We believe in functional mental wellness, a holistic approach to mental health. We know that there's hope for those of us who have experienced trauma, even profound trauma and that's why we created the universe is your therapist podcast, we believe whether you call it God, the universe, source, unity or love that there is something much greater than us that conspires for our good, we envision a world of healing and connection. And we teach you simple but powerful practices that integrate your mind, body and spirit so that you can come home to your highest self and your truest identity. You are not broken, you are loved, and you can heal. My name is Amy Hoyt, and together with my sister, Lena, we will take you on a journey of healing and self discovery. Hi, welcome to another episode of the podcast. We're so excited and honored today to have a special guest with us. Monica Coleman, and Monica is a professor of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware. And Monica and I went to graduate school together at Claremont. So just a little bit of a reunion. It is very, very fun. So, Monica, recently, your late latest book is bipolar faith. Yeah. And I think this is such an amazing conversation that needs to happen in all communities. But especially, of course, the African American community kind of destigmatizing mental illness and mental health. As I'm reading it, it's just so applicable to so many other communities, and especially spiritual or religious communities where sometimes mental health can maybe accidentally get sidelined out of a hope for spiritual, spiritual healing, perhaps. And so I just I loved it, I had so many moments of that I could relate to. And I'm just, I'm just so honored that you're here. So thank you for being here.
I'm glad to have a chance to talk with you about it. Yeah.
Well, let's open it up by talking about the thing that kept going through my mind as I was reading is, how did mental health or mental illness affect your relationship with God? Oh,
yeah, no, I did not actually anticipate that question.
I think it's because it just affected me so deeply through my life. And so that's always what I'm looking for is how do people navigate this?
You know, I think, in many ways, it brought me closer to God, because I felt like other people didn't understand me, but God. Right, I felt like nobody else knows what this is like, nobody else knows how I feel. Nobody else is there at two in the morning, but God is. And so in that sense, it generally had a really, it strengthened my relationship with God. And so I feel like God's presence in my life is a fact I think it's not a feeling, because we know we can always trust our feelings. So I began to see that it just is whether I feel like it is whether I think it is it just God just is and God is here. So I'd say ultimately, it definitely had a, you know, a good impact on my personal relationship with God. But it was a little bumpy getting there. There are times, which I think I don't know if it's God as much as like crap theology. I have a bad relationship with about what God was supposed to do or who guy was supposed to be and then being like, Oh, you're not, but I don't think that was God. I think that was, you know, less than good. church teachings. Yes.
And human understanding of what we think God should be. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. So tell us about how your book answers a question in your community, because I feel like it answers a question in a lot of communities.
You know, I mean, I don't know I was thinking, Okay, I'm trying to answer a question. I think I was trying to provide a resource that I was looking for. Right, I was reading Memoirs of people who lived through different kinds of depressions, because I wanted to see how people got to the other side, but I wasn't on yet. That was like, I need a little hope here. I need to feel like I can get to the other side of this. And that I was reading them. I just, they felt so far from my experience. I was like, why are you gonna let me do it all religious? That just seemed really weird to me. That out of all the people who wrote memoirs, no one had anything to say about anybody's God. And I'm sure I live in a bubble that's more religious than other people's because I'm a religious leader. I'm a religious scholar. But that was like nobody goes to church or mosque or anything. So I really was looking for something that dealt with the religious part. I was also looking for something that dealt with bipolar two, because there's very little written about that my memoir perspective. And it's different than bipolar one, and is different than a unipolar depression. And I wanted to read that I wanted to kind of talk about that a little bit. And then I wanted to feel home like and what you know, people say it feels like a very generic black girl book. And I wanted to feel that way. Right, I wanted to just still carry all of the resonance of my culture, which I bring with me, a lot of which, of course, is shaped by African American experience, but a good part of which is this also American experience, right? You know, war and poverty, and trauma. Slavery, it's not like this only affects African Americans, it's affects Americans. And so I think that there are resonances. They are because we know the water that many of us are swimming in. But I still wanted to kind of, you know, read like a black girl story. So I don't know that I was trying to answer a question as much as I wanted to share that perspective and hoping that other people wouldn't feel as alone as I did when they were looking for.
