Elizabeth Ruggiero & Stacey Joslin | Photographs by Adam Williams
Overview: Stacey Joslin is executive director of the Chaffee County affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Dr. Elizabeth Ruggiero is a systemic therapist. Both have extraordinary personal experiences that influence their insights on mental wellbeing.
They talk with Adam Williams about what’s missing in how we think about and experience therapy, and why it goes against the grain of conventional perspectives. They talk about stigmas and “normalcy.” And touch on neurodivergence and on the warrior spirit of masculinity. Among other things.
SHOW NOTES, LINKS, CREDITS & TRANSCRIPT
The We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and is supported by the Colorado Public Health & Environment: Office of Health Disparities.
Along with being distributed on podcast listening platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple), Looking Upstream is broadcast weekly at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, on KHEN 106.9 community radio FM in Salida, Colo.
NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness)
Website: namichaffee.org
We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream
Website: wearechaffeepod.com
Instagram: instagram.com/wearechaffeepod
CREDITS
Looking Upstream Host, Producer, Photographer & Website Manager: Adam Williams
Looking Upstream Engineer & Producer: Jon Pray
We Are Chaffee Community Advocacy Coordinator: Lisa Martin
Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment: Andrea Carlstrom
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts are produced using a transcription service. Although it is largely accurate, minor errors inevitably exist.
[Intro music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:15): Welcome to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream, a conversational podcast of community, humanness, and well-being, rooted in Chaffee County, Colorado. I’m Adam Williams.
Today, I’m talking with two professionals in the realm of mental illness and mental health. Stacey Joslin is Executive Director of the Chaffee County affiliate of The National Alliance on Mental Illness. Dr. Elizabeth Ruggiero is a systemic therapist. Both of these women have extraordinary personal experiences that influence their insights on mental well-being.
They share something of those stories and we dive into the roots of their interests in the field. We get into what’s missing in how we talk about and experience therapy and why it goes against the grain of conventional perspectives.
(00:00:56): We talk about the need for balance in all things really, but specifically here with nature and with technology. We talk about stigmas and “normalcy.” We also touch on neurodivergence and on the warrior spirit of masculinity among other things.
The Looking Upstream Podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health and The Chaffee County Housing Authority. As always, show notes with photos, links, and a transcript of the conversation are published at wearechafeepod.com. More photos are shared at wearechaffeepod on Instagram.
Okay now, here’s Elizabeth Ruggiero and Stacey Joslin.
[Transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:01:44): I have really been looking forward to talking with the two of you because I’ve wanted to go more in-depth on a conversation that relates to mental health. I’ve talked with the occasional person about their own experiences, maybe it’s anxiety, depression, what have you, and I certainly feel these things. I feel like it’s a big topic that a lot of us are feeling and that we could use your expertise and insights and maybe helping us understand something more about ourselves and about maybe the whole environment and how we’re interacting as a community and society right now through the emotional and mental status of us all.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:02:16): Thank you for having us. Thank you.
Stacey Joslin (00:02:17): Yeah, thank you.
Adam Williams (00:02:18): Yeah, I appreciate you both being willing to dive deeper here with me. I’m going to start with you, Stacey. I want to hear about NAMI just a little bit. Let’s kind of get some foundational information here. This is The National Alliance on Mental Health. You are the Director for the Chaffee County Chapter of that. Is that right?
Stacey Joslin (00:02:36): Yeah, and so NAMI is an acronym, like you just said, and it’s for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. It is a national organization, and we’re just really lucky that here in Chaffee County we have our own affiliate.
Adam Williams (00:02:49): Did I just say mental health on that? Did I say that wrong?
Stacey Joslin (00:02:51): You did see it incorrectly, but at the same time it kind of fits, technically it’s mental illness, but we’re also working with health as well.
Adam Williams (00:03:00): Is there a difference between those two? What do we mean by making that distinction?
Stacey Joslin (00:03:04): Well, when NAMI originally started back in 1975, believe it or not, it started in Madison, Wisconsin, and it was a bunch of parents that were sitting around a kitchen table one day, and these were parents who had children who were dealing with different mental illnesses, but back then it was so taboo and it was so stigmatized that they couldn’t get help in the schools.
They couldn’t get the right help from doctors. That was still kind of the time period where the solution was, “Well, you need to institutionalize your child,” and they just felt that there has to be a better way to do it. They got together and they started having weekly meetings and they started working together and it slowly grew from there.
(00:03:46): Then, they started working at a governmental level trying to get the legislation to change, and then they started creating smaller affiliates. The point was to, how can we actually get help for people, not just children, but our family members and stuff who are struggling with things like schizophrenia or even depression or anxiety or a whole array of what we call illnesses?
It’s just evolved so much, and hopefully in our culture it has evolved as well. Mental health is something that we all need to strive for, whether you’re diagnosed with something or not, so someone could have a mental illness like depression, but still strive for mental health.
Adam Williams (00:04:37): I think that that sounds like mental health is more encompassing. It allows for a much broader conversation because it pertains to all of us, whether we have something that is considered a disorder or something that has been diagnosed. Yeah, and we’re going to talk about in this conversation, I think we’re going to get to some of that progression or evolution of how we’re looking at all this and how we’re talking about it. If we get specific to what your role is here with NAMI in Chaffee County, what do you see as, well, the role? What is the place that this is filling in our community of here locally?
Stacey Joslin (00:05:14): Well, as the executive director of our local affiliate, I run the affiliate, and then we have a small board. We do have volunteers, but we need more volunteers, so if that’s something anybody’s interested in, reach out to me.
Adam Williams (00:05:30): What do volunteers do?
Stacey Joslin (00:05:32): Well, it depends on the person’s individual skill set, but we need volunteers to do things as simple as helping to set up a table at an event like FIBArk or-
Adam Williams (00:05:45): To share information?
Stacey Joslin (00:05:46): … yeah, to share information versus volunteers who, well, like Elizabeth here, who’s very educated. Yeah.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:05:55): Well, I guess so.
Adam Williams (00:05:58): We’ll get to that.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:05:58): I did like this past Saturday, I did a NAMI training that was fabulous. Yeah, Stacey I’m sure went back through it and it was just… You want to talk about that? It was fabulous. It was-
Stacey Joslin (00:06:08): Yeah, so Elizabeth and I just did a training for a presentation that’s done for elementary school kids-
Adam Williams (00:06:16): Okay.
Stacey Joslin (00:06:16): … because even an elementary level, it’s good to just bring up the idea of anxiety or just bring up the idea of depression because what people have been finding is even at that young of age, third, fourth, fifth grade, kids are showing signs and symptoms of some sort of mental distress. This presentation is wonderful, and then there’s also another presentation that’s for teenagers.
It’s called Ending the Silence. We’ve done that a couple times with The Boys and Girls Club, both in Buena Vista and in Salida. We’re looking at doing it through the high school in Salida as well, and a couple other organizations have reached out to me for that, but-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:07:00): You don’t have to be a mental health professional to do any of these. The training, even the one we just did, was fabulous, and they give you a book and you read the book to the children. You do not have to be a mental health professional to volunteer or be trained or find your spice of what you want to do to help people.
Stacey Joslin (00:07:17): Yeah, so if we have volunteers who like to work with kids or volunteers who like to work with the teenagers, or we also have a support group which is for adults. The support group is for the friends and family members of the person with the mental illness-
Adam Williams (00:07:33): Okay.
Stacey Joslin (00:07:33): … because if someone in your family’s diagnosed with mental illness, it can be very stressful for the family. They don’t always know how to handle that, and there’s a lot of information, and there’s also a class called Family to Family, which is also for that same group of people. The class is eight weeks long and they get to learn all kinds of amazing things about how to deal with this in your family.
(00:07:58):Chaffee County, it’s kind of a silent epidemic really, and I know it’s a hard thing to talk about. A lot of people don’t want to talk about it, and that’s okay, but I just want people to know that we are here. They can reach out to us. If you have a teenager who’s suicidal and you have no idea what to do about it, or an uncle who’s acting really bipolar and you have no idea what to do about it, you don’t have to sit in silence and stress out and worry. Reach out to either NAMI or Sol Vista, too, but NAMI is particularly skilled about helping the family deal with the problem.
Adam Williams (00:08:37): Okay, and we are going to have the website on the website for the podcast. It’ll be part of the episode show notes and any other information that maybe helps people know how they can volunteer or just how to learn about the programs, those sorts of things. I’ll be certainly include that-
Stacey Joslin (00:08:55): Okay, great.
Adam Williams (00:08:56): … for people to go to wearechaffeepod.com, find this episode, and they’ll be able to link to you and get the information and reach out to you as needed. Elizabeth, let’s talk about this education. Let’s talk about your career and history as a systemic therapist. You have a Master’s degree and a PhD, both are in Marriage and Family Therapy. Is that right?
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:09:16): Right, which is based in systemic thinking and systemic therapy, correct. Yes, yes.
Adam Williams (00:09:20): Let’s talk about systemic-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:09:21): All right.
Adam Williams (00:09:21): … this word. what does it mean, systemic thinking and systemic therapy?
