[DR. CRISTINA CASTAGNINI] Behind The Bite podcast is part of a network of podcasts that are good for the world. Check out podcasts like the Full of Shift podcast, After the First Marriage podcast and Eating Recovery Academy over at practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to Behind The Bite podcast. This podcast is about the real-life struggles women face with food, body image and weight. We're here to help you inspire and create better healthier lives. Welcome. . Hello, hello everyone. Today's show is not focused specifically on eating disorders and body. However, I do think that what we're going to discuss today is extremely important and actually very relevant to eating disorders and body image. Mental health in general really needs to be discussed much, much more than it is. While I'm glad to see that there is now more than ever really, especially post-pandemic, really a lot more discussion, we still need to break the stigma that still unfortunately exists out there about mental health illnesses. Unfortunately, there's also still a lot of information out there that's just wrong about it. So, in my opinion, we really can't talk about it enough and so with all of that being said, I'm really looking forward to speaking to today's guest, and I know all of you out here listening are going to be glad you tuned in as well. Sit back, relax, and find a quiet space to listen because Erik DaRosa, who is known to friends as Yoda, is an inspirational speaker and both the founder and co-host of the From Survivor to Thriver podcast. He is on the front end of mental health conversations, along with his co-host Marc Fernandez and each week he tackles different mental health topics through honest and relatable, "kitchen table conversations" with real people who are helping to shatter mental health stigmas and find their voices. He aims to normalize discussions around mental health topics and remind his audience that they are not alone and that there's strength in community, and that it's perfectly okay to not always be. Well, Erik, welcome to the show. [ERIK DAROSA] Hi, Cristina. Thank you so much for having me. Really excited, and I couldn't think of a better way to be spending my Friday morning other than speaking with you. So thanks so much. [DR. CRISTINA] Right, Friday morning, I got my coffee, you're here. This is great. [ERIK] That's right because you're on the Pacific Time, I'm in the mountain. I just finished my coffee and getting ready to go out on a fun mountain bike ride after we finish our recording. [DR. CRISTINA] Nice. Is that typically how you spend your Fridays? [ERIK] Yes, summertime, definitely try to get some work in the morning whether we're recording a show or if I'm doing something related to my other nonprofit work and then go out for a nice long mountain bike ride in the mountains. It's beautiful here this time of year and very similar in the winter, so try to get same thing done early in the morning and then go out skiing for a few hours and finish up my day late in the afternoon. [DR. CRISTINA] That awesome. [ERIK] It's interesting, there's been such a drought I know in the West for a number of years now, and this year they were expecting it to be pretty dry here in the Rockies. We had a fairly rainy June, and it's been raining at least for an hour or two every day now in July. So everything is super green. I'm watching a hummingbird just fly around outside my window. It looks like a lush rain forest. It's as green as I've ever seen it since I've lived here in the past 11 years. [DR. CRISTINA] You have quite an interesting story and I'm really excited also to have you on because we're going to talk about something that is a little bit off from the typical topic I talk about, which is eating disorders, but it's so related because we're talking about mental health. So would you just mind for the audience sharing a little bit about your path, your journey, and what this is that you're doing that's so amazing that why have you on the show? [ERIK] Sure. I love the question. I'm 50 now. My journey has been probably since the age of seven, my mental health journey and I haven't always had a podcast and I haven't always lived here in Colorado. Prior to that, I grew up on the East Coast, about 45 minutes south of Boston, went to school outside of Boston, was very lucky, met my wife at university and we moved to New York. I spent almost two decades in New York in the financial world before moving here to Colorado in the fall of 2011. Underpinning all of that was for a very long time, my own very secret and private battle with OCD, intrusive thoughts, physical manifestations of OCD as well as severe, oftentimes crippling anxiety which has just recently in the last nine months been diagnosed as PTSD. When I talk about it now I say I'm so excited to have my PTSD diagnosis because hearing those four letters for the first time changed my life for the better. I suffered in silence. As I said, I can remember back to being seven all the way through middle school, high school, college, living in New York. It wasn't until 2004 when I had my first real dissociate episode. That my wife was a very big inspiration to get me into seeing a therapist, a real therapist for the first time. That was the first time I had ever spoken really openly and honestly about what was happening with me but at the time, I thought it was more of just a quick fix. I didn't realize that this