Thank you everyone for being so patient with me as I took another needed break. I deeply appreciate all of you.

I've recently been diagnosed with CPTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and in this episode, I talk about what CPTSD feels like and briefly touch on some of the memories I have recovered (not intentionally) and how they have contributed to my diagnosis. I also talk about what it feels like to remember traumatic experiences and reiterate how we are not alone in this journey. There is someone out there who needs to hear this, so I am going to say it: You are not alone. 

The wonderful Sean McMullen returns to Optimistically Depressed to talk about his excursions as Saltwater Sean, the thrills of discovering what lies under the sea, and how the exposure to cold water benefits him physically and mentally as it requires him to listen more closely to his body and mind. 

Have a listen and be sure to check out his YouTube and Instagram accounts under Saltwater Sean!

https://www.youtube.com/c/SaltwaterSean

https://www.instagram.com/saltwater_sean/

Are you looking for ways to improve your emotional and physical well-being? Do you struggle with some of your thoughts and feelings?

Pat Sebastien, CEO of Moodie Inc, & I sat down to discuss the app Moodie, which is designed to be your personalized wellness companion. Try it out and find a place to reflect, get helpful information, encouragement, guidance, and some coping activities.

Moodie enables you to change your mood through customized engagements called Actions and gives you the ability to create Routines that will help you create positive habits. The only way to change a behaviour is to practice doing it. This format will help you to understand your habits better.

You can click either of these links below to get 25% off your first three months!

http://feelingmoodie.com/opde/

http://feelingmoodie.com/optimisticallydepressed/

It's amazing how many contributors there are to the inability to regulate our emotions. They feel like this involuntary experience that takes over our body - you know the feeling - the anger takes over and all you see is red, or the sadness is crippling. It's like the only options we have are to let the emotions take over or to resist them. 

Turns out those aren't the only options. We can actually have a good relationship with our feelings, who woulda thought?!

Have a listen for good coping mechanisms and habits we can work on in order to love our emotions.

What do we all share? Our emotions. While the way we experience them is unique, the feelings themselves are what connect us. With something so powerful, we need to be aware of how we use them and, while protecting ourselves, we can also use the gift of emotions to create empathy. And that, friends, is how we can help heal the world.

So let's take care of our emotions and talk about them.

After a much needed break, I’m feeling mostly refreshed and ready to get back to all of you and share what’s been on my mind for the past six months.

It isn’t a surprise that it’s been rough, but it’s brought me to some realizations that were learned through tough lessons and many tears.

Thanks for waiting so lovingly for me and I am thrilled to finally continue our journey together.

It's Rumination time! 

I got more topics for discussion from you beauties and used the opportunity to practice being more honest and raw with my opinions. I can't wait until all this crap with Covid is over. One of you asked what I'm looking forward to doing when that happens so I talk a bit about that.

Next, I discuss my thoughts on the importance of taking responsibility for and maintaining our own mental health and not taking on the responsibility of anyone else’s. I finish off the episode by talking about the importance of listening to our bodies in order to allow the pain and discomfort associated with some feelings to move their way through, opening up room for the pleasant feelings to take up space.

Thank you everyone who contributed to this podcast with your discussion points. I hope you find this to be beneficial!

The glorious Lindsay Umlah joins Optimistically Depressed for a second time! 

I saw a post she made on Instagram about being enough and it struck me. There are many areas we need to work through when it comes to feeling like we measure up and believe me, I've been working on them. The first one I wanted to tackle was being enough as myself, with my personality and my opinion. I've made great progress in that area and I've been dedicating a lot of focus to it. But another area that haunts me is my body image. 

I know I'm not alone here. We each have our unique struggles with it. I have identified as being thin - very thin. And it was something I don't recall thinking much about growing up because I was a scrawny kid. But now I'm older and my body has some more miles on it. My body has changed. My eating habits change with the season, especially with emotional seasons. Let me tell you, over the past couple years, I have been through some dark emotional seasons, and I find comfort in food. As a result, my body has changed and I have felt so much shame about it.

Lindsay and I talk through these things along with some other good stuff. If you need a reminder of why you are enough and that you aren't alone in feeling like you aren't, this talk is for you.

Hey friends! 

