“How God Transformed Dale Walsh’s Life: A Memoir, 5000 Poems, and His Journey as a Life Coach on ...

Welcome to the CJ Moneyway Show podcast, the podcast show where we unlock potential one dream at a time. Today we have another guest whose journey is truly worth hearing. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the Moneyway experience.

What's up, my good people? Welcome to the CJ Moneyway Show. The podcast that brings you stories behind the success. Today, my good people, I have on the show life coach Dale Walsh. How you doing today, Dale?

Uh, great to be here, CJ. I'm just doing excellent. As I like to say, I'm ducky, man.

Uh, thank you for taking the time out your busy schedule today, man, to come on the podcast show. Really appreciate it. So, uh, Dale, tell us a little bit about yourself and about your background.

Well, I had a very ideal childhood in Abilene, Texas. And at the age of 10, my mother divorced and remarried. So I went from Abilene, Texas to Midtown Manhattan. From there, I went to boarding school for 4 years and ended up at Dartmouth College where I did a lot of drugs. And ultimately in the summer after my freshman year, The drugs basically tipped me over the edge into psychosis. And so I was taking— one Tuesday I was a successful Ivy League student, and the next Tuesday I was in a mental hospital for what I thought was a great joke, which was, "Hi, I'm God." And so basically authority didn't find it very funny and thought I'd flipped my cookies. So I went to a mental hospital for 13 weeks. Ended up in a psychiatric program in Hackensack, New Jersey for 5 years and got my own apartment, which is where I still am. I've been in this apartment for 42 years. Went back to college at Fairleigh Dickinson University and basically my whole life since 1975 has been dealing with recovery from schizophrenia.

Mm. That's a lot, man. So let's dive into some of this, Dale, man.

So tell us about your mantra that you live by, "Recovery is always an option." Well, the most important thing about that is the word option because especially from schizophrenia, you have to make a conscious choice to be able to recover and to take care of yourself. And ultimately, the thing is, CJ, A lot of people are— have you ever heard of the term agnosognosia?

No, I've never heard of that, Dale.

Okay, well, agnosognosia is a common symptom in a serious mental illness, not only schizophrenia but also bipolar and everything. And it's taken from neurology, and it talks about stroke victims who can't understand that there's something wrong with them. So agnosognosia is like not a denial of the illness but an inability to comprehend that you're ill. So one of the major steps in recovery is always an option is like to be able to get beyond agnosygnosia, to be able to admit to yourself that you have an illness or that you have a condition and ultimately to be able to deal with that condition in the best way possible. So, and I think recovery is always an option. Is true for basically any mental or even physical illness because I mean, take addiction for an example. You aren't going to be able to stop your addiction until you actually decide that you want to and I could go into addiction because I was like a pot and beer head for 35 years until I stopped in 2007 but That was like a major milestone in my own recovery from my mental condition.

I understand what you mean about addiction. There's many forms of addiction. And like you say, you're not going to stop until you get to that point. Because I gambled, I had a gambling addiction. I gambled for, I want to say, 10 years straight. 10 years straight, every paycheck, Dale, I'm going to gamble. And I was gambling my life away. And I can count out of the 10 years, I can count on one hand how many times I actually walked out of the casino a winner, you know, and it wasn't a lot. I got my head beat in more, but like you said, it didn't come, I didn't stop until it came to a point where I said, you know what, enough is enough. And actually it was a voice that spoke to me and gave me the inkling to begin like, you know what, this ain't, this not what it do. And I ain't going to go into it, but like you say, I think I stopped smoking marijuana in 2008. That was my last, but I had been smoking marijuana for 16 years every day. That was another addiction, drinking. Like you say, until you get to that point that this is overtaking your life and things of that nature, man, you're going to keep on doing it. So I understand about what you're saying as far as, you know, just like smoking, it's an addiction. And sometimes people think that you can just stop, you know, right away because they say, well, you need to stop smoking. Well, it's not that, it's not that easy. It's not that simple. It's processes, you know, for certain things. If you been doing something for a long time, it's just hard to stop cold turkey, as they say. What you think about that, Dill?

