Welcome to the universe is your therapist. We are your hosts, Dr. Amy Hoyt and Lena Hoyt. We are sisters. Take a seat and let's dive into this week's episode. Welcome back to the podcast. This week's guest is one of my favorite people. Her name is Dana del Val. And Dana and I became acquainted after she joined the whole health lab our signature program for people recovering from trauma and toxic stress. Dana has such an interesting background. She has left a professional career in the nonprofit sector and has recently started with her husband, a discover your spark couple's sober experience, kind of piggybacking off their experience of sobriety. And learning to be a couple again, after her husband became sober. Please help me welcome our guests, Dana Delvaux.
Thank you, Amy, I'm really, really thrilled to be here.
I am super excited to be to have you here and to, I just want to thank you for coming on, and letting people kind of get a peek at the journey that people go through when they work with us. That's such a gift that you're giving to people. So thank you, I wrote down a few questions that I thought people may have. And so we'll just kind of go through those and and feel free to add or, you know, enter, you know, anything else into the conversation that you feel like is relevant? Okay, so you've been part of the whole health lab for almost a year now. Is that right? Yeah, I joined in July. Okay, July. Yeah. So what originally brought you in to work on a program for trauma or toxic stress.
So I was working with to marketing women, and I had this virtual meeting with them, where we were sort of setting up what was coming, and I had a physical sensation, like I was watching a tsunami come at me, because they were saying things like, you know, we're gonna launch this five day free program and up to 500 people, and then we're gonna do a six week course. And then we're gonna, and all this stuff. And it was all these things that I wanted. And the reason I was working with them. And it really did, I felt like I was just watching it charge at me. And I kept it together on the call. And I got off, and my husband and I were making our way to a lumber store, because we were having all this construction done in our house. And I burst into tears in the car. And he said, what, what is the feather and I said, I am not ready for what's coming. And I've spent all this money and all this time, and I've put all this energy into it, and it's everything that I want. And I'm going to do what I always do, which is I'm going to derail it, to make sure that I can never be as successful as I'm supposed to be. And I cried and cried and cried the whole way to the lumber store. And okay, so then I had my next week's meeting with my marketing women, and they asked me how I was doing. And I thought, I'm just going to be really honest. And I said, I'm in a real place of panic. And I don't know what's, what I'm going to do, because I can feel myself already screwing this up so that it can't work. And they said to me, without missing a beat, you need to join the whole health lab. And I said, I don't even know what you're talking about. And so they explained it to me. And I looked into it after my hour with them. And I joined it immediately, immediately, because I just felt like I guess I could go search for a therapist. First of all, I think everything I hear about finding a therapist or a counselor or anybody is yeah, good luck. You can't get in for months and months. Well, I had about six weeks to get some kind of ducks in a row. And so part of the appeal was I could get started immediately. It the price point was right. And I watched a video between you and Lena or I listened to a conversation or something. And I just thought, okay, they're calm, they're rational. They're smart. They're they're kind. I have to do something. I'm just going to do this. And so that's how it started for me.
Wow. I hadn't heard the entire story, especially about the going to the lumber store. So I'm grateful. Yeah, no, I'm grateful that you would share I think that's what it speaks to, to me is the subconscious patterns that we all have. And you were a little bit aware enough, right? I'm going to screw this up. I'm going to derail it to know you needed something. And I I wanted I guess I want to know at the time in Your Life? How? How was it presenting? Was it was it simply that you were worried you were gonna derail the business that you were working so hard for? Or were there any other kind of symptoms that were manifesting for you?
Um, well, certainly sleep is a huge issue for me. And I think it's it's multiple reasons I was a single mom, a young single mom. And so I had some of that really heavy pressure of wow, it's just me. I mean, if something happens to me in the night, what is this baby going to do? So there that sort of began the now 27 and a half year history of poor sleep. My husband, after so we met when my son was five, we got married when he was 12. He very shortly after that descended into alcoholism, which lasted for the first eight ish years of our marriage. And so that was a piece of that stress and no sleeping, and I'm kind of a highly anxious person. Anyway, I'm highly strong, my mind works very fast I have, I'm just wrapping up a fairly high pressured position in the nonprofit sector. And so there's just a lot of things that equate to me not sleeping well. But this, this side work, which I started two and a half years ago, which is now going to be the next iteration of my professional life is also stressful. Entrepreneurship is not easy. So, you know, there's just a lot of things that I think definitely manifest itself. A perfect example is last night, I was up from 115 to 4am. It was in bed for an hour, sort of just hanging out. And then I finally thought just get up and read. So I did. And that's not really a typical for me. And I'm a person who needs an incredible amount of sleep, because I use an unbelievable amount of mental energy, because I'm a high energy person. So I would say sleep is definitely a piece of it. And my if my husband were here, he would say that I have like an insane level of high strung Ignis. So I can know he's in the house. I can know where he is in the house. And yet, if he walks into the room that I'm in, it's as if I've been alone for 10 months, and had no idea that anyone else was ever going to join me again. I mean, I am sort of that, like, throw everything up in the air and scream kind of person. Join me. Yeah, totally irrational, unnecessary ways. And that seems probably part of all of this.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, it speaks to an activated nervous system at some point, right. When did you start to feel better when you join the whole health? I know you had an experience with EMDR. Pretty quickly. You joined? Yeah.
