How to C.O.P.E. with Challenges and Overcome with Brooke Ellison, PhD | Ep. 91

Foreign.

Hi Everybody. This is Dr. Nicole and, and happy, healthy Hadley. And we just did an absolutely amazing interview with Brooke Ellison. And the book that she wrote recently is called Look Both Ways. And I am so incredibly moved by this conversation.

Oh my gosh, I have just chills all over. I'm so inspired. I know that you're all going to be so inspired by her and not only the challenges that she's overcome, but how she's kind of like alchemized it into this message that is relevant for everyone. And, you know, she does so much work with policy shifts and changes and, you know, working with politicians to make life better for not only people with disabilities, but also all people. And we talk a little bit about that in the podcast and it's also going to just be a really, really inspiring hour long chat. So I am so excited for you all to listen.

She, she said, I think will be really relevant for everyone listening to this. And definitely I benefited so much from this conversation. You know, we, we discussed the intersection between hope and trauma, resilience and neuroscience, which is just like the most delicious combination of things, you know, best. And we talked about, she has this really good mnemonic to help us work through, like, her process of going through something incredibly devastating as a young girl and then being able to transform that process into something that's making change in everybody's lives, arguably on a huge scale. And so she kind of walks us through. So when you finish this episode, when you finish listening to this, you're going to get access to her really easy mnemonic device that you can start using right away. And how to not only survive something that's devastating there, it's disabling or just whether you just are stuck at rock bottom and you don't know what to do next, I think it'll be really relev to help you with transformation. And so I'm, I'm really excited for you to get that.

Yeah.

Listeners, yes. I'm looking at Hadley on video as I say that you, Hadley, I'm so.

Glad you've gotten it.

So, yeah, I'd love to read her bio so y' all can learn just a little bit about this interview. And so I'm reading this out of her book. And so Brooke Ellison, PhD, is an associate professor of health policy and medical ethics at student Stony Brook University. Following a car accident that left her paralyzed from the neck down and dependent on a ventilator at age 11, Ellison went on to graduate from Harvard University in 2000, received her master's Degree in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of government in 2002. She ran for New York State Senate in 2006 and was granted an honorary degree from Rutgers University in 2011. In 2014, Ellison was chosen to be a World Economic Forum young global leader. She joined the board of directors, the New York Civil Liberties Union in 2017 and was chosen to be a Truman National Security Project political partner in 2018. She was appointed to the Suffolk County Human rights commission in 2020. She has a first book, 2002. It's called Miracles Happen. It was adapted into a movie directed by Christopher Reeve, who we all know is Superman. Right. And it's called the Brooke Ellison Story. And then, of course, her most recent book that she's doing a book tour for is called Look Both Ways. And you can learn more by going to her website, brooke ellison.com. you can contact her by emailing her at brookebrookellison.com. she's also pretty active on Instagram and Twitter.

She's so impressive. Like, yeah, she's so impressive. And then when you know, you'll all hear this, but, like, her heart is just so big, and she's just so warm and loving and. And lovely. I am just so excited for you all to listen to this one.

All right, so let's dive in. This is going to be a great episode. Thanks, everyone, for listening. Hi, Brooke.

Hi. How are you? Good to meet you.

Hi.

How are you?

Doing well.

Good to meet you as well. Thank you. Wherever you are is beautiful and sunny. My goodness.

Y. Yes. I'm in San Diego.

Oh, yeah. It's known for that.

Yeah.

I'm in Arizona, but you can't see it.

Sure. It's equally as beautiful there. We're dealing with rain and cold here.

So are you northeast?

Northeast, yeah. New York. Yeah.

New York.

So. Yeah. Well, outside of New York City.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Coming. Right? Just a couple more weeks.

Fingers crossed.

Yeah. Yeah. I loved your book, Brooke. I just had to. I had to say it's wonderful.

Thank you. Thank you. That means so much to me. Thank you. Yeah. It was certainly a labor of love. You know, I put everything that I had into it, and hopefully that showed. Absolutely.

You are quite the academic. It's, like, very clear that you are so well studied.

Thank you.

You managed to blend. There's this art to keeping something personable and accessible, but then also, like, weaving in, like you're making some really important points, especially when you were talking about the politics and being able to speak articulately to certain populations. I just thought you rocked.

Well, thank you. That was exactly the tone that I was hoping to strike. You know, not too much of any one particular thing, but hopefully enough to pique enough interest in various areas and touch on the different sides of my own life. So. Oh, I'm so glad that that resonated with you. Thank you. Thank you. And the kind of finding my voice angle was something that, you know, I had woven into the entire book, both from a metaphorical standpoint as well as, you know, an obvious, literal one. So I'm so glad that that resonated with you. Thank you.