Yeah, no, I would, as I was reading it this week, and I kept, you know, and I said to you, before we started recording, I wish we had been closer in graduate school. We liked each other, I remember driving in your car somewhere,
or I'll be to Karen, probably.
So I was having these memories of us in graduate school. And I was like, I know, we hung out a few times. But just as I was reading, I was thinking it's so lonely to have mental illness. You know, I suffer from depression as well. And I'm also bipolar two. And but I didn't know any of this about you. And you didn't know any of that about me. And we were not sure
how much of it I knew about myself either. Right, you know, I mean, I think I just was like, I'm sad. This sucks. And I don't know, but I was thinking in clinical terms, even at that.
Sure, sure. And I think it's talking about another culture, the academic culture, it's not necessarily one where we show our vulnerabilities. Right. And so especially as graduate students, you know, you you wrote about being excited when you would answer a question in class and have something to contribute to the discussion. And that really resonated with me just a lot of feelings of, Do I belong? am I contributing? What does my voice matter? And how, how, I don't know, there was a lot of insecurity in that in that process of graduate school, and kind of trying to find your own voice, I think for me, and so as you talked about that in your book, I was I think I was tickled that I wasn't the only one there was sitting in class going. I don't know if I belong, okay, maybe I do belong. But why I'm thinking this, should I say that? So
I felt like my perspective was like, no one else saw things the way I thought so I would say something and they'd be like, Oh, also a lot of sexism, right? There's a lot of sexism in the academy. When most of your teachings for me, most of my teachers were male, you know, I think every woman I know. So the story of you make a comment, it kind of falls did five minutes later, a man makes the same comment. And it's brilliant. And you're like, you're right. Like, everybody I know, has a story like that. They're a person of color or woman. Right? So there's that part that makes me like, I know, I'm not crazy, but that was not like what, you know, if you're in that kind of environment, it just plays with your head.
It does. It does, especially if you've already had issues with mental health or trauma or abuse. And you're coming with all of that extra stuff, which mostly let's be real, most of us have had those experiences, right? So I would love for you to tell the listeners a little bit about the history of your family and how you came to understand your place in your family in terms of mental health and where you fit and I just thought that was so beautifully done.
Well, thank you. Um, you know, I talk more about my mother's side of family, but I do Talk about my father's side of family as well. So I think I'll begin with my father's side, because that gets a little less treatment in the book. And I do talk a bit, probably not in direct terms, I think it becomes clear that my father was an alcoholic, and his father was an alcoholic as well. And they were also both my grandfather's were veterans of World War Two, right, just by age and draft. And so, but they're people who survived a war, right, which already means that they are having trauma. And that at least I know, in my paternal grandfather's case, that, you know, he began drinking after this traumatic event war, and he survived things that his friends didn't survive, right. And so that this was very much a coping mechanism. But it also, you know, often leads to abusive behavior as well. And so there was very much this mixture of I'm trying to survive and trying to do better than the generation before me, but I don't have healthy coping mechanisms for the pain that I feel, and that this was very strong in that part of my family. And so this is mixture of being happy and grateful for certain things that were good, and then also being very upset, or abused, or sad or scared for the other side of how, you know, addiction manifests. And in my mother's side of the family, which is the more prominent story that I tell, I talk about my maternal grandmother, who said that she's one of nine children. And she said, when she was young, and her sisters were younger sisters, or even younger, that her mother died shortly after childbirth, and her father died of grief. And I thought that meant that you would just get so sad that your heart would shrivel up, right, kind of like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. That's how I pictured it in my childhood head. Did you just die because you were so sad. And I was like, Oh, he was sad because his wife died. Or he was sad, because he had all these children to try to figure out how to raise and much, much later in my life. Maybe when I was in my 20s, the story was actually revealed. And it wasn't a secret, it just no one told, told my part of the family that my grandfather had hung himself and had the help of his oldest son in doing so. And not only had he done that, but this wrote this news that kind of stayed in this closet shed area of the family home for years. And there were parts of the family that would say oh, yeah, I remember seeing it. And I was like, wow, people. This is this is deep. This is this is something how did you not tell the story this way? Within I think that my grandmother was like, I did tell it he died him clean. Right. I think that's probably how she felt it. Right. This is what happened. And that there, you know, so I began to think about that. Well, who is diagnosing sharecroppers? Right? You know, who is looking at these, you