So I had never heard of EMDR. First of all, I have to say, I, my parents got divorced when I was almost 15 years old. And I went to see a counselor, two or three times during that period, because it was kind of a family thing, but I went on my own. And then I really had never done any other therapy as part of my husband's sobriety journey. We did do four mandatory marital therapy sessions, but that was really it in my life. So I didn't, I didn't have a language around this. I don't really have the vocabulary. But a good friend of mine has a PhD in psychology and had just been on this live stream program. My husband and I hosted around addiction and marriage and all those things. And she had referenced EMDR, which I had never heard of. So then part of the whole health lab and mending trauma was EMDR. So I it was sort of like when you think you're going to buy a red car, then you see red cars, so Okay. So I thought, well, I'll go to this session. I don't know what this is going to be. But I already felt so positively around you and Lena that I wasn't afraid of what I didn't know. Because I thought, well, if it's terrible, I'm in a Zoom meeting. I'll just like pretend my internet conked out and get off. So I went in, it was just me. So Lena and me. And Lena would say if she were here because she said this to me that my experience was not typical. So people shouldn't hear me and think oh my gosh, one and done and I'm fixed. First of all, I'm still jumpy, and I'm not sleeping. So I'm clearly not fixed but whatever. So EMDR from my very simple understanding is really the upper tunity to get your conscious brain, which is this small part of your brain that dominates so much of your life, sort of circumvent that, and move into your unconscious brain. And what I love most about it is when I said to Lena, I feel like I'm feeding my unconscious brain, the stuff I want it to work on. She said to me, yeah, you can't. And I loved that it was so freeing to realize I wasn't doing it wrong. Because I'm kind of a control person. And so I thought, How am I even trying to control my subconscious that felt
somehow manipulating the outcome? Totally.
So it was good to know that even I can't control my own subconscious. Okay, so it's a series of sort of four similar little sessions. And Lena is so fantastic in it. She's so supportive. I walked away feeling like wow, I'm a grand champion breather and a grand champion, shoulder Tapper and all these things. And almost instantly, I had a really beautiful physical response, I closed my eyes. And I started to do this consistent tapping and breathing. And I instantly started to cry. And I was not bothered by that, because I have a theater degree. And breathwork is a huge piece of being an actor. And so I was really comfortable. And found, I really resonated with how intimate breathing can be. And so I was not off put by crying, I know that, that can make other people uncomfortable. But it was very, very reassuring to me, because I knew that I had tapped back into something I hadn't been to in my own self for dozens of years. And what I realized was, there's a moment from when I was 18 years old, with my mother, that was a defining moment. For me, it was not a defining moment, in the big picture of definitional moments, it was kind of a nothing little moment. But it took on incredible significance for me. And so this session, and the conversation that Lena and I had afterwards, freed me of that Lena gave me the most beautiful image. She said, can you take that moment? And can you put it on a beautiful little leaf, and can you put the leaf in the water and just send it upstream. And I was able to do that effortlessly. And suddenly this thing, this two minutes of almost 50 years of life, which I had carried with me for almost 38 years, 32 years, suddenly just left me in the, in this very tangible way, I felt, I felt it just leave my body and just go away. And it wasn't, I didn't send it away, angrily, I didn't send it away with anything other than just gratitude that I could finally say to my 18 year old self, this does not have to define you anymore. And it really was, I mean, I'm kind of tearing up now because it was so profound. And so simple, and so complex at the exact same time. And such such a gift, really one of the one of the most extraordinary gifts of my life was that our
Wow, thank you so much for being willing to share that. And I know you've written about that in your blog, or your newsletter. And before you know, we go, I want you to make sure that everyone knows where to find you and where to find those stories and more of your vast experience walking through sobriety with your husband, and also you know what you're doing now with that, which is incredible. And we'll we'll get to that in a little bit. But I just want to thank you for sharing that. I think one of the things I keep hearing and it could be the red car thing, right, that I'm focusing on is just these these things that are really not in our conscious awareness that are keeping us stuck. And that when we do these small and simple tools that are backed by research and that are, you know, clinically effective and shown to I think EMDR and the research has shown to be as effective as seven one hour talk therapy sessions, one EMDR session, because you're accessing both sides of your brain and your Your reprocessing memory so, so differently and so fully right. And so you're speaking to that, and I love that. How has How has the the tools you've been given through the whole health lab? Whether it's EMDR? Or whether it's working, you know, you in on breathwork or with the community, how has that changed how you've approached things in your life?
