Sarah Sarkis: I guess if I had to go back to my 23-year-old self, I would encourage myself to be more comfortable in the discomfort of maybe not being so sure about what you want to do for your life.
Speaker 2: You're listening to the MILF Podcast. This is the show where we talk about motherhood and sexuality with amazing women with fascinating stories to share on the joys of being a MILF. Here's your host, the MILFiest MILF I know, Jennifer Tracy.
Jennifer Tracy: Hey guys, welcome back to the show. This is MILF Podcast, this is the show where we talk about motherhood, entrepreneurship, sexuality and everything between. I'm Jennifer Tracy, your host. I wanted to tell you guys a story in two parts, before I introduce today's guest. Because this story is very personal, it's very vulnerable and yet it's so important that I share it because it speaks to exactly why I have this podcast, exactly why I'm here and everything I believe in about stories and women's voices and mental health. About three weeks ago, right before I interviewed April Uchitel, the CEO of Violet Grey, I was in a pole dancing class and I hit my head on the pole really hard, really, really hard. I've been taking pole dancing class for five years and that's never happened, but it happened that day.
Jennifer Tracy: It was just one of those things as I always had my eyes closed. I thought the pole was further away from me than it was. I whiffed my head around and bam, the front of my skull hit the pole dead on. It immediately started to swell into an egg on my forehead. I was okay for the first 60 seconds, maybe two minutes. I finished my dance. I was done dancing. I said, "Oh, I hit my head and there's a lump." The teacher came over and felt the lump and she said, "Okay, let's get some ice." It was a really big lump. Then, I started crying. All the women in the class circled around me, the class was over anyway. We all went out into the lobby. They laid me down on the sofa and I just was sobbing. I was sobbing and sobbing and sobbing.
Jennifer Tracy: Two things happened. I couldn't stop crying. Later my friend Terra told me it was about two hours. I thought it was like 20 minutes, 30 minutes. She's like, "No, honey, you were crying for two hours." I was crying. I was crying for all these different reasons. I was grieving over the loss of my marriage. I was grieving over the loss of my friend who took her life in October. It just was pouring out of me and the hit on the head just opened this, like a dam opening. That's one thing that happened.
Jennifer Tracy: The second thing that happened is that I was so embarrassed. Not just that I had hit my head in a stripper pole in a pole dancing class, which is a very safe loving, nurturing environment full of women. It's just a beautiful place where it's not about being exploited of. It's very loving and nurturing. I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed of that. I was embarrassed that I was having these emotions and that people felt a desire to care for me. I felt like a terrible burden. I felt like, "No, no, no. Go. You have kids. You have appointments. Go, go, go." They said, "No, no, no. People that had to go went and we're staying because we want to stay and you would do the same thing if it was one of us."
Jennifer Tracy: I knew at the core of me that that was right, because of course I would. I love helping whenever I can. For me, being of service to another human being is the life blood of my journey. Yet, it was so hard for me to accept this love and this nurturing. I just wanted to be invisible. There was a big lesson in that for me. Then, I had a huge egg on my head for … I still have a lump, but it's much smaller now. I had an egg for at least 10 days and a huge black eye on both eyes that just kept growing and changing. It was dark and got darker and then it was yellow and green. It was really bad.
Jennifer Tracy: I had this story going along with it. Then, a few days ago, I had this other experience. This is the second part of my story and then I am going to introduce our guest today. I was having very severe suicidal ideation. For those of you who don't know what suicidal ideation is, it's when you are thinking about killing your self, thinking about ending your life, thinking about wishing to be dead, that kind of thing. I haven't had this in many, many, many years. As I've shared on the show, I've been treated for depression since I was in my early 20s and I was treated for postpartum depression two years after my son was born. I'm very familiar with this feeling and these thoughts and it came on extremely suddenly and it scared me.
Jennifer Tracy: It also was very insidious and divisive. What was happening was I was dissociating from myself. I wasn't emotional about it at all. I was making a grocery list in my head. After about 48 hours of this, I reached out to two people. I reached out to my therapist and I reached out to one of my best friends. They came in immediately and brought me to the psychiatrist and the psychiatrist said, "Okay, you are going to UCLA, I'm going to call ahead. They're going to examine your head and your neural functions to see about this lump on your head," even though at that point it was two weeks old, "then, they're going to give you a psych evaluation."
Jennifer Tracy: My friend drove me to the ER and they checked me in. They asked me all these questions and they said, "Here's your scrubs." They were going to give me a gown, but thank God they didn't because I'm almost six feet tall and it would have been like I was practically naked and it was cold in there so they found these scrubs. They let me wear the scrubs but they took my clothing. They took my personal effects. They went through my things. I was completely compliant. It was such a lesson in asking for help before. Everyone that was there, the nurses, the doctor that came and examined me particularly the two psychiatrists that came and examine me and evaluated me so that I could go home.
Jennifer Tracy: They were detaining me. They said, "We have to detain you because you said you've been having these thoughts." I said, "Absolutely, I want to be safe. I need to be stable. I have a child." Even though this is very vulnerable and it's scary and there's such a stigma around mental health and psychiatry, I just think it's so important to share that it cannot be ignored when this is happening to you. No matter how small you think it is, no matter how insignificant, no matter how much of an inconvenience you think it might be to someone else, it'd be a lot more inconvenient if you kill yourself, if you harm yourself, if you harm someone else, these thoughts are not healthy thoughts. They're not your brain in its best normal function.
Jennifer Tracy: Accepting that help from my friends and my family and even my ex-husband who came to watch our son so that I could go to the hospital was really hard, again, just as it was with the women circling around me. It was so hard to accept the help. Yet, everyone kept saying, "I'm so glad you reached out. I'm so glad you said something. I'm so glad we're here." At the end of the day after it was a 12-hour ordeal then I was back home safe with several therapy appointments, psychiatry appointments lined up day after day. I'm on a path to getting better. It is the three month mark of my friend taking her life. That's part of it. The head trauma was a big part of it. There's a lot research that substantiates, correlates, excuse me, head injury with depression particularly with people who have had a history of depression.
