Mental Health Awareness, Part 2
Extended show notes and remembering Frank
We waited to share the second half of the transcript from Episode 34, Mental Health Awareness, until today because it would have been Dr. Frank Falk’s 83rd birthday. Frank has been mentioned several times in posts and podcast episodes, and he was our guest in Episode 5, Researching Overexcitability.
Chris shared a tribute post about Frank in November 2023. Here’s a photo of Frank delivering his keynote address at the 2022 Dąbrowski Congress, “Kazimierz Dąbrowski: The Existential Therapist.”
Thirteen months after his death, he is still very missed by those who loved him.
Here is Part 2 of the transcript. [If you missed Part 1, click here].
Emma: We've got this tool [TPD], and it works. In some instances, it's an absolute lifesaver. In my mind, we've got a responsibility to get it out there in as many places as humanly possible so that it can help other people because I've seen the magic that it can do because it's happened in my life. It's happened in your life, Chris. It's happened in the lives of plenty of the people that we've had on the podcast. Even some of the feedback we get with emails is how much of a game-changer this theory can be, but it's not out where it needs to be.
Chris: I'm glad you mentioned the people who write to us because that's part of what makes me feel bad right now. It's hard to keep up. We get a lot of emails from people who resonate with what we're saying and who get it. I want you to know how meaningful that is for us. We try to get back to everybody, and we will get back to you eventually. We appreciate everybody's patience.
It's amazing to me that I went through all of these disintegrations. I wish that I had known when I was young that all of that suffering meant something. That something positive would come from it. I had no idea, and I wanted to kill myself. I couldn't see what was on the other side of my suffering.
Emma: We're talking about this tool and how useful it is, and one of my observations is that anytime I go to a mental health website looking at what their content is or how they're framing mental health, you never see any mention of neurodivergence. So, when we're talking about why people might feel depressed or anxious, never any mention that, oh, perhaps you might be neurodivergent, maybe that's why you've got really big feelings, or perhaps that's why you have a bit more anxiety than the average Joe. There's no mention of that.
That really bothers me. But there's also a real lack of recognition of Dąbrowski's theory—of the role of emotions and how they can be normal responses to the world. There seems to be that fundamental lack of saying that sometimes it's okay to feel like shit, particularly when circumstances in your life are shit, and this is going to be a normal response.
Because that's part of the reason why I ended up on antidepressants at one point, and I decided to stop taking them. If they had just probed a little bit further before tucking me on pills, they would have understood that I was in such a shit situation with my home life that it's like, dude, you've got to leave. Really, that's your solution. The pills were not the solution. The solution was to get out of the shitty circumstances that I was in. But when you're looking at mental health websites, they're all like, well, it's something within you that you're just having these bad feelings. And it's like, where is the recognition that there are some really vulnerable people out there, and they're just having a normal response to the crap in their lives?
Even if you're not conscious of it, some people can be struggling. Maybe they're getting career fatigue, or their relationship's starting to go sour, or they're just struggling. We're now seeing articles about finances leading to adverse mental health. It's like, I don't see that as adverse mental health. If you're struggling with money and you're always broke, it's normal to feel like that. But there's no recognition of the normalcy and the situations where sometimes these things are quite fine things to feel.
Chris: Oh, absolutely. You made me think of a conversation that I had with Frank about the book Developmental Psychotherapy. It's an unpublished manuscript from Dąbrowski. And Frank, when he was reading that book, was so blown away by learning about Dąbrowski's therapeutic approach with his patients.
Dąbrowski would sit down with his patients and help them come to conclusions about who they were. He would help them understand their developmental potential, frame it for them as strengths, and identify what kind of dynamisms were going on with them.
So, when Frank was reading this stuff, after spending his career working with overexcitability, he saw it was this theory that applied to mental health and helping people out of suffering. It was such a cool thing to work through that kind of book with him and see how this stuff really holds up and that that's what we want to do for people now.
We should be helping people identify—if you have overexcitabilities, these are not things that are wrong with you. You do have to learn how to live like this, but like you said, you also have to take stock of your environment—what is my life like right now?
When I was suffering in these times that I've been describing today, I was living with my alcoholic father. This man died at 52 from alcoholism. It was a traumatic situation to have a parent like that. There were also traumatic events happening in my life that went along with how we were living. I've witnessed violent events, and it was traumatic on multiple levels.
It was a natural reaction to my environment to be feeling those feelings and struggling like I was. It's sad that I thought there was something wrong with me. It blows me away that I was always like, oh, this is a mental illness. It's not a natural reaction to this environment where my father has signs of dementia in his early forties from alcohol. That was traumatic.