Well, that's a nice question. Um, I think that it has invited me to be kinder to myself. I am, I am a fairly impatient person. I think fast, I act fast. I move fast. I respond fast. I mean, it's why I pulled up your website. And within minutes, I was like, Yeah, man. I mean, I'm not a dweller. I don't contemplate things in the way that many people do. I am very in touch with my intuition. And when my intuition says go, I just go. But it also means that I am impatient, because often, I can't keep up with the pace of myself, much less anyone else around me. And so I know that when I am, when I am frustrated with myself, I'm not bringing my best self to anything else. And so this has really invited me to just have some grace and kindness for myself form, past mistakes, present mistakes, for disappointments, for pacing, not going the way I want it to for all these things. I sure have a long way to go. But I'm at least at least instead of just berating myself, I'm saying, okay, yeah, it's not working the way you want it to work. But you're here you're showing up, you're doing the work, just keep going. And that's been really important. Because all this work asks you to take risks and to be vulnerable, and to show up sometimes not as your best self, because things have happened along the way that have banned you up, literally, or physically or metaphorically. And so this grace piece has been, has been very important for me. And I think the people around me would say, it's been important for us to bring a lot of energy to the table, if I could just dial that back a little, it's a little more pleasant for everyone.
That's awesome. I was just gonna ask How have your relationship shifted? Have you noticed a shift in your relationships?
Yes, I would say that, because my husband is the most present person in my life. And the person I see the most consistently, it would be easy to take this frustration on this work out on him, because he's here. And he's, you know, the one who happens to ask me how my day was. But what I've really elected to do, and actually, me, I didn't even really put these two things together until right this minute, what I have elected to do is, I might have a day where nobody's buying any of my programs, and nobody seems to be paying attention. In fact, to the point where I did ask these marketing women about a month ago, I said, Have I died, and I just don't know it. Like, maybe I think I'm producing all this work, and it's not being produced because I'm dead. But they ever go back and they said, You have not died, let's not get dramatic. Um, but what I have decided, and pretty consistently am doing is saying, all right, you were not fired. From your high profile day job you elected to leave that to pursue this other work. That's a gift and a privilege. So you get to choose how you're going to respond when he comes home from his day job and says How was your day, you get to decide if you're going to, you know, rip your face off and scream at him because you can't scream at everybody else. Or if you're going to say, it's kind of a rough day, but I'm glad you're home, and set the day down and move on to the rest of it. And that, that has been huge. And I I can say now in thinking about it, that that's a direct piece of having been part of this community and, and engaging in the community because I know that you can be part of this community and really never get to know the other people. There's asynchronous and synchronous ways to be involved. Exactly. Synchronous ways have been really important for me.
Yeah. Oh, that's and that's beautiful. And I just, you know, I'm still working on that as well with my husband right. And and the people we love the most and choosing and getting as well. Lena says, having that benevolent curiosity. So agitated right now. Oh, because XYZ didn't go well today in my job that I did elect to leave a career for. And so how am I going to show up with the people I love and maintain connection in those relationships that are really the whole reason any of us are doing this work? Yes. So it's ironic that, you know, because we do generally feel more cocooned with them, we can sometimes accidentally show our teeth a little more. So I just want you to know, solidarity. Honestly, I think that this is the work. This is the work. And, you know, we talk a lot about that trauma and toxic stress happens in relationship. It's almost never I can't even think of a time when it's isolated. And so healing also happens in relationship because we can theoretically learn all of these things. But until we actually practice it with another human, it's all theoretical. And so that true, the true litmus test, I think of my own growth, and what I'm hearing from you is being able to practice it with those that we really love and care about. Yeah,
yeah. Yeah. It's it's a really lovely thing. And I mean, from a selfish standpoint, it will allow me to a stay married, which is something I greatly desire. And be it will allow him to continue to support me through perhaps a longer period of building than either one of us hoped for, because I'm not making him pay for the frustration I'm feeling with the pace of the work. Yes. And so there's, there's just great inner benefit and relational benefit to that benevolent curiosity.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I can't thank you enough for being willing to speak to me and to our listeners about your own experience. And I want to highlight what you're doing, because I think it's really, really incredible. You know, I've been sober for quite a long time.
