Dr. Sherry Walling’s New Memoir - Touching Two Worlds

This idea of touching two worlds is about my experience going back and forth between the world of aliveness and the world of grief. Really had a profound experience of using MDMA to have a different reckoning with my own grief and with my father's death. How do we use these tools, which are biochemical, they're therapeutic, but they're also really spiritual in nature? We have to fight for the integration of our full selves in our healing work.

All right, welcome to the Big Leap. We have a very special guest, Dr. Sherry Walling, and she's going to be talking about grief. Grief and psychedelics, grief and the circus. And one of my biggest takeaways from this is I got to ask a very deep, touching question about dealing with the grief of the upcoming loss of my parents and how we're dealing with that as a family with my other three siblings. It was really, really, really powerful and meaningful to me.

This was a fascinating, fascinating conversation, because what you're going to hear are some new ways to be with grief, some new surprising ways that you can deal with grief, which is something that touches everyone. So I really want you to pay attention to this, not only in your mind, but also in your heart, because I found it incredibly moving.

Dr. Sherry.

Ooh.

This is going to be a fabulous conversation in which we talk about how grief transforms and makes you different than you expected, not always worse. Sometimes it has deep, deep lessons that help make your life better.

All right, well, all that and more in this episode of the Big Leap. Stick around, join us and share this with anyone you know who's going through the experience of grief right now.

Well, welcome to our Big Leap podcast. I am so excited to be here with Mike today. And we have a very special guest today who's written a very special book, and I think you're going to want to hear about it because it touches on some things that. Well, when I read it, I felt myself engaged emotionally in ways that I often don't get emotionally engaged with a book. And so rather than talking about my experience of it, though, I'd like to introduce the author of the book, Dr. Sherry Walling. Sherry, welcome to our podcast.

Thank you so much. It's so good to be with both of you.

Yeah, thanks.

Well, thank you for joining us. And, well, instead of me trying to summarize the book, why don't you take it from the get go and tell us the title and what inspired you to write it and what you'd like everybody to get out of it.

Yes. So this book is called Touching Two Worlds, a guide for finding hope in the landscape of loss. And it's a book that's partially memoir. It's written about my experience losing my father to esophageal cancer and my brother to suicide within six months of each other. So huge losses, big immersion into grief and into this world of people that I love who were ill, who were dying, and who, you know, eventually did lose their lives. And at the same time that this is happening, I'm also growing my career, raising my children sort of in the prime of the richness of my life. And so this idea of touching two worlds is about my experience going back and forth between the world of aliveness and the world of grief. And so it's memoir, but it's also based on my life as a psychologist. And so offers the reader some. Some invitations, some suggestions, maybe do this journaling prompt, maybe do this exercise, maybe think about this question. Because of course, my desire is to tell my story, but also to engage with the stories of other people and to leave something that's helpful.

I'm going through a particular type of grief processes at the moment. My brother, my older brother, who's 85, has been going more into Parkinson's and Parkinson's dementia, and it's. He's my only sibling and he was always the kind of the golden boy and the person that I looked up to and everybody looked up to. And I had never thought about it before, but as he's mental abilities have begun to change and go in different directions, it's tugged on grief in me. So I guess I'm saying it. I found your book of value not just about people who have died, but in grief processes that I was going through with real life. People too, that are still living.

Yeah, you know, grief is obviously the emotional reaction to loss. And you're watching your brother be lost slowly, which is, I think, you know, it's its own kind of unique pain. But so many of us are grieving not just grief according to death, but grief according to distance relationships, the end of marriages, you know, loss of jobs. There's all kinds of grief circulating in the world right now.

Yeah, I think a lot of grief about just general. The circumstances of the world have a big, powerful impact on people too.

You were going through grief about two different people that you had obviously two different kinds of relationships with at the same time. What was that like, dealing with two things at once?

You know, I think both of those relationships were separate and both of the deaths were different. They had a different quality to them. I reacted to them differently. And then there's the combination of them, like the cumulative grief. So there's all these sort of different components. But my father's death.

