Episode 185: Beauty in the broken pieces – TBI, epilepsy and ADHD with Kate Wallinga

The episode transcript is below.

Carolyn Kiel: Before we get started with today’s episode, I want to give a special shout-out to Beyond 6 Seconds listener Buna, who recently helped support this podcast by purchasing 3 virtual “cups of coffee” for me on BuyMeACoffee.com! Thank you Buna, I really appreciate your support. BuyMeACoffee.com is a simple way to encourage and support indie podcasters whose content you enjoy, for the price of a cup of coffee, and it helps defray the cost of producing this podcast too. If you’d like to buy me a virtual coffee and get a shout-out like this one on a future episode, check out the link in the show notes to BuyMeACoffee.com/Beyond6Seconds.

Also, I want to give you a quick heads-up about some of the content of this episode. During our conversation, my guest and I talk about an incident of medical trauma that she experienced, as well as some mental health crises she witnessed when she was working as a crisis clinician. There are a few mentions of violence and death during this episode as well. If those are difficult topics for you, please use your discretion when listening to this episode.

Welcome to Beyond 6 Seconds, the podcast that goes beyond the six second first impression to share the extraordinary stories of neurodivergent people. I’m your host, Carolyn Kiel.

I’m here today with my guest today, Kate Wallinga. Kate, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself?

Kate Wallinga: Sure! So Carolyn and I met because we are both podcasters. It’s a very tightly knit community and you end up meeting everybody eventually anyway, I think. I think that’s the rule.

I am a forensic psychologist and crisis clinician by training, so everybody gets all excited because they think forensic psychology sounds really cool, but what it means is spending a lot of time waiting. You do a lot of time waiting to testify in court, or for your clients to show up, or you’re waiting for the printer to unjam itself because your report hasn’t printed, or whatever the case may be. But so what forensic psychology means is that someone is already in the system — I’m not a profiler and I never have been — and I’m asked a question. Maybe, what’s this person’s diagnosis? Maybe, are they competent to stand trial? Maybe, what’s the best way to house them after their court trial is all done? You know, do they need to be in supermax? Do they need to be in a mental health facility? That kind of thing. I’m asked a question and then I tailor a mix of tests and interviews to that.

I did that for a while and then for several more years after that, I switched to doing crisis work in the emergency room, in private homes, because my husband is an educator and so his hours are very limited.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: And court hours are the same hours, pretty much. So, as we started having kids, I learned very quickly that kids ruin everything. And so it was very difficult to, you know, you were, I just, I felt like I never saw my family and never saw my kids. And so I moved to crisis assessment, which is whenever someone shows up in the emergency room or in their home and when they’re suicidal, homicidal, having a psychotic break, a manic episode, that kind of thing. And I show up and figure out, what do we do next? What’s going on right now and what do we do next? And the beauty of that is that, I guess beauty is a strong word… but people have crises 24/7, so I could work nights and weekends and my husband could work day times. And I got to see everybody at every point in the system. And I still ended up going back and working in jails and prisons at times doing that work, because people have crisis in jail and in prison as well.

And so I did that until 2014. Then I broke my back. Not a great idea. And then I spent four years pretty much sitting home and moping. That was basically my full-time job unpaid was to sit at home and feel sorry for myself. And on New Year’s Day of 2018, I went up to my husband and I, depending on who’s telling the story, I either gently tapped him on the shoulder or I grabbed him by the shirt collar and pulled him in real close. And I said, “I’m gonna start a podcast!” And he said, “… okay. Why?” And I said, “because you all are making too much noise! Everybody keeps talking to me, and if I start a podcast, you’ll leave me alone once in a while!” And so that’s where we’re at. That was about five years ago now, and seems to be going pretty well. So now I consider myself a podcaster where I work full-time for part-time pay.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow. You’ve had this incredible experience in these very intense and what sounds like very stressful environments or very high focus environments where you’re dealing with people at, in some ways, at some of the worst points in their lives or the most highly critical points in their lives. Is that something that you bring to your podcast now? Like all those experiences? Or are they related to what you talk about now on the show?