Emma: It probably is. And it's a perfectly normal trauma response as well. When I say normal, I mean like anyone else who was going through that probably would have had some of the same reactions, but this is the whole band aid on cancer thing, right? It's like we're looking at the symptoms and, oh, you've got these bad feelings, let's deal with that. And sometimes, when people go to therapy, they’re trying to dig down to the underlying causes of this.
But for people who aren't actually engaged with a professional and aren't going to therapy, maybe they can't afford it, or maybe they're a bit nervous about it. Some of that information needs to sit in the public space. To open up those conversations in the first place, to say, okay, this is how anyone would react to those circumstances. Maybe you've got circumstances in your life that are giving you trauma or bad emotions, but that's okay, and it's okay to need to talk to someone about it.
But if you don't mention that and open the doorway for those ideas to get into people's heads, if you don't start saying the message, maybe you're not broken, and open that door of thought, then there are so many people who are just going to stay hidden and aren't going to come forward with their stuff.
Chris: You have to crack that door so that somebody can see that there's another way of looking at it. That's absolutely what happened to me.
Last weekend, we had the Dąbrowski Study Group, which Frank ran. It was our first one without him, so we talked a lot about him. It's hard for me to believe now the way that things unfolded. That I met these people, and they’ve had the impact that they had on me.
I met Frank and Nancy, and Nancy said, “Oh, you should write a paper for the journal Advanced Development about the autoethnography you did.”
Because I was telling them about the study I did to figure out what had gone wrong—the research question for my autoethnography was, what went wrong with me? How did I go from gifted child to mental patient? I was trying to understand how I could be gifted and mentally ill. So, I described it to them. She was like, well, you should write a paper about that. And I did.
I wrote this paper, I submitted it, and that's how I met Michael. He first wrote to me as an editor, and he offered to help me with this paper. He was like, this is pretty rough right now, but you have the stories, and you did this work. So, yeah, I'll help you.
I saw him as so intimidating. I didn't want to work on the paper with him. I said, I don't want to [work with] Michael Piechowski. He's going to tell me that it's overexcitability, and I knew that I was mentally ill. It's such a trip in retrospect to remember that I was like, “Oh, I don't want this guy to challenge my thinking.”
But that's exactly what he did. He said, “I don't see your ADHD. I don't see your mental illness.”
He definitely just saw it as overexcitability and giftedness, but there was a lot of truth to that. It turns out that there's not something wrong with me. I identify as neurodivergent. I don't know exactly what labels I would have, but I know I'm atypical. But there's nothing wrong with me.
Emma: No, but can you imagine having that conversation on a large scale? If it was hard for you to take that message and shift your thinking that, oh, maybe I'm not broken. Maybe this is not a mental illness. Doing that on a large scale is daunting, to say the least. To try and put this theory out and say to all sorts of people that are currently working in the mental health space, “Hey, here's a new way to think about things, but it might really break your head open and challenge the way that you're thinking about shit.”
That seems like a monumental hurdle because the way of thinking with the theory is so drastically different, and you are going to push those things that people are holding on to, these really deep-set beliefs, not just about how people see themselves, but how they view mental health, anxiety, depression as a whole. This is not an easy conversation to have on a broad scale, let alone with one person.
Chris: I think that that's what I'm hoping we'll be able to get across with the podcast. I know that there are practitioners who listen. We have a variety of listeners.
Emma: We do have a variety of listeners, but I think it's necessary that we start talking about this stuff. Because if we just try and talk about it from a therapist's perspective, we're going to get pushback. And there's going to be people who don't want to work with the theory.
We can't rely on people who are in treatment to take this theory to their therapist and go, “Here's something I want to discuss. I found this new way of thinking. Can we talk about it?”
I think we have to attack this from as many angles as possible, even to make an inroad, simply because it is so challenging to the way people are thinking about stuff at the moment.
Chris: I hope we can reach people. I never know how to talk about it. The most effective way to reach the most people—I realize I tend to be too in the weeds with details. It's because I have been trained to be a scholar. This is my job is to be in the details about stuff.
But I realize that that's not going to be my most effective way to bring the theory to the people. And that's who I want to bring it to. At the end of the day, I want to reach you, listener, and help you get the most benefit out of this theory. Whether you need it because you're struggling right now or because you're doing work with people and you want to help them with it, I think that we're trying to cast the widest net.