While, you know, he died at 65, really, really young, but we had some time to prepare for his death. I had the really sacred privilege of being present with him when he died. So I had the experience as his daughter of kind of walking him right up to the gate. You remember when you could go into airports and, like, walk people all the way up to the gate, and then they got in the tunnel, and you could kind of wave goodbye as they got on the planet. Of sort of felt like that there was a beauty and an intimacy for being present with him in his death. And that didn't eliminate the grief, but it certainly changed the quality of the grief. And my brother's death, you know, felt so different. It was, in many ways, a traumatic bereavement. It was sudden. It was shocking. He died far away. He died without comfort or touch or connection. And so that loss really sat very differently within me and within my soul. And then, of course, the two together, it just felt like, oh, my God, I don't even have a family anymore. You know, to sort of lose my dad and to walk around in the world feeling like I'm a person without a father. And then also to lose my brother, who, you know, is supposed to be my buddy in life, the person who knows my history, and we grow old together. It's. It just led to a lot of disruption, I think, a sense of lostness for me for a time.

Mike, did you have things you wanted to bring into the conversation? I sure do.

So.

I'm in a different phase in life than gay in some ways, but similar in others, where both my parents are in memory care right now. My father has basically been dead in his head for a couple of years, and he was my rock and my greatest mentor. And my mom recently is. She also went into the last stage of memory care, so she's losing her marbles very, very quickly. And she still knows who I am, but she doesn't remember what she talked about, you know, a minute before.

And I'm going back to visit him in two weeks. And so I'm the oldest of four, so I've got a sister, two brothers, and going through this as a family, we've done our best to keep things civil. We all have different opinions about what to do. And we went through these struggles where, you know, two of my siblings, all three of them actually wanted to, like, Take care of mom and dad, which, you know, they tried that on and they found out really quickly why there are actual people who should be doing this. We also.

Professional help.

Totally. Yeah. And for them, they're two of them, you know, they had, they had, they had marital issues because, you know, it, it's a, it's a full time job plus some. And.

So I'm grateful for the fact that we've been able to consciously let them go. At the same time, it's created an enormous amount of shock in the family. Just the way everyone deals with what they deal with in ways that I, I couldn't have imagined.

And so I want to bridge that to, you know, how you use psychedelics to relieve and go through the process. I'd like you to talk about that for yourself. But then bridge to. And I've, I've attempted to have this conversation with my siblings which I've done a fair amount of psychedelic work myself.

With everything from 5 Meo to Psilocybin to MDMA and Ketamine as well have been the main ones who, they're, they're amazing tools. I think it's had a profound effect on me. But I also know of people who've done them as families.

And I don't have a need to do this, but I just know in looking at them.

You know, a couple members of my family could definitely use some therapy and haven't gotten it. And as we are aging, we're all looking at the mirrors of what's coming with our parents, there's a certain amount of work we can do, but we're looking at ourselves in 20, 30 years. So I'd love to be able to resolve some of the anger and the shock and the trauma.

Ahead of time and be able to, you know, unite with them on a level that it seems to me only psychedelics can provide. And maybe that's too broad, but I'd love your perspective on that.

Yeah, I think psychedelics are such an incredible tool for grief because it's so many different kinds of emotions at once. It's, it's anger, it's lostness, it's fear, it's sadness. It's this sort of combination that I think is pretty difficult, not impossible, but difficult to unwind in traditional talk therapy. It's very time consuming, it takes a long time. And I was fortunate enough to have access to really high quality psychedelic supported psychotherapy with mdma and I had been aware of and interested in how psychedelics were being used in therapy. Really much more academically much more. As a scientist, as a psychologist, I knew about some of the research that was happening, but I never really thought about needing them myself or even being a practitioner who would be offering those services. But after my dad passed away.

I had an opportunity and decided to do one of these trials and really had a profound experience of using MDMA to have a different reckoning with my own grief and with my father's death. And for me, this looked specifically like returning in the session to the moment of my dad's death. But instead of.