Well, it's interesting you should mention that, CJ, because actually I smoked cigarettes for 35 years up to 2000, and basically I just stopped overnight. I had 2 cigarettes left at 2 o'clock in the morning. And I said I didn't want to go. I could have gone across the bridge to the old night gas station and gotten another pack, but it was too late. So I said, well, if I have one now and I don't have this last one, before I— when I wake up, I'll be able to quit. And that's what happened. And, you know, it was the Lord working with me and everything. But I didn't realize the import of what I'd done till about like 3 years ago. I was seeing my pulmonologist and we're just talking and I said, yeah, I quit smoking. And her jaw literally dropped and she says, what? I said, yes, I stopped smoking. And she said, "I've never heard of a person with your condition stopping smoking." Mm. And the same thing happened with the marijuana and beer. I went down to Oklahoma City for my mother's birthday and she basically freaked out. And so I got back to Hackensack and I went up to the bar fully intending to have my first beer in a week. Yeah. And I got to the bar I said, you know what, my mother hates my partying so much. I mean, she blamed my whole mental illness on marijuana. So she says, she hates it so much, I'm just going to make a secret vow to her that I'm going to quit everything. So I went to the bar, sat down, ordered a Coke and never looked back. I never did a 12-step program or anything, but with me, The chemical addiction, I always said it was secondary to the primary condition problem, which was my schizophrenia. That was sort of reinforced when the pulmonologist said that, but ultimately, everybody has to arrive at that point where they feel they can quit or they want to quit rather than just trying to artificially say, "Well, I'm going to quit." You know, and then 2 days later they're back to the addiction.

Yeah, I think something that you just said is very key in what you said. A lot of times you got to want to quit. You got to have that desire to want to quit. Not just saying, "I'mma quit." It has to be a desire to want to quit. So Bill, I keep calling you Bill, I'm sorry, Dale. Tell us about your program, Live Love.

Well, Live Love is something that I came up with. Well, let me preface this by saying I'm a mentor for the family caregivers of those with schizophrenia. Okay, so Live Love is something that came to me in a flash of genius. You know, I'm at— like Les Brown says, that 3 or 4 times a year you'll have like an idea that can change the world. So Live Love was basically something that I felt could change the world because it's a whole new therapeutic approach, which is Live Love stands for listen and listen, integrate, value, validate, and explore. And then love is— no, it's learn, integrate, validate, and explore. And then listen, observe, value, and express. So it's an 8-step program where people like— where you take people through a process of like self-awareness. That goes deeper and deeper. And, you know, when I came up with it, I just thought I was just thinking in terms of my own coaching, but I think it's like a therapeutic method that could be generally applied to like many situations. But so Live Love is something that I've developed, and it's basically just like a program for helping people become self-aware because You know, I call family members with mental illness the forgotten victims of mental illness because you get so involved in like helping your loved one, you know, sometimes to the exclusion of other people, you know, including your kids or even your spouse or something. And I feel that it's very important for people who are taking care of someone with a serious mental illness to understand They can't lose themselves to the illness of their loved one.

Mm. So, so on that note, let's go here, Dale. What is schizophrenia and why is it such a major problem?

Well, schizophrenia is officially diagnosed as a, you know, a serious mental disease where you have hallucinations and lose touch with— and psychosis, which is losing touch with reality. But Actually, I define schizophrenia much more simply. You know, that's the clinical definition the doctors use, but I just say schizophrenia means you're living in a reality that was not conceived on Earth.

Mm, okay, that's a good way to put it. So Dale, besides schizophrenia and the diseases that you say that You know, when you're a caregiver and you're helping people. So as we was mentioning earlier, what are the dangers of drug and alcohol use?