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:09:25): Okay, thank you. Well, what drew me to it is I knew that I didn’t want to just diagnose. I knew that I didn’t want to just figure out, is it nature or is it nurture? A systemic approach is it’s both, It’s both who you are and how you were born coupled with the environment to which that you are in, and so I think all of those in a balance of, and asking questions about all of those things, will help create health and specifically with what Stacy and I are talking about, mental health.
It’s looking at all aspects of your life from who you are and the environment you were born into, all of your experiences, all of your life, what you eat, what you wear, what your hobbies are, what you do for a living. It’s everything. It’s every part of your environment and who you are.
(00:10:11): It takes a look at all of those things. Hard part for me educationally is I studied sociology, social work, psychology, therapy, counseling, and then you even have to kind of pick a specialty that you’re going to go into once you do all of that. I didn’t know if I wanted to be a medical doctor or a brain surgeon or what I wanted to do, but what drew me to it was I realized how important the human body is, and the human body is controlled by the human by the human body.
(00:10:38): If we don’t understand who we are in that human body and how we work, how are you going to do anything, including any type of illness? The body makes illness, so the body can probably cure illness. The body holds onto a mental health issue, so who can heal that mental health issue but you? It’s figuring out every single element in somebody’s life and trying to see what it is that maybe they’re missing or maybe they… You know they say practice makes perfect, sometimes it doesn’t. You can practice wrong and then you’re just practicing, you know?
Adam Williams (00:11:09): The wrong thing.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:11:10): The wrong thing. Maybe what you know, and I don’t think that in any way it’s by harm, but sometimes maybe you have a parent that maybe had a habit and that’s your habit and you never slowed down enough to think about, “Well, maybe I do that because that was my environment,” or-
Adam Williams (00:11:24): They did it because it was their environment
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:11:27): … yes, of course-
Adam Williams (00:11:27): … growing up-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:11:28): … they did.
Adam Williams (00:11:28): … and on back. Yeah.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:11:29): Of course they did, and I think where true mental health steps in is in the, “Well, what now?” I think there’s a lot of self-help books out there that are fabulous and a lot of people out there with a lot of fabulous information. NAMI’s one of fabulous information, but you get to the point you go, “But what now?”, and I think that’s what Stacey was hitting on. Maybe you took your child to the doctor or to a clinician and they were diagnosed as schizophrenic or bipolar.
What now? Maybe your child’s getting treatment or on medication and they’re doing better, but what about you? What about the family system? What about the school system? I think it’s super important to recognize that we’re interacting with every system and every system has to be healthy in order to help us be healthy-
Stacey Joslin (00:12:09): Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:12:10): … so that’s what I try and do.
Adam Williams (00:12:12): I want to ask, we might be splitting hairs here, but just for some basic knowledge, what’s the difference between a therapist, a counselor or a psychologist, a psychiatrist?
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:12:22): Wow. Are we raw here? Do we talk about real things here?
Adam Williams (00:12:26): Yeah, I hope.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:12:27): I actually got in trouble for this. I used to teach this in graduate school because it’s really important as a human being to know, what do you want to do? You want to go into the mental health field or the helping field? Okay, but what exactly do you want to spend your day doing? I’m going to answer this question, and I’m going to answer it the same way that I answered it when I got in trouble. I’m hoping that nobody takes a clip of this and then it on the internet to beat me up.
Adam Williams (00:12:50): In trouble with who?
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:12:52): Well, let me explain first and then maybe you’ll see.
Adam Williams (00:12:52): Okay, okay.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:12:54): Okay. I’m going to metaphorically answer you in a metaphor, okay?
Adam Williams (00:12:54): Okay.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:12:58): This is a metaphor, so give me a mental health problem. Just pick one randomly out of the air. What’s your problem? You have a problem?
Stacey Joslin (00:13:09): Like bipolar.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:13:09): Okay, you’re bipolar. That’s great, so first of all, we have to figure out what that means. If you are diagnosed by a medical doctor, of course, they have their stance on what bipolar means and how they’re going to help you, what to do next. In the mental health field, you have psychiatrists. Metaphorically speaking, one of the things that they can do is prescribe you medication.
They could do many more things than that, but in a metaphorical principle of answering your question, psychiatrists, they’re doctors, they’re MDs. They can prescribe you medication. Psychologists, jump in here anytime you want to save me, Stacey, psychologists, they’re trained in giving tests. Some can prescribe in some states, so they do similar things. We all do similar things.
(00:13:57): Counselors and therapists do very similar things. It’s just a different theoretical approach to the problem and helping you, but most of them are talk therapy. Again, some of them, some states sometimes, depending on licensure, could do other things as well. Then, social workers, boots on the ground. They’re our front line. They are hard-working individuals. They can actually go to your home and help you. They can change environments. Altogether, nothing. They’re people you could go and talk to and say, “This is what’s happening in my life. Help me.”
(00:14:30): Then, just dependent upon their theoretical approach is how they help you. Knowing the different and knowing if your theoretical approach as a human being, if you’re like, “I think I’ve tried talk therapy,” or, “I think I’ve tried… “, try another form, which would mean maybe you’d go to a psychologist or maybe a psychiatrist if that makes sense. You try all of them and then you see what fits for you, and each one has different tenets, but the major thing you go to those people for is to talk and to say, “This is how I feel. This is what’s happening. This is where I need help.”
Adam Williams (00:15:02): What is the problematic expression of it? Why did you get in trouble? Again, still, with who?
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:15:11): Somebody, we live in a digital age, and I do these things like this a lot. Stacey and I are even a little nervous being here right now. When you are in the mental health field and you have an opinion or a thought and you speak out, you become a target.
People don’t always like things that we say, and one of the things that happened is somebody, who later came and apologized to me, but took a clip of what I said on the news and whittled it down to I said that social workers only get people food, and then it just became a runaway train on the internet. They didn’t watch the whole clip. They didn’t listen to the whole thing, and so it became a kind of a… yeah, I got-
Adam Williams (00:15:12): Okay.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:15:54): … I got kind of attacked in my field for saying and being a doctor in the field also, we kind of become targets sometimes because I think people think we know more or we act like we know more. I just want to say for the record, I just paid more money and stayed in school a little longer and had to write a book like that. I get it. The mental health field is very… I mean, I don’t know the word to use. Competitive, I almost want to say it’s competitive, and so you have to be very careful. You have to toe the line I guess I want to say, and when you don’t or you do something like this and you step out and say, “Well, here’s who I am,” it’s scary in the field.
Adam Williams (00:16:34): I feel like there’s a lot of things we could unpack about when it comes to the communication or why somebody would take a clip, and then we need to develop skills or at least more compassionately maybe apply them to think about, well, what was the context of what you really were saying in that-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:16:50): … thank you.
Adam Williams (00:16:50): .. clip, for example?
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:16:51): Sure, thank you.
Adam Williams (00:16:53): In terms of competition, is there even tribalism, for lack of a better word-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:16:56): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:16:56): … between, well, psychologists are better than psychiatrists, which are better-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:16:57): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:16:59): … than whatever-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:17:01): There’s a hundred percent that.
Adam Williams (00:17:01): … you know, and-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:17:02): Leaning in to say yes.
Adam Williams (00:17:02): … which is-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:17:02): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:17:03): … counterproductive.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:17:05): It is, but because mental health, I mean, we’re really pretty new to… We’re still figuring it out. It’s a science, it’s the practice of medicine. It’s the practice of… We’re still figuring out what works and doesn’t work. I think the competitiveness comes from, “I spent a hundred thousand dollars on my education.”
Adam Williams (00:17:26): Aah.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:17:26): “My education is the right way to see this.”
Adam Williams (00:17:28): Yeah.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:17:30): Even when I was in grad school, I have like, well, I had, I’m retired, but I had five different licenses, and the reason I had five different licenses is because I went to school for so many things. Not that that makes me any better than, I’m never settled. That’s what it is. I’m never settled, but me saying that, there was a competitiveness in that, in getting different licenses and different trainings and people thinking that we’re saying one is better than the other.
Stacey Joslin (00:17:56): The thing with that is everything works different for different people.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:18:00): Yes.
Stacey Joslin (00:18:00): What works for one person doesn’t work for the other person-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:18:00): That’s right.
Stacey Joslin (00:18:03): … so-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:18:03): That’s right.
Stacey Joslin (00:18:04): so it’s okay to have a variety of approaches-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:18:06): We need it.
Stacey Joslin (00:18:06): … to mental health.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:18:07): We need all of that.
Stacey Joslin (00:18:08): I think it’s a good thing.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:18:09): Yes.
Stacey Joslin (00:18:10): We just don’t want the field itself to be people attacking other practitioners-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:18:15): Right, for their strength.
Stacey Joslin (00:18:16): … because the-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:18:16): Sure.
Stacey Joslin (00:18:16): … the whole point is to be of service-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:18:19): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:18:19): Right.
Stacey Joslin (00:18:20): … and part of being of service is being able to say, “I actually can’t help this person. Let me find the person-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:18:20): That’s right.
Stacey Joslin (00:18:26): … “who can help you.”
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:18:27): That’s right.
Adam Williams (00:18:28): That requires enough self-awareness-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:18:31): Yeah.
Adam Williams (00:18:31): … to set aside ego, and ego is what I was thinking about when you’re talking about somebody who has spent maybe, you said a hundred thousand dollars, maybe it’s $200,000. It’s, “I’ve spent all this money.”