This week I thought I’d do another rumination. I asked for some suggestions on what to talk about and suggestions were made! I talk on some tips I’ve learned on how to stay sane during quarantine and how to take care of ourselves. Then I venture a little into the world of astrology - something I’ve learned a bit about recently and am rather intrigued by. 

I hope all of you are doing well and this episode can help you feel less alone. Sending my love!

Anyone else feel like a caged animal right about now? Like you need to get out but you also have so much fear around going out because you don't want catch Covid-19 and bring it home to your family? 

Needless to say, the past couple months have been somewhat traumatic for all of us, which is why I think it is the perfect time to hear what Shannon has to say about C-PTSD (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and how EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) Therapy helped her reprocess and move through her trauma. This opened her up to many other effective practices when sorting through pain and abuse and continuing to release trauma. These practices include meditation, therapeutic writing and art therapy, which she now teaches through her counselling practice in London, Ontario.

Shannon is deeply compassionate person who instantly makes a connection and provides a safe space where you feel free to talk with her about anything. That being said, it may be helpful to know that Shannon provides counselling sessions over Zoom, so if you're looking for some extra help and counselling right now, I recommend checking her out. You can either find her at @moyer_and_co on Instagram, go to her website at https://www.moyerandco.com/ or you can also go to her other website, https://insighttimer.com/sweetstellas, where she provides guided meditations.

Rumination time! 

I tried out Ruthy's Rumination many months ago and have recorded others since but haven't released them because I'm not ready for that level of vulnerability. And now here we are, one that made the cut!

I want to thank the people who made suggestions for what I could talk about. I hope that if you listen to this you find what I had to say on your topic to be helpful or interesting.

I took this podcast as an opportunity to express my thoughts on cutting out relationships, no matter how important you think they are, as well as taking a deep look at who you are by going into the darkness you have created inside yourself out of fear, and then finished off the episode with what hope means to me. 

I hope you enjoy this week's episode and I hope you are taking care of yourself.

Ok, it's been something like four weeks since we've had to stay home, right? Perhaps some of us still need more time to grieve, but others may be noticing a crossroads. What next? Shall I plunge into self-destruction? Sink into mediocrity? Honestly, I couldn't blame you for doing either. How many of us have been through such an experience? It's difficult to decide how to behave and each of our circumstances at home are different.

However, there are some of you who are either knowingly or unknowingly looking at some options. You can decide how you will behave during this experience. 

The conversation Alexa brings to the table is one to consider. This is a woman whose fire inspires and challenges you to consider new ways of thinking and therefore new ways of living. So, if you are looking for that spark of innovation, look no further and enjoy.

Freedom. Ah, doesn't that sounds especially sweet right now?

We may be feeling a little caged right now since we can't go out and visit our friends, but the most effective cage in our lives is our mind. Now, I don't expect that statement to be particularly shocking. Our culture is becoming more sensitive to mental health and the influence our minds have over our lives so we mostly have this basic understanding. That is a great start, but where to go from there? Ok, our mind is holding us back. But how? What does that look like? And what do we do about it?

Have a listen to my conversation with the brilliant Abigail. Her fresh insights offer a new way to break through the limits we place on ourselves. 

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The youngest of four, Abigail was born in the UK to artist parents. With the backdrop of rugged Dartmoor and a home full of creativity, art came naturally and she grew up drawing, spending thousands of hours mastering realism.

As a young adult, she abandoned drawing completely while she and her husband travelled together. They lived in New Zealand for several years before venturing to the East Coast of Canada where they settled and raised three children.

One day about 15 years later, she picked up a piece of charcoal from the embers of a fire and started to draw again, instantly reigniting her passion for art. Charcoal was a medium she had never worked with and she had never drawn an animal, but they both took her hand and led her into the wilderness…

https://abigaillower.com

I think we’re starting to get to a point where we’re really starting to understand this pandemic isn’t going away soon. I know we “knew” that, but we didn’t really know that. That make sense? It’s like the five stages of grief. We’re starting to move through them and mourn our old lives while wondering what out new ones will look like. It’s kinda scary.

Sean and I talk about how we’re feeling and manage to get some laughs in. Things feel so heavy lately it seems. It’s nice to have an honest talk about it while remembering how nice it is to joke around. I hope all of you enjoy it, too.

This thing is just getting started, but hang on. Let’s try not to lose hope. It’s times like these where some of the best stuff comes through the human spirit.