was going to be a lifelong journey. So I spent about a year working with my therapist and then decided I was my own best doctor, stopped taking my medication, wasn't seeing him anymore. In 2006, I'm sure it's no surprise to you or your audience, went through my second dissociate episode, and that was when I realized it was time to get very, very serious about my mental health and what was happening to me. From that point on I've been on medication. I've had an amazing therapist in New York. My wife and I moved here to Colorado in the fall, as I mentioned, of 2011. A very big piece of that was leaving New York City and finding a place where I would be much better suited to be able to deal with my own mental health issues and be outside, be in nature. Here I am the journey continues, but I started a mental health podcast, as you had alluded to with my very close friend hearing in Snow Mass Village, Marc Fernandez. We launched that in January of 2021. Ultimately, the goal and the mission of the podcast is to shatter this stigma around mental health conversations so that others don't have to suffer in silence. They will recognize, hey, I'm not the only one. There are other people just like me. In order to be able to utilize and find all of the amazing resources that are out there, and as we've done more and more episodes of the podcast, what I've really realized, at the end of the day, it's aimed at helping people and giving people hope by hearing other people's stories told in a kitchen table like conversation. Our hope is someone will listen and say, "Hey, that person sounds like me." They're real and they're relatable and if it helps them to change your trajectory of their own personal journey, or if it gives them one extra hour to just stop and think about what they may or may not have been contemplating, and allows them to just take that pause and take some action to either reach out to speak to somebody and if we can save a life, if we can change the course of somebody's journey, then that for us, the job is done. [DR. CRISTINA] That to me is amazing because that's really the goal of my podcast too, is to have people come on and share their stories because we don't talk about much privately. I think there's a lot of shame, a lot of embarrassment, a lot of stigma about mental health. So I applaud you so much for having your podcast. Mine is, like I said, more geared toward eating disorders, but same thing, the more we get talking, the more we open up about it, the less I think there's stigma, the less fear there is. There's more awareness. I think your big word that you said was hope, hope that things can get better, hope that people listening you can relate and go, wow, that's me. Your life can improve, your life can get better. You don't have to suffer. [ERIK] Yes, and I love what you're doing with your show. You and I have spoken a couple of months ago about each other's mission. In fact, I listened to a couple of episodes back and there was a really interesting topic, which was on, related to the intersection of exercise and eating disorders. As I was listening to it, I was putting into my own mind the idea of not only exercise and over exercising and how that relates to ED, but I was thinking of my own personal journey of how I often use things like exercise, whether it was running when I was younger, mountain biking, skiing. I noticed now that I did those two extremes and I use them more as a distraction. It was a way for me to escape for whatever period of time that was the intrusive thoughts that were in my head. It helped me a little bit to calm my anxiety, but it really was a distraction. It wasn't until the last year or so that I realized that those are things that I really cherish and love to do. I don't need to turn the dial from zero to a hundred. I can turn the dial from zero to 10 or zero to 20, go out and have a fun ride with my friends. If my body's feeling tired on a particular day, maybe I don't even go out. So hearing that episode brought up a whole bunch of interesting thoughts in my own mind about how things like exercise can play so many both good and self-destructive roles in people's lives. [DR. CRISTINA] Oh, thanks for listening, Thanks for sharing that. I think that's when you were just sharing about your own history starting at age seven. I'm wondering even for you just, did you just think that was the norm, like how everyone existed in and experienced the world? Because as you said, you didn't really realize anything was, you were struggling with anything. It was just like, this is my life, this is how things are. So I don't know, until somebody maybe listens to like one of your podcasts, they might not realize like, oh, wait, how I've been experiencing life and going through life is a struggle, or I might have something that I don't need to be dealing with, or there's something here that maybe if I go talk to a therapist that I can change or shift. [ERIK] No, that's a great question. If I think back to my much younger self, and we now refer to that much younger self as little Erik, as we've done a lot of inner child work around my trauma and PTSD, that for a very long time, yes. On one side, I thought it was normal and I thought that this is just how the world was but there was another part of me, which was I think taking on a larger and larger role, which was telling me, there's something not right about you. You're different but don't say