Jennifer Tracy: I think that a lot of things were coalescing to have this incident happen. The fact that it came on so quickly, it was really important to me to share this with you guys because I love you guys so much. I also want to walk the talk, because my whole thing is we have to share our stories and this is a huge part of my story and it's current and I'm in it and I'm still in it. I'm still asking for help. We don't do this alone. We don't do this alone and we don't have to do it alone. I just want to offer that to you guys and just call somebody, call a friend, call 911, really, because it's not okay to be thinking those thoughts. It's okay that you're in the space that you're in but you can get help and it will get better and it will change. That was my experience.
Jennifer Tracy: Anyway, at this point, I'm rambling but it's a perfect segue because I'm going to introduce today's guest, Dr. Sarah Sarkis, who is a psychologist who lives in Hawaii. We talk so much about everything I just talked about. This was before this happened to me. Talked about that. We talked about my friend's death. We talked about different diagnosis. We talked about general mental health. She's brilliant. She's funny. She's incredibly witty. I really love talking with Sarah. I hope you guys enjoy my conversation with her. Thanks so much for listening.
Jennifer Tracy: Hello, Dr. Sarah Sarkis, am I saying my name correctly?
Sarah Sarkis: You are saying it correctly, hi.
Jennifer Tracy: Hi. Thank you so much for being on the show, number one.
Sarah Sarkis: Thank you for having me.
Jennifer Tracy: You are in Hawaii. What island are you on?
Sarah Sarkis: I'm on Oahu.
Jennifer Tracy: You're on Oahu. Okay.
Sarah Sarkis: I'm not native to Hawaii.
Jennifer Tracy: You're from the East Coast?
Sarah Sarkis: Massachusetts. Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, yeah, that's right, right. Sorry.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: I just want to say at the start of this, so we're doing this online obviously because I'm in California. We're having some technical difficulties. This happens to me often when I do the online. I can't see Sarah. She can see me but I can't see her, so this is going to be a first for me.
Sarah Sarkis: As a shrink, it's a real metaphor, right? Because most of the patients in my life, right, I know them and see them at a much deeper level than they see me. This is staying within the metaphor of my wheel house.
Jennifer Tracy: I like that. Say that one more time. You see them much deeper, right, because your …
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. If you got to a shrink and you end up knowing the shrink better than they know you and you know yourself …
Jennifer Tracy: They're not doing it. Your money back.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah, exactly.
Jennifer Tracy: Totally. You're from Massachusetts. I went to BU by the way.
Sarah Sarkis: Nice, Terriers, love it.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. You grew up in freezing cold weather.
Sarah Sarkis: I did.
Jennifer Tracy: What was that like? What was the childhood like in Boston or outside Boston?
Sarah Sarkis: Outside Boston. I lived 35 minutes southwest of the city, in a town called Westwood. Anybody out there listening from the East Coast. Yeah. It was very cold. I come from a big family so I'm the youngest of six. For probably reasons of simplicity, we were not a skiing family, we were a warm weather family. On vacations, we always went to warm weather places, mostly Florida. That's probably where I fell in love with the beach.
Jennifer Tracy: Yes. Yes.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. I have first cousins who are born and raised in Hawaii, which is how I ended up. We all went to college together at Georgetown. The first time I came to Hawaii, I was a freshman at Georgetown and my cousin took me home with her. I was like, "What's happening to my world right now?"
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. How quickly after you finished college did you get to Hawaii?
Sarah Sarkis: Decades. Although every time I came here, I would think to myself like, "Why aren't you living here?" I was in hot pursuit. I was super focused in my 20s. I was getting my masters and then my doctorate. I just lived wherever I was going to get the opportunity to study next.
Jennifer Tracy: Right.
Sarah Sarkis: Then, when I was 37, I was married, I had my child. Really, almost on a whim, an opportunity availed itself particularly to my husband for a job and we were on vacation here in February, in late February, on a big island. Then, he saw this job. He's like, "I think I could be competitive for this." The scene, I couldn't have written it better. We were landing at the Kona Airport and I put my hand on his leg, I'm like, "Listen, just this once, can you not go into fantasy land and tell me that we're going to move to Hawaii. Let's just try to embrace the now and be on vacation." I gave him this whole new age spiel. Five weeks later, we were living on Oahu. That's a true story.
Jennifer Tracy: That's incredible. How old was your child? You have a boy or a girl?
Sarah Sarkis: Two. A boy, Luke.
Jennifer Tracy: Luke. Wow. You guys moved to Hawaii five weeks later, because he was little enough to take him out of school? What about your profession and your business? Did you have …
Sarah Sarkis: Ever since I went through all my training and did my post-doc and I was pretty clear during my graduate training what I thought I wanted to do. I had that. I had a private practice partly that worked with people like you and me just like I have now. I guess in the industry, we'd call it a practice with high functioning neurotics. That's the best we can be.
Jennifer Tracy: Neurotic.
Sarah Sarkis: Me too. Then, I had a small forensic practice, from that I worked with a company on that at a company, where I did evaluations for court ordered matters. It could be serious stuff. It could be family disputes. They had teams of psychologists that would write these evaluations. Basically, to answer your question when it came time to being able to say yes to this adventure, I was self employed. I just closed my practice and moved to Oahu and replicated my private practice in this part of the country.
Jennifer Tracy: You had a toddler.
Sarah Sarkis: I had a two year old. Yeah. I know.
Jennifer Tracy: That's pretty astounding. I'm jealous. I'm jealous, which I have to say is rare, because I have a relationship to Hawaii. My parents bought a condo there in the '90 and we'd always vacation in Maui. Then, they had a house there part of the time. I'm from Denver so I grew up in a sort of cold climate, nothing like Massachusetts. I always thought, I'll end up there at some point. Then, they sold it and they moved here, so they're closer to me, which is great. We live in California. I miss it. I haven't been in a long time. I love that you built a life there, because there is something magical about the islands and something very healing and you're in a healing practice.
Jennifer Tracy: You have a toddler. You're married. You move house. You move everything. You build a new practice, boom. Then, what happens?