Well, I'm speaking from a perspective of what's called MICA, Mental Illness Chemical Addiction. And the difficulties or the problems that can— I meant, A lot of people with serious mental illness use drugs and alcohol to self-medicate. And so especially if they're on other medications like I've been for 45 years, it just complicates the situation. And if you tend towards psychosis— when I was in the program, my doctor always said that marijuana was my nemesis because He said, "When I escalate use of marijuana, I go psychotic, and I actually had like 9 hospitalizations when I was in this program, and I've had a total of 15 hospitalizations. The last 6 I admitted myself because I knew I was psychotic." But ultimately, the fact is that self-medication, it might help you deal with the stress, temporarily, but the long-term effect can be very detrimental. And that's something that people don't talk about when they talk about legalizing marijuana. I would never put down someone for using marijuana because I loved it for basically 35 years. But I would say that, you know, Marijuana used by people, by young people whose brain is still developing, and you know, I meant, can be very dangerous. And I think that my first doctor told me, you can smoke till it comes out of your ears, Dale, but never do LSD again. So with me, it was like the hallucinogens that I had did, I think, are really the thing that threw me over the edge. Ultimately, marijuana and beer can be very detrimental to recovery just because they keep you in a feeling of comfort zone with your illness that ultimately is false.

Mm. I mean, you said something that I caught that was valuable. You remember it used to be a commercial back in the day that would say, "This is your brain, and this is your brain on drugs." Right. And as you said, as you alluded to, that even as a young person, as a young adult, as a young teenager that's out here smoking marijuana, their brains are still developing. And so we get that. I know from smoking marijuana myself back in the day, right, Dale? And so say like I had 5 things to do that day. I'm off, I'm going to the neighborhood, I go kick it with the guys for a little bit, And I began smoking marijuana and drinking beer and whatever else we was drinking. And one thing that I learned that marijuana did for me was that it left you stuck. Like the things that you had planned on doing, it's like, okay, I just, you put it off and I do it tomorrow. You know, it's just a feeling where you just, this is all I want to do at this moment. I believe that more and more people are getting into that rut where now I put marijuana, you know, because to get a job, most of the time you have to take a drug test, have to take a hair test, hair sample. You get young people nowadays saying that, "Well, I can't get a job because I smoke too much." Instead of quitting smoking, they'd rather be unemployed than to stop smoking. That's a dilemma that we're facing in society today.

Absolutely. And the thing about it, to me, I would actually use marijuana for motivation. I had a business after I graduated from college where I helped people write papers. And so I would do outlines and everything. I would smoke a joint and then I'd do the outline and then I'd go back, smoke another joint and do the next thing. But in the great majority, it did make me very apathetic towards my life. I think it basically put me in a rut where the comfort zone was smoke a joint and hang out and everything, but don't really commit yourself to working and everything. I think that's another danger of marijuana. As I said, I would never put down people for smoking marijuana just because I don't want to be a hypocrite and have a great time on it for 35 years and then say you shouldn't do this. But I think that people and even parents should be aware of the deleterious effects of marijuana and just be on the lookout for— The thing about recovery is always an option. I feel that recovery is based upon self-awareness, and ultimately self-awareness comes from looking at yourself honestly. And a lot of times people just use marijuana to avoid looking at themselves honestly.

Don't miss out on CJ Moneyway Johnson's book, Both Eyes Open and Both Eyes Shut. And get ready to preorder his upcoming release, The Issues of Life, coming soon. Moneyway, aiming to inspire.

I totally agree with you on that. Alcohol as well, sometimes, you know, but at the end of the day, soon we can try to drink our problems away, smoke our problems away. Once that high is gone, once that alcohol is wore off, that same issue that we had before we started drinking and smoking It's still there, and at some point you got to face it head on. But like you say, a lot of times we try to do things to wash it away. And I agree with you on one thing too, where you said that you would smoke a joint and then write an outline. Marijuana does make you feel very, very creative, right? Very creative. Hey, so on that note, Dale, So you talked about, you know, admitting yourself to the hospital. You talked about being hospitalized 15 times and things of that nature. So with these challenges that you faced in life, how did you overcome some of these issues that you endured?