anything. I grew up in the seventies and eighties during my formative years and it was never spoken about. The sleepless nights, the thoughts swirling and raging around in my head, the physical and emotional manifestations of anxiety, it was all things that would come on at any particular point in time in my day and I just thought if I could just like, wish it away, push it away and not talk about it. That's how I existed for a very, very, very long time. I talk often about, as I moved through my teenage years and then into college, and especially into my career, I was almost living a dual life with the façade and the energy drain that was occurring from me trying on the outside to make people see who I wanted them to see, who is this person that was completely put together. I was able to interact with people. No one knew what was happening. While all the while on the inside I was just struggling. There were times when it would abate and I would think, oh, great, this is over, almost, almost like having a stomachache. I would think, okay, great. Some time would go on and then it would come back. My thought would be, why is this happening again? Why me? So I would sort of retreat into that dual role again and I realize now how exhausting that was. It was trying to be two people at the same time, and it was physically and mentally exhausting keeping that façade. It was just as it was physically and mentally exhausting going through all of the manifestations of anxiety and OCD that I did for so long in my life. [DR. CRISTINA] So did anyone pick up on it? Did anyone ever say anything to you or is this just this internal, it sounds like hell to me, the way you're describing it. Did any anyone know or say anything to you? [ERIK] It's interesting, so I've done a lot of work currently looking back and when I launched, when we launched the podcast, I had a bunch of friends from high school and from other younger times in my life. Their response, one was like, "Congratulations, we're so proud of what you're doing," but the other was, "We had no idea. We absolutely had no idea and we just thought that's who you were. We didn't think anything was wrong." But it's also led to some very interesting discussions because they've said to me, If I had only known what you were going through, I would've been able to share what I was going through. So I think about kids nowadays, and I think about high school and middle school and social media and there are so many kids who are in that very same situation that I was in and my friends were in where we didn't give off any of those signs or symptoms. We didn't talk about it. We didn't hint at it. So one of the things that I hope is people don't have to suffer in silence as I did at such a young age for so long, but they'll feel more comfortable having that conversation, whether it's with friends or whether it's with their parents. That was another thing I really never shared it with anyone in my family. There was a lot of childhood trauma, which led up to those symptoms and was eventually one of the root causes of my emotional PTSD. I wasn't really even aware of what was happening, I never would've even thought how to start that conversation. So yes, it's, there were no, there were definitely no tells. I would make it a point during the day to really just check in and be like, hmm, does anybody know? Like, is anybody, I'm like getting any looks. So I was very aware of what was happening, and I was also very aware of making sure that nobody could see it. [DR. CRISTINA] That is so interesting, so there was a part that knew like, I have to hide this? [ERIK] Oh, yes. I think when it became really, really challenging for me, so I graduated university, we moved to New York City, and I like to joke, what better place for somebody with spiraling anxiety and OCD than Wall Street? So go to Wall Street and now I'm in a world which is, back then, it was in the early nineties, so it was still very much dominated by, let's call it that toxic masculinity culture. So I immediately, I'm thrown into this world, I'm only 21 years old, and I'm like, nobody can see this. Like, nobody can see this. They have trusted me to come work in this firm, and they think I'm this completely put together individual and I've gone to the right schools and I've done all the right things. So I did all these things to try to fit into that world and it was a real challenge. I think if anything, it just continued to exacerbate all of these underlying symptoms for me. There was more and more stress that I put on top of myself in my career and in my life in general. From 1993, I left Wall Street in 2004, and I moved into the corporate world, on the corporate finance side and even then I thought, I'm going to leave Wall Street. I'm going to go into a world that's a little bit less frenzied and fast-paced and stressful. I found myself following that exact same path, like, I just wanted more and more and more and more and the responsibility came and the roles and the promotions and jobs came, and I found myself right back in that same place that I had been in my Wall Street career. So, yes, it was definitely a struggle to try to fit in and especially being a male in that world, like, I didn't want to show any weakness. I didn't want to show any vulnerability. I thought if anybody finds out what's going on with me or the imposter syndrome started raging, I'll be out the door in a second. [DR. CRISTINA] Wow, so