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. Actually, Hawaii is, I agree with you completely, in Maui in particular, has a very supernatural feeling to how green it is. There's parts of Maui that remind me of Colorado with those big tall forests and trees. I really love Maui. Every island has its own unique vibe. All of that is true. In the interest of being truthful, the move was like a lot of things in life, it had a lot of grit to it and a lot that wasn't romantic. Life got in the way. I moved, my mom got sick. She died within 10 months. Yeah. It was an adjustment. All of those things now, nine years later, have shaped me in such beautiful ways that I wouldn't change a thing.
Sarah Sarkis: I will say, one of the things that I got moving to Hawaii and I realized how ignorant I was of this before was that I really experienced culture shock. I moved from a place that is so different right down to the way that the culture that I grew up in communicates to the way that this beautiful communicates. It's so different. I just had a probably like a two to three year period where I was building my practice and having a great time. There was a subtext that I was like, "What have I done to my life?"
Jennifer Tracy: Totally a fish out of water.
Sarah Sarkis: Totally a fish out of water. I have family here and deep roots and stuff that anchored me so I can really appreciate now people who move and relocate to foreign lands that often it's out of your country. I still had the safety and protection of like, "Oh, I'm in America." Yeah. Then, we started building a life here slowly but surely, we put it together. In terms of my practice, it took about a year to be full.
Jennifer Tracy: That's nothing.
Sarah Sarkis: No, it was nothing. I gave myself 10 weeks. I said, "When you land, you have 10 weeks to get the home together. Get my son settled, then, you have to get out there and you have to start networking. You have to start to look for an office." Within four months of being here, I had a small handful of patients.
Jennifer Tracy: That's impressive. I'm sorry. You said you're the youngest of six?
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah, youngest of six.
Jennifer Tracy: Do you attribute a lot of your moxy to that of like you had to do shit or you are going to be forgotten?
Sarah Sarkis: Totally. I think, yeah, the vast majority of my personality probably is owed to the fact that I was born the youngest of six. By the way, all of my siblings are strong dynamic personalities. There are no wall flowers in the crew. Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: You really had to stake your claim.
Sarah Sarkis: I can thank them.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: That's awesome.
Sarah Sarkis: Being from Boston. There's a certain type of straightforwardness and …
Jennifer Tracy: I love it. I love Boston. I miss it. Do you miss it?
Sarah Sarkis: It's so funny to think about it. That's such a good question. Okay. Let's be clear. I still don't miss an ounce of winter.
Jennifer Tracy: No, me neither.
Sarah Sarkis: Essentially, the weather is the thing that keeps me from contemplating that maybe there could be another chapter there. You can't change that. It's just so miserable and now seeing what's it's like to be outdoors and in nature 360 days of the year, I don't think I can go back, right?
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
Sarah Sarkis: There's tons I miss about Boston now.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. It's improved my relationship with Boston. Moving improved my relationship with Boston. I miss the sports. I miss the food. I miss certain parts of downtown Boston with the cobblestone streets and that old little world charm. Then, I really miss the frankness.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. It is refreshing. I don't know if you used the word straightforward but it does feel like … they just get right to it. I really appreciate that in a different way than New Yorkers.
Sarah Sarkis: Yes.
Jennifer Tracy: Wow. Do you visit there at all anymore?
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: You still have family?
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. Most of my family lives back east. I don't think since living here we've ever gone longer than two years. The last couple of years, I've gone every year.
Jennifer Tracy: Wow. What a long flight. What is that a 12-hour flight?
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah, it's 12 hours. Once you're five hours from the nearest land mass, something shifts inside your body about distance. Like now flying to California, I'm like, "It's just California." In Boston, I would even like, "Oh my god, it's all the way across the country."
Jennifer Tracy: Right. Right.
Sarah Sarkis: It is a long trip but you just know that that's the price of living here. You just cope with it.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. Worth it.
Sarah Sarkis: Sometimes I'll break it up with a stop in Los Angeles. I'll stay a night or two with some friends in LA.
Jennifer Tracy: Let me know when you do, we'll go to lunch.
Sarah Sarkis: I will. I will do that for sure.
Jennifer Tracy: Really, please.
Sarah Sarkis: I'm going to take you up on that.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, please. Because I just had another guest who came from New York, Brooke Christian, and we had lunch on Tuesday. We went to the Ivy on Robertson and it was just so cool to meet her in person and chat in private, which was nice too.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: I would love that.
Sarah Sarkis: I will do that for sure.
Jennifer Tracy: Please do. You're living in paradise. You have a toddler. You now have a practice, a full-fledged practice, tell me about your practice, because it's very interesting the way that your website is set up and what you've told me that you do. It's just really interesting, so go. How did it start? You can go back to that place where you are …
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. I guess I would say about my practice now and I'm sure it will be different in five years, because it's so different than where it was five years ago. Now, I work a lot with functional medicines and naturopathic doctors. I for sure still work within the mainstream allopathic medical community because that's unavoidable when you're running a complex private practice that sees a full spectrum of psychological needs.
Jennifer Tracy: Just for the listeners and myself, can you define allopathic?
Sarah Sarkis: Sort of standard western practice.
Jennifer Tracy: Okay. Okay.
Sarah Sarkis: I have increasingly found myself, I would say probably 10 years ago, so even before I moved here, I had really started to move deeper and deeper in a direction of realizing that if we continue to isolate each subspecialty, like the heart person takes care of the heart and so the shrink takes care of the head, that my patients were feeling … they might have some movement on the needle but it wasn't what my type A wanted for them. I didn't want them to have the absence of feeling crappy. I want them to have the presence of feeling well.
Sarah Sarkis: I was doing it in my own life. I had my own stuff going on that I was really trying to figure out like, okay, what's going to be a solution-based approach here that's going to help me feel better from my own particular stuff. I found functional medicine and in particular probably the first person I found was Mark Hyman and then that sent me in all these other directions. I started to talk about it with my clients. Now fast forward 10 years later and I really feel privileged, I have a private practice that most of my patients are operating in this world now. They understand the notion that how you interact with your own relationship with yourself. One of the most valuable efforts you can make toward feeling well and that it falls in line with feeding yourself nourishing food, that it falls in line with getting eight hours of sleep.