Well, I was very— I was blessed with two things. I was great. Blessed with great intelligence and also I was blessed with a great sense of humor. My whole mental health journey began with what I thought was a joke, which was, "Hi, I'm God." And that escalated and basically changed my life completely, just the reaction that people got. But I think intelligence and sense of humor led to greater self-awareness. But I also had some very challenging experiences that made me see that if I was going to get out of this pit that I was in, then I really had to work. I mentioned agnosognosia. I was basically in agnosognosia for the first 10 years of my illness. But then I had a vision of the world exploding, being imploded in a thermonuclear holocaust. And that really like blew— I called that the death of Dale. Actually, I became another personality for the next 30 years after that happened. I became Dewey Duck. And so, you know, but that experience was such that I realized the folly of my delusion. That was like the first step, and I've been working on that ever since.

You there now?

I'm here, yeah.

Okay, it froze up for a second.

So on the solar eclipse on April 8th of this year, I really feel that I reached the third level of my lifetime journey, which is where I You know, people were saying it's going to be an apocalyptic solar eclipse and everything. And I really feel that that's the day God judged me. And he said, I'm not going to kill you. You know, he didn't. He hasn't killed me yet. I feel very fortunate because I feel I've dodged a bullet. But he said, but I want you to get on, get off your ass and start spreading the message that I want you to spread about like God and, you know, just being able to cope with humanity and with the earthly situation. And so that was really like where I became Dew, D-E-W, which are my initials. And he's sort of like the grandfather of my personalities. I have Dale, Dewey, Dew, Duck, and Genius. But so I became Dew. I became Dew. And I feel that like now it's my mission to spread my message of hope and recovery and saying, you know, basically everyone is God, everyone is a fractal of God. And ultimately to realize the Godhead in yourself is like to get into the potential that God really meant every human to have.

Hey, I agree with you on that, man. Amen. We was all created in his image. He all sent us with a purpose, with a gift. And the thing is, is just tapping into that gift of what he actually wants us to do in the world. And like you say, when you get that call and when he draws you to him and you get that calling, you really have no choice but to go out and do his will because it's not really our will that we want to do for ourselves. It's the will of the Father that we have to respect because it's the kingdom work that he wants us to perform. And, you know, and when you do that, man, it's just no greater feeling in your life. And sometimes it's hard to explain to others this inner joy that you feel when God is— or the spirit has spoke to you and you know that you're a child of God and that you're on a mission, not just for yourself, but to help and like you say, transform and help others transform their minds as well, man. There's no greater feeling than that.

Well, it's interesting you should talk about the joy because my primary doctor of 22 years used to say that I suffered from psychotic bliss. Now, you know, I never could figure out how bliss could be psychotic, but, you know, but, you know, people I've been very fortunate in that a lot of schizophrenics, a lot of people with serious mental illness are like very tortured by their illness. And I have experienced despair, like I said, after the death of Dale, after that vision of the thermonuclear annihilation. But all in all, I've just been very positive and I've just had like this mindset, but for a long time, especially after my vision, I was dealing with, you know, I've committed the greatest sin ever. I'm saying I'm God, you know, that's the sin of Satan. Yeah. And I mean, that's why it's taken me so long to get to this point of like reconciliation with myself, 49 years, because now I know I'm an instrument of God. I don't think I'm God anymore, but that's something that like was constantly in my programming for a very long time.

Mm, now I see. Now that you tying it in, all that in together, now it makes sense. I get you, I get you. You know, I get that. So Dale, tell me, tell us, what is the greatest challenge? What do you consider the greatest challenge of your clients?