Yeah, yeah. I also, I love how you bring in the fact that the fight for disabled rights is really just a fight for human rights in general, and it improves the lives of every single person. It's just beautiful.

So thank you. Thank you. My goodness, that is exactly the response that I was hoping for and what I was hoping people would get out of the book. And like I wrote in the introduction, I vacillated a bit between, do I write a book that's just about disability? Do I write a book that is relevant to everyone? How do I beat both of those challenges and cater to an audience that is general without making it look like I'm, you know, trying to deny a real part of who I am? So the fact, you know, that that really means a lot to me, that you understand that came across and that disability as a part of humanity was something that was evident and hopefully something that people will start to integrated to their own line of thinking a little bit more prominently than they do.

Yeah, I love that. That, Hadley, you pulled out the word humanity, because I think that everybody who reads your book and hears the podcast or that you're doing will be able to think about what it is to be human and what it is to suffer and what it is to create meaning and drive and identity from those experiences. And I think that you really touch on that. And one thing that you wrote about is the identification of self, of who am I? And I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about that, like, who is Brooke? Like, who are you, my friend?

Thank you. My first. It is such a pleasure to be Talking to you, Dr. Kane. Nicole, however you refer me to address you, it's just a pleasure, and especially in a forum like this that is not necessarily disability focused, but focused on how we all can improve our lives. I think that understanding disability is a part of how we all improve our lives, because disability is just a manifestation of many of the challenges that we all experience. A Very obvious one, a profound one, but one that falls into that category nonetheless. So it's really. It's a pleasure to be able to talk about my life and share my life with, with all of your listeners. So thank you so much. So if I had to isolate one part of my identity that I am proudest of, I would say when I was a child, I grew up here on Long island, where I'm speaking to you from today. And for many years of my life, the first 11 years of my life, I envisioned myself as kind of an introverted child. You're not a child, necessarily, who would put herself too far out there, terrified of public speaking. You're not something at all that I thought I would ever become a part of after my accident, at the time of my accident. So I would say in 1990, I knew very quickly that I was going to have to change. Sorry, I just paused for a second. I knew that the behaviors that I had typically ascribed to or had associated with who I was were no longer going to hold me in good stead. Moving forward, I needed to become much more vocal, much more certain of who I was, much more certain of what I believed in. Even, you know, up until that point in my life, you know, I kind of thought that I just needed to believe the things that I was taught to believe. And it didn't take long for me to understand that many of the things that I was taught, particularly about disability, were just simply not true. So I think, societally speaking, we have an understanding about disability, that it is a manifestation of weakness or vulnerability or marginalization or the people with whom we do not want to associate or who represent the worst in humanity or kind of the greatest vulnerability in humanity. That was kind of what I thought. Even just at 11 years old, I thought that seeing somebody with a disability on the store or anywhere, I should feel pity for them, feel sorry. And it wasn't until I learned to live with disability that I said, wait a second. All of those things that I was taught or came to believe are simply not true. And I am, after living with disability for however many years I have now, personally, 30, going on 33 years. But at the time, I came to these understandings fewer years than that. I am not a less valuable person because of the circumstances that I face and the disability that I. That I live with. I am, in fact, a stronger person. I have experienced sides of myself that I never would have fully appreciated by virtue of my disability. And I think that that comes through in many of the challenges that people experience. In their lives. I think what happens very frequently is that we become all consumed by some of the challenges that we face, learn to understand ourselves in terms of those challenges, become unable to disassociate ourselves, disassociate ourselves from the challenges that we face. We kind of view our lives as fully integrated into those challenges when that's not who we are. And sometimes those experiences are what make us who we are. It's not until we experience those challenges that we understand how strong we can, in fact, be. And how aspects of our character that we had never even known existed Become very prevalent, become very real. So if I had to isolate. So I know that was kind of a long way around to getting to the question. If I had to understand myself and who I am, I would. I would say that I have learned to embody and integrate into my identity the kinds of values and virtues that I think are very rarely ever associated with disability. So the things that I had mentioned before, Vulnerability, marginalization, weakness, Aspects of the human character that we don't want to know much about, I think I see them as the exact antithesis and what disability is all about. And this is something that I write at length about in both ways. That if disability is the manifestation of the human experience at its very strongest, at its most willing to take on the world, a world that is not designed for your needs, the reserves of resilience and hopefulness that you need to draw every single day in order to navigate that world, if those are not the qualities that we want to see more of in the world, want to see in our leaders, and want to see in people who we hold in the highest esteem, that I don't know what are. If those are not those qualities, then I don't really know what are. So disability has taught me those things. Were it not for my accident and the disability that I have experienced ever since, I. I can say with almost 100% certainty that those aspects of who I am never would have been forced out of me. And I feel very thankful for that. So that is how, if I could be understood in any. In every. In any way, it would be, though, in those terms, in addition to, you know, being a member of the family that I'm a member of and, you know, the daughter of my parents, who instilled much in me when it comes to belief in myself and providing opportunities for me. So those are the things that I would. That I would like to associate my identity with.