know, poor, Southern black families, it ended up being that my grandmother and her siblings were raised by a family friend who was formerly enslaved, right? So we're not far out of slavery at all, at all. And, of course, slavery and poverty and oppression. And, you know, economics, you can't get out or, which is a definition of sharecropping, right? It's gonna be hard, it'd be tough. And no one's thinking, How do you feel about that, when you're trying to make sure you have enough food and housing if people's clothes fit? In, but I think that's part of my story, right. And this was a story that was known in my family that you and I bought, you could die of grief, you could just become so sad that you could die. This was something that was possible. And I always kind of believed that. And so you know, when I wrote bipolar faith, no one on my family was like, shocked, like, we don't know their story. What are you doing? What are you telling? Everyone's like? Yeah, that's, that's pretty much it. But we just didn't talk to each other about it. And so now my generation, you know, cousins, we talk about it more, you know, we'll say, Oh, this is kind of what I'm experiencing, or probably not in great detail, but definitely more than my mother's generation or my grandmother's.
That's amazing. Because just from my own experience, there's so much relief that comes just from having someone to say in passing what's going on. So I love that you have that with your cousins now. What Why do you think the family kept the noose in the shed?
I have no idea. Like, what is this? I don't know if it was completely you can take it down. Right. I mean, there were people who were a generation later, who remember seeing it's there a long time. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if it was a room to be a reminder. It just, it just seems tragic. To me, it seems like it was a way of the grief still living, right? That sorrow still living in the house, like there was always a place where they knew it was. And I'm like, wow, that's heavy. That's a lot to put on these kids growing up, right? And then even the generation after them, some of them, the older ones who saw that. So why didn't anyone take it down? It's a very good question. But most of that generation who would know is, you know, now an ancestor, so we can't. Yeah,
I know, I've talked before, in our listeners probably remember that. One of the things that has always surprised me, since I learned this about five years ago, was how trauma can actually change our DNA. And, you know, with epigenetics, we know that our genetic expressions can change and that the work I did in Rwanda and South Africa, one of the conferences we put on at the University of Rwanda, there was a presentation about, you know, research that had shown that it has, it will go down seven to eight generations in terms of the way our genetics start expressing differently. And so when I never understood the importance of, of looking at generational trauma, and I never understood how the past would literally affect our genetic expression. And I just think it's so I feel like it's really healing. And I feel like, it's really important that you're opening this conversation, not just publicly and letting us into your family, for your family sake, but for all the other families who I hear say, but that happened so long ago, it's so long ago. And we know that when we actually look at trauma, and we deal with the actual trauma, that healing can occur. And once that healing occurs, then of course, our genetics can express differently. So I, I think what you're doing is, is a gift for all of the generations to come as well.
Well, I hope so for sure. And you know, it's always interesting to me that, like, Western medicine catches up to things that spiritual systems have been saying for a long time, right in the language that they use. You know, there are parts of the Hebrew Bible that talk about your, you know, there will be a curse on your family for seven generations, or there'll be blessings on your family for seven generations right. Now, there are a lot of reasons we should be critical of the idea of curse. But I think it does suggest, right, that there are things that stay in our family. And just like that spiritual system suggests, but there are ways to interpret that. Right? It's like, Yes, this is a curse on your family. But there's this god part, right, that can interrupt it. Right. And you know, even in indigenous African traditions, which I study, right, there's very much this sense of, Oh, of course, are these things that are in your ancestral line. But we have rituals, we have practices that we that we use to change that if you if there's somebody in the family line that wants to write and is being intentional about it. And I do get how my grandparents generation were like, we don't talk about these things. This is painful. We're trying to escape it were trying to read the beehive, and took them to talk about it was probably read traumatizing. But then we didn't know Right? Yeah, this whole group of people who don't know, our family stories, or what happened or trying to piece together, like, is this just me? And no, it's not just you as if no one ever told you. And so I think even if we don't know the details of our family history, we can piece together parts we have, and then start making assumptions. And it's helpful because then we can say, Oh, well, what can I do to interrupt that? Right? How am I going to make different decisions? What rituals am I going to do? Where practices are going to have spiritual disciplines, depending on where you're coming from? Right, that will been break this so that my children and my children's children have a different experience?