were you talking to anybody about it or just holding it all in? [ERIK] Oh, I was holding it all in. My wife and I would just chat a little bit from times to time. Well, one of the things that's been so amazing here we are, we've been together for over 30 years now, and --- [DR. CRISTINA] Congratulations. [ERIK] Thank you. We just celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary a couple of months back. We would each talk a little bit about some of our issues but I never led on to what was going on in my head. I thought if anybody, if I disclosed any of this even to a therapist, I didn't trust speaking to a therapist about it, I was afraid I was going to get either locked up, I was going to be brought to a psychiatric ward and maybe never see the outside world again. I just kept thinking, I've managed it and I've lived with it for this long. I have periods where I do tend to feel or did tend to feel okay and so if I could just make those periods last a little bit longer then I can deal with the bad times. So, yes, I never spoke about it. It was not anything that I discussed until I was 33 years old. In 2004 when that dissociative episode happened, the floodgates opened for me at home with my wife, and I shared everything that was happening for the very, very first time. It was the first time I shared it with somebody who I wasn't close to who happened to be my therapist [DR. CRISTINA] For anyone listening's going, "What on earth is a dissociate disorder," I mean, would you mind sharing a little bit because I think that, like how would I know if I've had one of those? [ERIK] Sure, sure. As a professional, you can correct me if I miss anything along the way. So dissociate episodes, and I know now they're often referred to as like a psychotic break or nervous breakdowns is how they were referred to way back in the day. They happened for me, and I use that word for, not to intentionally, what often leads up to it is for me, it's usually a nine-month build, I would say, where my stress level is building and my anxiety is building but it's bubbling underneath the surface, and I'm not recognizing it so I just keep pushing myself. The obsessive compulsive thoughts and the intrusive thoughts cycle begins, but it's not completely and totally unmanageable. So I would work through those things, and then there'd be a trigger, and that trigger would set the intrusive thoughts in my case off racing. Then it would eventually over the course of, let's call it three or four days lead to a complete lack of sleep. So I was exhausted both physically and mentally. I wasn't eating very well. If you imagine like a pair of blinders, and they start like, and for people who aren't watching, my hands are way out to the side of my head. Just like in the shape of a funnel, they close in and they close in and they close in until it feels as though you're just looking through a pinhole. I started, and as I remember it now, I really started to find that my brain and my body were not running on the same speed, that my brain was slowing down but my physical body, I was feeling anxious and uptight and angry. Then all of the sudden, in one instance it was about a 24-hour period, and the second instance it lasted for a long three-day weekend where I have no recollection of that time period. It's as though I completely disassociated or left my body. One of my therapist friends refers to it like a ctrl-alt-delete on a computer when you need to reboot it. It's your brain's way of protecting itself from going into this manic spiral. So even though physically I could walk around I wasn't sleeping, but I was able to like, find my way around to do things. My brain was completely shut off. Then I just remember when I would come out of that episode it would start with almost a mania or a euphoria, like it was as though my brain had reset and all of those anxious and OCD moments had disappeared and all I wanted to do was eat. All I wanted to do was to laugh and to joke. That would last for a few hours, and then suddenly the long downward spiral would happen and then that could last for a while. So that's when, with the help of medication and talk therapy, I was able to start at least getting to what the root causes were. The second time, the only thing that allowed that to really subside I went on a very low dose benzo. I just remember sleeping for like 12 hours. I came very close to a third one this past fall but knowing and recognizing some of the signs and symptoms, we caught it a day or so before it would've become a full blown break. So that's what the experience is from my side and what it feels like. I don't know if I've missed anything on the professional end, Cristina, but let me know. [DR. CRISTINA] Well, no, and I think that that's the thing, it's your experience of it and you sharing how you experienced is exactly the point of you sharing it. Because other people hearing that might go, "Oh my gosh, I had no idea when I went through something similar or something like that." The way you describe it, somebody listening to this might go, "Oh my goodness. I thought that was something else. Or I thought I was just exhausted." Or I thought, so for anyone listening who maybe is going, "Oh my gosh, maybe I need to go talk to somebody, or I didn't realize that's what that was," that's the whole power in you sharing. So thank you for that. [ERIK] No, my pleasure. As you were just talking, it