Kate Wallinga: I hope so. I hope I bring them. My show started as a true crime adjacent sort of show.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: Because I would hear people misuse terms or make assumptions, or just, “I don’t understand how somebody could do something like that! I could never murder somebody!” And I’m like, “you know what? I guarantee you could.” Or “I would never confess to something I didn’t do!” And I’m like, “you know what? Give me three hours. Okay, 23. But give me enough time and I could make you forget your own mother’s name.” You know, our brains are mushy and they act funny under stress, and being interrogated is one of the most stressful things that a human being can go through.

And so it started with me just being like, well, I’ll do five or 10 episodes, I’ll describe what forensic psychology is, what it’s not, what profiling is and what it’s not, and just try to get people to understand a little bit, like, you are a lot closer to violence and murder than you realize. And that sort of, I don’t know whether the idea came first or the title came first, but the title of my show is Ignorance Was Bliss. And one of the taglines is, “Didn’t you feel better before you knew that?”

Carolyn Kiel: Mmm.

Kate Wallinga: Because I felt like, if I can just get you to understand a little bit more how somebody ends up doing this, you might not sleep as well at night, but maybe you’ll be a little less flippant about calling the bad guy bad names or whatever it is that the True Crime podcast community likes to do nowadays. So that’s how it started.

And then like a year or so in, I experienced a tremendous personal loss in my life, and so I had to step away from podcasting altogether for a little while. And then when I came back I was like, you know, I don’t wanna just talk about dark stuff. Like sometimes that’s fine, that’s life, no problem. But I wanna talk to other people too. I wanna talk to gamers and I wanna talk to actors, and I wanna talk to authors, and I wanna talk to Carolyn. You know, and I just, I wanna do other stuff.

And so I decided, you know what? This is the beauty of podcasting, is there are no rules. So I still do maybe, mm, 20% of my episodes has something to do with crime specifically, but all of them have something to do with psychology, with people’s stories. I consider myself a story collector.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm. Yeah, story is something that has always excited me in general, and it’s really what got me into podcasting is just really trying to tell the stories of people that, those stories that I wasn’t hearing anywhere else really. I knew they were like really compelling and, and fascinating and inspiring and motivating and, and all of those things, but they weren’t out there for whatever reason. Just, you know, not everybody’s out there sharing their story all the time and even if it’s amazing and the work that they’re doing is incredible. So yeah, totally relate to that story being an important thing to share as well. Absolutely.

So as my listeners know, this is a podcast mainly focusing on neurodiversity, disability. And you mentioned a little while ago, some of the major challenges that you had went through in the past couple years. But you’re also neurodivergent in many different ways. Would love to learn a little bit about how that journey took place. I know it was kind of like a series of events. It wasn’t like all at once. So I’m just kind of curious about how that came to be.

Kate Wallinga: Kinda was though, honestly, kinda was — more like falling off a cliff. For me, I was not neurodivergent as a child. I was not neurodivergent through my twenties. I, in fact, ran a clinic for a while that diagnosed learning disabilities and ADHD.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: That was my job. And I supervised it, you know, that was my strength. And I can remember when making lists made sense to me. And I can remember not ever wondering, what is wrong with my brain? I can remember what it’s like. My moods would be off, but my thoughts would be clear.

And then in 2010, I effectively died in childbirth.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow.

Kate Wallinga: I had a near death experience. I spent 10 days in a coma and six weeks in the hospital. It was a mess. And when I came out of the coma, I had complete amnesia for the full year leading up to the birth. Like, I didn’t remember giving birth. I didn’t remember being pregnant. I didn’t remember going to Paris. I didn’t remember like all this stuff. I didn’t remember words. I couldn’t speak at all.

I didn’t know my own name. And let me tell you, that’s terrifying when that happens, because that’s one of those things that people ask you, and they’re like, “oh, what’s your name?” And it’s just tip of the tongue. You just know it right away. And it’s so hard coded socially that people would ask me, “what’s your name?” And I would start, you know, I would try, because some part of my brain knew I was supposed to know it, but I couldn’t find it.

I had completely lost my ability to handwrite.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow.

Kate Wallinga: So my handwriting is totally different than it was before.

Nothing really neurological happened during the coma. It’s just that the brain really doesn’t like to sleep for a week straight, no matter how much we say we would like that. And so for the next couple of years, I kind of masked and faked it and struggled a little bit. So that was 2010. I went back to work in 2012 for a couple of years.