Absolutely. As you're speaking, I'm remembering another event in Kigali, where, you know, during the month of April, where they remember the genocide, and they process that in many different ways, as a country and as community and as family. And one of the ways that was so striking to me that I now understand through the literature in trauma repair is they dance and they sing through that trauma, and that's traumatic memories. Yeah. And of course, out with Bessel Vander Kolk, the Body Keeps the Score and all of the really concrete research we have in Western culture now that shows when you involve the body, that's the actual key to healing trauma. I just love that, again, you're talking about the spiritual insight, but it's also indigenous insight. It's ancient wisdom. It's, it's so beautiful to see it confirmed, you know, in the science, what has been practiced, and it has been working for generations in other parts of the world that value different types of wisdom.
Right. And I think, you know, even for some of the communities that have, you know, survived, and the great trauma as much as they have you been in Western worlds is because they've embodied aspects of those things, right? Whether whether it's with that same kind of intentionality or that but it's become part of their culture, right? Absolutely.
And I think that I see, and feel a lot of resistance in North America to the idea of switching from simply talking about what happened to us, to embodying it. And you talk a little bit about how you embody it in your book, and I would love for you to tell our listeners that experience and what works for you,
you know, I of course, I stumbled on it, right, I wasn't particularly looking. But I found a lot of, you know, healing, I think it's probably the right word to say right, and freedom and my faith again, in what was at that time West African dance that I was doing, that I got into it, right, because I thought the drummer was key. Right? Whatever, whatever motivates you, he was not like, Oh, I like the drama of a dance class. You know, the way it was taught, it wasn't like, Oh, this is aerobics, it was like, this is prayer. This is ritual in these communities. And we're learning this. And, you know, I was just being the kind of person who just danced in the club, like everybody else, right? I wasn't, I had no dance training. But you know, I figured it out. And once I stopped thinking so hard, like if my foot in the right place, if my arm in the right place, and just really embodied, right embodied the meaning of it, it did for me very much become prayer and become healing, you know, and, you know, it's still a very big part of my face position. Right? But the dance is prayer, right? And that this is how we communicate with, with God and with each other, and with the earth and with our ancestors. Like it's all of those things. And I do you know, no, not many, of course, but, you know, there are therapists, and I think, especially about those who are focused on expressive arts therapy, you know, but who really incorporate, you know, embodiment, and dance and those kinds of things into the healing work they do. Because, right, I think there are times when talking to somebody one on one, that's not going to work, right? Or it's not the only thing that works, I think it can often make something very individual that is actually communal, right? And that I know, for me, community is a big part of what heals. And so if I'm doing something in this little corner with somebody else, and not talking to anyone about it, not in a larger community, we're not honoring it, celebrating it morning and all those different things, then I'm like, better than I would be if I weren't talking about it. But I don't have that fullness, right. But the piece, I know that I really need.
Yeah, and I love your connection with community in in the answer. I was also thinking as you are responding. It's so interesting that even you know, just very recently, research is showing that when we talk about trauma, it's really difficult because our language center shuts down our speech center shuts down during a traumatic event. So it's really difficult to access language to describe it. And even if you can, it actually lays down those neural pathways even deeper, which is not what you're looking for when you're healing. You're looking to create new neuropathic pain, right? So just again, it's just another testament of how there is so much intuitive knowledge and understanding that we can access if we look around and look outside of our own scope, right. And perspective and community really allows us to to do that as well. I wanted to talk about some of the stigma of mental health and mental illness, you talk about it in your book. And I know I've seen it in my life in the cultures that I am, you know, part of, and I would love for you to address how that affected you how that affected your journey of getting diagnosed and getting the help you needed.