reminds me of like, being in a zombie state, is another, I think, way to be able to describe it. When I tell you, I literally, and I tell your audience, I literally have no recollection of what transpired while I was in that state to this day. [DR. CRISTINA] Wow. I think the most amazing thing I heard from what you said too, is you started, now you can identify when it's starting to come and I think that there's two things to that, one is through the use of all the work you've done. You've come so far in being able to understand yourself and how you function in your body, and being able to say, wait a minute, I see something coming here, which is improvement in terms of like your life functioning. You're able to now have some awareness to improve your mental health so that you don't go through that again. Like you know what's coming, You've done a lot of work, obviously. [ERIK] I think the biggest part of it, when I think about all the work I've been doing, a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy, I have an amazing therapist here. Interestingly, both Marc and I, my podcast, we share the same therapist and so we talk openly about her on the show because we also want to destigmatize that about like, yes, we talk to each other about our therapy sessions. It's no different than if you're going to the doctor and having a procedure done and you shared and talk to your friends about it. So there's that piece of it. There's what I've been doing on the eastern medicine side. I've done lots and lots of reiki energy healing, which has been extremely helpful and mindfulness and meditation and living here in the mountains, I get to spend 365 days a year outside connected to nature, which is so very important to me. I think all of those combined, I call it my equilateral triangle. That's what keeps me balanced is each one of those. If I take one of those away, the whole triangle shatters. That's how I've been referring to it recently, but also it's helped me to understand what I talked about earlier, which is this dial. My wife used to give me the nickname, all or nothing, so I either did things at a hundred percent or I didn't do them at all. So by shifting that mindset and being able to recognize that today is going to be a day where I'm going to go ski with my friends for two hours, I don't need to ski from the time the chairlift opens until the end of the day and then I'm going to come home and I'm going to spend half an hour listening to some music, and then I'm going to go check some emails. Just checking in with myself, and I call it now, meeting yourself where you're at, because we're all taught throughout our lives to meet others where they're at. But I like to say you can't meet others where you're at until you know where you are at. So on a daily basis now it's checking in with me and saying, where am I at today? What do I need today? What do I don't need today? Every day it'll be a little bit different, one day, maybe more work one day, maybe more outdoor activity and it's finding that correct balance so that I can keep the cognitive and the somatic working together. I don't allow one or the other to get so misaligned that I suddenly start to go down this spiral. [DR. CRISTINA] That's a great message, I think because you're so right, most people don't put self-care as a priority or even know what that looks like. I think there's just so many, talk about, like, there's so many have-tos versus like, want-tos, and there's not much of a balance. Even there's a confusion, I think even on the want-tos people like, well, if I get my laundry, then I'll feel better. So that's a want-to. I want do it so I feel better. Like, wait a minute. As I'm listening to the choices you've made your life, even like drastic choices, you've moved states away. You've changed your whole life. You've changed so many things. You can have that like triangle you talked about. You can live in a different environment, you can fit in things that give you something back, like you being able to go on a bike ride or ski or do these things. Because I'm imagining I had a little thought in my head, like people listening, going, "Well, yes, that'd be great. I'd love to leave the office and go on a bike ride today, but I can't do that" But really maybe sitting back and thinking like, how can I shift my life or do things? Maybe it might be of drastic change, but what's the cost if you don't? [ERIK] Exactly. I think we talk a lot about Covid and the negative impacts of Covid and Covid anxiety and long-haul Covid and all these things but I also feel like there are some silver linings that have come out of Covid. One is getting this whole mental health conversation going. I think the other is, it's changed not only the way, but the location of where people work. So I still have some friends back in New York. There are still some offices which are demanding the employees have to go. It's no coincidence that it's the finance world and the legal world and I don't see that changing anytime soon, unfortunately. But so many other companies are allowing people to work from home and that I think allows right, to be able to step away for an hour. Whenever I had teams and people working for me, and this was way before Covid, I always said, It doesn't matter where you are. I really don't care where you are. You know you're an adult. You know what needs to be done. As long as it gets done, that's great. So for me, FaceTime