Sarah Sarkis: All these are simple but actually kind of rare things these days. That's really how it evolved. Then, now in my practice I have a lot of executives that I work with here in the community and people who are … it's actually men that taught me this principle. I decided a year and a half ago that I basically … my practice at that time was 70% women and 30% men. It had been that way since the start. I got three brothers, I can jive with boys. I got a son. I basically thought to myself, what if you try to switch that ratio over this next year and you had 70% men and 30% women.
Sarah Sarkis: Over the year, when I would get vacancies, I would just wait for a male to call and see more and more men. What I've realized is that a lot of men come in and they talk about their sense of wellness through this language of performance. Once I got that, I was like, that's my in. Because they're actually willing to do the emotional introspection if they know there's going to be a return on investment that's tangible. It's just how their brain is wired. Now my practice has this other realm that it's evolved into, which is also super fun, and I've gotten some of these guys to be super interested in what you feed your brain contributes to your mood. They are not disconnected concepts. It's been great.
Jennifer Tracy: Say more about that, what you feed your brain. What do you mean by that? Because you're not talking about smoothies, you're talking about actually content that you put in your eyeballs and your ears, right?
Sarah Sarkis: I'm talking about both.
Jennifer Tracy: Okay.
Sarah Sarkis: Yes. I actually am talking of I try to have all my patient meet with some kind of Nutritionist. It can be wrapped up in your primary care person if they're interested in this world. What I was finding a lot of times is was that when I would go to western doctors, they were helpful, but when I would try to talk about food and stuff, like what can I eat? There really wasn't much feedback. I guess what I'm learning now from listening more and more to people like Mark Hyman is that they don't actually teach that at medical school. I think for a while he was trying to get it back in to the medical school curriculum.
Jennifer Tracy: There's no nutrition or maybe there's like a day?
Sarah Sarkis: Maybe there's a day, maybe there's a CE you have to take but there's not like an ongoing discussion about the ways in which food can participate in keeping you well.
Jennifer Tracy: Why do you think that is? I'm sorry to interrupt you? Why do you think that's absent in traditional western? Basically, in traditional western medicine but especially in the medical schooling?
Sarah Sarkis: I'm no expert and I didn't go to med school but I'm never short of opinions. This should be …
Jennifer Tracy: I'm asking.
Sarah Sarkis: Okay. It's a serious grain of salt. I assume that it also reflects, that first of all medicine is based in figuring out pathology. My mother died of colon cancer and she was somebody who was going to what we'd call integrative or complimentary or alternative doctors that never went to a western doctor and lo and behold nobody found the cancer. Seeking for pathology is something that I do believe has a lot of value. I crave it being balanced with an understanding that you have to pay equal investment in trying to keep the vessel from getting sick.
Jennifer Tracy: Prevention.
Sarah Sarkis: Yes. Yeah. I think probably that that's one thing. First of all, I think western medicine is pathology based and there's real merit for that. The second is that I think that there is a relationship between this focus on pathology and then having to find something to fix the pathology. That can come in lots of forms, but the easiest target in that bull's eye is there is, for me, an uncomfortable relationship between the pharmaceutical industries and how frequent the first line of approach is a prescription.
Sarah Sarkis: For me, as a psychologist, the way that I would see it is I would have 24, 25, 26 year olds coming in and they'd be on at least an antidepressant for sure. They'd probably have an antianxiety medication like a benzodiazepine for PRN use.
Jennifer Tracy: What does that mean, PRN use?
Sarah Sarkis: As needed.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh, okay.
Sarah Sarkis: There'd maybe also be some sort of low grade stimulant in there because the antidepressants cause lethargy and all kinds of other things, right. For me, what I was seeing was just so many people coming in that I couldn't even really get like a baseline understanding of who they were. Who are you at baseline? I have to say now, I'm almost 20 years, 17 years with the private practice or working within the private practice setting. There are mental illnesses that are very real. They cannot be acupunctured away.
Jennifer Tracy: Yes.
Sarah Sarkis: Right? That's not the vast majority of them.
Jennifer Tracy: Right. I just want to point out, first of all, thank you for saying that. For everything you just said, but what you just said resonates so deeply with me because I just lost my best friend in the world to bipolar. She had been treated for many, many years successfully and long story short, she ended up ending her life this past October after going off her meds because she and her husband wanted to have a child. I think that it's so important, there's room for all of that. There's room for all of the … I'm very into eastern and holistic and all of that, but sometimes there are these disorders that the person really needs to be on medication.
Sarah Sarkis: I completely agree. I'm so sorry to hear about your friend.
Jennifer Tracy: Thank you.
Sarah Sarkis: It's awful and it changes the lives of everybody that orbited in somebody's sphere who dies by suicide.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
Sarah Sarkis: I'm glad that I had the opportunity to say that because I often don't want to come across as though I have some idealized version of the human condition.
Jennifer Tracy: Right.
Sarah Sarkis: I don't. I know that the vast majority of times, there are things that we can do for ourselves …
Jennifer Tracy: Yes, absolutely.
Sarah Sarkis: … that make a huge difference. Bipolar is one of those. There's a short list of scenarios where I would essentially require medication compliance in order to work on the case because they are so volatile and so susceptible to suicide. Major suicidal depression is one of them and bipolar is the other.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. It's something that up until we know better, we just don't. Either we don't have the science for it right now or this is the best it's going to be. Medication is really necessary in those cases.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. I have had depression and anxiety my whole life. I'm also sober. I haven't had a drink or a drug in 20 years. I know that is a piece of myself like an addiction quality, but I had really bad postpartum depression after having had depression like I said off and on throughout my life, I am currently still on 10 milligrams of Prozac per day. It keeps the bottom from dropping out.
Sarah Sarkis: Totally.
Jennifer Tracy: I also hear too often, so often of, some of my close friends because many of my friends are sober also, but so many people just have Xanax, have Ambien. They just have all of these things. I'm like, "Who is giving you guys all these drugs. Why?" I also feel, and I'm not even in the medical profession, I'm just your average lady, but it feels like it's everywhere. It's just like, "Who's giving you this? Also, who's supervising you after they've given you this?"