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:18:42): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:18:43): “Please don’t tell me that was foolish on my part-
Stacey Joslin (00:18:43): It is.
Adam Williams (00:18:45): … “because you spent 50,000 and you’re able to help this person-
Stacey Joslin (00:18:49): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:18:49): … “and I can’t.”
Stacey Joslin (00:18:49): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:18:51): There’s a lot of… Everybody’s who in this field, just like everywhere else-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:18:55): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:18:55): … professionally and personally in life, socially, whatever, we’re all struggling with the same issues.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:19:01): That’s right.
Adam Williams (00:19:02): If you don’t mind my pointing out, the fact you are both human as far as I can tell-
Stacey Joslin (00:19:08): What?
Adam Williams (00:19:08): … and so you have-
Stacey Joslin (00:19:08): That’s right.
Adam Williams (00:19:08): … you are struggling with the same issues of humanity-
Stacey Joslin (00:19:08): That’s right.
Adam Williams (00:19:10): … as we are internally.
Stacey Joslin (00:19:12): That is right.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:19:12): Externally as well.
Stacey Joslin (00:19:14): Exactly.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:19:15): That is exactly, and I like to think of it better that we’re wise counsel. It’s not that we’re a better human being. Maybe it’s just that we’ve read more books, or Stacey and I like to say we’re old souls. We have this knowledge and we’ve built upon it, and you have your knowledge. We’ve been asking you questions about podcasting. You have yours, and so if we could put the ego down and say, “What do you know? Well, what do you know? Well, what do you know?” I think Stacey and I are just in the mental health realm of life and we know some stuff. That’s it, and I think, yes, if we put our egos down, we just try to be wise counsel.
Adam Williams (00:19:58): In service, like you said-
Stacey Joslin (00:19:59): Oh yeah, yeah-
Adam Williams (00:20:00): … Stacey.
Stacey Joslin (00:20:01): … and the second you say, “I know all about this field-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:20:04): Uh-uh.
Stacey Joslin (00:20:05): … then the mind closes down and that person tends to stop learning-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:20:09): Yes.
Stacey Joslin (00:20:09): … new ways.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:20:10): Yes.
Stacey Joslin (00:20:11): That’s where people become dinosaurs in the field-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:20:13): Yes.
Stacey Joslin (00:20:14): … and they maybe have helped a hundred people, but there’s still a thousand more who need help, and they might need to do it totally differently.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:20:22): Yes.
Stacey Joslin (00:20:23): Look where we live. There’s people who would rather go on a mountain bike ride as their therapy, and they might get-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:20:23): Which is therapy.
Stacey Joslin (00:20:30): … just as much from it-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:20:30): That’s right.
Stacey Joslin (00:20:32): … as going to a psychologist.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:20:34): That’s right.
Stacey Joslin (00:20:34): … but then there are people who have brain trouble and they do need the medication-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:20:35): Yes.
Stacey Joslin (00:20:41): … and the medication helps them very much, and they really need to go that route. Basically, people need to be able to really explore what their own healing process could look like, and yes, there’s a lot of options and it can be overwhelming, but that’s where organizations like NAMI can help.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:21:00): Yes.
Stacey Joslin (00:21:00): Just help direct people where they need to go, and NAMI doesn’t have all the answers either. NAMI’s just another viewpoint. It’s just another avenue to get where you need to go.
Adam Williams (00:21:10): I’m a big proponent of being able to say, “I don’t know.”
Stacey Joslin (00:21:14): Mm-hmm.
Adam Williams (00:21:14): I would like to hear more people be willing to say, “I don’t know,” whether that’s professionally, personally, whatever it is-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:21:14): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:21:20): … we cling so much to whatever it is that we, I think, want to have as our guardrails, our identities.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:21:28): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:21:29): This is our understanding of the world. Please don’t shake it up. I’m comfortable here.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:21:34): Yes.
Stacey Joslin (00:21:34): Exactly.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:21:34): It always reminds me of the stories of Socrates, which I mean, he was the ultimate, whether you believe it or not, I know Plato wrote it, whatever, but it’s a beautiful story. Sorry, but what a beautiful story of I don’t know. I mean, down to the point where he was so annoying. I mean, he’d walk up to the man making the iron swords. “What’s a hammer? We do we a hammer? Hammer? Why do we call it a hammer?” That’s annoying because the guy’s standing there trying to do his job, but he took it to the ultimate level of question. I don’t know why I call it that or why you’re doing that or what that is, and no matter how educated you become, I think that’s what happens in education. I think we lose the ability to say, “I don’t know” because people look at you like the expert. “Well, you should know.”
Adam Williams (00:22:22): And as parents.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:22:23): Oh, as humans-
Stacey Joslin (00:22:25): Yeah.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:22:25): … as humans.
Stacey Joslin (00:22:26): … and the “I don’t know” can actually be the catalyst for a wonderful adventure, so-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:22:30): It is an adventure.
Stacey Joslin (00:22:30): … I wish more people were willing to admit that.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:22:33): That’s right, and true therapy, man, jump in. True therapy is the one down I don’t know stance. You could walk in and look exactly like me. You could walk in and tell me my story to my face, but a true therapeutic stance is, “But I don’t know what it is to be you going through that. Teach me you.” What a beautiful place it would be if we all did that to everyone that we met. I don’t know. You teach me you.
Stacey Joslin (00:23:02): Beautiful.
Adam Williams (00:23:03): Stacey, I would like to know what led you to this work. What led you to your interest and passion for this service?
Stacey Joslin (00:23:10): Okay, well, when I was a child, I had a father who was severely bipolar, and for anyone who doesn’t really know what bipolar is, it’s a swinging from very high ecstatic state down to the very low depressed state. It’s actually is brain chemistry, which also affects the nervous system. It affects the whole body because it was brutal on my father to go through that, and medication can stabilize that process in the brain and everything, but for him it was unchecked.
Then, another aspect of bipolar is instead of the highs being like happy and I love everybody, it can also be rage, and that’s what my father had. His upswings were intense rage, and then his downswings were very victimhood. “I can’t do anything” type of thing, or the whole world’s going to heck. He was so hard to deal with, and for those who have grown up with parents who have some sort of mental illness like that, the child tends to become hyperfocused on the parent because it’s a survival mechanism to have to be able to detect their mood.
(00:24:35): I grew up always having to be hypervigilant of, “Where is he on the scale? What am I walking into?” I knew if he was on a high, I could say one thing, but if he was on a low, I can’t say it. I didn’t get a lot of opportunity to explore myself and who I was and the person I wanted to become, but because of that, so here we’re going to dive into another realm of mental illness, if people don’t want to go really deep, they might want to stop here. Another aspect of what my father was dealing with was a spiritual component. I was gifted with the ability to… I can see and hear the spirit world, and I know a lot of people maybe don’t believe in that, but it’s very real. I could see darkness around my father.
Adam Williams (00:25:32): Are we talking about an aura?
Stacey Joslin (00:25:35): For me, it was very physical in the physical world. It would be like a shadow, somebody standing next to him, but it was just dark. Or like here’s an example of it being physical is I would see these dark beings talking to him. There were times as a child I tried to confront it a little bit and I’d be like, “What is that? What’s going on?” I’d watch it happening. “What’s happening over there?”
Then, I’d actually go into my bedroom and it would be full of smoke, and it was very physical or things that were my belongings would go missing. From a very young age, I was having a very physical interaction with the spirit world, and that alarmed me for my father. I didn’t want to see him experiencing that suffering with the bipolar plus some sort of spiritual contagion that I couldn’t identify.
(00:26:39): I started talking to God and I started praying about it, and actually both of my parents were atheists, so I wasn’t raised in any kind of spirituality or religion in any way, shape, or form. In fact, it was the opposite. I was always told that that wasn’t real, but yet here I was having these experiences, and I just had some intuitive knowing about God and angels, and I started praying.
I feel like that experience led me to really dive deeply into studying psychology, and as I got older like in high school and stuff, I took all the psychology classes, I took all the sociology classes, but it was continuing to happen to me when I was in high school. I was just seeing spirits all the time, and I was seeing people’s grandma or people’s pet that passed away-
Adam Williams (00:27:38): Not just with your-
Stacey Joslin (00:27:39): … and-
Adam Williams (00:27:39): … father?
Stacey Joslin (00:27:40): … yeah, it started to be with everybody. Yeah, but it scared me because my family was atheist and I was told that’s not real, so I thought I was the term “crazy.” I don’t mean that to insult anybody, but that’s what I started to tell myself like, “Oh my God, I’m crazy.”
Adam Williams (00:27:59): It would’ve been a term from the time, certainly.
Stacey Joslin (00:28:01): Yeah, back then, I mean, the ’70s and ’80s, the sensitivity wasn’t quite there, but I had nobody to talk to about it. We didn’t go to church. There was nobody at school I could talk to about it.
Adam Williams (00:28:14): I’m not sure anybody at church would have been open to hearing from you quite possibly, right? This would’ve been disconcerting.
Stacey Joslin (00:28:21): Yeah, so I got to the point where I was diagnosing myself like I must have some mental illness. Maybe I have schizophrenia, and actually I think that’s common when people start studying psychology, especially abnormal psychology, you start to question yourself like, “Well, I do A, B, and C. Maybe there’s something wrong with me or whatever.”