was never, like, literal FaceTime in the office was never a big thing. Working super late hours, that wasn't something, I never gave people accolades because they had been in the office until like 11 o'clock every night. So I think nowadays as the conversation around mental health becomes more and more open, as people start to talk more about self-care and they have these different work environments, I think it's a matter of figuring out what needs to be done when, what's a priority, and also recognizing that your own care is a priority. So if you're in a place where instead of hopping in the car to go get lunch, maybe you make lunch at home and go walk and find a quiet place to sit. Or on the weekends maybe you get up a little bit earlier and go do some activity that you really like to do. It doesn't have to be as dramatic of a change is what I made. It's if you start making some of these small changes you'll find, I think a little bit better balance overall in your life. You'll become better at your job, you'll become happier in your overall life and you'll figure out like what the right balance is for you, because for everyone it's different. [DR. CRISTINA] Yes, that's true. I think you're right, Covid did change lots and lots of people's lives and priorities and so we're living in a different world now,. one of the biggest things that has shifted is there is more talk about mental health and there's more awareness, which is great, wonderful, positive thing. Like you said, you started your podcast during all this, as did, so things have shifted, changed, and glad we're having more conversation. And definitely your podcast, people are probably, "How do I listen to it? How do I find you? It's great. [ERIK] Thank you so much. [DR. CRISTINA] How do people find your podcast and you? [ERIK] Sure. The podcast is called From Survivor to Thriver. We named it that because when I looked at myself, Marc looked at his journey and we think about mental health journeys, there is a point at which we are hanging on and we're surviving. But then there's the point at which we begin to take some steps, whether it's having the conversation with a friend, a loved one, somebody that we trust, starting to do some work through therapy or during some eastern medicine healing or being able to go out and explore in nature. When that happens, that's where the shift happens and that's where you go from surviving to thriving. We wanted to make it clear that thriving doesn't mean that every single day of your life is rainbows and glitter in unicorns. It just means that you now are comfortable owning it and you've recognized that you can move through it. The tagline I always talk about on the show is it's perfectly okay to not always be okay. I do it always in there, because I know for myself and also a lot of people talk about it's okay to not be okay. I'm like, yes, not really. Like if you're not okay for a period of time, that's not okay, but you're going to have good days and bad days and things are going to change. That's where the name came from. Really, as I had mentioned, that whole, the thriver piece is really showing people that there is hope, that there is a way through, that there are resources out there and that there's light at the end of the tunnel. So you can find us on, we're on Apple, Spotify, all the major players, wherever you find your podcasts. We have a Facebook page, it's called From Survivor to Thriver. It's an interactive Facebook page where we're doing lots of posts, we put up the podcast episodes, we'll put up some short either teaser clips or once in a while we'll put up full videos if our guests want to have those posted. We also love the interaction. It's been created as a community and so we want people to not only see what's, see what's there, but also interact and find a safe place where they know they can comment and they can message us and they have, well as I call it, a healing team, a support team that completely and totally comes from a place of empathy and knows what they're experiencing. I'm also on Facebook personally, it's Erik DaRosa and I'm on Instagram. My handle is @Ski Sherpa. You'll find a fun mix of my mountain biking and skiing exploits. I show the real, not the Instagram world, but I show the real world of that. I mix in a lot of what we're doing on the podcast as well as my own personal mental health journey. So I'd love, please feel free, reach out give us a follow, give us a listen. We've released 68 episodes now into the world, and we have a whole bunch in the works. Cristina, I know you're going to be an upcoming guest on our show and we're really excited about that as well. [DR. CRISTINA] Looking forward to that too. Fantastic. Lots of great content, lots of stuff that people can go and look at his mountain biking and skiing too. Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to have you on. Thank you for sharing. [ERIK] Thank you so much and yes, if I can leave your audience with just one message, it's if you feel like something isn't right, you don't have to suffer in silence. Find someone, doesn't matter who it is, as long as that's a trusted person. The moment you begin to share what you are feeling, you'll feel a weight come off of your shoulders and the journey from that point on will get easier, I promise. [DR. CRISTINA] Very well said. Thank you again so much. [DR. CRISTINA] This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.