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. I'm so far removed from that world that I can only conjecture that. There ain't a lot of supervision. I can tell the difference when a client locks in who has a conscientious psychiatric care and I have clinicians here, a handful, that over the years that I've really come to value their consultation. When I'll have a complex case where I'm like, "Maybe there is some sort of mood component here, or there may be some suicidality." When you find a gem like that, it's awesome because there is … I'm writing this. My next essay will be this thing on epigenetics and neural plasticity and what that means in the field of psychology. It's really fun.
Jennifer Tracy: Cool.
Sarah Sarkis: It's a fun one. Thanks. I was reading the statistic. I'll probably butcher it but at least I'll have it footnoted in the blog. Americans are 5% of the world population that they consume, we, consume 66% of all the psychopharmaceuticals.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh my gosh.
Sarah Sarkis: Produce in the world.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh my god. That is horrifying.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. Your feeling that you'll listen to friends and be like, "Where is this coming from? How are they getting this?" I don't think you're crazy. I don't have concrete, I mean, I have that statistic and I have what I see coming in and out of my office. I don't know that one of the biggest risks on high school campuses right now is Adderall.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh, yes, I've heard that as well.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. It's cocaine basically. It's one molecular salt away from it or some silliness.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
Sarah Sarkis: Again, I've seen some cases. I always want to be moderate. By nature, I try to be a person of science, really try to take a case and look at it objectively. I have seen cases like if my child was failing out of school secondary to inattention and impulsivity.
Jennifer Tracy: Sure.
Sarah Sarkis: I can't say I wouldn't try it either. I don't think that the vast majority of people that are being prescribed are failing. I think it's often prescribed long before other things could be explored.
Jennifer Tracy: Also, there's probably, I'm sorry to interrupt you, because there's a resource issue here as well.
Sarah Sarkis: Totally.
Jennifer Tracy: For example, my son, I'm very, very blessed and my ex-husband and I are blessed, but my child was diagnosed with dyslexia and something called central auditory processing disorder, which is you know what that is, but for our listener, that's where you have trouble hearing things if there's any kind of noise that's the short version of what it is.
Jennifer Tracy: In a normal classroom, he was in this darling little private school like a little cottage. It looks like Harry Potter School. There were 24 kids and two teachers and he could not focus, he couldn't concentrate. We had the means and the resources to go to a nutritionist, to go to a psychologist. To get him fully assessed to then discover he needed to be in a specialized school where there's five or six kids in a classroom and special teachers. We couldn't afford that.
Jennifer Tracy: When I went to this International Dyslexia Convention last year, it was great to meet so many parents from all different socio-economic levels and all different cultures, who were struggling. This one woman I sat next to her and she said, she was so sweet and humble and gracious and she just told me not in a martyr sort of way, but about what she has to do in a daily basis to fight with the public school system to get her son the support he needs in his public school.
Jennifer Tracy: I just thought, "That's your life." I couldn't do any of this. I couldn't do the podcast. I couldn't do any of this. It would all be about that.
Sarah Sarkis: Management.
Jennifer Tracy: I get where if someone is in a different place, socio-economically, culturally racially, ethnic all of those differences. That if the doctor said, "Here, your kid is not paying attention have him take this pill." You're going to say yes. You're going to say, "Okay. Thank you."
Sarah Sarkis: A hundred percent.
Jennifer Tracy: I don't have the money and I don't have the time. My heart aches and yet that is one maybe one piece just based on my tiny slice of experience.
Sarah Sarkis: It's a huge piece of it.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. I think it's a huge piece of it. I like the way you said it that it's an issue of resources. It's true. It's that the current system is not designed to make these kinds of pursuits available to people who don't have disposable income. Unfortunately, we have a system where what is covered is covered and what is not is your responsibility. That's easier said than done for the vast majority of families out there.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah, it is. It's a real. It's a shame and it is heartbreaking.
Jennifer Tracy: Same for someone with a mental disorder. The tenting here in Los Angeles, the homeless tenting problem just breaks my heart every day. I want to pull my hair out because I don't know what I can personally do about it except maybe talk about it on the show and raise awareness and donate many as much as I can. Most of those people I know from personal experience are, not all, but many of those people have mental disorders or addictions. There's not support them. I don't want to veer off too far because I want to get back to you, but it's just an interesting transgression on the topic of medication and big pharmacy, is that what's called, big pharmacy, bit pharma, whatever.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: Anyway. I'm getting off track. You have this integrative practice where it sounds like, I mean, if I came to you, let's say I'm Bill and I come to you and I'm having horrible anxiety. I work 60 hours a week at a job and I've been brought to you for therapy. I'm on three different kinds of medication from Dr. John Doe in Kansas. This is just a crazy sketch scenario that you can't probably give me a full answer because you'd have to do like six weeks of diagnosis. I don't know. What would you do? Would you say, you have to see a nutritionist? You have to see I mean ...
Sarah Sarkis: The first thing I would do is just have them in for an intake and really just try to spend, the appointments are about 50 minutes long. We would spend the whole hour being just really curious about what it is that made Bill come to me at this moment of time. I just try to understand that context.
Sarah Sarkis: The other stuff has to come later when you've really built the intimacy of a therapeutic relationship and that you've laid some ground work in the therapeutic process so that they could safely try to see if they can tweak their medications. I would send them off to somebody else to do that component of it. Then yeah, if they get really interested in it and I have yet to have that many people. There must be a small handful of people that haven't been really curious and that's not because I'm the best salesman, it's because people are dying for information, dying for resources to try, to better …
Jennifer Tracy: Want to fucking feel better.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. They just want to fucking feel better. Thank you, exactly, exactly. Then, I'll refer them out. Then, the therapeutic part the place where I really work is I had to summarize myself, although I really load this task. I would say that the sweet spot that I think I have a talent for is that, so we all have these behaviors we do, right. They are sort of fixed in our wiring. There's this whole host of them that are conscious to us. That's in the first appointment, what the person talks to me about.
Sarah Sarkis: They talk to me about everything they're conscious off and that's valuable. It provides us a starting space. It's safe. The person is telling you. These are the things I feel safe to talk to you about. You start there. Fairly soon, within six to ten sessions, you're going to start to see or I start to see the flipside of those conscious behaviors, which are the unconscious behaviors and the unconscious fuel sources that contributes to a vast majority of how you respond to the world and yet you're completely unaware that that's what's operating.