I know you have, I'm so proud of you.
Thank you. It is one of the things I'm most proud of in my life. And I have such a tender heart for anyone working with those who are wanting to get sober or wanting to stay sober. And so please tell our listeners what you're doing. Because I do feel like it's just, it's such an incredible project.
Well, thank you. So to make this brief on, my husband's leading up to his third, sober, Versary. So he got, he went into the hospital February 1 2017, and was gone for six and a half weeks and came home from hospital and rehab, and has been sober ever since. But leading up to his three years sober Versary, I had this kind of direct download from the universe that we should share our story. Because almost nobody in our life had any idea that this had happened. And people were starting to question why my life suddenly looked so incredible, because it did become incredible when he got sober. And I said to him in November of 2019, I'm going to ask you a question. And if you say, No, I'll never ask you again, which is the most least me thing ever. Because I'm like a terrier. If I get something in my mind, I'll know on my own foot off to make it happen. But I said, I'm wondering if you'd be willing to go public with our story from two perspectives, and he said, Let me think about it. And he came back the next day. And he said, Yes. And so we did. February 1 2020, we launched this nine, week 27, part series, back and forth, multimedia series, and it got picked up by our local newspaper. And suddenly my little website went from about 800 visits to 25,000 visits. And people started showing up out of the woodwork. I mean, what I didn't know. And what I think nobody knows when they're in it, is that almost everybody in this instance, can say me too. They grew up with it. They've been married to it, they've suffered with it themselves. They have good friends. I mean, alcoholism is so pervasive in this country, and maybe in the world. And I just had no idea. I somehow convinced myself I was the only person who was living with this. And so I couldn't talk about it because nobody would even know what I was talking about. And the problem is, is that we all convince ourselves of that and so then nobody He talks about it in the isolation and the shame just perpetuates over and over and over. And I think that's a huge piece of why it's such a cyclical addiction and become such a multigenerational problem is we just don't talk about it. If we do talk about it, we talk about it in terrible ways. People's mugshots show up on the front of newspapers, and we shame people, and we judge people. And it's just, it's a terrible thing. So we went public with it that ended in April of 2020. In July of that year, you know, everybody was still kind of in lockdown. Everything was so uncertain. And I went back to him. And I said, I think we have more to say. So we started a daily program called daily dose of Dr. Mary and DD, which was 15 minutes, five days a week for 56 straight weeks, we did that. And then we kind of recalibrated. And we we wrapped that up in December of 2022. But we had on 90 guests, one of whom was you, which was such an incredible conversation. And we healed ourselves in ways that never could have happened, had we not had the pressure of what the heck are we going to talk about today? Sometimes, sometimes I cried, sometimes we often laughed, we often would show up, and we'd been fighting in the morning. And I'm a big believer in if we're fighting at three to one we're fighting when the camera goes on. And so you're gonna watch this happen, lucky you audience, you know, and all of that. And we wrapped it up because it was time but we're not done. We're still we're still working on things. Now we've got this 90 minute experience, called discovery, discover your sober spark that we are doing with couples, either who have elected to stop drinking, because it's a problem for one or both of them, or who just are sober, curious, because what we realized when mass came home from the hospital is Hmm, now what? What are we doing because so much of our lives revolved around alcohol, even though it wasn't a problem for me, it was the only way I could engage him. So, so this work now is about helping couples figure out, we made it through that initial, a massive hurdle of sobriety. Or we just stepped away from the cultural fascination and obsession with alcohol. Who are we? What do we do? How do we get together with other couples friends, when it used to be that we all got together and drank? And now one or more of us isn't? What are our hobbies? How do we travel? One of the great first things we had to figure out was Matt's was terrified to get on a long haul flight where he wasn't drinking. So one of the things we're working on is taking daily dose couples, to Europe. And how do you go to a pub in the afternoon, and not drink? Because it's such a piece of their culture? Well, you know how you do it, you do it the way England has done it, which is to say, we've got all kinds of non alcoholic options, and nobody's here to judge what's in your friggin glass. We're here to be culturally together in this environment, drink or don't drink. You know, how do you make that flight? How do you how do you go to a pub? How do you work together as a couple, when one or both of you aren't drinking, and it has been? I had no idea that I was going to become an advocate for spouses who survive their spouses addiction and sobriety for the trauma of having watched that happen in my household, watch it happen. With a child in the house, I figure all of that out. My own trauma once he did get sober, my own journey of figuring out how to comfortably talk about it. It just had an amazing moment. Yesterday, a woman I barely know I met in a professional setting for lunch. And out of the blue, she said to me, my husband's in rehab. And I don't know who's been paying attention to us or who hasn't. So I wasn't exactly sure why she was telling me this. But I said to her Do you know my story? And as she was wiping away tears, she said I do. And that's an awesome privilege, and a burden that I now carry, that people know that they can come to me and have that moment, and that it will safely stay with me. And I just I it's I never would have picked this work. But it is a gift and a privilege. And I take it very, very seriously because I know what people have been through because I've been through it to
is wonderful. Thank you so so much for telling us about what you're doing. I think it's so valuable and so needed and as someone who informally walks people through sobriety I you know, I'm not their formal sponsor sponsor, but I, I'm pro sobriety.