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:28:42): It’s kind of like WebMD when we go on there, right?
Stacey Joslin (00:28:45): Uh-huh.
Adam Williams (00:28:45): Yeah [inaudible].
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:28:45): “Oh, I’ve got that.” You read [inaudible]–
Stacey Joslin (00:28:45): Yeah.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:28:46): … [inaudible] “Oh, I’ve got that.”
Adam Williams (00:28:47): Anywhere on Google now-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:28:49): That’s right.
Adam Williams (00:28:49): … or anywhere, right?
Stacey Joslin (00:28:49): Exactly.
Adam Williams (00:28:49): I mean-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:28:49): That’s right.
Stacey Joslin (00:28:50): Like, “Oh, I have a little sore throat. It must be some huge illness.”
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:28:53): Right.
Stacey Joslin (00:28:54): It was very scary for me, but all I had for my own support was praying and talking to the angels and talking to God. Then, I just continued on that path of developing my own spiritual relationship with God and studying psychology at the same time. I just learned more and more, and God actually taught me things, and one of the best things that ever happened to me is it got to the point where I think it was one of my psychology professors in college said to me, “Well, are the voices saying good things or bad things to you?”
I thought about it and I was like, “Well, actually, they say wonderful things to me. They teach me things. They tell me wisdom. They taught me things about nature, and all I ever heard was wonderful messages.” That professor said to me, “Well, that doesn’t sound like schizophrenia,” and then that launched me on a whole new understanding, and then I started to get really curious about, “Okay, what is mental illness, though, versus how do we know somebody’s not having a spiritual experience?”
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:30:08): Or a spiritual warfare or… right?
Stacey Joslin (00:30:10): Yeah, spiritual warfare. How do we know they’re not seeing spirits for real? Why are we jumping to the conclusion that something’s wrong with them?
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:30:20): If you take mental illness and you do an overlay of biblical studies, you’ll see very interesting… We’ve been able to look at Moses, not to offend any Christians, and we think that Moses had a really bad stutter because he usually would have Joseph speak for him. There’s a lot of documentation things out there where if you go back and you kind of analyze it, you can see what type of people people were, but if you do the same with our lens of a mental health lens, you could see that some are mental health issues and some are not. Some are spiritual warfare.
Stacey Joslin (00:30:51): Yeah, so I started to realize that the difference was, are you happy with what’s going on with you? Is it good for you? Or is it suffering and is it pain what’s going on for you? That’s how I personally, in my opinion, made the distinction between a mental illness versus a spiritual experience.
Adam Williams (00:31:13): You came to wonder about your mental well-being, but I wonder if on some level when you were younger might’ve also taken for granted this is an experience that a lot of people are having. There are other kids who are having this experience or they talk about imaginary friends. Maybe this is what they’re talking about. Maybe these are the real things and real people they’re seeing, like-
Stacey Joslin (00:31:35): Yeah, so that’s another thing I studied in college, actually. I actually did a paper on that where I went around and interviewed people. When you were a kid, did you have an imaginary friend? Were you scared of the monster in the closet? Was there something under your bed? I was blown away. I think 90% of the people told me yes and then told me a story. I started to hear the same story very similar from person after person after person.
(00:32:04): I remember this very clearly. I was in the Tivoli Building at Metro State College of Denver, and I was walking around during lunchtime in the cafeteria and I was just asking people these questions. It was so many people said yes, and then I started to realize, “Are all children just connected to the spirit world? Is it a disorder?” I feel like this really needs to be studied, very open-mindedly, and not through the lens of religion, but through the lens of spirituality because maybe there was something in the closet.
Adam Williams (00:32:42): How do you differentiate those two, religion and spirituality?
Stacey Joslin (00:32:47): What I have experienced is religion is very rule- based. It’s very other person-oriented, meaning what you learn about God and the Bible is always coming from someone else. Whereas, spirituality for me is very personal experience-oriented. I have met some religious people who never had a spiritual experience in their whole life, but they would call themselves very, very, very connected with God, but yet they’ve never experienced it. They’ve only heard it from other people.
Adam Williams (00:33:22): I think that comes from following the rules, right?
Stacey Joslin (00:33:22): Following the rules.
Adam Williams (00:33:22): Obeying that-
Stacey Joslin (00:33:25): Yeah.
Adam Williams (00:33:26): … external versus from within the self of what you’re describing-
Stacey Joslin (00:33:30): Yeah-
Adam Williams (00:33:30): … as spirituality.
Stacey Joslin (00:33:31): … and like an actual personal experience, and I’ve had many of them, and I’ve written about them in books, just one quick example is I was swimming in the ocean and I got swept out by the undertow. I was way, way, way far from the beach, and I knew in that moment I was going to die or I was going to ask God for help. Those are my only two choices because I certainly wasn’t going to make it to the beach on my own power. I just looked up into the sky as I’m drowning and coughing on water and exhausted and feeling myself going under.
(00:34:06): I looked up at the sky and the whole sky was breathing and there was a heartbeat to it, and I suddenly saw the interconnectedness of the water and the sky and the breath and the heartbeat. At that moment, I said, “God, please get me out of this.” The next thing I knew, my feet touch sand and I have zero memory of getting from way out in the ocean to the beach. It was instantaneous that I was just on land, and I cannot explain what happened, but I just knew that that was a Godly experience. I knew that I had been saved.
Adam Williams (00:34:51): I could go on and on and on with you about this. There’s a lot that I would love to be asking you about. I want to bring Elizabeth back in.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:34:58): Yes. I want to ask about that. That’s just-
Adam Williams (00:35:01): Go ahead.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:35:02): … oh, I love it. I love it. I think that that’s what we’re looking for, and when I even say wise counsel, it’s people who have had experiences that we lean into. We go, “You tell me more about that. I want some of what you have.”
Stacey Joslin (00:35:17): Yeah, bringing that back to mental health, my personal belief is that we have to bring a spiritual practice into our healing no matter what mental issue we’re dealing with.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:35:29): It is an important tenet-
Stacey Joslin (00:35:31): Whether we’re-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:35:32): … of all of the tenets.
Stacey Joslin (00:35:32): … actually diagnosed with something or not, or you could just suffer from anxiety, but I feel like in therapy, one of the biggest components that’s missing is the spiritual connection.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:35:45): Agreed.
Adam Williams (00:35:46): Can you think of a group, a civilization, somebody somewhere that has this sort of at least equal balance, if not priority, over spiritual experience versus where we feel like it’s stigmatized, we feel like we can’t talk like this. Religion is okay. I think some people are put off that there is a distinction even made between spirituality and religion, like it’s some sort of woo-woo trendy thing.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:36:16): Right.
Adam Williams (00:36:17): I’m putting you on the spot here. Is there anybody out there we can point to and read stories of to be-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:36:23): Oh, that’s [inaudible].
Adam Williams (00:36:23): … this is the way they lead-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:36:24): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:36:25): … their lives and their society?
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:36:26): If you look at some of my background, also being in this sociology realm, if you look at indigenous peoples, they didn’t separate this. They didn’t separate communities. They didn’t separate from what we now call mental health issues. They would call it something different. Now, we’re just in a rhetorical realm, right? We’re just talking about rhetoric.
We call it this, they call it that, but if you look at indigenous peoples that were connected to the Earth, that understood how we are no different than the trees, that we are no different than the other animals, that we are all interconnected and they live that way, that’s their spirituality realm. The tenet of all of the other tenets that they brought to the table about connectivity and community and health and mental health, even though they didn’t call it that. Rhetoric-wise, that’s what got me on the journey.
(00:37:19): My background is Native American, and I didn’t understand that when I was a kid and I had a trauma childhood as well. I think that’s what brings a lot of people into the mental health arena, to be honest. Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, sometimes it’s that physician heal thyself.
“I’m attracted to this because I need to heal within me.” That’s okay as long as you’re not doing that while you’re in practice and you can only take a client or a patient as far as you yourself have gone, so you need to grow. Saying all of that, what really got me into this spiritual realm was it was right before COVID, I actually died. I had a death experience, died, like ambulance came, kicked in the front door. They found me DOA, like dead, but I didn’t die. I know exactly where I went and I got to see things and hear things, and I know where we’re going.
(00:38:14): Without getting into the story in-depthly, when I came back, of which you don’t want to come back, so I’d like to say that. I’d like to tell people that there is peace and that where we are going, it is so incredible, and the most beautiful experience you’ll ever have on Earth is nothing. It’s one-tenth of what we experience where we’re going. Saying that, I came back and that’s actually where my first type of what I would say the kind of mental health crisis came from because I had survivor’s guilt. Why did I come back? I think I died right around the same time like Mother Teresa did. I had a lot of of like, “If you’re going to send somebody back, that’s the chick to do it. Who am I? Let’s have another Mother Teresa here.”
(00:38:57): I had survivor’s guilt. I had a lot of… I didn’t know why, and then plus the way that I died, it was very similar to drowning. I was very, very, very aware that I was dying, and that’s a very scary thing to happen, so I had a lot of trauma. I had a friend call me. It was about two weeks into the hospital and I had a friend call me and he’s very spiritual, very religious but very spiritual person. He actually goes to church with the Duck Dynasty guys. Can I say that-
Adam Williams (00:39:26): Sure.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:39:27): … so he knows? Hey, Kerry Brown. He called me when I was in the hospital and he said nobody knew. Nobody knew what happened to me. Nobody knew what I was going through, and he called me and he said… His wife is super, super spiritual, and he said, “She told me to call you. what’s happening with you?”