You know, I mean, I think the biggest part of stigma was knowing that it's a bad thing, right? Like being depressed or being sad is this bad thing. And you don't want the bad thing to be your bad fit. And so, even though I guess somebody just kind of generally speaking, and you know, we're around the same age, right? We're children of the 80s 70s 80s. Right? There. This is not the world of today where people talk so much more about mental wellness than they did when we were growing up. Right. And so, you know, we were pre Columbine teenagers, like, there weren't counselors in high schools looking out to see if you were okay. It was like, they were counselors to see if you needed a job when you finished. But you know, it's a very different kind of world. So, you know, growing up in a world that wasn't checking out to see if kids were okay. Or if they were going off the rails, right, then was like, children to be seen and not heard is definitely how I was raised, your voice wasn't valued, my voice wasn't valued, at least, like parts of my voice, right? My academic voice might have been valued, but the like, what do you think? How do you feel was not valued in the same kind of way? And so I even if I had it for myself, which I did, it's kind of an avid journaler. I didn't think I could tell people, right, or that it would be okay, or that people would know what to do if I did say something. So that was definitely a part of the stigma. And then, you know, among the African American culture, I grew up in, like therapy for white people. And not in a good way. It was like, because they're crazy, right now. They're getting the health thing. So it wasn't, like, that's not what black people do. Black people are okay, we don't need that. Right. That's what white people do. So there was very much a kind of racial stigma and cultural stigma, I think, along with that, and clearly only the most privileged, right, even if White people would do this, because nobody who lacking kind of the economics would be able to access this. Anyway. So I would definitely say that was part of the signal. You know, the more involved I was with religious communities, there was definitely the stigma about one mental health issues being different than other health issues. Right? Nobody had problems praying for somebody who going into surgery, right, or somebody who had a heart attack. But you know, depression was seen as spiritual weakness, it was seen as a tool of the enemy. Right? It was seen as kind of a spiritual failing, right, that there's something that one has done wrong, not prayed enough, not connected with God enough, been grasped by the enemy, right? Where depression kind of fell into, it was fairly exclusive. In my communities, the way people pray the way people talk about it. So clearly, you're not going to say, hey, something's wrong with my relationship with God. And you also had a pretty good sense, I did that. praying over, it wasn't gonna fix it. Because trust me, I pray that was like, the first thing I did, right. So if that would have fixed that we would have been good. And so there was a sense for me, not that I was wrong, but that these were not safe places where this was not a safe place to share the truth of who I was or how I felt. And I do believe that silence can create shame, even when it's not there. Right. So it wasn't like, Oh, I'm ashamed of this. But the more silent one can be about something. It's almost like a degenerate state, even if you don't have that kind of shame. So I would say those were definitely the kind of stigmas that being an academic, right, it is literally called The Life of money. And so it's not particularly advantageous to share that something is not working right with your mind when you've made a hole, or you're trying to make a whole career and living off of your mind. And so I would say those three communities together, definitely made for this is something we're not going to talk about, this is something we're going to try and figure out on our own. And then, of course, for me, it seeps out anyway, right. It's coming out through all the edges, and I think I'm holding it. But it was definitely hard to begin to find, you know, a place where I thought I could save this and not be judged. Right. I think being in California helps because when you get to California, everyone's gonna bear. The time we're in California, the early 21st century. It's like you go to lunch, you have a therapist, right? And so it was not as stigmatized there as it had been anywhere else I had lived
it That's, that's such an interesting blessing. I love that you brought that up, because I know it was a hard time. And it was a hard location in some ways. And so what a gift that that part was. That's hard. You know? That's, that's really amazing. I'm wondering, I hear a lot of people ask about medication. And if medication, there's there still, I think it comes from kind of the stigma. But, you know, will I need to be on medication is medication. Okay. And I would love to hear how you process that for yourself. If you wouldn't mind sharing that?