What I hear you saying is that you had this existence, and then suddenly everything changed. And it's almost as though you were at a juxtaposition fork in the road where you had to maybe again and again and again, I imagine, make this conscious choice to not be all consumed by the challenges, but rather work on the process of integration so that you could become and embrace and discover those really deep, profoundly strong and powerful parts of yourself that may not have otherwise been revealed.

I think that's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. And that was a very difficult realization to come to. And so I don't, I don't want to be blase about it, you know, in, in any way, or minimize it or even be hypocritical about it. So I spent seven and a half months in rehabilitation after my accident. So I was in pediatric intensive care for six weeks, and then that's where I was initially stabilized. And the acute aspects of my post accident care was provided until I got to the point where they couldn't do any additional intervention or meaningful intervention at the icu. And then I was moved to rehabilitation all the way in New Jersey, in New York, and it was all the way to New Jersey. And I was there for seven and a half months, which, when you're a child, it seems like forever, right? It's just like an inordinate amount of time. And it was there that I learned, you know, to, to do the kinds of, you know, mechanistic things that would make my life move forward. So essentially you learned to talk again? Because I lost my ability to talk. I wasn't able to talk because I was on the ventilator. Learned to just kind of breathe on a ventilator and what that meant, you know, I learned to drive a wheelchair. And, you know, the recipient of physical therapy and occupational therapy and even speech, language pathology and remedial educational health services, all of those things I was introduced to very early on. And when I was discharged from rehabilitation, that was the kind of mindset that I had, this patient mindset, this medical model of disability mindset that my life was some kind of injury. Right. The situation that I was in was the product of some kind of devastating, catastrophic accident. And I could only understand my life in those terms for a very long time, that I could not in any way separate the disability that I was experiencing from the trauma that produced it. And I think that was very difficult. So it cast this, this cloud over an aspect of my life that I needed to come to terms with. Like I needed to integrate into my identity. But it was always, for a very long time, coupled almost to the point of Inseparability with this trauma that I experienced that produced it, and I was fearful of it. I viewed it as something I needed to run away from. I did not want to be associated with it in any way, shape, or form. I thought of it as a source of weakness. Weakness. Right. It's something that, like, I wanted people to look at me and not see my disability at all. Like, I don't know what I was thinking. You know, people could obviously see my wheelchair and everything, but that was, like, not how I wanted to be understood at all. I was terrified of talking about it. I remember very, very clearly that here, for many years after my accident, I was kind of encapsulated in my community, and I didn't need to talk about my accident in any way. And everybody knew what happened to me. I was very much shielded from taking the power away from the memory of my accident. It wasn't until I got to college where I had to talk about what had happened to me and claim ownership over a narrative that was very difficult to grapple with and kind of change it to something that I could deal with and not be terrified about and not feel like was. Was making me a weaker person. In that process, I realized, wait a second. I can't talk about my life and the injury that I had sustained and the traumas that I had experienced without also talking about the strength that I had to integrate into my life in order to overcome that trauma. You know, I needed to be able to talk about the trauma that I experienced, but also talk about the resilience that I had to integrate into my life in order to overcome that. I needed to talk about moments of weakness, but I also needed to talk about moments of strength. I needed to talk about instances of fear, but also instances of hope. And in so doing, I came to realize, wait a second. The virtues and the sources of strength clearly have outweighed the sources of fear and the sources of weakness. I would not be here at Harvard were that not the case. And in that process, I gained an entirely different understanding of who I was, who I am, what disability has come to mean to me, and how disability is not the thing that I thought it was. That it's not these representations of human vulnerability, but actually can be something that people can integrate into their identity, can draw strength from, can find a sense of pride in, and feel like, you know, they. They're. They're attached to in a way that is. That is not. That is not fearful or it's not traumatizing, but it's actually A source of strength. And that took time, right? Like, that's not something that. Certainly not a realization that I came to quickly. It took a lot of self analysis, self reflection. It's a bit difficult to say, okay, I'm going to let go of the person and the life that I had and feel like the life that I still have is not less than the life that I had. It's a different version, but no less than. And that takes a lot of struggle, a lot of, you know, a lot of personal resilience and personal awareness. When I teach, I'm a professor at Stony Brook University and I teach medical ethics, which I'm sure something we'll talk about the rest of the conversation. But I have a conversation with my students every year and I ask them about, you know, what, you know, what would constitute a life not worth living, or if they were to find out tomorrow that they're going to be disabled for the rest of their lives, what would be their fears? And it almost always focuses on things like, you know, I would not want to live if I were attached to some kind of medical technology, if I were attached to machines, if I couldn't do things independently, if I was a burden on my family, or if I was not able to do the things that I always was able to do. So the obvious things are things that people would just clearly be afraid of. But all of these things, I think, are not necessarily associated with our identity. We think that they are. We think that they're things that we can't live without or would not be able to live with. But again, you could find really meaningful parts of life in parts in areas that you never would have expected before. And that is something that I think was a very valuable lesson for me to come to terms with and to integrate into my personhood. I was just talking to a friend of mine from France earlier today. We met through the World Economic Forum. Are both members of the World Economic Forum, Right. So this organization of people and entities, and it just kind of, you know, the people, the most powerful people in the world, I pull them all the different strings, right? Dignitaries, leaders, heads of corporations. Right. So this is organization that we're both a part of. And like, that's just, you know, people hold themselves in, I think, a lot of esteem and rightfully so. Right. They've done incredible things, you know, really elevated themselves to really important person positions in the world and have the ability to make significant social change. And like, that's. That's great, but that's not necessarily like, where I find the most powerful people, right. Are the people who's. Who, who are worthy of the most respect. And it's often people who have seen life at its most difficult and have said, okay, I'm going to forge ahead nonetheless, I'm going to find a path forward and something meaningful with my life, irrespective of what I might be facing. So, yeah, that's kind of how I've tried to live my life. Not without, you know, without putting patting myself on the back or anything, but that's how I've, I've chosen to live my life. And it weren't it, were it not for my disability, that would have been much more difficult for me to understand.