Being really focused on him and on my mother's experience, on my brother's, like, in my role in. In real life, quote, unquote, I was the functioning daughter psychologist, right? Take care of everybody, make sure everyone's comfortable. Do your job. But in my session, with the assistance of the, you know, infusion of empathy that comes along with the chemical of mdma, I saw myself as this daughter who was losing her daddy. And it was just so softening and tender, and it made my grief feel clear and. And, you know, again, tender is sort of the word. Instead of fraught, it was tender. And so my brother and I both experienced our dad's death. We were both present. For me, it became this very important memory. For him, it was torturous. It was something that he couldn't find his way through. And the loss of him is really what catalyzed me to really become much more interested in the role that psychedelics can play in healing, especially in these incredibly emotionally complex experiences that are, as I said, very sort of difficult to unwind in traditional talk therapy. So this idea, Mike, that you're bringing up of, like, how do we use these tools which are biochemical, they're therapeutic, but they're also really spiritual in nature, and they help us tackle some of those, you know, what does it all mean? End of life, the nature of time. Like these big, huge, complex topics in a way that's safe and accessible. And I can only imagine the magic that would happen if you and your siblings were able to hold that space together.

Thank you.

I had a remarkable grief experience once, taking MDMA personally, back in the 80s. There was a period of time before they made it illegal where a lot of us used it for ourselves and then our clients. And then there was a period of time when they were juggling with it legally, where it kind of went into the background. But in my own personal experience.

My father died when my mother was pregnant with me, so I never experienced, kind of in real waking, breathing life, the loss of my Father. But when I took the mda, I realized that it was all there prenatally because I. That there was a level of me that went through that in an extreme way with my mother. And later on it became an issue because it turned out that.

A big, shocking emotional event during that period of time or around birth can prevent the mother from producing some hormones and chemicals that are important in things like bonding and things like being able to digest milk and a whole bunch of things like that. And apparently my mother didn't put out those hormones. And so I ended up.

Getting very obese as a baby, partly because all of that mechanism had been turned off during, you know, trying to survive, I guess. And so anyway, just to make a very long story short, I think that one of the implications of a lot of the things you write about have to do with being able to heal things on a different level than talk or often even body therapy can get to. And I wonder if you would speak about that.

Yeah, I think it's been really sort of sad, I guess, is the word that comes to mind, to step back and watch my field, the field of psychology and the way that we relate to medicine and the way that we relate to spirituality and that we've segmented ourselves off into these little bits. So you go to your physician when you're struggling with your weight, or you go to your psychologist when you're feeling sad, and you go to your clergy when you know you have something to be forgiven for. But there's. That's just not a real representation of how we work as humans. Like, we're. We're all connected, all those pieces of us. And so when we are thinking about healing and pursuing healing, that gets at the cellular level, that gets at the chemistry, the biology of our bodies, but then also gets at our. This beautiful metacognitive practice that we have, right? The ability to think about thinking and to understand and interpret our reality and then to make meaning and be spiritual beings. I think we have to. We have to fight for the integration of our full selves in our healing work. And what you're talking about with your own experience and you're in your little baby body and how the implications of your mom's trauma and the loss of your father got stuck in your cells and what that meant for you as a developing being. You know, that happens to all of us in the intergenerational transmission of trauma or in the ways that our bodies carry the stories of things that happen to us pre verbally or things that we maybe don't remember. So I think this return to an interest in how we heal the full self and how we are full selves in our care is extraordinarily important moving forward as a species.

I very much agree. In your own experience of all of this, did your body have a reaction to the grief, and how did you deal with that?

Yeah, this is one of the stranger essays in my book. But.

When I heard the news that my brother died.