Well, the greatest challenge of my clients is the family members is to bring them back to themselves and make them like independent and interdependent beings instead of just like codependent beings. But I think the greatest challenge of people with serious mental illness is agnosognosia, which— because if you don't think anything's wrong with you, CJ, why would you take this medication that at first makes you feel absolutely terrible? And I have sort of like an amusing story if I could, but when I was at Fairleigh Dickinson, there was this guy, his fraternity name was Worm, and he was like a big druggy, you know, he loved everything. He loved all drugs and he just like kept bugging me to try my medication. So after about like 3 months of him constantly asking me, I said, "Well, I'm curious to see how strong my medication really is anyway." So I gave him like 2 pills, 2 5mg pills of my medication. Which was a third of my daily dosage. And I also gave him a side effect medication. So he said, "Great, this is going to be fantastic." And I said, "You don't want to find out, Corwin, but go ahead." So he went home, he took the first pill, the first 5mg pill, and he got on his bed, he's playing Nintendo, and after 15 minutes he realizes he can't move anything but his thumbs. To play Nintendo. And so after 4 hours, he can move his arm enough so he can get the side effect medication. And he takes the side effect medication, feeling better after 30 minutes. And so then, like an idiot, he takes a second pill. CJ, 18 hours on his bed, not able to go to sleep or anything, just able to move his thumbs to play Nintendo, and that was like a third of my daily dosage. So, but what I was saying about the agnosognosia and the challenge of agnosognosia is if you're given a pill that makes you feel like that, you aren't going to want to take it. So a lot of people with serious mental illness, rebel against their medication. And every time I stopped my medication, within 2 weeks I'd be back in the hospital. So, you know, after a while I put 1 and 1 together to get 3. I said, well, I got to take my medication. And basically, I haven't had any major problems, even though for a long time I was doing the medication with marijuana. But it's been 30 years since I was in the hospital after 15 hospitalizations in 18 years.

So let me ask you, Dale. So I was reading your bio, and so these 5,000 poems that you have written, is it anything— has it— does it have anything to do with some of the situations that you were in? You know what I'm saying? Like, what did these poems actually resonate from?

Well, thank you for asking about that. So basically, on my 10th birthday, I decided I was going to be a writer. So one of the ironies of my mental illness is it allowed me to become the writer that I always wanted to be because, you know, my family took care of me, God bless them and everything. So I didn't have to like enter the rat race and everything. So I wrote 6 novels before I graduated from from Fairleigh Dickinson. And since then, I turned my focus to poetry. And I have 5,000 poems, including 5 collections on Amazon that I self-published. But, you know, not only was the creativity of my poems extremely critical in my own recovery, but it also gave me an outlet for, you know, for expression and for bringing something into the world that ultimately I feel it adds to the wealth of the world so that even though I don't have kids, I'll have a legacy of my poetry. And in answer to your question, my poetry is basically romantic in nature, meaning not only is it about loving a woman and everything, but it's also about my thoughts about God, you know, that's very romantic. And also just like the interaction of myself with the world, not only because of my illness, but in spite of my illness.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Before I get to that, what you're talking about, God, tell me about the book Escape from the Ivory League.

Well, Escape from the Ivory League isn't published, but that's my book about what happened at Dartmouth when I got taken away. Okay, so about my freshman— about my friend— well, basically at my, my term after my freshman year when I got taken away.

Okay, so when is that coming out?

I'm not sure. I'm, um, I, I, I, I sort of been waffling on that one, CJ, but, uh, I wanted to get out before the end, uh, before the end of the year. It's, uh, just a matter of like publishing it on Amazon.

Yeah, let's get it out there, man. And then when you get it out there, Dale, come on the Moneyway Show, man, and let's talk about it. Okay, Dale, my last question for you, man. Give me one second. My last question for you, and we're going to end it on a note that you've been talking about because it's a subject I, I believe that we both love and that we both are very, you know, intimate with. With the love of God. So tell us about your book, Becoming— tell us about your book, How Becoming God Changed My Life.

Well, that's the Escape from the Ivy League.

So, okay, okay, okay.