No, I would be happy to it is like literally the single biggest question I get when I talk about, you know, mental health in religious context, especially, is like, what's the deal with medication? Now, I won't be one of the first to say that I am that sold on the western medical model, just in general. I think it waits till you're sick to see if they're going to do anything about it. You know, I think we in the US are in a less than enviable healthcare situation, where you have to have literally job privilege to have decent health care. And then it's still not great, right? So access is a problem, cultural competency, and access is a problem. The entire model of treating people by symptoms, I think, is a problem. So that being said, you know, I'm a little skeptical of the Western medical model to begin with. And yet, like many others, I'm dependent on it, right, you gotta get your tests, you gotta get your physicals. Right. I've had glasses since I was a kid. Right? So I'm always getting my exams. So I'm not saying it's all bad. But I've always been like, no about you people. Right? Even when I've, you know, kind of gone in for medical services. So I think that there is the medical model around psychiatry could be better. Right? There's very much the sense even if it's like the commercials I used to have on right, where somebody's in the gloomy room, and everything's bad, they take the medicine, and they're leaping to the lilies of the field and the sun. Like, this pill is going to solve all your problems, like, No, it's not. And so, or you're gonna have to be on X for the rest of your life to be okay, whether it's blood pressure medication, or psychotropic medication. And then it's the brain, right? People don't really understand the brain, like really. So everything is trial and error. When it comes to the brain. As compared to like, you break your arm, we pretty much know how to fix it. Right? You break your brain? Well, it's a little more difficult, because it's kind of a mystery how these things work. And so I came in with a lot of skepticism about Western medicine. And in part because I had been mis medicated, right, I've been given medication I'm allergic to, I've been given medication that made me very sick. While doctors just kind of didn't get the right medication, which had nothing to do with my brain just period. So I came in very skeptical about it. But I also want to live. And it really came to a point where I would say two things about it. Now, there were I'm very much in favor of medication and helpful. And that is, you know, I had to trust it. Right? Just like if I have bronchitis, and I take, you know, penicillin, or whatever it is, you take the antibiotic, I definitely trust it's gonna it's gonna work, right. I'm not sitting here. I don't know. I'm like, I think it's gonna work. And so I had to have a level of trust or confidence. In this medication, I couldn't take and be like, the same shit. Like, no, I would be, I sit on a chair, I believe it's gonna hold me up, right? Like, I had to have some basic level of non skepticism, or else I was just undermining myself. Right. And I like where that came from, you know, and I talked about this in the book, one of my friends saying to me, you know, if you believe God isn't everything, then isn't God in the medication to know. The point Wait, is push me on that pantheism. So, and I do believe that isn't everything. And I do believe God's in every breath in every molecule in every atom, and hopefully the doctors that are working on it, and the scientists are working on it, so why wouldn't get to be a part of this process? So that was really important for me. And the other part was to say, just like cold medicine, it doesn't cure the cold, but it does help with symptoms, right? It does help with symptoms, and symptoms can take me out, so I can't play around with symptoms like they're something that doesn't matter. Right. I can't act like oh, it's just a sniffle. That's getting in the way of me. singing today, like no. being suicidal is a symptom they can take me out if I don't know rested, right? And so I like okay, what it does is it addresses symptoms, but addressing symptoms is really important if the symptoms can threaten your life or can, you know, make your life so, so much more difficult that you know what one psychiatrist said to me that was very helpful was like you're pushing your brain, they're taxing your brain.