And then in 2015, I had my first grand mal seizure. No warning. I had no idea it was coming. I had no idea it was happening. And again, you come outta the seizure. A grand mal seizure is a hard reboot of your brain. So, the systems come up a little at a time. You know? The eyes open before the brain turns on. And I have a very, very clear memory of the EMTs asking me what my name was and going, “oh, it’s…” and it just wasn’t there again. And, this time I, you know, I had another EEG. I had had one in 2010 and everything was fine. I had another EEG in 2015 or 2016, and now there’s a significant lesion in my right frontal lobe.

Carolyn Kiel: Mmm.

Kate Wallinga: Which is where a lot of executive functioning sits. So ADHD, autism, OCD, schizophrenia actually sits there as well. The ability to come up with a plan, follow the plan through, and then assess how well the plan went. So a lot of cognitive stuff sits right there, and that’s exactly where this lesion is.

And nobody really knows how I did that. Like I didn’t have a fall or anything. It’s just, it’s probably the result of the seizure, not the cause of the seizure. And so I just lived with it for a while. And again, like a lot of us, either because of social pressure or personal pressure, that’s really what masking is, right? Is pretending to be normal, pretending to be ourselves, whatever normal is for ourselves.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: And as time went on, my memory was getting worse and worse and worse. And my ability to do things like, like rely on lists, I couldn’t write a list anymore. And it wasn’t a physical thing, it was … like, neurotypical people, if they write a list, they can write like, “here are the things I’m gonna do on Tuesday.” And they can do that. And they can assess, “here’s about how many things I typically do on a Tuesday, and I can write those things down and we’re good.” The first item I write on a to-do list is “write to-do list.” And then I just keep writing. I can’t, like, it’s, I’m writing down to the smallest thing, like “remember to stop and use the bathroom.” Like things that were just, I’m gonna do anyway. And I’m writing huge projects that there’s no way I’m gonna do on Tuesday. You know? I just, I just don’t know when, I don’t, the concept of list writing wasn’t working for me anymore.

And around the same time, a relative of mine had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and I started to think, “oh no, I, I have early onset dementia.” That’s what I believed, and I was 36 at the time. And I was like, “I’m gonna die. That’s what’s gonna happen. I’m gonna forget everything and die.”

And I already had a neurologist because of the epilepsy. And so I called and I was like, you know, in this full panic, “I need to get assessed for something, you know, or get on meds or something. I don’t even know.” Like whatever. And he’s like, “well let’s start with having you see a neuropsychologist and getting an accurate assessment.” And I kinda, I was a little bit snotty with him about, “well, you know, I used to run a clinic like that. I know what the tests are. I know what the answers are.” He was like, “that’s okay. Come in anyway.” And because it’s true that I did remember some of the answers. But it’s not just knowing the answers. There’s, how long does it take you to come up with the answer? How do you word the answer? How do you approach the test? And there were other answers that I just didn’t know at all.

And when I was done with it, he says, “well, you know, I’m gonna write you up a report.” And that takes somewhere between two weeks and the rest of your life, it feels like, in the moment. “But I can tell you right now what your diagnosis is, if you’d like.” I said “Sure. That’d be handy.”

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: Thinking like, I was there alone and I’m like, oh God, I thought I would have my husband here with me to hear this terrible news, that we would go through together. Whatever. You know, this is awful. And he says, “no, you have ADHD.” I was like, “no I don’t. What are you talking about? Of course I don’t. I knew what ADHD is. Two of my kids have it. I don’t have it. I, what, what are you talking about? Like, I used to diagnose people with it.” And he’s like, “okay, like I’m gonna do the scoring and I’ll do the writeup and we’ll meet again, but I’m telling you.” And I live about 20 minutes away from the testing site. And by the time I got home, I went from, “no I don’t” to “holy crap, I have ADHD!”

Carolyn Kiel: Wow.

Kate Wallinga: Because I could remember, I could picture the page in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that has all of the diagnostic criteria for things. And you don’t have to have all of them to be diagnosed, you have to have a certain number of them. And I had more than enough. And I was like, wow, that’s what it is! That’s, you know, I think differently. And so it’s this lesion in my right frontal lobe has just literally cognitively changed who I am, which has changed my emotions and has changed my personality in certain ways as well.