She’d had dreams of me the entire time it was happening, and she told him he was supposed to call me and tell me this thing that he was supposed to say to me. It was all spiritual. The whole thing was spiritual. Everything that happened was spiritual.
(00:39:59): That’s when I started to realize that was the tenet that was not only missing from my life and my practice, but from every human that I encountered, people who come to me with their struggles. I think I helped a lot of people in my career. I would like to hope that I did, but I think that I could have helped a lot more if this was an open conversation and I was able to share with them this realm of spirituality because a lot of times that is what is missing.
Adam Williams (00:40:27): Do you feel like if we go back to this idea that people might judge, in one way or another, what you are sharing publicly? That you feel like there is a little bit of a risk maybe in you sharing these things? The spiritual realm of things is not what’s common when we’re talking about mental health, medical science and all the things.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:40:49): That’s right.
Adam Williams (00:40:51): How do you feel about, both of you, how do you feel about what you’re sharing here and the fact that you are being so open with these very personal and deep and spiritual experiences and you wear these hats that are supposedly not meant to go together?
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:41:06): I’ll speak first and say that I’m having this conversation because I’m retired. Seriously, I told Stacey, so that really is, I’m a chicken. I am a chicken. I’ve had enough stuff happen to me in my life where I’m like, “Yeah, it’s not… The mental health field is now… It’s a medical leading field. It just is.” Let’s just face it. It is, and so because it’s a medical leading field, this is not something tangible that we are talking about, and therefore, I don’t know how relevant it is to health.
(00:41:34): I’m saying that speaking from where I came from, what I was trained to do. As a human being, as a human, I don’t know what else, as a human being in my experience and education combined, yes, this is a very unpopular topic in the field to which I worked, but I’m retired. You can’t hurt me anymore. Ha ha. so sorry, Stacey, I’m here to help you.
Stacey Joslin (00:41:58): Well, since I work with NAMI, NAMI does have a program that’s called NAMI FaithNet, so they have a whole spiritual-based program that we just have not been able to bring it into Chaffee County due to lack of personnel. Once again, if we have volunteers that want to get involved and get trained in how to run NAMI FaithNet, we will definitely bring it here, but I think everybody’s spiritual, whether they realize it or not. We are spiritual beings and we all maybe express it slightly differently.
(00:42:35): There’s also cultural components to it because like a Native American client coming in to get counseling is going to need to have a different type of conversation than somebody who’s like working Wall Street in New York City or something. I would just ask people to just be open-minded and don’t automatically assume that we are wrong, and we’re also not saying we’re right. We’re both saying that we’ve had these experiences and this is what we’ve learned from it. That’s all we’re sharing.
Adam Williams (00:43:06): I want to bring up stigma. The word has been out here a couple of times. All three of us would understand that from being told, like you said, Stacey, you were afraid to share. You thought you were crazy because that’s the environment, the time and place that you were growing up in where, “I can’t share these things. People are going to think it’s very strange.” We’re so used to hearing stigma placed with the words “mental health.”
Stacey Joslin (00:43:33): Mm-hmm.
Adam Williams (00:43:34): I’ve got a couple of lines of thought going on this. One is I want your opinions on if we’re gotten better about it, and I would attribute that in some way possibly to the Brené Brown effect because she’s made it okay to be vulnerable on podcasts and books and-
Stacey Joslin (00:43:49): We love Brené.
Adam Williams (00:43:50): … TEDx Talks on video. There’s a lot more of that out there now-
Stacey Joslin (00:43:50): Yeah.
Adam Williams (00:43:54): … and my second thing on that is that I realize I learned some things from my kids who, my two boys that are 12 and about 14. I’m learning on some different topics some of the things that we all take for granted as the status quo of society. They’re like, “What are you talking about?” My oldest son recently, racism came up because maybe it’s part of things with politics or whatever. He’s like, “Why is this an issue? Why are we talking? This is stupid.” The things that we put on them is what I’m getting at, if we keep talking about, if we keep associating the word “stigma” with the words “mental health,” we’re not helping the younger generation that is not necessarily assuming there’s a stigma.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:43:54): That’s right.
Adam Williams (00:44:38): They’re growing up when there are endless videos on social media-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:44:42): Mm-hmm. That’s right.
Adam Williams (00:44:42): … for example, of people baring themselves. We are doing this right now.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: That’s right.
Adam Williams: A public conversation the three of us are having-
Elizabeth Ruggiero: That’s right.
Adam Williams: … and-
Stacey Joslin: Yeah.
Adam Williams: … we’re one of very many.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:44:52): That’s right.
Stacey Joslin (00:44:52): Even just like 20 years ago, if I would have looked at you said, “You know, Adam, I think you might have a little bit bipolar, or I see something going on,” 20 years ago, that would have been an insult. You could have been like, “What are you trying to say? Are you calling me crazy type of thing?” Yeah, I think in a very short time, it has shifted a bit because being told that you have some sort of mental illness should not be an insult. It should not be a put-down and it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. People with mental illness are still people. They can heal and recover and they can be successful and be happy and live great lives.
(00:45:32): I think most of us have some sort of mental illness, honestly, because I don’t think our society is really supportive and loving, and everybody who has kids has probably gone through something with school. The teachers need more support and the kids need more support, and our police department needs more support, and it just ripples out. Parents need more support.
We all need to look at the fact that maybe we each have some sort of form of struggle just trying to live day-to-day lives, and maybe that’s okay, and maybe that’s where the conversation needs to start. If you’re having trouble just getting through your day-to-day life, it’s okay to start exploring that and engaging in self-care and start trying to find an answer and start considering maybe something is wrong and maybe that’s okay.
Adam Williams (00:46:28): We tend to mask up to go out into the world every day. We go to our offices or workplaces. I mean, that’s maybe less relevant certainly for me now and with remote work than it used to be, but I remember being so bothered when I was working in a corporate environment that people would bring in their workplace self. It was a false self. I’m like, “Why can’t I be honest? Why can’t I be real? Why can’t I be the full me here?” It was so aggravating. We mask up and don’t have deep conversations like this.
Stacey Joslin (00:47:00): Mm-hmm.
Adam Williams (00:47:00): That’s one of the reasons I love having a podcast like this because these are the conversations I want to have the fake ones where we pretend is cool. By the way, that reinforces that you should feel cool and good and everything, too. Nothing should be bothering you. That will bother me if you tell me. If I say, “How are you? What’s going on?” you better say fine–
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:47:00): That’s right.
Adam Williams: … or nothing.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: That’s right.
Stacey Joslin: Exactly.
Adam Williams: You know?
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Well, and there’s also the arena of, does the person really want to know? So-
Adam Williams: Right.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:47:28): … I think the basic communication skills that we share in the office, around the water cooler, you say, “Hello, how are you?”, to somebody on the street. You don’t really want them to stop and go, “Oh, you want to know?” No, not really. It was just my hello. It was just my hello, but I think we are missing the deeper conversations, the slowing down and the really, who are you, how are you conversations, which comes with a healthy community. If we want to talk about health, it comes with a healthy community, a healthy school system, a healthy judicial system, healthy programming on the airwave, like healthy and aiming for healthy. I think sometimes the stigma of healthy gets tied to norms. Well, then, what’s normal? Well, then, what’s normal?
(00:48:09): I think I agree with Stacey on that. I think we need to shift what normal is. I mean, every male engineer I meet, I think, “Oh, you’re on the spectrum.” You know what I’m saying? Well, here’s why, though, I think that. I’m talking about my son. I love you very much. You’re on the spectrum, and why that is is because the way that his brain works works beautifully in that realm. That’s how he’s built. That’s how he’s made, and it’s a beautiful thing, but what you would see when you saw my son is autism because he’s not normal. He doesn’t put on a mask or he doesn’t, and so why don’t we? The stigma attached to not acting normal is punitive. You better say, “Okay.” You better act okay, and so I think once we dispel with the norm or we reevaluate what normal is, it’s there’s a stigma attach to the title.
Adam Williams (00:49:04): Is normal a fallacy? You brought up autism, and I’ve been thinking about these things around neurodivergence in general, whether that’s autism, ADHD, other forms I may be less familiar with to list. First of all, my very layperson understanding is that neurodivergence is not considered a mental health matter, but I think we’re tangential here, aren’t we?
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:49:04): Yes.
Adam Williams (00:49:27): You brought up autism and normal, and I wanted to talk about both of those things because what I am feeling like is that, well, first of all, I feel foolish that it was only in recent years I figured out that my brain might work differently than everybody else’s. It should seem incredibly obvious to us that we are living among millions and hundreds of millions and billions of people on this planet. Why would we all be the same? Because of the norms, the so-called “norms” and the rules, the rules of religion, the rules of the classroom, all of these things come out from parents, everything in society is squeezing down on, “Do this thing that does not seem weird.” Conformity, right? I’m now starting to get pretty suspicious. I think we’re all different.
Stacey Joslin (00:49:27): Jump on the bandwagon of suspicion.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:49:27): That’s right. Good, good.
Adam Williams (00:50:17): I think we’re all different. I think-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:50:17): Good.
