Life School Elly Zaid

It’s sexual assault awareness month and in this personal episode, I speak about surviving sexual assault, the predatory warning signs my intuition caught and the big signs I missed. I talk about recovering from the attack, the power of choosing who you want to be, resilience, hope, what survival really means, the power of kindness, symptoms of PTSD, how health care failed me, the lovely volunteer advocate services out there, the backlash from American culture, rape culture’s toxic garbage, how beneficial Ketamine therapy has been for me, karma I saw the rapist receive, crisis services and how to be intimate after being assaulted.

Here is my interview with Danica I. Lepojevikj. Danica is the only practicing doula in Macedonia, a lactation expert, a psychologist, a yoga instructor, a poet, a mother and a humble, inspiring woman. We talk about what being a pioneer has been like, what it is like to push for change-when to stop pushing, how to care for yourself when you’re trying to care for the world, her mother-baby practices, spirituality, going with the flow and much much more!

Tonight I got to interview my friend Sarah, an actress, mother, artist and 3 year sober Chicagoan. Sarah shares the lessons she’s learned from crafting her beautiful philosophy for living with Bi-Polar Disorder. Sara shares her experiences with adderall abuse, heightened sensory perception, suicide, medication, raising her daughter, getting help and a lot of positive coping skills she’s mastered. We tear apart mental health stigma and talk about how to find the words to communicate from a emotionally different world, to our loved ones.

Life School is back! 🚌📚I interviewed a dear friend of mine, Carly Novoselsky. Carly is also known as @queersobersocial and @queersobertherapy is a queer, sober LCPC & CADC therapist who provides mental health care, is a community leader and a millennial badass. We are both healthcare workers seeking to improve the health care system. We discuss how we can serve our patients and be trusted to do our best as health care providers in a for profit healthcare industry. We talk about A LOT: How we are trying to be lights of hope for our mental health, queer, trans, alcoholic/addiction patients, Carly’s alcoholism and found sobriety, the ‘gratitude wake up call’ after you realize life is ticking away-so you might as well live well, how to replace self destruction with authentic living, health care industry problems, the fentanyl/heroin overdose of a high school friend of mine, warning signs to look out for if your friends are struggling, boutique wellness, finding a good therapist (what is a good therapist!?), important/hard/confrontational conversations that can save lives, misuse of social media as diagnostics data to prove mental illness, over pathologically interpreting human tendencies, “crabs in a bucket”, normal being not the best thing to strive for, perfectionism being unreal, suicide, picking your version of hard, how to let go and more! 💗

Wow, this interview was incredible. I spoke with Trauma and Somatic Experiencing LCPC, Becky Carter, about raising her African American little boy with developmental disabilities knowing how the world will see him, her experience as an African American woman with her own early childhood betrayal and we both speak on a very honest level about be “othered” being our own Defibrillators, what shame does to you and how to call it by its name, neglect in mental health institutions, our toxic partner president, relearning how to see yourself as the wonderfully unique, imperfect and irreplaceable you there is and ever will be. Www.BeckyCarterlcpc.com