I hope all of you are doing well. If you are struggling, my heart goes out to you. If you have lost someone to this horrible virus, from the bottom of my heart, I am sorry. I have been thinking about those who are hurting from this. I can't imagine the pain. The best thing I know to do about that right now is staying home and creating what I can from here and then sending it out to you.

We changed things up a little this time and Marc interviewed me! We talked about what I've been up to and some of the things I have been doing to try to cope while being isolated with my husband and three young kids. There were a couple challenges, which I know is the case with pretty much everyone. Some included the fact that I couldn't exercise because of some issues I have been having with my lungs (but I just got cleared to start exercising from home again yesterday which has me thrilled!). The inconvenience of not being able to exercise had me looking for other ways to cope and I found a few. One of them includes using the Calm app, which has a free seven day trial so you can see if you like it (I made a mistake in the episode and said I thought it was a 30 day free trial - sorry!). Here's a link to Calm: https://www.calm.com/

Have a listen! I hope you find it helpful and it makes you feel a little less alone in this time. Stay inside and stay healthy!

It's so great to have a friend that you can talk to about anything, including the stuff that we generally hate talking about, ie: confrontational stuff. Candyce is one of those people that can look at a problem and not only find a solution, but break it down in a way that is non-threatening and provides a solution before there is even a problem. Talk about the perfect recipe for a happy community.

Candyce and I discuss the ways to build happy, healthy and proactive relationships and how to avoid the self-sabotage that comes along with the feeling that things are too good to be true.

Listen in on this, the spoon theory and much more in this latest episode.

We all have a part of our pasts that we can feel the victim of, and the truth is that when we’re children, we are the victim. But what about when we become adults? Do we carry the victim status along with ourselves or do we grab the pen which has been writing our life story so far and take over?

Christy Ann has quite literally grabbed that pen and started writing through her own struggles and thought patterns with fictional stories. Her witty and thoughtful tales show a reflection of herself in different quantities, and the quality of her stories resonate in your bones.

We cover some of her tales in our episode together and also discuss the feeling of being an idiot and how to prove that feeling wrong.

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CHRISTY ANN CONLIN is the author of three critically acclaimed books, Heave and The Memento, and most recently, Watermark, a short story collection. Heave was a national bestseller, a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals including Best Canadian Stories, Brick, Geist, Room, Numéro Cinq and Review. Her work has also been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the American Short Fiction Prize. Her radio broadcast work includes co-creating and hosting CBC Fear Itself, a national summer radio series, along with documentaries for CBC The Doc Project and CBC Outfront. Christy Ann was born and raised in seaside Nova Scotia, where she still resides along with her big quirky sandwich generation family and assorted livestock. Christy Ann is also a passionate mental health advocate and motivational speaker.

We’ve heard from this guy before, but I had to interview him again. Lee Fraser is one of those minds that many try to mimic, and why? Because when he sets his mind on something, he gets it done.

This past weekend, I got to participate in a weekend Lee is well known for hosting: the Creatives Weekend. Over the span of either three or four days, creatives participate in workshops, socializing, creative feats and outdoor exploration. There’s something for everyone.

I got to speak at this event as well as do a live podcast with the man himself. Lee gives us another peak into what drives him as well as the emotions and mental obstacles that come along with rejection or things just not going as planned. His main motto? It’s simple. F*ck it.

Have a listen as this inspirational guy gives us a lesson and a laugh, and check out his own podcast, Living Life Intently.

One of the mental disorders that has a lot of confusion around it is Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Many people get a little freaked out at the idea, but they don't need to be.

Wren Kelly openly discusses her symptoms with BPD and what they feel like. She describes what she does to counteract her symptoms and the mental discipline needed to do so.

Get ready for an open and honest discussion about the illness that Hollywood loves to take advantage of and why it doesn't necessarily need to be that scary.

Inspiration graces us in many forms and in this case, it comes in the form of my friend Verity. I am thrilled to have her back on Optimistically Depressed.

As a professional hypnotherapist, she has shared with me several helpful insights for managing my thoughts.

This time Verity returns to talk about anxiety, being properly aware of danger and the mindset needed to climb mountains. Among her many talents, Verity is quite the mountaineer and will be climbing to the Everest base camp this May! Tune in to listen to how that came about and how she is preparing herself for the feat.