You talk about how there are things that, that you have found that are so much more important than all of these things. And I'm just curious if you want to talk a little bit more about, about some of those things that you've discovered. And I know you talk about some different pillars of hope and empowerment and if you want to just talk a little bit more about that as well.

Sure, sure. So. Well, there is a section of the book which is the most difficult section of the book for me to write. I was actually. I had written it before I wrote anything actually. It was probably years before I actually sat down to write, put myself, put my head to the computer to write. Look both ways. It was the I want section of the book, right. So it comes at the end of chapter four, where I start, where I talk about the things that I want versus the things that I need and how it took me a bit of time to realize that there's a distinction between the two. There are things that I thought that I needed, that I don't necessarily need and things that I always wanted that are not necessary for my life. Things like going on a trip or seeing other parts of the world or be living independently, having a job that I could just, you know, come home and flop on the couch and, you know, watch television. I have to think about all the things that I have to do in order to make sure that my health is, you know, is maintained. Right. All these, these things I don't necessarily need or things that I want. So, like, that was, that was a very difficult part of the book to write. It forced me to be very self analytical about, you know, how I understood my life and how you can separate yourself from life as it had been and the way many people live their lives and the life as you have have known it. And I think that dovetails very Nicely with work I've done on hope and you know, what hope means, what hope has meant to me. So I first started investigating or kind of thinking about the concept of hope when I was in college and I was the major that I chose was cognitive neuroscience. So essentially like a very biological look at human behavior, kind of a neurological look at human behavior. So it was a joint concentration between biology and psychology. So very kind of of science driven approach to human behavior. And it was a kind of an accelerated program. And many of the people who were in the program with me were looking to be physicians. So their honors thesis, it was an honors only program, so we had to write a thesis in order to graduate. And many of the people who are with me were looking to go into medicine. So their theses would run, would revolve around medical questions, some very kind of prototypically scientific questions. And I chose to do mine on the intersection between hope and resilience and what these two constructs mean and look like and how they're integrated into the lives of people who have undergone significant trauma. And you know, I would talk about this and a lot of my classmates would be like, huh, you know, that's interesting. That's not necessarily what many of us are, are looking to, you know, to integrate into our future practice or whatever, but, you know, interesting nonetheless. But that had been the construct of hope and the construct of resilience had been so central to my ability to get from the time of my accident to where I was to the halls of Harvard, much more than almost any medical intervention other than what I had received at the time of my accident, immediately thereafter. This ability to rely on hopefulness and what that means. I approach hope from a very, I think, particular vantage point. Not just one of the things that we hope for, kind of an amorphous, non tangible idea, but something that is very action oriented. Right. So it's born out of the kinds of challenges that we face. It is a clear willingness to acknowledge and even embrace the challenges that we face, to feel the challenges that we face and say, okay, I'm going to find a way around this. So in my head over the years I've created this little mnemonic device. Cope is, you know, cop. So the first thing to do when you're facing a challenge, right. If you want to integrate hope into how you behave, right. Is like to first compartmentalize the challenge, right? So anytime we face difficulty, it feels like it is totally overwhelming, right? It's that, it's, it is subsuming all parts of Our lives, right. I know that I felt that after my accident, you know, I thought that there are many things that I couldn't do that I actually could do purely because of my disability, right. I thought, oh, I couldn't, you know, find romantic love. I couldn't, you know, go off to college. I couldn't get a job. Right. None of these things was good. That was going to be impossible for me. Right. That was kind of what I understood. Understood. It felt like completely incapacitating in every way, shape, or form. And I think that happens for a lot of us when we're facing difficulty, right. It just feels like, oh, my God, this is taking over my entire life. So step one, right? Just kind of circumscribe that challenge, right? Just to put. To compartmentalize it and say, okay, this is where I'm going. I'm going to relegate this challenge to the least impactful role that it can play in my life. And then, you know, oh, right. So orienting or reorienting our focus, right? Just up to other things, right? So when I was a child, I was. My days and nights even, were completely dedicated to physical activities, right? So I was a dancer. The dancing was just, like, so much a part of my life. I started dancing when I was just 2 years old, and it was a part of. Actually the year of my accident was going to be my 10th year as a dancer. And I remember that I was looking forward to getting a little trophy on stage at the recital that year, that June. Like, it was going to be a big moment for me. So, yes, I was a dancer. And it was just, like, so much a part of my life. Even to this day, I have dreams of dance recitals and being in the dance studio and all that. I studied karate, I sang church choir was. I played little League baseball and all of these things, but those things were gone after my accident. I thought that much of my life was gone. But it took just not too much time to say, wait a second. I can shift my thinking to the things that are equally valuable in my life. And it didn't take long to see my education and my ability to, you know, to write and to. To read and to study poetry and to study literature and music. They were not gone. They were equally a part of my life. I could derive just as much enjoyment from them if I just sought new ways to explore them. Right? So kind of reorienting your focus to the things that are still present, and you can conceivably find more that, you know, possibility as a Result of. Right. If I know that. I know, looking at my life in hindsight now, that if I had spent so much time in the dance studio or in the karate dojo that I would not have focused as much time and attention on my education, I likely would not have ended up in Harvard. You likely would not, you know, have experienced many of the things that I've experienced ever since. So that's kind of number two. And then, you know.