To do really, you know, you're putting a lot of work into really basic things. So you're like, you're asking a lot of your brain, here's like, pushing your muscles like working out too hard, right? You need to kind of lower the lower the weights, you know, lower the reps until you're strong enough. And I'm like, Oh, okay. And so when I began to think of like, this is what I need to be okay, this is what I need to get rid of symptoms for at least to lessen symptoms, this is what I need help in. And I think that's a big part of it, right is saying, I need some help. And that's, you know, hard for Type A overachievers like me. I think if we're trained that, like you're fulfilled, to pray something away, or make it better by your own grit, to say, You know what, I need help. And that's something I've been working on for a long time, I'm getting better at it in all arenas of my life. But there are plenty of times when I have no problem saying I need help. If I hurt my knee, I needed crutches, I was okay with that. And so beginning to think of this, like I've thought of many other physical conditions, made a big difference in saying, Okay, if you need help, you need help. And you might not need it forever. Or you might, we'll see. But I didn't, it was it was frustrating when someone said, Oh, you're gonna need this forever. I'm like, you know, right. Be defensive about that. And there are times that I'm like, Well, you know, maybe I do, maybe I don't, and we'll take this, you know, one six week period of time, or whatever it might be.
And I love that, because as a tool, it helps our brain ease into whatever we need, those micro steps are so important. So I love that as a cognitive tool, I just am so happy that you were able to join us. And I think one of the questions I want our listeners to know from you is, what is your go to tool when you're feeling dysregulated to get back into regulation? And I think that's something I love practical tools. So what do you do when you're needing to get regulated?
Well, one thing I'll say that I find very frustrating is that it changes over time, right? The go to tool and worked five years ago, wouldn't work now. And I'm like, really get some consistency with this. So I know what to do. So I find that frustrating, right? Things that helped 10 years ago don't work now. So it changes I change, right? And so it changes for me. So, my go to tool, pre pandemic is very different than my, you know, whatever part of the pandemic, we're in tool, but I would say for me, a lot of what helps me is community, like friendship, like being able to connect with friends, you know, makes, you know, the word I used recently was it gathers. It helps me it helps put me back together when I feel like I'm falling apart. So being around my friend had really great friends. So being around my friends, is probably my best go to tool. And of course, the isolation the pandemic is very, very hard for that reason. Because talking to friends is good, but for me, it really is being around them physically, I've learned is a big part of my go to tool. The other one is anything that creates endorphins, right? So whether it is dancing, or cycling or physical activity right now, it's like the bike in the house. I live where there's winter. But you know, I mean, I need endorphins, right? And I hate that I need them. I don't want to need them. I want to stay in bed longer and not workout. I don't like working out. I'm not a natural athlete. I think it kind of sucks. But I made it. I do. So when I realize I'm not feeling well. I'm like, Oh Get your ass up and work out. Right and that is like really a good kind of quick go to write in terms of they will literally change my feelings in an hour.
Yeah, I love that. Thank you. Thank you. Where can my listeners find you? Where can they get in touch with you? All the all the things?
Well, you can find me at Monica a coleman.com on the web. You can find out about the book and bipolar faith.com. And I am rev Dr. Monica, our Evie Dr. Monica on all the socials Facebook, Instagram, Twitter that made me hanging out on Instagram.
Okay, wonderful. Monica, thank you so much. It's such a delight to see you and talk and hear from you and your experience. And thank you for sharing so publicly and helping the rest of us process this for in our own lives.
Well, thank you for having me. And I'm so glad about the good work you're doing about mending trauma because we all know You get, you know, felon back together again.
Thank you. Thank you. And thanks again for joining us. I'm glad to thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you want to go deeper on this subject or any other subjects we've covered in the podcast, we are so excited to be launching our signature membership program at mending trauma.com This is a trauma informed mental health membership where we combine clinically effective practices courses and mentoring while putting you in the driver's seat. We teach you how to heal your trauma with the latest research combining mind body and spirit we want to walk you through a healing journey while also empowering you. If you have felt this episode is helpful. We would absolutely love if you would go to Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your pods and give us a review. We'd also love it if you would share it with someone you think it might help tag us on social media at mending trauma.com Or at Amy Hoyt PhD, we would love to reshare and also if there's anything we can do to help we would love to hear from you email info at mending trauma.com Give us your suggestions or topics you want to hear about. We would absolutely love to be of more service to you. We're so excited because we have so many good episodes coming up in season two, and we can't wait to go on this journey with you