But first of all, knowing that it wasn’t Parkinson’s was reassuring.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: And secondly, just knowing, you know, knowing what it’s not helps, but knowing what it is helped, because it gave me a better sense of who I am and things I can try. Now, one thing I can’t try, and this is a fabulous little bit of cosmic irony, and by fabulous I mean terrible, is that I can’t take ADHD medications, because most of them are stimulants, and they are prone to causing seizures. And they believe that having a seizure is what caused my ADHD in the first place.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow.

Kate Wallinga: Right? So it’s this cyclical thing. I’m like, that’s not fair, but fine. You know, I was, by that point, I was already on disability, so if I’m having a day where I just can’t focus, or I just can’t think in a functional way, it’s okay. You know, I can usually put it off by a day or I can ask my husband for help or whatever. And I’ve learned a lot of coping techniques and ways to compensate instead.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow. So in terms of the podcasting, did you start your podcast after getting the ADHD diagnosis or before?

Kate Wallinga: Yeah, I started the podcast a year or two after. Kind of with this mindset of, I don’t know what I’m doing with anything.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: Really, you know, I’m learning all kinds of things from scratch. So let’s start this hobby from scratch. You know, I don’t know how to edit. I don’t know how to, nobody’s born knowing how to edit. Nobody’s born knowing how to record things. Let’s learn. And if I can’t learn, okay, I’ll find a different hobby. And I, you know, I’m five years in, so I seem to have figured it out.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. I know when I do podcasts I have like whole systems. They’re not necessarily checklists, but I know I have like Excel spreadsheets that help me keep track of like, which episode is in what state or, or anything that seem to, to help me and my autistic brain kind of keep everything all set and managed. So do you have certain tools that you’ve developed for your podcast that help you like, you know, with the recording and the whole overall production end-to-end of your show?

Kate Wallinga: Another fun fact about me is that I am mostly deaf.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: That’s been most of my life. I was diagnosed with a degree of hearing loss around age five, and it’s gotten worse and worse and worse. And so I hear about 25% of what normal people do now. And so again, you know, people sort of assume that, first of all, I’ve had people tell me I don’t look deaf, which is weird. And that there can’t be deaf podcasters. I can’t listen to podcasts. And I’m like, I just listen real loud. Like you wouldn’t, other people wouldn’t like it. It’s too loud for them. I have to use special headphones. But yeah, I can do that. And I edit visually.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh!

Kate Wallinga: So no one ever taught me how to edit and I’ve never given enough thought, or maybe I’m not adventurous enough to create like a training for how to edit visually. But you know, everybody who’s in podcasting knows what a wave form looks like. You know, if you’ve done it enough, you know what your “ums” look like.

Carolyn Kiel: Yes.

Kate Wallinga: You know what a “you know” looks like, things like that.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: And so you know what silence looks like and you know what normal ranges of sound look like, and you know how to make different speakers match, you know, make their wave form. And so I just sort of figured it out.

And so my early audio from, you know, February 2018 is terrible! It’s okay. Like I accept this. It’s, what are you gonna do? You, you have a deaf podcaster! I’m, I’m a lot better with it now. And so it was things like that, that I had to sort of self-teach. I have spreadsheets, but I more have learned to embrace chaos in a way that I used to. You know, I used to, you know, when I ran any of it, when I, you know, working as a forensic psychologist, you have to be super organized and controlled at all times. When I ran the learning disabilities clinic, you had to have spreadsheets on spreadsheets on spreadsheets, and everything had to be just so. And it’s just not a way I function anymore. And, and I’ve learned that that’s really common with ADHD and it has to do at least partly with the fact that we have a difficult time remembering something exists if we don’t see it.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: My husband, bless him, is a deeply, he’s a mathematician. He’s deeply organized and likely autistic. Like we talked about how if we all have to pick our neurodivergencies, that’s his. Like his side of the bedroom is very neatly stacked and organized. And like he, okay, I’m not making this up. This is the funniest thing. He’s gonna kill me for saying this on mic, but you know, it’s been a good run. We’ve been married 22 years. That’s fine. (laughs) He has three medications that he takes.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: And he codes them in like a, in a binary system, like a, you know, zeros and ones. So for, for the day of the week. So like one is vertical and the other two are upside down. And he can look at that and say, “okay, that’s Tuesday. That’s how I know I took two of them.” (laughs)

Carolyn Kiel: Wow!