Can I pause you there? I just want to. I just want to, like, bring this to our audience and, and really, like, drive this home. Like, this is so awesome. Like, this is such a great. Well, the whole, like, all of the pillars are really great. So I want to, you know, go into each one of them. But this is so awesome because whenever, even, no matter what the obstacle is that we come up against so many times, start to say, make meaning out of it, right? We start to say, well, because of this, now I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this.

Or the negative. Right, right.

Exactly.

Yeah. And.

And this is what this means for my life. And now this is what my life has to look like. And now I have to do things this way. And usually there's like a. Usually there's another. Another option. Right? And so I just want to, like, really drive that home for everyone because you're just. You're just inspiring me so much while. While you're talking about this.

Thank you. Exactly right. That's exactly right. Like, that is how disability has been thought of, and that's how challenge is. Right. That's why I think, like, the parallels are so clear, right. That disability, very frequently, especially for people who acquire disability later in life, are not necessarily born with disability. Right. It's always viewed in terms of the loss that it creates. Right. The. The deficit understanding of disability. What have I lost because of the life that I'm not living? Right. Like, it's. And I think that's the case for the challenges that we experience. Different kinds of turns that our lives take. Like, what would have. What would have our lives been always looking at them in terms of loss. So actually, when I titled my book Look Both Ways, it was kind of a tongue in cheek, unique kind of, you know, acknowledgments, how we're always admonished as kids, you know, if we're crossing the street when I was hit by a car, but at the same time, right. It's looking at our lives from both directions, right. Not just in terms of the things that we lose, but the things that we still have or never would have had if our lives didn't take the turns that they end up taking. So, like. So that I think is a critical understanding for me to come to. Right. That even of a situation like mine that is, I think, so clearly typified by loss or by disadvantage. What people would think on the outside has been full of many, many opportunities and things that I've found immense virtue and value in. And I feel very thankful for that. So, like, so would we reorient our focus to the things that maybe we didn't ever expect in our lives? Like, that is a tremendous opportunity. That's a. That's a way of looking at our lives in post in terms of possibility. Right. As opposed to negativity.

Brilliant.