Sobriety I'll just
Yeah. So I'm excited to have another resource, especially for those who are in partnerships and, and are looking to realign their relationship outside of outside of drinking together now. Yeah, yeah. It's a big shift. Yeah, it really is. No, as you're speaking, I'm thinking, oh, yeah, these are the conversations I've been having with my friends who are one day at a time doing the work. So where can we find you
at Dana delvalle.com DAY and a dlval.com. I love it so much. If you'd sign up for my newsletter, scroll down a little ways. And you can find that. And if you're really only interested in daily dose, send me a note, and I'll get you on to the Daily Dose section of things. It doesn't have its own website right now. But you could find daily dose on YouTube, all our episodes are there, there are 384 episodes. So there's a lot of content to explore. But I want to make one more point if I can about your work. Because this was a, this was a hurdle for me. And I think it could potentially be stopping other people from saying yes, and I just want to encourage them to let this go. The word trauma is a complicated word. Because, like, alcoholic, and like a lot of words, we sort of think we know what trauma means. In my mind, trauma was things like well, I was sexually abused, or I was physically abused, or I lived with, you know, homeless or food insecurity or those kinds of things. I had a really lovely childhood, when I did the trauma assessment that you send out. The only point that I picked up was that my parents got divorced before I was 18. But I was almost 15. So I didn't have big T trauma in my life. And I would say to this day, despite having lived with an alcoholic, I did not have big T trauma because there was no physical or mental or physical or verbal abuse. That's okay. Your trauma can be little T trauma, it can be things that you tried and failed at, it can be opportunities that you didn't get to pursue, it can be things that just didn't work out the way you hoped or dreamed they would work out. You have a place in this network, because that trauma is valid to your lived experience. Someone said to me once, it's not a hierarchy. Like if someone's trauma is worse than yours, they're not better at Trauma than you are. So they get more help, or they have more value, your lived experience is your lived experience. And if it was hard for you, that has value.
Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. And I do know that is a barrier for people. And you know, in the research, the term toxic stress is used interchangeably with trauma because of it has the same effect on our physical health. And so that's one way that we often approach it is toxic stress. But I love that you're bringing that up because it can be a barrier. And none of us want to be labeled. And I think one of the things that we do really well in the whole health lab is we don't label anyone by anything that did or did not happen to them. And we feel so strongly about creating an identity outside of what happened to us. Because we are each in there living proof that we are so much more than what did or didn't happen to us, and that we have so much more to give. And so I really appreciate you saying that. It's been such a pleasure to have you on today. Is there anything else you want to leave our listeners with before we say goodbye?
Just boy, if you're on the fence about this work, jump to the side of Yes. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work. And that's a different conversation. But the surest way for nothing to change is to do nothing. So in Amy's case, and that work, that's clinical work, I'm not a clinician and I don't pretend to be sometimes I have played one on stage and TV but I don't play when in real life. But my work is is also sort of companion work to that in the sense of if you feel sort of stuck and your life is just sort of fine, but it's not what you would love it to be then then that's where work like I'm doing, I think can be really helpful both personally and then again, in this sober spark realm. So if you have questions for my work, I'd love, love, love to have a conversation with you. And if you have questions about Amy's work, I'd be happy to talk with you too from my lived experience having been fairly involved and seeing real value. So that's the end of what I have to say.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Dana. It's been a privilege to have this conversation and I really, really appreciate you.
I appreciate you and everything that you have done for me with me and around. So thank you so much, Amy.
Thank you for listening to the universe's your therapist this week. If you have any questions or looking for more information, you can find us at mending trauma on Instagram, as well as mending trauma.com Our website and if you're enjoying our content, we'd love it if you could rate review and subscribe to the show. We'll see you all next week.