Sarah Sarkis: When we really get into the deeper work of therapy the way that I work in my particular training now, is that we try to move things from the unconscious to the conscious. All of that is in the effort that you, as you deeply know yourself, for men you will perform better. You will feel better. You will have more energy. You will feel more grounded in what your vision is for your career. That's the spectrum in which a lot of the therapy unrolls.
Jennifer Tracy: What about for women?
Sarah Sarkis: Very similar ark points of what is it that drives us to …
Jennifer Tracy: Oh my god.
Sarah Sarkis: I love that.
Jennifer Tracy: My dog pushed his nose in the frame.
Sarah Sarkis: I'm so happy. I have a cat who I want to make a cameo but being very cat like she isn't.
Jennifer Tracy: Of course, of course.
Sarah Sarkis: I forgot I was saying. That was so awesome.
Jennifer Tracy: Sorry. Sorry.
Sarah Sarkis: The women. We are all more human than otherwise, right. Gender mediates a lot but we are all more human than otherwise. There's a lot that overlaps. What I would say is that I find processing styles are different and the way that we experience and express the various stuff that people come in to digest. I'll say this about diagnosis. My practice follows the same as the national norms, the vast majority of who's coming into my office endorsed to psychiatric symptoms, depression and anxiety.
Sarah Sarkis: Those are global terms. There's lots of subcategories underneath them, but underneath all those diagnosis, to me, are just diagnosis. They're really just a code you use to get the health insurance to pay for it. They don't actually guide much as you have to really deeply know the person that's sitting across from you.
Jennifer Tracy: Okay. Wow. Okay. Can you tell me about The Padded Room?
Sarah Sarkis: Oh my blog.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: I love the name.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. I've heard people get very offended by the name.
Jennifer Tracy: Really.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. I know. It's my Boston humor I can't help it. I'm dark, I'm dark and stormy.
Jennifer Tracy: I mean, you're on the MILF Podcast. You're talking to the right girl.
Sarah Sarkis: Right, exactly, exactly. You can relate. Yeah. I like the Padded Room because it's literally a virtual room. For me it was the irony. I started that maybe four years ago now, but I didn't really turn my attention to it until two years ago. That's an example of anybody who's listening and has something in their mind that they think they're just like, "Oh, this is just going to be a silly hobby and I don't want to create the time." Create the time. It's the most rewarding. I love seeing my patients and it's fabulous. In terms of new challenges and new vehicle for expression, the Padded Room is the most fun I have had since honest to God I don't remember when. I'm talking it must have been my youth.
Jennifer Tracy: That's so great. You're still in your youth, honey. You're still in your youth. Why do you think it is that it is the most fun you've had as long as you can remember?
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah, that's such a good question. Okay. Growing up I was always somebody who like I wasn't a great student. I was athletic and that sort of … I got to coast on that, but I was always a good writer. I just had, somewhere just my brain chemistry words, of course now they fail me, but words come easily to me. For years throughout high school and stuff and then like sophomore year I became much more …
Jennifer Tracy: Are you a Gemini? What's your birthday?
Sarah Sarkis: Aquarius.
Jennifer Tracy: Okay. You must have some Gemini in there though.
Sarah Sarkis: Maybe it's tussled then.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
Sarah Sarkis: I did writing and at college I was and English major and I was a psych major. When I got out of college I just had this feeling like I have to find a career that I can support myself. I was always interested in …
Jennifer Tracy: Writer isn't at the top of that.
Sarah Sarkis: Oh god. I was so terrified of the notion that I would be like unstructured and thrown into the world. I envied the tough greedy women that were leaving Georgetown who were going in New York City to huff it. I was just like, "Oh my God [crosstalk 00:50:52.]."
Jennifer Tracy: Underrated. Underrated. I should have done what you did. I did that. That was one of the …
Sarah Sarkis: I know. I love it. Why do you say it's underrated?
Jennifer Tracy: For me, well here, to echo what you said about your own life. The hardships that I faced and the mirror of my own self-worth that I had to finally face up to over a long stretch of time, knocking on the doors, trying to get acting jobs, trying to do all that stuff. It broke me down in a way that now I'm super grateful for everything that happened. I wouldn't change it.
Jennifer Tracy: However, I think there's a lot to be said. It just wasn't in my makeup, it wasn't what I wanted to pursue, but there's a lot to be said for pursuing something that does have a structure. That does have an endgame. That does have something where you could say, "Hey, I have this certificate and I can serve this part of the public with this skill."
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. It's so funny you're saying that, that's what my mom always said. I would say to my mom, I'll be like, "What if I don't want to be a psychologist forever?" She's like, "Sarah, you've got to stop at the forever. You'll have it and nobody can ever take it from you." I just thought that was like … it's echoing the sentiment that you're saying. Yeah. I appreciate that, but I always admired women like you who were just out there like bad ass, like I'll pay the bills the way that I have to.
Sarah Sarkis: I just went and I'm glad I did. I enjoy my practice, but I guess if I had to go back to my 23 year old self I would encourage myself to be more comfortable in the discomfort of maybe not being so sure about what you want to do for your life. I think I could have really benefited from that. That's all wasted on youth now.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh no, we don't know. I mean we don't know. I mean talk about anxiety, the anxiety I used to have in my 20s over nothing, over nothing like I was single. I had no children. I could sleep till 9:00 a.m. Now, I'm like, "You idiot, what were you even worried about?" You don't know when you're done.
Sarah Sarkis: There's a beauty. The thing too that I love working with 20 something so much especially women, young women, there's a righteousness in your 20s. You just are so sure of what you're sure of and it takes you. For most of us, we can ride that to our 30s where you get more, you start to get a little more grounded. There is a beauty to it, but yeah I do look back at that life and think like, "Oh my god, what was happening?"
Jennifer Tracy: What was happening? Why was this boy who didn't love you was unrequited love? Why was this so important? Why did you think your ass was big? I look at pictures of myself, I'm like, "My god, I was a knock out. What was I thinking?"