Yeah. Thank you. And then, you know, the last two letter. Right. P. Right. So personal empowerment. Right. And then like finding the reserves of strength that we all have that sometimes we don't even know that we have until we're tested to find them. And finding a way forward. Right. Finding ways to plot a path that does not just ignore the challenges that we face, but accepts them head on and says, okay, I am going to move forward. And, you know, I seek out these opportunities, rely on the people around me to help get me there. Right. There's an aspect of personal empowerment that is intrinsic. We all have it. I didn't know that I had it when I was 11 years old and even for years thereafter, but it's there. I draw upon it every single day. I become a much stronger person than I ever would have imagined myself being. Doing things that I never would have expected myself doing. So I can, I can attest wholeheartedly that these reserves of strength are there. You just have to be a little bit self analytical and have some, you know, take some. Some presence of mind and some time to be introspective about your life to find them and then finding the people around you who can help support you. Right. Even people who you may not have expected to be those people. Right. So I. I've very fortunate to have a family that's been extremely supportive of me over the years, starting first and foremost with my mother, who her first day of work as a special education teacher was also the very day of my accident. So it was her first day and her last day of work. She left her job. She was actually setting up her classroom for that academic year, the day of my accident. And that was the last day that she was in the classroom as a teacher in front of the classroom. She's been a teacher nonetheless ever since then. But she left her job to care for me, to be by my side, to make sure that I was able to do the things that I had set for my life. The very first thing that I said after my accident, I wasn't able to talk, but I was able to mouth words was, am I going to be. Be left back in school? Like that was the thing that I was concerned about. I understood very early on that my education was going to be very central to my life moving forward. So my parents made a commitment to me to make sure that that was that they could uphold the promise that I would be able to return to school. So yes. Of finding the people in your life who can help you get to where you need to be. In recognizing that and recognizing that we all need help. Right. We live in a culture I think that is very much driven by self reliance or like, you know, you need to get to where you need to go on your own. And all success is self made. And I think that is, I think that is a maladaptive way of looking at any of our lives that none of us gets to where we get ultimately without the help of, of the people around us, whoever that might be. Family, friends, religious leaders, people in our communities, whomever who mentors, who we find along the way, all of these people play a role in our lives and making us stronger and not feeling like we're less of a person because of the help that we need and being willing to ask that help, ask for that help and offering it to people who we know are around us, who need it. Right. Like there's a bi directionality about help that I think is really beautiful and really powerful, that we can receive help from people that also offer it to others and in such a way can be sources of hope, hope for other people. So that's how I've come to understand it. I have integrated into my life on many different occasions and I have broadened it to my understanding of leadership kind of hope as a construct that works on the individual level. With leadership being one kind of just an amplification of those very same ideas on a generalized scale, societal scale. Recognizing the challenges that the world faces, knowing that we're dealing with certain parameters that we need to work within, but finding a way forward nonetheless. Finding the right allies to work with, to advocate for the kinds of changes that the world needs to see and being vocal in that. Finding our own voice in the kinds of work that needs to get done. And that's how I've tried to situate myself. I did not know the time of my accident and the years thereafter that those skills were going to be the very same skills I was going to rely on for the work that I continue to do now in advocating for different policy positions, advocating for disability rights and disability justice and what that means and how that's a part of really all of our lives. So that's kind of how Hope has been so deeply integrated into everything that I've done.

Yeah. And will you talk a little bit about how that is integrated into all of our lives? Because I think that was such a great piece of your book. And what you talked about is like, this is really. This is a fight for all of our rights. So you want to just speak to that?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So actually, I just gave a. A panel discussion. I was part of a panel discussion up at the Harvard Henry School of Government just last week, and we're talking about this. This issue, disability. So disability touches, I think, 15% of the population directly, right. So 15% of the population lives with physical disability directly. A far higher percentage you have people have family members or friends who live with disability. But it is an aspect of all of our lives in some way, shape or form. It's a part of humanity. It's a part of the natural human experience, not something to be run away from, not something to be thought ill of or to be dismissed or thought of as some weaker manifestation of the human experience in any way, shape or form. That said, the kinds of innovation that benefit the lives of people with disabilities invariably benefit everybody else's life. So I'm looking here at my computer, right underneath the computer, I. I have my Alexa device. And like that was designed by somebody who was working specifically to benefit the lives of people with disabilities. Actually, we have become friends. We just met over three different circles. His sister's name is Alexa. That's how the device was named. And we struck up a friendship. And he is very much mindful that this is where the technology was initially situated, but it has grown and it's now a household device. Curb cuts in the sidewalk, where that benefits everybody. The innovation that we put into place for people with disabilities really benefits everybody. So the conversation that I was having at the Harvard Kennedy School last week was largely policy oriented, but. But the same thing applies. We tend to think about people with disabilities as this kind of other population. We can other them very easily. These other people we can think about or choose not to give them rights if we want to, or possibly not when integrating them into policy decisions right from the get go. Makes a lot of sense because it benefits everybody. The kinds of concerns that, that fall into the life of somebody who lives with a disability are the very same concerns that invariably fall into everybody's life at some point. The ways that we make other people with disabilities lives easier ultimately makes everybody else's life easier. To look at people with disabilities as separate, I think is a really unfortunate way of, of looking at just the human experience. We wouldn't do that with any other population, any other demographic groups. Think of them as some other group that we need to develop policy around entirely separately all the time.