Kate Wallinga: Right?

Carolyn Kiel: Impressive!

Kate Wallinga: It’s very, he’s, he’s very, like we met in engineering school, so like, this makes sense. And for me it looks like clutter.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: It is clutter by typical standards, I think? But it’s not mess. You know, I don’t leave spills, things like that. I have children. I make them clean that up. What I prefer to think of it is that my husband is a vertical organizer.

Carolyn Kiel: Yes.

Kate Wallinga: He likes things stacked up. So when he has stacks of paper, you only see the white sides of the paper. And I’m like, how do you know what’s where?

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah?

Kate Wallinga: How, how do you know what that is? For me, I’m a horizontal organizer. If it’s all spread out, it all goes in its place. If it’s out of place, I notice immediately.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: If something’s been moved or it’s in the wrong place, I know right away. And so with the podcast, I’ve learned exactly where the pens go and exactly where the chapstick is and exactly where the marshmallows are, and exactly where the, you know, everything goes certain places.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm hmm!

Kate Wallinga: And those are things that I’ve learned how to do to sort of compensate and function better.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow. Yeah. It’s as, as you were saying, it might look like, you know, to an outside person as a mess, but you probably know exactly where everything is because everything has its place.

Kate Wallinga: Mm-hmm.

Carolyn Kiel: So you can find what you need.

Yeah. So I just wanna go back cuz I’m fascinated. As you were telling your story before, you mentioned waking up from the coma and having essentially aphasia it sounds like, where you lost a lot of words, amnesia, having to learn how to handwrite. But then you were able to go back to work like two years later! Were you in like, intensive therapies to get these skills back? How did that come about?

Kate Wallinga: Some of it came back on its own. I had complete aphasia for maybe two or three days.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: Where I just couldn’t answer any questions. I could recognize the language.

It emotionally bothers me, but I can’t throw it out either. So, you know when you send a toddler to preschool, they do like an “All About Me” poster.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah.

Kate Wallinga: Here’s my name, here’s my favorite color, here’s where I live, here’s my music. You know, whatever. Well, patients that are in a coma or in the ICU, often the hospital social workers will have the family fill that out for the patient. And the reason for it is both to give the family a sense that they’re doing something, because you’re so helpless so much of the time. And it also is a reminder to the doctors and nurses that this is not just a lump in the bed. This is a human being with preferences and with a life that brought them here. And so, you know, don’t just give their vitals. You know, introduce them as a human being. And so, somewhere upstairs in my house is that poster. It’s all about me for me, and it’s, you know, my name and my favorite music and my favorite color and address. Things like, you know, my children’s names and that sort of thing.

And so I, it, it’s complicated. So what happened was during the childbirth, somebody in the delivery room had strep throat and that got in my bloodstream, and my uterus ruptured. And, this was my third baby. And so I was like, “something’s super wrong.” And their answer was, “childbirth hurts everybody. Drink more ginger ale. It’s just gas pain.” So I spent three days with no treatment at all. Like not even a doctor. A doctor came in, tapped on my stomach six times and said “maybe you tore a ligament,” and left. And I’m like, what ligament are we talking about in my abdomen? And so by the time I actually got, I, you know, they literally, they discharged me and I went directly to the emergency room. And by the time I got a CT scan, I had necrotizing fasciitis, which is the flesh eating bacteria you read about in the tabloids.

And so I had 13 surgeries that week when I was in the coma. So when I came out of the coma, I tell that story to explain that when I came out, I had an 18 inch incision from sternum to pelvis, and then I had a hole the size of a grapefruit all the way through my abdominal wall on the right side. I didn’t know human beings could do that! Like I was literally afraid I was gonna sneeze and my liver would fall out. Like I didn’t, I, this was, this was a whole new world for me.

