do when I was too young and frail to fight. I've never forgotten you, hauling me out of bed, dragging me across the floor, tearing off my nightgown as I beg for mercy. You threw me out of the house naked, the allotted penalty for my expressing anger. I hid behind the milkbox by the front door. Flashbacks of your knife and hammer complete the tableau of horror. Now I am angry, and the venom of hatred disturbs my composure. I am viscerally reminded of the crippling damage incurred from our bond. Nonetheless, I pressed on and stayed the course. Ironically, consummating weighty ambitions to become a psychotherapist and subsequently an interfaith minister. I committed to years of therapy and sundry healing modalities, working multiple jobs to put myself through college and graduate school. To say it was laborious and demanding does not do it justice. The arcs, travel, sundry relationships sustain me. But always that dysphoric loneliness brought me to my knees. That immeasurable chasm of intangible, ravenous need will forever be my Achilles' seal. It is a constant reminder of what I was denied. Now the end is near, and societal mandates advise me to offer absolution, irrespective of whether you've made any sort of genuine attempt towards restitution. The exalting of an illusory ideal of the mother-daughter diet is to trump the preservation of my sanity if I am to ostensibly be set free and redeemed as a good daughter. With religious zeal, this is considered a crowning achievement. Along with this cultural prescription, the legitimacy of my self-protective distance and detachment, informed by an instinctual attunement and danger, is the impunitive and cruel. With despairing righteous indignation, I challenge these badgering collective judgments. How am I to measure up to proclamations that have no bearing on my history or my reality, that fail to consider the enormous complexity and singularity of this surreal bond and this mystifying loss? How do I grieve for a mother I never had? Mother, I am resigned. There is no formulaic pathway to rely on. My sorrowful search for cursory glimpses of you led me to finally accept that you are but a phantom to me. What I am to you continues to confound me. Playwright Robert Anderson wrote, Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship which struggles on in the survivor's mind towards some resolution which it may never find. While there is no compensation or opportunity for meaningful reconciliation, mother, for good or bad, is hackneyed as it sounds.

Speaker 00:

And willingly carry on with what will forever be unsettled.

GabeNathan:

And what you are able to convey through this piece.

SheriHeller:

Yes, uh, thank you. Thank you, Gabe. And I'm glad that I found the words. Um and I I connect so deeply to what you're saying. I think I would have completely imploded if I didn't have um art. I remember when I was little, I used my father was an artist, he had art books, and I would just lose myself in. He had a lot of the classics, and I remember looking at the Sistine Chapel, and I was more would marvel at the um the beauty, the artistry. And then I when I went to Italy and I went to the Vatican, and I remember sitting in that room and crying, and uh because it sustained me. You know, um, books sustain me, art. Um I took acting as a child, had art classes, same acting classes, guilty, yeah. Um and all those outlets, I think, kept me tethered. Um offered me a kind of a semblance of a sense of self that was so tenuous. Uh so yeah, I think it's uh I think it is such a critical part of healing.

GabeNathan:

And I I think it's important to also give voice and and know or acknowledge that not everybody can, not everybody can do it, not everybody is ready, like we talked about earlier. Not everybody has the the facility or the interest in doing it, or they may have the interest but feel limited in some other way. And so you doing it, I think, is so helpful to other people who can't or don't want to or aren't ready, or you know, just feel more comfortable or safe reading the experience of someone else. And if there isn't that experience of someone else, then they don't have what they need to hold on to. Um so you're you're doing this lovely thing for yourself, you're also throwing a lifeline out to other people, I think also. Um, and that's so, so critical and and wonderfully giving. Um, I think that's that's something I don't want to lose sight of, also. That people who who contribute to this site or they write on their personal blogs, it doesn't have to be here, it can be anywhere. It's it's giving a gift to someone else um who you may have never met and may never meet. Um and I just think that's it's really extraordinary. And for all the shit people sling about, oh, social media is terrible and it's awful, it's also crazily connecting. Um and throwing lifelines here and there to to people through just individual advocates or storytellers or people with information or resources that people can find uh in different countries and and just hold on to. And that's I I think what you're creating and bringing here is a really important reminder of that.