Adam Williams (00:50:18): … that neurodivergence almost seems like that’s what’s neurotypical because we are all different.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:50:23): Thank you, yes. To me, where it comes out, and I will speak… I don’t know how to separate, but as the expert or whatever in this and also the mother of a, my son cannot communicate, and I think that’s where it comes down to. Cannot communicate in a normal fashion. He can do a lot of other things, and I’m making the quote marks, “normal fashion.” He fits in, he blends, which is what we all want. We want to stand out for our perfections and hide our imperfections.
When you’re neurodivergent, it’s very difficult to do that because where he stands is his way of doing what he’s doing is normal. He can go for a week and not take a shower. Now, it starts to affect us, like, “Oh, he’s the smelly guy in a grocery store,” but it doesn’t affect him, but that’s not normal. What’s normal is you don’t be odorous enough to attract my attention unless it is in a pleasant way, so if you don’t smell like cologne or perfume. Now you’re an out. You’re one of those.
(00:51:28): Now, I’m going to pigeonhole you outside of the norm because you don’t smell right, and that’s a big one for me. I hate when people do that, and especially when they do it to each other. Can I throw my pet peeve in? I’m like, “What’s that smell?” “Calm down, people. Calm down.” “If I smell it, I smell it.” If it’s not unpleasant, unless it’s gas or something, we’re saving lives, but because that’s one of those things where you just don’t know what’s going on with that other person. Sorry, that’s a smelly pet peeve of mine, but I can’t stand when people do that. “What’s that smell?” “Calm down. Calm down.”
Stacey Joslin (00:52:00): It’s me.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:52:02): It’s me. Is that what they want you to say? “Oh, it’s me. I forgot to put on deodorant this morning. It’s me.” That outs me as other. That outs me as a normal. That outs me as… We hide those imperfections of ours, that imperfectness of ours, and we only show the world 10% of who we are anyway, and it better be the 10% within the norm.
Adam Williams (00:52:23): How do we connect with ourselves, then, when that is the society that is pressuring us and we are constantly having to try to fit to this idea? Where did norms even come from? Right? This is all constructed. I will say manmade. It probably is manmade.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:52:43): A hundred percent it is.
Stacey Joslin (00:52:43): Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:52:44): 100% it is. It’s one of the reasons I love studying about sociology and such. It’s like, “What were the norms?” If we go back to the indigenous tribes had it correctly, so let’s just say that I’m right. It’s a theory, who cares? Let’s say I’m right for a minute. Wouldn’t we look at them and say, “Okay, so how did they look at mental health?” What was normal to them in an indigenous culture of health and connectedness? What did they do? What did they consider normal? I think it’s… You could do research on that for your entire lifetime of what normal is, so I think we took that.
(00:53:14): That’s our word, right? That’s a Westernized look at, “How do we all fit in together and not stand out and be safe?” It’s about safety. Being normal is about being safe. You don’t want to stand out. If you stand out, you could get harmed, and I think in smaller indigenous cultures, that is not what happened. You were not harmed for standing out. You were not harmed from being of others. You were not harmed if you saw spirits.
Stacey Joslin (00:53:41): Yeah, you were elevated actually. You would be considered the holy person or the medicine woman or something.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:53:41): Yes.
Stacey Joslin (00:53:46): Yeah. You were respected-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:53:48): You were not looked at.
Stacey Joslin (00:53:49): … but I think in current culture, I’m going to sound like a broken record to say maybe back off of technology a little bit, but a really good way to get to know yourself is literally spend time outside. When I was a kid and I was going through all the struggles I was going through, it was not safe inside my house at all. I’m sure a lot of people can relate, but I found that when I went outside and would just sit with the trees, the trees didn’t judge me. The grass didn’t judge me. I still… The wind blew on me the same way it blew on you and there was no separation.
(00:54:26): I felt so completely myself. I could laugh if I wanted. I could be angry if I wanted. I could climb the tree or not climb the tree. It was just so calming and neutral, and as I was growing up, and it dawned on me that all of that was alive. It was life. It had its own consciousness. It had its own awareness. A tree is not a dumb tree. You can connect with it. Different kinds of trees feel differently and-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:54:56): Even scientifically, that’s been proven, like trees and the energy. If you ground yourself with a tree, if you ground it, and even if you don’t believe in this realm, scientifically, the data is there to prove. If you go outside, if you ground yourself, what it does to the human body, we’re disconnected. Whether we talk about disconnected from the earth, disconnected from each other, disconnected from our children, disconnected from our childhoods, maybe you grew up in an environment where you weren’t connected with at all. When I died, where I went was what we’re talking about. It was a place where you are connected to everything and everything is connected to it.
(00:55:31): I felt like Highlander. I mean, when I came back and I’m trying to describe it to people, which I still have trouble doing, I understood all of it. What I understood was there is absolutely no difference between me and Stacey and the sofa and you and the trees. We’re interrelated, but if you are sick, I’m sick. If our community is sick, I’m sick. If we don’t have a healthy school, whether my children are healthy or not, they walk into that building. Now, my children will be sick, and so we have to understand the interdimensional connectivity we have to everything and everything has to us.
Stacey Joslin (00:56:08): It’s not going to be sitting on the cellphone watching videos.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:56:12): That’s disrupting us.
Stacey Joslin (00:56:13): Yeah.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:56:14): That energy that that takes, again, there’s scientific studies to this. It proves that it hurts our pineal gland, that it disconnects us from ourself and from our consciousness, let alone from each other and the Earth and all, so yeah.
Stacey Joslin: Yeah.
Adam Williams (00:56:31): We live in a rural environment where we can walk outside and see stars-
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Yes.
Stacey Joslin: Yeah.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Sometimes.
Adam Williams (00:56:38): … and there’s maybe nothing that helps remind me more. Going on a hike, running trails, whatever, wonderful-
Stacey Joslin: Mm-hmm.
Adam Williams (00:56:47): … but when I can look at the stars at night, and there was one experience I got a… I mean, I don’t ever use the phrase bucket list, but it would go on there. It was one thing I wanted to do in my life was see the Aurora Borealis, and I got an opportunity to do that a handful of years ago, and there was nothing I think that reminded me more clearly there is something much bigger out here that we are just small piece of-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:57:14): Right. Mm-hmm.
Adam Williams: … and we tend to be so egocentric about this, I think, as humans, as American capitalistic sorts of humans-
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Yes.
Adam Williams: … right?
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Yes.
Adam Williams (00:57:21): We’re individualistic humans to think, “Well, my 75, 80, 90 years here is all-encompassing of everything that matters,” when really we are the tiniest blink in the universe’s eye and we forget. We get that disconnection. Stacey, early on you talked about what NAMI does in terms of going in to make these presentations with kids.
Stacey Joslin (00:57:47): Mm-hmm.
Adam Williams (00:57:48): As a parent, I think about that more in a way that I don’t recall feeling necessarily as a kid. I don’t remember middle school and high school. I mean, we all have our own stories of how that wasn’t the best time of life, whatever. I feel it more intensely now as a parent of kids that age, and in part because of things like the connections or disconnections they have due to technology-
Stacey Joslin: Mm-hmm.
Adam Williams: … to stuff that’s fed to them through the technology-
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Yes.
Adam Williams: … the inner supposed connections, the technological connections.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Yes.
Adam Williams: … with friends rather than getting outside of the walls of our house and being out in nature.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Yes.
Adam Williams: They don’t play the same that I grew up doing and I suspect you did, too.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:58:29): That’s right. That’s right. My youngest daughter, she just turned 23 and she’s brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Went to school real early, went to college real early. I mean, just absolutely smart, double major, blah, blah. I cannot brag on how intelligent this girl is and beautiful and whole. She’s a whole human. She finds it difficult to make telephone calls, and I really…
You know, she, “Oh, I have the anxiety. I have that [inaudible 00:58:54].” Well, knowing I’m her mom, I have to dig deeper and be like, “What is that?” They’re so disconnected that making a connection to another human being is very difficult for this generation. I’m just not speaking of my daughter, I’m speaking on my research and all, but it’s very difficult now for them to make connections with each other because we have disconnected them from each other and connected them to the technology.
Stacey Joslin (00:59:19): Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Adam Williams (00:59:20): It is highly possible that in my household of four, all four of us are neurodivergent, which also is part of my becoming suspicious and deciding that maybe every one of us is in our own way, which neurodivergent then is neurotypical. My older son in his sometimes slowness to go make the social connections IRL, I’ll use their language right, in real life.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:59:44): Yep. Yes, yes.
Stacey Joslin (00:59:44): Oh gosh.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:59:44): Thank you.
Adam Williams (00:59:48): He plays games that are internet-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:59:49): Yes-
Adam Williams (00:59:50): … connected-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (00:59:50): … right.
Adam Williams (00:59:51): … and he will do that with friends who are local as well. As a positive, I’m guess I’m suggesting here there is a different form of connection that my sons have made where they have friends that are across the country and around the world that they connect with some interest in common, which is a video game.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:00:09): Right.
Adam Williams (01:00:10): We see that element of it, too, and some of the skills that my older son, who especially has taken to the computer and technological sides of things. I don’t know what all he might get out of it socially, but I also know that intellectually there’s an awful lot for him there. As a parent, what I’m trying to do is balance.