Sarah Sarkis: I know. Yeah. The Patted Room has been my own basically. Once my mother died I sort of have had this … I don't know, as people who've lost their mother you have this unanchoring. I was very unmoored and I just thought to myself … and I hadn't written other than the academic work of my masters and my doctorate. I hadn't written in a decade. I literally hadn't sat down and written a single solitary meaningful piece. I was just doing life. I was working. I decided to do that and now I love it so much.
Sarah Sarkis: In many ways, all of my efforts with coming and meeting these wider circle of people like you and other people along the way that have been willing to talk with me is because I started to try to research what it takes nowadays to write a book. One of the things I continue to come up against is this realization. Everybody I speak to is like you have to have a platform. You have to have a platform. For the people out there that don't know code for platform, they mean an audience. When they mean audience, they mean you have to have social media presence.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah.
Sarah Sarkis: I'm a social outgoing person, but I'm basically introverted. I like to write all day. I would be somebody who could sit home and write eight hours a day and see no other human beings perfectly comfortably. That was in 2016. That's when I said to myself like, "Okay, this is the game that you have to play. If you keep saying you want to play it, then get busy playing it." That's when I really started. I was like, "Okay, I'm going to produce at least two pieces a month. I'm going to contact people to talk. I'm going to start to risk putting myself out there because who knows where it will take me." I know that doing nothing will take me nowhere.
Jennifer Tracy: Wow. I love your moxy. I just want to say that you did that with me. I think you had to email me.
Sarah Sarkis: Many times.
Jennifer Tracy: Two or three times.
Sarah Sarkis: Totally.
Jennifer Tracy: Then, I was like, "Oh my god of course." I don't even remember why I didn't respond the first time. It certainly wasn't a personal thing. I also want to just say that to people out there, when you contact someone and I do this too, because I have to get guests and I interview people. I try to get people that may never email me back. I don't know this woman. Sometimes, when I do it like you did two or three times, it's just persistent. I have this thing. I'd like to offer to you. I'm really interested in what you're doing. It works and that's what happened with you. Then, I felt like a dick because I didn't respond the first time.
Sarah Sarkis: No, no, not at all. You were great and gracious and so authentic. I think you wrote, "Of course, yes exclamation point."
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, because I was so excited. It was because you were so consistent and I appreciated that moxy that I said, "This woman has got some interesting stuff." I clicked on your stuff and I was like, "Oh my god." I thought she's writing a book. She's writing a book. She's got to be writing a book. I also want to just say to you as a fellow woman and a fellow writer. Hello, there's two other fury beings in this interview now.
Sarah Sarkis: They've multiplied.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah, yes you need a platform and yes you need all of those things and most importantly, you need a content with heart that comes from an authentic origin of need to tell story and you have that so beautifully and you do it beautifully. You've done it beautifully today.
Sarah Sarkis: That's so nice. You can't see me because we had IT issues.
Jennifer Tracy: I know.
Sarah Sarkis: I'm smiling, that means so much to me because that's really what … I really want that if there's people that jive with what I have to say and how I say it to connect because I think that's what matters. I think showing up and being present and authentic and available to share whatever it is that I have to say that might help others then …
Jennifer Tracy: Exactly.
Sarah Sarkis: … that's a pretty big gig to me.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. It spurs them on to … My little dog looks like he just did something naughty. I don't know what it is. I'm going to find out later.
Sarah Sarkis: You are.
Jennifer Tracy: It spurs them on to take those risks in their own lives, whatever it is, if it's writing something. If it's interviewing for that job they think they can't get. To me that's the magic of this. That's why I do this podcast is to just spreading that like the domino effect.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. It's great. What you said earlier I don't want it to get lost in the kind accolades because I want your audience to really hear what you said. I think what I said to you in the first email is I said, "I spent to all of 2018 inoculating myself against rejection." I have to keep reaching out. Honestly, if you can learn to inoculate yourself against, it's just our ego that gets a little, "Oh, I'm not good enough." "She didn't like it." "I don't want to bother her." Whatever it is. If you can just push right pass that and keep going. It isn't personal like this is a perfect example where I probably sent the original email and you were busy with something else.
Jennifer Tracy: It could have been right after my friend just died.
Sarah Sarkis: Exactly.
Jennifer Tracy: Something like that.
Sarah Sarkis: Exactly. That just keeps doing it. Like I said to you in one other exchange that we had podcast, I said to you something like one of my only talents is relentlessness. It's true. I just am somebody who I'm willing to keep going when all evidence, statistically speaking, would tell me to quit.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. Listen. The worst thing and I'm saying this out there for people who are listening and wanting to take a risk or afraid to take a risk. Honestly, the worst thing that can happen is that the person says, "No, thank you."
Sarah Sarkis: Yes.
Jennifer Tracy: Maybe they'll be rude to you but probably not.
Sarah Sarkis: I haven't come across one rude person and I can tell you from 2016, I started applying to writers residencies trying to get into different kinds of podcast. Every blog I was originally … before I had an audience on my blog that feels substantial to get some traction, before that, when it was like 100 people were reading the essay. I would send everything to all these psych blogs.
Sarah Sarkis: First of all, most of the time, you're just going to hear crickets. Okay. They're really appreciative. When they do respond with a no and I have gotten the vast majority of 2016, almost all of 2017 and 2018 midyear it started, the vibe, started to shift for me. I started to get emails back where I was like, "Wait a second, did they just say, yes?" Two and a half years of basically just hundreds and hundreds of no's a year that's all it was.
Sarah Sarkis: Every time it got easier and easier and now I don't even [inaudible 01:01:38]. My husband started joking, he's just the best. He's so positive and he understands networking so well which something I came to the game sort of late too. He said to me, "You should consider a written, when they respond to you with no, that's a win, you now have their email." He's like, "They took the time to say no, so you can, in a year or in six months, or when you get another piece that you feel really might move the needle, you can say, 'Hey, how about this one?'" It's so true.
Jennifer Tracy: It's so true.
Sarah Sarkis: I have a number of podcast that I am in that I stalk regularly. Yours is among them. I was like so psyched when you responded. I remember calling my friend who's also a psychologist and we do some seminars and stuff together and I said to her, I was like, "Remember that podcast?" She's like, "Yeah, I don't need an introduction to it." I was like, "She responded."