Feel free to give us feedback on what you think would help us be more effective if you have it. We're certainly open to that.
Emma: We went on that
Podcast and we were talking about—we've got to try and hang our mirrors so people can see themselves reflected in this thing in as many places as possible. It's like, we've got the mirror, but has anyone got any nails or a hammer or some spare wall space that we can stick this on?So, it's funny that you said to give us feedback. I'm thinking, yeah, if anyone's got any ideas on mental health spaces or other places where we can talk about this theory, I'd invite you to let us know. Because that's the challenge Chris and I have at the moment. How do we open the door, get our foot in, to enable us to talk about this stuff and have these challenging conversations in the right spaces? I'm a bit stuck. I don't know the answer to that question.
Chris: I think it's more than even just asking the question. I want to give permission to people who are listening right now—go forth with the theory and apply it. Use it however you see fit. Use it to make your lives more effective and to help other people. We need to constantly be thinking, who can we help with this theory? How can we bring it to somebody who can benefit from it? That's the thing.
I want to acknowledge that it was SENG who asked us to do this episode and be a part of Mental Health Awareness Month. I'm grateful to Lin Lim. She has given us a chance to share with their audience. I'm grateful because I know that gifted people are the majority of our listeners and people who work in this field. This is who we're probably reaching more than anybody else right now, but we need to go beyond that population. This theory has such broad applicability beyond the gifted that it's really important that we do the best we can to get the message out there. We're not able to do it on our own. So, thank you to everybody.
Thank you to Abbie [VanMeter]. I'm glad you mentioned that Stories Lived, Stories Told is the podcast we were recently on. It's so great to reach new audiences and to have these chances to collaborate with other people who have similar aims and goals.
I see a generational shift right now when it comes to those of us who or using the language of neurodivergence. When I said earlier, I don't know what labels I should apply to myself—I am comfortable with ADHD. That’s not something I think is wrong with me anymore, but I certainly used to. I put in my dissertation that I had “cognitive deficits” from ADHD. That's how I saw myself several years ago—as having something wrong with me. So, I know that when we're doing an episode like this, we're just trying to hold up a mirror to people. We're always trying to do that. We talk about that a lot.
I'm glad that we did this episode. I feel a lot better. I'm grateful that I was able to talk about Frank. I really needed to do that. Frank was on Episode 5 of the podcast, talking about Researching Overexcitability. He was such a kind, gentle person. The day I founded the Dąbrowski Center, he sent me a check. He supported me in every way. I couldn't have asked for a better friend and mentor than Frank.
I have been very blessed to have Frank and Michael as my mentors. I needed both of them, and they're such different people. Frank was so willing to get in the weeds with me. I could send him any thoughts. He was there for me and such a great person. I appreciated him so much, and I miss him already. So, thanks for letting me talk about him, too.
Emma: That was beautiful. Thanks to you for being so open and talking about your stuff. I know it's a really difficult time for you at the moment, and Frank was a lovely, beautiful human, so no doubt you’re feeling his loss quite strongly. And for someone who feels things quite strongly anyway, that's saying something.
But also thanks to our listeners for being with us through what was a difficult conversation at times. I hope everybody's out there looking after yourself. And, you know, Chris, it's an absolute pleasure and honor to be here as a friend to you and allow you the space to talk about this stuff. So, thank you. Thanks to our listeners. It's been a great conversation.
I'm going to challenge everybody out there—do it Frank, do it for Chris, do it for yourself. Whoever you need as your inspiration, go out there, share the message, as Chris said, work with the theory in whatever way is applicable to you, but share information as well. We sometimes talk about the fact that we don't never know who the theory is going to help. It might be someone in your life that you don't know that they need it, and we're really looking for needles in an eight billion human haystack who might not know that they're needles.
Share resources, links, whatever on your social media, talk about positive disintegration in as many spaces as you can, and share this wonderful tool that's clearly made such a difference through beautiful, loving humans in both of our lives because you could be that beautiful, loving human that makes a difference in someone else's life.
Chris: That was perfect. Thank you so much, Emma. I've so appreciated your friendship and support through all of this. And thank you, listeners. I always feel connected with you. Frank was in the hospital at the end of his life, and he wasn't able to read anymore. But he was listening to the podcast, and it was so heartwarming to know that he could do that. He will be missed.
It's been a pleasure, as always. I didn't know I would be able to do this, so thank you.
Emma: Thank you for sharing. Thank you for being here. It is always a pleasure. And thank you, listeners. We always appreciate you, too.