Stacey Joslin (01:00:29): Mm-hmm.
Adam Williams: What is the thing with like-
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Yes.
Adam Williams: … where are the phones too much? Where do we need more of the outside with them-
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Yes.
Adam Williams: … and the connection so that they don’t lose touch with all of that?
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Yes.
Adam Williams (01:00:39): I don’t want to be a knee-jerk sort of parent that’s like, “Computer’s bad, device is bad. I didn’t grow up with them. They’re gone. You can’t have them.”
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Right.
Adam Williams (01:00:48): Where’s the balance in that? That can be rhetorical. I mean, we can move on.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:00:51): It’s your word. You answered it. Balance, is it balanced? Anything imbalanced leads to unhealthiness. A balance in and whatever that looks like for you and for your family and for your child. My neurodivergent son is an awesome gamer, but where I find the imbalance came from is he’s online with his friends, too. Are they talking? If they’re talking, I am all about that game because his issues in life are communication issues, so what a beautiful tool. He’s sitting down there talking most of the time saying stuff I don’t want to be hearing that he’s saying, but he is communicating with others in his language system.
That’s beautiful, but when it becomes unbalanced is, is that the only way he’s communicating? Is that the only arena that he does it in? If it is, it’s unhealthy. If your kid goes to school and all they do is just talk to their friends and they go home and don’t talk anymore, that’s unbalanced, and so no matter… We could be talking about food like-
Adam Williams (01:01:46): That’s a great point, I think-
Stacey Joslin (01:01:47): Yeah, like-
Adam Williams (01:01:48): … because when I was a kid, if I didn’t go home and want to talk to my parents, which was highly likely-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:01:52): Yeah.
Adam Williams (01:01:53): … okay, you’re balanced. Stacey, sorry.
Stacey Joslin (01:01:55): No, I was just going to say when you get to the point where your kids are texting you from their bedroom like, “Can you bring me dinner?” Yeah, my kids did that to me and I would walk right to their room and open the door and I’d say, “Get up and go to the kitchen and get your own food.”
Elizabeth Ruggiero: I got it, I got it.
Stacey Joslin: Yeah, I had that problem.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Same, Stacey.
Adam Williams (01:02:13): Like having what would have been before an intercom system in somebody’s house that would’ve had the money or the size-
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Sure.
Adam Williams: … or whatever, but to push the button and call for that… Only now, of course, they don’t even have to get up out of a chair or off bed or off their bed-
Stacey Joslin: They’re in their bed-
Adam Williams: … or anything.
Stacey Joslin: … yeah-
Adam Williams: Yeah.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: I was-
Stacey Joslin: … texting me.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:02:31): … I was sitting on the sofa with my daughter and I sit on the ends of the soft and we’d find funny memes and we’d text back and forth and stuff. It’s not like putting it down and talking to them, but that’s their language system. That’s their language [inaudible 01:02:38] so for me, just to go back to the base root, what I’m looking at is, does it disrupt or become unhealthy? Is it unbalanced? To me, the biggest thing that we lose is communication. The rhetorical instances of practice, sometimes we stop practicing. I think if you’re texting your daughter on the cellphone, I think it can be funny, but are you also talking to her? Yeah.
Adam Williams (01:03:02): It might be a line that’s open that otherwise isn’t, yeah-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:03:04): Right.
Adam Williams (01:03:05): … but for me, it sounds like we’re all adapting on some level to the language that our kids are looking for from us. That for me, then, is, “Okay, save the full sentences, save a paragraph, send an emoji.”
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:03:05): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:03:18):Right? What I often get back is not even a full word. It’s not even the full abbreviated word. I get, “K-
Stacey Joslin (01:03:24): [inaudible 01:03:24] has got me
Adam Williams: … as in, “Okay.”
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Yes.
Stacey Joslin (01:03:28): Although I will say I’m not going to take us down a rabbit hole here, but while we’re at it, the fact that they don’t use punctuation can lead to confusion, and this-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:03:40): They understand. Confusion with us. They understand-
Adam Williams: Right, right, right-
Elizabeth Ruggiero: … completely how to read each other, yeah.
Adam Williams: … but what they don’t want, this is in-person conversation or with texting, one of my sons that especially doesn’t want is unnecessary numbers of texts.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:03:52): Yes.
Adam Williams (01:03:52): If you do it in a way where I can’t understand what you are saying because I’m having to try to interpret and insert in my mind the punctuation that you left out-
Stacey Joslin (01:03:53): Yep.
Adam Williams (01:04:02): … you just made me have to back and forth with you again to the point you got annoyed when you were asking me to help you with something.
Stacey Joslin (01:04:08): Yeah, and you know what my son says to me when that happens?” He says, “You textecuted me.” He calls it being textecuted.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: I love that.
Adam Williams: I’m glad we’re all-
Stacey Joslin: Textecuted.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Textecuted.
Adam Williams: … having a common thing here that it’s not just-
Stacey Joslin: Oh my gosh, it’s so-
Adam Williams: … our household.
Stacey Joslin: … so yeah. Then, I would tell him, if you would have clearly stated it the very first time, this would not have happened.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:04:28): Even this in history, may I just say I’m a huge history buff. We’re having the same conversation that they have had ever since teenagers were invented. It is their job at that age to disassociate from us, to come up with their own language system and and their own friends and to be anything other than us.
They don’t want to speak our language. By the way, they don’t want us to now theirs either because if you’ve ever tried to use that language with a kid, ugh, they invent a whole new word. They don’t want you using their words and that’s very… It’s actually healthy, if I may say. It really is. They’re figuring out who they are separate from us.
Adam Williams: I love to do that. I love to use IRL-
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Oh, me, too.
Adam Williams: … sorts of-
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Oh yes.
Adam Williams: … acronyms.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Oh yes.
Adam Williams: Yeah, that gets them.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Oh yes.
Adam Williams (01:05:11): Okay. I love for conversations around these very important topics that we have sort of action item things, which we already have some of. Stacey, you mentioned NAMI, and I’m going to be able to direct people there from the show notes and they can find services and information and know how to reach out to you. There’s volunteering as well.
Stacey Joslin: Mm-hmm.
Adam Williams (01:05:31): I want if we can kind of dip into here this idea of, what can we all as non-professionals, those of us who are non-professionals, what can we all do in our daily lives that maybe helps benefit those in our lives? Whether it’s coworkers, family members, we’re talking about parenting and our kids, of course, how can we be a better part of the mental health and well-being of the people around us? Which in turn it’s going to help me-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:05:31): That’s right.
Adam Williams (01:06:02): … if I learn how to have good, say, compassion-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:06:05): That’s right.
Adam Williams (01:06:05): … or communication with my sons, wife, everybody I encounter.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:06:09): That’s right.
Stacey Joslin (01:06:09): Mm-hmm.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:06:09): That’s right.
Adam Williams (01:06:10): Stacey, would you want to lead that?
Stacey Joslin (01:06:12): Well, I think maybe just educating yourself on what we do have here in Chaffee County. Just look into it a little bit like, what does Sol Vista offer? What are all the other programs? What does NAMI offer? Then, also, I always encourage people to engage in some form of self-care. If you have a friend who’s struggling, maybe instead of saying, “Let’s go get a beer,” maybe instead you could say, “Let’s go to the hot springs.” Just connect with people on more of that human level of like, “Let’s be okay to talk about it.”
(01:06:46): If you need to tell me what’s going on in your family because you’re really stressed out, I will listen to you and then I will figure out how you could possibly get some help. Let’s go for a walk one evening or let’s go on a bike ride together so that your interactions and your relationship is based on self-care instead of based on destructive habits together or let’s go on a bike ride together so that your interactions and your relationship is based on self-care instead of based on destructive habits together.
Adam Williams (01:07:09): What do you feel like is the difference between getting a beer, which might be a way that men in particular if… Maybe I’m still applying this idea of stigma and the fact that men of a certain age and generations are less open to talking in some sort of intimate, vulnerable, courageous way, but what’s the difference between getting a beer, which might be something that helps them get out there and the idea of going to the hot springs or going for a hike?
Stacey Joslin (01:07:34): Well, I guess it would depend on the context of it, like, “Let’s get a beer and go out so that we don’t have to talk. We can just BS and get drunk and then be in denial about everything in our lives. That’s totally different, but I guess if you have the intention to actually talk, maybe getting a beer is okay. I also know that men can engage in a lot of other activities together where conversation comes out, but the activity is more important at that moment. I know men tend to work together shoulder to should with facing forward, and then women work better together face to face.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:08:16): That’s right.
Stacey Joslin (01:08:19): If you have a guy friend and you want to get him talking, do something that’s that metaphorical shoulder-to-shoulder like go out on a bike ride together. Go out rock climbing together. Go on a raft trip together, but yeah, I don’t say that there’s anything wrong with the alcohol, but it can just so easily slide down into, “Let’s use it to deny everything.”
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:08:41): Right, and so the balance and the unbalance. Alcohol could be an unbalancer for him. I think to Stacey’s point, with men, we have to recognize we all have more in common than we have that separates us. We’re all humans. We all have brains. Right? Well, some of us. We all have more in common than we don’t, but we are unique creatures, and men are different than women, another taboo think, I guess, to say, but we are because we are different. Men tend, and that’s what I mean, not all, but men tend to do what Stacey says. I used to do couples golf therapy and I’m a huge golfer. It was a great tax write-off, but it wasn’t just that. It was because men felt more comfortable getting into a conversation with me on the golf course. It was a safe zone and a safe area. We were facing forward.