I fell on the ground, which is, you know, common among people who experience a shock or something overwhelming. And I had two simultaneous overpowering sensations in my body at one time. One was to destroy something, to throw something, to kind of claw at something, to, like, you know, if I can swear, to just, like, fuck something up, to just rage, rage against what I'd learned about the new reality of my life. And then the other instinct was a desire to, like, to fuck in a different way, right? To, like, have a union, experience, a sexual experience. Something that made me feel really alive because I had just encountered this sort of demon of death. So my body had this really big reaction. And if, you know, we think back to classic Freud, it was these two drives of thanatos and libido, the destructive instinct and the reproductive instinct, the creation instinct. And I feel like that was a really important imprint in my body in that moment. That shock of trauma and the balance of those two drives. I think my body has sort of struggled to integrate since that moment. So for me, movement, big movement, big expressive movement has been a core part of this journey for me. Because I know really clearly that my body's holding these big energies as a result of this traumatic loss.

And to extend that question from the body out into relationships, what kinds of things. Did you notice the impact of all of this on your relationships?

Yeah, that's a tricky one, to be honest, because I. I was, you know, raising young children at the time my. When these deaths happened. My kids were 8. 8 and 12. And so.

That'S not. Those aren't ages for there to be a lot of disruption among mom. You know, this is a phase of life where children need consistency and predictability and can't have mom, you know, flying off the handle in the backyard. And so I think it was really.

Challenging to find my way as a parent in the midst of grief, to be both authentic enough with my kids that they understood they had a narrative for what was happening. I didn't try to hide it, but also to be then careful of not overburdening them or sort of being.

Being too far from the caretaking, stable parent that they needed. And I think similarly, you know, in my relationship with my husband. We. We've been married for 22 years. We have a long history together. But this experience of me kind of going into this land of grief, this darkness, felt pretty threatening to the relationship that we had had up until that point. So in a way, all of these things had to be reworked. Myself as a mother, myself as a partner, who I'd been before, wasn't quite right anymore, and I had to re. Re. Adjust. Regrow myself in light of this new experience of being in grief.

I often tell my clients who are going through grief that it comes in waves. That's one thing I noticed in the year after my mother's death.

I didn't get to be there at my mother's death because of not being able to get the airplane to get me there on time. So I was in transit when she died. And so I very much missed that connection because I wanted to be there so much.

But I noticed over the next year.

I had all sorts of reactions, but they would often kind of almost come out of nowhere, you know, like a wave, like a rogue wave or something. And I wondered if you noticed that phenomenon too.

Oh, yeah, I think that's. That's really common. You know, sometimes we call them triggers. But that sense of which.

You think you found your footing and then something happens inside of you that destabilizes you, you know, that happened recently for me. I just was walking through the airport and heard a little kid's voice calling out, grandpa. And it just, like, hit me right in the gut. I just thought, oh, my God, my dad, my kids don't have a grandpa. Like, it just was a little thing that happened in the course of my life, and it almost like, sort of doubled me over.

And I think those things happen with. Sometimes there's some predictability, right? I think there's some reality to those anniversary dates, you know, the birthdays, the death days, the rhythms of grief that become a little bit predictable the longer we live with them. And I think it's important to sort of honor and create space for the grief when it comes up in those rhythms. But I absolutely agree with that sense of sometimes it just hits you like a rogue wave, and you're like, what just happened to me? Like, I was fine. I was fine, and now I'm not fine anymore.

I'm curious just to extend on. On that. I didn't expect to ask this question, but I'm going to do it anyway. And it has to do with this physical trauma release. And.

I'm gonna just ask the question by telling a story, because a few years ago, I was going through a major.

Shift in. In life. And when I listened to you tell your story about how you had to redefine even your marriage and. And your role, I went and saw a trauma release, very esoteric chiropractor. And, you know, he does the normal back cracking, and then he's got his special room that you go into, and he was just, like, very lightly touching. And suddenly I heard an animal scream. And my body started flopping around and it. And my body just started crying. Releasing a lot of stuff. And I'd never had anything quite like that happen before.

And too many questions. One of them is, did you do any physical trauma release or do any esoteric work? And then secondly, what's your opinion of grief?

And.

And, you know, having. Having a significant physical release.

You have any opinions or thoughts on that?

Yeah.