And so I would lie on my left side because that was the only part of my body that was not completely messed up. And the poster would be on, was on the wall there. And so I, I was in a lot of pain and I was very confused and I, I mean, they’re telling me I just had another baby? Like, I don’t even remember seeing him or meeting him. Like all of this was, it was the stuff of nightmares.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: And so I didn’t sleep. Plus I had just slept for 10 days. I laid on my left side and I read this poster over and over and over and memorized it. And that’s how I started to learn my name and I started to learn, okay, apparently I like the color purple. And the, like the, the, the band that I had been listening for, this was 2010, and so at the time it was still iPods separate from phones, you know? And the band I had been listening to quite often at the time was Blue October, which is a alt rock band out of Texas. And when my vitals would get out of control, my husband would put one earbud in my ear and one in his, and play music. And my heart rate would go down and my blood pressure would go down a little bit. And so that was on there as my favorite band. And we’ve always joked a little bit about, because we’re, we’ve got a little bit of twisted sense of humor in my family, about how, what if he had made it up? What if he had put the color yellow?

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: You know? And I, I don’t know, Garth Brooks or something, you know, like totally wrong answers only kind of thing. Would that be my favorite band now? I’ve always wondered, but that’s in any case, how I started learning things about myself.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: And then another thing that happens to a lot of people with traumatic brain injury is there’s a look that the people who’ve known you for a long time before you had it and then they meet you after. There’s a look they give you when you give the wrong answer or you answer in the wrong way. So if I got frustrated quicker than I was supposed to, cause I tend to be a pretty patient person, but that first year I was not. I would get very angry and frustrated very quickly, and I was also very tired all the time. And it makes sense now that, you know, my body was just trying to, was trying so hard to fix itself. But I would get frustrated or, or, or I would speak in ways that weren’t typical for me, and somebody in the room would give me that look, and I would start to get the feedback of like, okay, I’m responding “wrong.”

Carolyn Kiel: Oh!

Kate Wallinga: And it, it took me years to realize, no, they just expect me to return to my prior baseline.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: And that’d be cool and all if I could, but this is who I am now, and this is what my baseline is now. And if I give myself a little more grace and a little more space to, to, like, I, I feel emotions differently. I have synesthesia, which I did not prior.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow!

Kate Wallinga: And so if I accept that some songs smell wrong, I just accept that. That’s just how it’s gonna be that day. And I can’t say that to everybody. Like there are family members that I just can’t have any contact with anymore because they’re so, they’re so intense about “You’re gonna get better. You’re gonna get better.” And I’m like, “what if this is it? What, what? But what if I don’t?”

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: “What if this is as better as I ever get? Is that good enough or not?”

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: And so it was a lot more, eventually, talking therapy. Once I had enough words to get through it. It was a lot of working with my husband. I mean, one of the first sentences, complete sentences I was able to say to my husband when I was still in the ICU was, “we need therapy.” And at that time we weren’t having marital problems. We weren’t having, there was nothing going on. It was just that, I don’t know what just happened. We both just, our lives just got steamrolled.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah.

Kate Wallinga: Something big happened. We need, at that point we’d been married 10 years, we need to figure out how we’re gonna work through this together because it’s a huge, major change. Even without the ADHD, even without neurodiversity, just the simple recovering from a medical trauma is a lot, but then when you add the ADHD on top of it and realize like, I don’t know how to be the person that you married, and so either we need to go to therapy or we need a divorce because I can’t be that.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: And we’re still married, so.

Carolyn Kiel: So you talk about people giving you “the look” that at that point would give you the feedback that like, oh, okay, I’m not responding in the expected way. Did that feedback contribute to you, like masking maybe in the early days or any point and trying to act like you used to?

Kate Wallinga: I, I mean, I’m sure, early on. My, my mother with whom I have no contact anymore because she’s never gonna forgive me for getting sick and, and for being broken. And I don’t find any shame in being broken. I think that breaking is part of life. But my mother is very much about, don’t have problems, just don’t have problems. I’m like, okay, well I can’t help you there. So she was one of the more vocal early on, like she would shame me in front of other people.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh.