Jennifer Tracy: Oh, that's so awesome.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. It's been great.
Jennifer Tracy: Thank you so much. I can't believe this but we've already come to the time where I ask you the silly questions.
Sarah Sarkis: Okay/
Jennifer Tracy: This has just been a delight. I could definitely go on talking to you for a much longer time.
Sarah Sarkis: We'll take it offline in LA.
Jennifer Tracy: That's right.
Sarah Sarkis: In the next few months.
Jennifer Tracy: That's right. Let me know when you come out.
Sarah Sarkis: I will.
Jennifer Tracy: I ask three questions of every guest and then I go into a lighting round questions.
Sarah Sarkis: Okay.
Jennifer Tracy: The first question is what do you think about Sarah, when you hear the word MILF?
Sarah Sarkis: Wisdom.
Jennifer Tracy: What's something you've changed your mind about recently?
Sarah Sarkis: Psychedelics.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh say more. Are we talking ayahuasca, basically?
Sarah Sarkis: No, I don't like throwing up. I don't want to throw up and I don't want to be around people throwing up. Ayahuasca is sayonara.
Jennifer Tracy: Is it what it does? I don't even know.
Sarah Sarkis: It makes you throw up. I hear it's transformative. I haven't decided whether, I'll be 44 in a month. I feel like at 45 maybe a vision quest would be cool. There seems to be something great about that. I haven't committed myself to it but I will say. I have worked with somebody who became interested in microdosing. She was a scientist to herself. She experimented with it and the journey with her surprised me in ways unexpected. It made me really open my mind, no pun intended, to the idea that true microdosing may really hold therapeutic benefit for people who have struggled in the cases that I see with depression.
Jennifer Tracy: Interesting. Interesting. Okay. How do you define success?
Sarah Sarkis: I define success as feeling as though my career has passion and purpose and that I can support myself. It's important for me that I feel like I can support myself. Then, in a global sense success, I want to feel connected to myself. I want to feel that I deeply know myself. Therefore, I can connect with others in the world.
Jennifer Tracy: Great answer. Lightning round, ocean or desert.
Sarah Sarkis: It's a Sophie's choice, but ocean.
Jennifer Tracy: Favorite junk food.
Sarah Sarkis: Pizza.
Jennifer Tracy: Movies or Broadway show?
Sarah Sarkis: Movies.
Jennifer Tracy: Daytime sex or night time sex?
Sarah Sarkis: Daytime. I'm too tired at night.
Jennifer Tracy: Texting or talking?
Sarah Sarkis: I talk all day so I text a lot with friends.
Jennifer Tracy: Yeah. Cat person or dog person?
Sarah Sarkis: Cat.
Jennifer Tracy: Have you ever worn a unitard?
Sarah Sarkis: I don't think so.
Jennifer Tracy: Shower or bathtub?
Sarah Sarkis: Shower, barely ever bathtub.
Jennifer Tracy: Ice cream or chocolate?
Sarah Sarkis: Ice cream.
Jennifer Tracy: On a scale of one to 10 how good are you at ping-pong?
Sarah Sarkis: Five.
Jennifer Tracy: Most people answer five. Isn't that weird?
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: I don't know. Because it's just like a good neutral like, I could do it, but I'm not good at playing at it.
Sarah Sarkis: Right, exactly. I'm not going to play.
Jennifer Tracy: What's your biggest pet peeve?
Sarah Sarkis: Insincerity.
Jennifer Tracy: If you could push a button and it would create 10 years of world peace but it would also place 100 year ban on all beauty products, would you push it?
Sarah Sarkis: Okay, say that question again.
Jennifer Tracy: If you could push a button and it would create 10 years of world peace but it would also place 100 year ban on all beauty products would you push it?
Sarah Sarkis: Okay. I am going to say no, but not because of the beauty products, but I don't know that I believe that struggle is necessary. It's a necessary stage in growth. I'm not somebody who is seeking Utopia.
Jennifer Tracy: Great answer. Okay. Super power choice invisibility, ability to fly or super strength?
Sarah Sarkis: No questions asked, I've known it since I was five, invisible.
Jennifer Tracy: Nice and what would you do with it?
Sarah Sarkis: Lurk. You voyeur just like I am in real life.
Jennifer Tracy: Would you rather have a penis where your tail bone is or a third eye?
Sarah Sarkis: I have always wondered what it would feel like to be controlled by a penis, but I think at this point at 44, I'm going to say third eye.
Jennifer Tracy: What was the name of your first pet?
Sarah Sarkis: Governor.
Jennifer Tracy: What was the name of the street you grew up on?
Sarah Sarkis: Grove Street.
Jennifer Tracy: Your porn name is? Governor Grove.
Sarah Sarkis: I love it.
Jennifer Tracy: Is your porn star, is she English maybe?
Sarah Sarkis: No. I don't feel like I'm not refined. I feel like I would have been like a street whore.
Jennifer Tracy: No but like she's cockney.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah. She could be, yeah. I think I'd be like an old like Boston broad.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh there you go. I like that. I would have thought of that, yeah.
Sarah Sarkis: Yeah.
Jennifer Tracy: Oh my God so good.
Sarah Sarkis: That's my alter ego.
Jennifer Tracy: I love it. I love it. Sarah, this was such a treat. Thank you so much for emailing me and contacting me. I really enjoyed having you on the show and I can't wait to share this episode with my listeners.
Sarah Sarkis: This was so fun. I'm so glad that I didn't take it personal. I persevered.
Jennifer Tracy: Me too.
Sarah Sarkis: Awesome.
Jennifer Tracy: Me too. Thanks so much for listening guys. I really hope you enjoyed my conversation with Sarah. Tune in next week for a new fresh episode of MILF Podcast. Also just a quick reminder, if for every iTunes review that you guys leave in the month of February, I'm going to be donating $25 to the organization called Lumos. They can be found at wearelumos.org. I'm really, really proud of the work that they're doing. Also founded by JK Rowling another amazing mom I'd like to follow.
Jennifer Tracy: If you have it already go ahead and grab your free copy of "7 Habits of Baller MILFs" on my website, milfspodcast.com. I'll be talking to you next week. Thank you guys so much for listening. Have a wonderful week.