Absolutely. Grief is embodied. And if we don't have some ways of release, it gets stuck. I mean, I believe that down to my toes. I think that release can look very different. I think psychedelics can be a release. I mean, I had a psychedelic session after my brother died where I was running from a fire, and I was 100% sure that I just had to run for my life. And it was terrifying. And I huddled under the blanket, sort of like this wild, scared animal. And it wasn't like, a fun psychedelic experience. Anybody who thinks that, like, psychedelics are fun, you know, when they're done in therapy, your body is working these things out. And so for me, I think that was a big release. The other thing that may be a little bit surprising, but I started a very serious practice in the circus arts.

I was gonna ask that next, but I wanted a bridge to it.

Which.

Is, you know, not necessarily under the guise of a professional healer, but I will say.

For me, standing on the platform of the flying trapeze and putting my hands on that bar and having the moment of, like, I have to just jump.

There's some spiritual work there. There's some, like, deeper reckoning that's going on with my relationship to risk with my body, with all of those things. And so for me, having that very significant practice that is very embodied, but also very creative and artistic, felt like a lot of the kinds of release that you're talking about, maybe in smaller doses over time. But I think that kind of physical practice then alongside having a really wonderful body worker or having somebody who can help guide you in psychedelic experiences helps to unleash the places where the trauma gets stored in the body.

I can make a relationship between psychedelics and circus. It seems to be a natural outgrowth.

Send in the clowns. Send in the clowns. No, no.

Yeah. Well, if you could, Sherry, encapsulate the whole circus experience for us so you could give our listeners and viewers a picture. Some of them may not step out there on that platform.

So tell us what the video link in the show notes. I'll make sure we get those. But, yeah, go for it.

Yeah, I, I have an image of standing on the ground and looking up this piece of fabric that's attached 30ft in the air above me to the ceiling, and what it felt like to stand there and look up and think, I'm, I am never going to get up there. There's no way. Felt very similar to what it. The moment of realizing, like, I, I, I'm gonna have to live in a world without my father and without my brother and that message of, like, I'm never gonna get up there, like, I'm never going to rise from this. And so learning to circus is learning step by step, motion by motion, how to move your body in ways that you didn't think were possible, and how to use both your strength, but also your strategy. Like you, you have to be really clear and concise movements.

And it's been a powerful teacher for me in that the analogy of how to do hard things thoughtfully, sometimes with brute strength, but mostly with strategic laziness, like, you know, trying not to make it harder than it has to be.

And in being able to be really brave and in being able to trust myself that I am capable. I am a fully grown adult lady and I can be in the world without my dad. And I am a well trained physical athlete and I can take the leap off of the trapeze and trust my body to do what it does. So lots and lots of lessons in a really, really beautiful art form.

Well, you seem like an absolutely fabulous human being, Sheri, and it's a fantastic book. Incredibly articulate. Some things that are hard to be articulate about. And so I'm really grateful that you gave us the opportunity to look deeply into that. Anything else you'd like to say before we kind of fold our tents here for this particular version of things?

Yeah. I'm so grateful for the conversation and for your work in inviting people into these deeper conversations. Not in a way that's without hope, where we just focus on the painful, hard, gritty things but in the way that encourages God courage. And it's. It's a wonderful conversation, and I hope that we can begin to interact with grief in that way as something that is both hard and heavy, but also a source of great learning and can be a source of transformation when we give ourselves to it, when we engage it. So I'm grateful for being with you. Thank you for the conversation.

Well, thank you so much for your mind and your heart and the gift of your book, and we'll make sure a whole lot of people get it into their hands and hearts, too. Yeah.

Well done. Thanks. I've had. I've had these questions, and I wasn't sure who I could ask, and it was good to get your point of view today and. And just hear about your journey and how you've worked through it, and what a great opportunity that we had. The chance to connect.

And the fact that you and Vivian have a history together was. Was great. So thanks for your time. This has been awesome.

Yeah, Wonderful. Thank you so much.

All right.

Come sit in our living room in California sometime.

My pleasure. I'm on my way. Be right there.