That's the subtitle of Escape from the Ivy League. But basically it's a story of like how I just like came to a revelation that I was God, you know? I mean, And I meant it as a joke. I meant it as a punchline to a joke because how could God be 5 foot 8? You know, that was like what made the joke so funny to me. And, you know, but, you know, God is so great and so all-enveloping, universal and everything. It just like seemed to me like extremely hysterical and people, you know, I use that word conscientiously. I just found it extremely hysterical that I could think myself God. But it's been a journey of 49 years. As I said, basically until April, I had this thought, Dale is God, every day. But now I've transformed that into a more complex equation, which is Jesus equals God. God squared equals Dale cubed, and equals Dewey squared equals Dew. So basically, the basic equation is changed from my beat Dale equals God to Jesus equals God squared equals Dale cubed. And the thing I love about that equation is it doesn't have to be Dale. It can— you can substitute any name for the the cube, because, you know, I feel that we're all in a direct mathematical relationship to God and Jesus.

Oh man, man, you know, there's nothing I can add to that, and I'm not going to try to take anything away from it. So Dale, what's your program, man? Where can we find Live Love, your program at?

It's www.dew, which is my initials, livelove.net.

Okay.

And I'm also on Instagram, you know, that's basically the platform I've been using recently. I've been doing a lot of reels and everything. But it's Dale, D-A-L-E, Walsh at 55. And that's what my Instagram handle is. So, you know, if you're interested in, you know, I'm always inviting people to DM me and to contact me. And, you know, I've been doing this for free. And I look at all these coaches and, you know, they have programs that start at $3,000 and everything. I think, you know, and eventually I think I'll get to that point. But right now, I just want to like make contact and help people. You know, people have questions for me, you know, whether it's about my journey or whether it's about life in general. I'm happy to answer them and just see if people want to work with me, fine. But I really, I'm sort of taking this God thing a little far, CJ, because I'm not looking for it for the money.

Yeah, and that's cool, man. Although the things that we do, do you want to get compensated and things of that nature, but at the same time, a lot of time it's not It's not all about the money because you're coming from a good place. Your heart is in a good place. It's all about the service. And if we go out there and do God's will, then God, he's going to give to us what we deserve, you know. So you don't have to look for money from man or whatever. He's going to always provide a way. So I understand that mindset.

And financial remuneration is directly, directly proportional to service. This service spilled.

I got that. Hey, so I appreciate you. I appreciate you, Dale, for coming on the show, man, sharing your wisdom, sharing your journey, man, and some of the things that we probably didn't know about. Some of the words that you used today that I cannot pronounce, and I'm not going to even chop it up and try to say it. And tell your mans that took your medication, I hope that he's all right to this day.

He was. It took him like a couple of days recovered, but he says, "I'm never going to do that again." Everybody I've given my medication to, they say, "I'm not going to do that again, Dale." Yeah, that's a lesson learned.

So appreciate you coming on, Dale. Hey, Live Love, you can find him on Instagram. You can go back to his website, find Live Love. He says that he's an open book. If you have questions for him, you can come tune into him. He's not charging for it right now. Today is for free, but tomorrow it may be another, it may be another day. You might get it for free. Uh, it was, it was, say, he say it might cost you a little, it might cost you a lot, but it's gonna cost you something. Hey, this is your boy CJ Moneyway with my boy Dale Wash. Hey, you have been listening to the CJ Moneyway Show: Stories Behind the Success. Peace, we out of here.

Thank you for listening to the The CJ Moneyway Show. Don't forget to share this episode with your friends, leave a comment, and drop a review. Be sure to tune in every Tuesday and Friday for more inspiring journeys. Who knows, your story might be next. Hey everybody, I'm Trevor Sikkema, host of the PFF NFL Show, here to tell you what you can find on all of our shows throughout the week. On Mondays, we have the Grade Release Show where myself and Dalton Washman break down every single game that you just saw in the NFL. On Tuesdays, we have the Quarterback Breakdown with Seth Gallina. On Wednesdays, we've got the Rookie Review with Jon Ledyard and the preview for the upcoming week in the NFL. So make sure you are subscribed to the PFF NFL Show wherever you get your podcasts.