I want to make sure that I got each piece of this wonderful mnemonic is cope. And so C is compartmentalizing the challenge. It can help with the overwhelm piece. And O is the reorientation or to orient your focus on other things. And I think that's really, really profoundly important, especially with neuroscience, is the way that we wire it is the way the brain will fire it. And so if we're. Or trying to create intentionality with focusing on what we have and what our opportunities are and on hope as opposed to what we've lost, can change our literal biological and then our emotional and mental experience.

Exactly right. I mean, I'm sorry, yeah. Even just how we, we talk about our experiences. Right. Moving something from, from like emotional memory to active memory. Right. From the limbic circuitry to like the prefrontal cortex allow to deal much more effectively with the challenges that we face are not associated with trauma and with fear and those kinds of emotions, but how we can actually make use of them. I think you're exactly, exactly right.

I love that. And you having that neuroscience background is just so cool because sometimes, as clinicians will tell our patients, or I'll tell my clients, we want to work on creating that bullseye. We want to focus on what it is you desire, what you love, what you have, what you're grateful for, your opportunities. And then they're like, that just sounds like positive thinking. And it's like, I'm not really down with that. In fact, I had a teacher once who talked about a study that if you're a glass half empty person and then you shift to try to be positive thinking person, it will make you worse in the beginning. You're coming at it from a trauma informed neuroscience model. And I think that's really compelling for certain people, myself included. And I love that. Then you have P. And then is P that personal empowerment?

Yeah, P. Exactly. So personal empowerment. Yeah. Yeah. So those two letters together. Right. And that comes from both things. You find intrinsically finding those reserves of strength and resilience and identity even that I think we far too often think we do not have, when I know that we do, and then finding the people to rely on to help get us to where we need to go, even if it means looking beyond the immediate circle of who we would would, you know, often think would fill those roles.

I love that you bring that into personal empowerment, because so often we would think of personal empowerment as individuality and like individualism, but we need other people.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I mean, that's who we are. Right? Yeah. We have relational creatures. Right. So, I mean, there's something to be said for personal resilience and personal, I guess, ways of understanding problems and problem solving skills and leadership skills that we develop. But none of those really gets fostered or comes to fruition without the people around us. Totally.

If you've taken it from this process of conceptualization, thinking about it, sitting in it, not just avoiding or running away, but you allow yourself the process to sit in it, and then you allow that more cognitive acknowledgment to then transform your feeling, and then buoyed by an integrated self, that feeling, that thinking, all of those parts of who you are as a dynamic human being within your family and the culture, you're able to then use that to catapult you into to meaning making and showing up in a way that makes a difference in the world, that allows you to be your full expression of an integrated self. And so you've been very involved in politics and in teaching. I admire that so much. And I feel like people need to hear your message. People need to hear the story because you're not just talking about it, you're actually showing us how to do it, how to live that out.

Thank you. That means the world to me. I mean, that's what I was hoping. That was exactly what I was wanting for the book. I wrote both ways. At a time when I was facing a significant health challenge. I had encountered a pressure ulcer that became very infected, and I was very, very sick right around the time of my 40th birthday. And I knew that I had wanted to write a book for a number of years. I wrote a book after I graduated from college. I knew that I wanted to write another one, but I never really felt the immediacy of writing it until I became very sick. And I said, wait a second. You have some important lessons that you have learned. Yourself that I think are worth other people hearing. And if you don't do it now, you might not have the opportunity to do it. So that's, that's what I did. And I wanted it to be lived. I didn't want it to be kind of just my thoughts on a whimsical, kind of in a whimsical way, but something that had some example built into it. And that means a lot to me that you're, that you gained something for that.

I'm curious about what advice you have. You know, as we're coming to almost to the end of our time here together is if somebody is listening to this episode, someone's listening to your words, someone's reading your book and they find themselves feeling really stuck where they're trying to work their way through the compartmentalization and the reorientation of focus and the personal and the empowerment. And yet the sticky factor is making it so hard, hard to make that shift. What advice do you have?

Right. I would say let go and you can. Right. There are parts of any difficult experience that we undergo that are born out of our unwillingness to detach ourselves from things as we have known it. I've known them to be, or some kind of aspect of ourselves that we think we're going to lose by coming to terms with a new reality. I know it took me a very long time to come to that realization that letting go of my life as a dancer didn't mean that I could not dance. It doesn't mean that I could not enjoy music or be on the dance floor with my friends. Letting go of some of the visions that I had for my life. Life did not mean that I could not create other visions for myself and ones that are equally as important. And then that you can't. Right. There have been people like when anytime any of us undergoes a life altering challenge or any kind of challenge even, it is immensely isolating. Right. Like nobody could ever understand what I'm dealing with, with, you know, I feel so alone. How is the world going on around me. But there are people who have gone before you even as, as, you know, isolated as you might feel and have come out on the other side and you know, believe in that, believe that there, that you can do it and not feel like life is defeating you. That's not something. Again, not something that I learned, learned quickly. It took time. You know, there have been many instances of difficulties I've experienced over the years since my accident. And it's a constant reminder. Wait a second. You can define your life by possibility and by strength, but you do not have to be defined by the challenge or by some semblance of weakness that you think you face. You can turn that around. And. And to do that is quite liberating. And once you do that, once it becomes who you are.