SheriHeller:

Um I agree. Thank you, Gabe. Yeah, I agree, I agree. Um and I everything I go I have gone through, you know, in my life, I've sought out web forums, places, platforms, uh, and I and I incorporate that into my work um so people can find those resources. And there are organizations actually that have um connect people throughout the world um to find each other and even offer um virtual groups, virtual meeting places, so which is not something I necessarily availed myself of early on because it wasn't available to me at that time. Um, but yes, we have to give back. And I think it's it is part of our purpose to give back. It brings a full circle.

GabeNathan:

Yeah. And and unfortunately, there are always going to be people to give back to. Um, there is always going to be intergenerational cycles of trauma. There's always going to be people who are severely impacted um by other people's mental health challenges or their own. Um, there's always going to be suffering. There are always going to be suicide loss survivors or attempt survivors, or always going to be people who who need others who are further along in their journey or in a different place to show them, hey, I'm here. You know, there's hope for you too. Um and I I think that's kind of the last question that I have for you is talking about, you know, you're you're here now. Um, you were in a different place when you wrote this piece. You were in a different place when you were struggling with your mother to get out of the, you know, the squalid apartment. Um you're you're not in New York anymore, you're in Montreal. Is that right?

SheriHeller:

Yes, I'm in Montreal.

GabeNathan:

So where is Sherry Heller now? Um, not geographically, but where where is where is she now in her kind of life's journey?

SheriHeller:

The most important attainment from my life's journey is that I have a cohesive sense of who I am. I'm no longer plagued by fragmentation, which was terribly painful, um, consumed, flooded by heinous flashbacks or crippling numbness. I feel um, for lack of a better word, whole is kind of contrived to say, but I mean I feel I have a cohesive self, um, which uh I never thought I would have. Um I'm married to a wonderful man, which I never thought would happen. He's a musician and also has his own history of trauma. Um and um so there are critical milestones that I never thought I would be able to uh actualize in my life. And moving to Montreal, actually, my mother was born in Montreal, and so by virtue of her being a Canadian citizen, I was able to get Canadian citizenship, which I'm very grateful for. And um I have a practice, a private practice, and um I feel at peace. You know, of course I have my neuroses and I have my issues. Uh, you know, I'm a human being, um, but it revisiting that piece I wrote, I mean, it really, it really um illuminates for me the reality of where I am now, that I am not in the trenches anymore. That I could um that I'm regulated. And when I'm not regulated, I can regulate myself. Um, I'm no longer using substances to uh escape or to have uh respite for my pain. You know, um it feels miraculous, and I'm grateful, and I think that was my what inspired me actually to explore my spiritual side. I think that was an organic part of my recovery. Um and um I can engage in life in a way I always loved nature, you know. That was something also I think along with art that sustained me. But I feel I have an ability to appreciate the wonders of the world of light that eluded me when I was just crippled by pain. So um I'm content.

GabeNathan:

Well, Sherry Heller, with your wholeness, with your neuroses, with your contentedness, um, and with your bravery and vulnerability, uh, I just can't thank you enough for spending some time with me and for being a part of this community. Um just so grateful to you. Thank you.

SheriHeller:

Thank you, Gabe. Same here, so grateful for you and this platform.

GabeNathan:

Well, it's gonna be around till the wheels come off. So thank you. Thank you again for joining us in conversation today. It's beautiful to see the progression of our contributors. Thank you so, so much to our guest today, Sherry Heller. She is how we are able to do what we do and the way we do it. An extraordinary human being. She's a certified coach, an addiction specialist, Ericksonian hypnotist, an interfaith minister. She's also the author of the memoir, A Clinician's Journey from Complex Trauma to Thriving. Before we leave you, we want to remind you to check out our website, recoverydiaries.org. There, like this podcast, you'll find additional stories, videos, and content about mental health, empowerment, and change. We look forward to continuing to grow our community. Thank you so much for being a part of it. We wouldn't be here without you. Be sure to join our mailing list so you never miss a podcast episode, essay, or film. I'm Gabe Nathan. Until next time, take good care.

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