Kate Wallinga: You know? Or she would make unilateral decisions. I mean like, and now I want to like, credit where credit’s due. When I was first recovering, so I was in the hospital for six weeks and then for about a month after that, my mother lived with us. So she lived with us the whole, lived with my husband and my kids the whole time I was in the hospital, and then for like a month afterward until the end of my husband’s semester, and then she went home. So, I am grateful and, and I acknowledge the effort that she put forth in, you know, closing up her house and moving in and taking care of my children cuz I couldn’t, I couldn’t leave the house for a year. I was on home healthcare because of these open surgical wounds that were still healing.

So my son was born in March. And that Christmas, so eight months later, nine months later, we were trying to play a card game. And it was a card game that we’d played a thousand times, so I was told. I didn’t remember it and I couldn’t learn the rules. And it’s a form of rummy, but it’s played with two decks, even if it’s only three or four people. So it’s like, it’s a lot of cards. And I didn’t have the, you know, it took me a long time to redevelop fine motor skills as well, and, and that kinda thing. And so I, I, I kept dropping the cards and I was frustrated and it was noisy and I was, I was overwhelmed and just, it was too much. And I, I finally, I set the cards down and I was just like, “look, I can’t play this with you guys. And I, I, I’m not, I’m not contributing to the fun here, so I’m, I’m gonna go lie down.” And anybody else, I feel like, especially at Christmas time, would be like, okay. But my mother was like, “why, why, why, why? Why you gonna go lay down?” And I was like, “look, I’m like, my brain is broken right now. Like, my, my, my, I I’m not thinking right. Like, I, I don’t, it’s too much.” And both my mother and my sister, who is 10 years younger than me, literally raised their voices to me to shout at me and say, “you’re not broken! You’re not broken! You’re gonna get better!” And I remember being like, again, “what if I don’t? How do you know? I don’t even know. How do you know?” And that’s sort of the early, that was then more emotional and sort of like, I, I think if I had to had space, I would’ve been able to learn the game and we would’ve been fine. But look, like, games are supposed to be fun!

Carolyn Kiel: Right!

Kate Wallinga: If I’m not having fun, maybe don’t play! You know? And don’t force me to. And I’ve really leaned very heavily into, there’s a, there’s a Japanese art form called kintsugi.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah.

Kate Wallinga: Which I have, I, you can’t see, it’s cold. I’m in Salem, Massachusetts and really, really cold here right now. But I collect tattoos now. And one of them is a human heart, an anatomical heart, with kintsugi lines. So what kintsugi is, for people who aren’t familiar, is if they drop a, like something porcelain or ceramic, they don’t sweep it up and throw it out. They collect the pieces and then they mix gold leaf into the glue so that when you glue it back together, you always see those lines and they find beauty in the broken pieces.

And I’ve really embraced that, that yeah, I’m different. Like I don’t think I could testify in court, for instance. You know, being cross-examined is really, really difficult and you have to remember 47 things at the same time, but also remain very calm, especially being a woman in a men’s system. And so I don’t know that I could go back and do that anyway. But I’m a much better mother, because I understand what it feels like to be frustrated and pressed beyond what you can express anymore. And I’ve learned to give my, myself the same kind of grace that I try to give my kids of, “okay, all right, we can’t do this right now.” And, and that there’s a beauty in that. There’s a, there’s a beauty in, in, in saying, “I may not be able to do this today. Okay.” Like there’s not a whole lot of things in life that are really honestly live or die. So it simplifies a lot of things and it gives me space to enjoy the things that I can do.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s those priorities and knowing what’s important.

The way that you have conversations on your podcast, where you are able to listen and, and guide it and find those important and, and critical gems and have interesting conversations that are impactful for people. Is that something that you discovered as a talent when you started podcasting or was that something that you were always good at?

Kate Wallinga: A little of both? A little of both. I mean as, not so, I mean, with forensic, forensic psychology has to be very structured for legal reasons.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah.

Kate Wallinga: Right? But crisis assessment, which is what I did the last five or six years that I was working, is less structured. It’s still structured. There’s still paperwork because it’s a state job and so there’s always paperwork. But it’s, it’s less specific and structured and you’re less likely to be cross-examined on it.