(01:09:30): Whatever it is that you do, I think the utmost important thing that we’re saying is connect. That’s how you can help your community and the people you know and the people that you love. The thing I want to add to it is you have to understand that every single human being that walks around that you see that you think of or that you’ve ever met, brushed by, or whatever, has their own struggles.
If you understood the context of everyone’s life, you would be a lot kinder. If we could walk around this world like this, here’s my metaphor. If you see somebody walking down the street with tin foil on their head, pushing a shopping cart, you automatically make an assumption about him. I’m not even saying it’s wrong, it doesn’t matter, but if you do that, you don’t take that step back to think, that is a human being just like me.
(01:10:17): If you understood the context to which it made sense that that person was doing that, you would be more compassionate and kinder and understand. One of my favorite Biblical quotes, not to be religious, but is, “There but by the grace of God go I.” There are very few things that separate you and I.
You may have been born into a family with two whole healthy parents, one healthy parent, no healthy parents, but you were born into a family, and that’s what we have that is similar, and that you should have compassion for other people that did not have what you have. If we walked around doing that to everybody, and if we saw the brokenness in people and the hurt in people and use that and run it through the crucible of that and look at human beings, it would be a lot easier to have conversations like this and see what-
Stacey Joslin (01:11:09): Yeah, and then-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:11:09): … healthiness is.
Stacey Joslin (01:11:09): … I actually like to add onto that, too, is just because we brought men, men need support, too. Men need help, too, and they’re going to receive it differently than women do. That’s great because I do not believe in toxic masculinity. I think that’s a horrible term that has developed. I would like to see men bring back their warrior spirit, and I think masculinity is very valuable and necessary. It’s really sad how much men have been emasculated. Sometimes therapy for a man includes allowing them to bring back that masculine voice-
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Yes.
Stacey Joslin (01:11:51): … allowing them to be strong, allowing them to be forceful because there’s nothing wrong with it.
Adam Williams (01:11:56): I think there’s a lot we could unpack in what you just said, Stacey. When I hear warrior, I think of not just strength. I hear honor, to be a warrior then and to have that strength and to be a man in that way is to be one that functions with integrity and honor and honesty.
Stacey Joslin: Absolutely.
Adam Williams (01:12:16): Those are not things that I would associate with what we’ve come to recognize as toxic masculinity.
Stacey Joslin: Mm-hmm.
Adam Williams: You said you don’t, I don’t know if you said you don’t believe in toxic masculinity.
Stacey Joslin: Well, I don’t like that term. I think it’s very degrading.
Adam Williams (01:12:31): What is it that… How should we look at those traits of behavior? Or maybe traits isn’t the right word, but those behaviors that we have kind of put that term as an umbrella over. How do you view what those are? I assume you’re seeing those things still as problematic, or are you not? I don’t want to assume.
Stacey Joslin (01:12:51): Well, no, I mean, if you go back to tribal lifestyle and the whole planet has had their native cultures, so this isn’t just Native American or anything like that, but in a tribal culture, a man was the protector and he had his own wisdom. The unbalance of that is they didn’t go and beat the women and hurt the women in their own time.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:12:52): It was healthy and balanced.
Stacey Joslin (01:13:19): It was the healthy masculine, so they protected everybody in a healthy way as the same with the women. The women weren’t the stereotypical feminine of weak and helpless and having the perfect nails. The women weren’t like that either, so-
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:13:35): No, if somebody broke into this room right now, no matter what Stacy and I’s stance are, we would hope that you would get up first. You are stronger than we are, so if something was some dire urgency or a safety issue came up, you’re the one that could protect us the best. You’re taller, you’re stronger. Now, that doesn’t mean that this girl who took some years of kickboxing ain’t going to get up and catch your six. I got you, but if it comes down to it in society, the roles of, we’ve so dismissive of that, so completely dismissive of that. It’s unbalanced.
There are human beings that are walking on this planet. There are men that are protectors. We have dismissed them, we have labeled them. Now, I’m not talking about aggressive, I’m not talking about abuse. I’m not talking about anything toxic, and I think that’s Stacey’s point. Masculinity is not toxic.
Stacey Joslin (01:14:35): No, not in itself.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:14:37): Toxic-
Stacey Joslin: No.
Adam Williams: Right.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: … is toxic.
Stacey Joslin (01:14:39): Yeah. Yeah, and I agree with you. Well, I use the term “spiritual warrior,” which like you just said, it encompasses the connection from the spirit to the physical realm. It’s honor, it’s integrity, it’s honesty, it’s foresight. It’s being able to plan. It’s being able to organize and structure and build so that it benefits the whole tribe. That nowadays when men stand up to do that, or if men stand up to say, “No, this isn’t right,” or, “I don’t like what the government’s doing,” or, “I don’t like the foreign policies,” then there’s a group of people that are labeling that as bad trying to squash it. I think that’s a very sad thing. I don’t like seeing that happen. I think for men, mental health is being able to be that spiritual warrior and being supported by the feminine energy in their life, whether it be wife or daughter or mother, whoever it is.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:15:40): Right, and I think one of the things, my take, too, is in society, we’ve done ourselves a disservice in we have imprisoned way too many Black males. We’re not taking into consideration that we set them up to be imprisoned. When you’re in an impoverished socioeconomic place where you can’t get out of it, that makes me absolutely sick when people say, “Well, you live in… ”
I’m from Connecticut, so New York, Connecticut area, and it’s just the impoverished areas. How do you get out? If you have no money and you don’t have a job and there’s no cars in those rural areas, how do you leave? How do you get… What now is your choice? It’s survival, and in order to survive, I have to do bad things because there are not good things or good opportunities around me. Now, society is going to punish me for doing the… It always reminds me of Les Mis. If you’ve ever seen, he got in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to give to his sister’s children.
(01:16:46): What a beautiful story of our society. Sorry, I love it so much because it’s so reflective of where we are. Take a step back and what is crime? What is true, equal punishment? What is justice? What is that? We have a society now where we imprison people for doing what we force them to do, and I have this whole theory about it. We unsheathed each other. If the male is the protector of the family system, which I believe, this is my belief stance, okay, this is me. If you wanted to control or annihilate that family system, the first thing you have to do is take off the sheathing, take off the protection. What do you do? Take the males out of the household-
Stacey Joslin (01:17:24): Put them in prison.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:17:25): … and put them in prison. Then what do you do? You tell the women that are left to caregive children, “Oh girl, you could do it. You can do this. You can do this on your… You can bring home-
Stacey Joslin (01:17:26): “You can work.”
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:17:33): … “the bacon. You could fry it up in a pan.”
Stacey Joslin (01:17:34): “You can raise the kids.”
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:17:37): “It’s all right.” No. No, I have been a single mother. Stacey’s a single mother. I need help. It’s hard, so I’m raising my hand for myself and maybe my sisters that agree with me that it is hard. It is hard to be a single parent, male or female. It is hard. Why did we do that? Why do we say it’s okay> Why did we make it normal? One, to me, the reason we did that is we unsheathed ourselves. We said, “You don’t need a husband and you don’t need a father.” Children are growing up fatherless, women are single, and it was not ever meant to be the way we should do it. It’s not healthy. It’s unbalanced.
Stacey Joslin (01:18:15): It may be normal, but it’s not healthy there.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Oh, beautiful. Clap. Clap.
Stacey Joslin: Yeah. Thank you.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: I like that.
Stacey Joslin: Yeah.
Adam Williams (01:18:22): Thank you very much for all of the insight and passion and emotion and everything that you’ve brought to this conversation. I think it was a lot of what I wanted and so much more than I even knew we could do, so thank you very much to both of you.
Elizabeth Ruggiero (01:18:37): Thank you.
Stacey Joslin: Yeah, thank you.
Elizabeth Ruggiero: Thank you for having us.
Stacey Joslin: This was wonderful.
[transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (01:18:51): Thanks for listening to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream Podcast. I hope that our conversation here today sparked curiosity for you, and if so, you can learn more in this episode’s show notes at wearechaffeepod.com.
If you have comments or know someone in Chaffee County, Colorado, who I should consider talking with on the podcast, you can email me directly at adam@wearechaffeepod.com.
I also invite you to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever platform you use that has that functionality. I also welcome your telling others about The Looking Upstream Podcast. Help us to keep growing community and connection through conversation.
(01:19:28): Once again, I’m Adam Williams, Host, Producer, and Photographer. Jon Pray is engineer and producer. Thank you to KHEN 106.9 FM, our community radio partner in Salida, Colorado, and to Andrea Carlstrom, Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment, and to Lisa Martin, Community Advocacy Coordinator for The We Are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative.
The Looking Upstream Podcast is a collaboration with The Chaffee County Department of Public Health and The Chaffee Housing Authority, and it’s supported by The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Office of Health Equity. You can learn more about The Looking Upstream Podcast at wearechaffeepod.com and on Instagram at wearechaffeepod. You also can learn more about the overall We Are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative at wearechaffee.org.
Till the next episode, as we say it, we are Chaffee. Share stories. Make change.
[outro music, horns and guitar]