Right.

It's like, wait a second. I'm going to be associated with that part of who I am, not the other one. I'm going to be associated with the stronger part. I'm going to be associated with somebody who can do. And somebody who can move ahead with your. With his or her life. And that's pretty rewarding. That's a pretty valuable place to get, too.

Thank you for that.

Yeah.

And do you. I. I'm curious. I'm curious about how, you know, our audience might be able to integrate this into their lives. If you have any, like, practices or reflections for them that. That were helpful for you in actually really, like, embodying all of these amazing, amazing thoughts, but really bringing it in.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Well, during this pandemic, I struggled for sure. Like, there were times when I actually had just come out of the hospital right after. Right before the pandemic, I acquired sepsis. So I was like, very, very, very sick and was discharged right before the pandemic hit. Discharge from having sepsis in January 22nd of 2000. And then the pandemic hit right after that. So I was like, totally thrown. You're thrown into some kind of alternate universe. You're coming home and. And going into lockdown. Not feeling well enough, like, feeling like my life was in peril all the time and feeling like the place that I would go to seek refuge. Right. The hospital was not a safe place for me to go. Right. So I was just like, terrified all the time. And, like, I had to reground myself. You know, I had to, you kind of step back a little bit and not let. And like, know that I could have those thoughts and not just completely ignore them, but turn them down a little bit and not let them be so loud in my head. And that's possible, right? Because when you have these fears and have these thoughts, they're just like bouncing around in your head all over their place. But you can actually turn them down and you can tell them, wait a second, I'm gonna put you lower the volume a little bit, maybe even put you on me. You, you know, if you're lucky, and just let them exist, but have them play, you know, a minimally impactful role. And that takes you that Takes just like being mindful that they're there, number one, and that they. They can have less power over you if you detach yourself a little bit from them. So, like, that. That took a little bit of time during the pandemic, especially for me to say, okay, wait a second, let me just slow down here. These. These ideas are becoming all, you know, all consuming, and I can't let that happen. I've been through much worse than this to have these ideas, you know, totally infiltrate my life.

Is there anything else that you wanted to share during our conversation today?

Gosh. Well, I would say just that. That we, again, understand challenge to be such an isolating thing when it is the exact opposite. It is one of the most unifying aspects of the human experience. Right. It is difficulty and change. Right. They are universally rejected, essentially, but they are universally experienced. Right. And nothing to be afraid of. There's some really beautiful things, things that can come out of it, even something that is as profound and as catastrophic or devastating as an injury like mind. As I wrote in the book, my disability is the result of a tragedy, but my life is not tragic. And I think that that is something that I think we've all integrated into our lives, that we can experience tragedy, but our lives themselves are very different from those from that experience. And we all can do it. You know, I know it firsthand. You know, I've experienced it, I think, in some of its most profound. So I know that. I know that the ability is there. It's built into. It's built into our genes.

Have full body chills. Just when you said that. We think of it as so isolating, but really it's the most unifying thing. It's so good. Thank you so much for this. So inspiring. I'm so inspired right now. And the book is amazing. So.

Yeah.

So I think Dr. Kane was about to. About to ask. Yes.

Yeah.

I was gonna ask how people can stay in touch with you, buy your book, obviously, but how else can they find you online?

Oh, absolutely. So you can go to my website, which is brookellison.com so Brooke with an E V R O O K e l l I-s o n.com and then also on Twitter. You can find me on Twitter. I don't tweet quite as much as I would like, but yes, there's Brooke M. Ellison. Brooke M. Ellison. And then also on Instagram, you can find me there as well. And I'd love to hear from people, people, you know, so there's ways to contact me there and we'll be sure.

To put all of those notes and resources into the description and yeah, buy the book. It's really good. And definitely follow her on TikTok or not TikTok but you said Twitter and Instagram and so we're really grateful for you. We're grateful for your time and you're amazing and I can't wait to see what you do.

You. Thank you. That means so much to me. Really. This is such a, such a pleasure, such a privilege to do and I feel quite, quite fortunate to share my life with, you know, with you, with your listeners and for everybody, you know who picks up the book. It means a great deal to me and it's changing something that could conceivably seem meaningless into something that is quite meaningful. So thank you for the opportunity to do that.

Awesome.

Well, thank you. Thank you so much.

All right, well, we'll take care. See you soon.

Absolutely.

All right.

Bye.

Brooke.