And as well, you know, you, you asked earlier about, you know, I would see people in some of the darkest moments of their lives. And I learned while I was still working to embrace that as a gift. You know? I would often drive home with no music on at all. No sound on, nothing, and just think about, like, who gets to see this? Like, everybody thinks they know what it’s like inside a prison or what it looks like to be in the room with somebody who’s suicidal or, or, or whatever. But I actually do it and these people trust me. They’re telling their stories to me. They’re telling me things that they’re not telling their partners or anybody else. And I have to honor that. You know, and what, what, what a gift and what an honor that is to have.

And when you’re talking to somebody who’s in like an intense manic episode or a psychotic break, you gotta check your own reality at the door. You can’t walk in going, “okay, tell me what’s wrong.” Because they’re just gonna greet you with a couple of middle fingers and bad words. Like that’s all that’s gonna happen. So you have to learn how to check your own reality at the door and walk in. And the question that, that I, you know, I would, I would start with the easy stuff. You know, can you spell your first and last name for me? That kind of thing, even though I already knew it.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: But it just kinda helps break the ice a little bit. But then the first question of any weight that I would ask is, “what brings you here today?” And now right there, how you answered that question told me a lot about how the next hour was gonna go. Because I had people who would answer, you know, I’d say, “what brings you here today?” and they would say, “an ambulance.” (pause) I’m like, oh, it’s gonna be one of those. Okay. Okay. All right. Lots of questions for this one. Cool cool.

And other people, I’d say, “what brings you here today?” And they’d be like, “well, when I was in second grade…” and I’d be like, “sir, you’re 74 years old.”

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: You know? But that’s, again, those are the ones where you just kind of sit back and you let ’em talk for a little while or whatever.

And, and so it’s learning who the person is and learning how to get them to tell you things. And like I said, as a forensic psychologist, but also as a crisis clinician, there’s a question I have to answer. You know, what is their diagnosis, or are they safe? Can they go home tonight? Those sorts of things. Well, it’s different for every person. Somewhere in this conversation I will get to that answer.

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm.

Kate Wallinga: And it’ll go better, faster, smoother, and less painful for all of us if we don’t pretend, and not all of my colleagues agreed with me on this, because I had colleagues who’d walk in and be like, “sit down, I’m gonna lead this!” I’m like, all right, that’s how you wanna do. But for me, I just felt like they’re already stressed out enough. Let me let them tell me without telling me how they communicate and how they roll. And we’ll go from there.

And so when I started the podcast, all of the shows I listened to until then were fairly either scripted or heavily edited at least. And so I kind of thought that’s how they had to be, you know? And so my earliest episodes are, several are fully scripted, and then I was like, wait, this is, this is way too much work. Like this is not fun. I don’t wanna do this. And even after that, they were planned very heavily for a while.

And then I had the opportunity to do a, a recording with an ER nurse. And it was literally a matter of, I was, I was DMing back and forth on Twitter with her, and I was like, wouldn’t it be a cool collaboration? Because when people see a crisis clinician in the ER, they have to wait like four hours before they can see me. So she could talk about what happens in those four hours and why it takes four hours. And then I can talk about what happens after I walk in the room. How cool would that be? And I, I mean your mileage may vary on coolness, right? But that’s when I realized like, I can just do this. I can just talk. And that was fun. I left that recording jazzed up and that was fun. That was an adventure. I wanna do more of that.

And pretty quickly after that, I stopped scripting. And once in a great while, I’ll have somebody who really wants to set a topic to come on the show, and if that’s the case, okay, fine. It’s not a requirement, you know, nobody’s life has to be an open book to me. But I use that skill of figuring the person out a little bit in how we talk in the housekeeping that we do before I hit record. And then as it goes, and I’ve learned questions to ask and I’ve learned questions to steer away from. And you know, and I’ve learned when to say like, this isn’t working. I’ve only thrown out maybe three or four episodes total, but part of that is because I’ve learned how to say, look, something’s not working. Can we reschedule?

Carolyn Kiel: That’s a real talent. Listening and really giving people that space to talk. It doesn’t seem like it should be so hard, but it is! Like so many times we don’t get that. So being able to do that is really, really amazing.

When you do your podcasts, is there a question that you’re trying to get people to answer while they’re talking? Or is more just trying to figure out who the person is?

Kate Wallinga: I don’t have questions I want to ask. But I hate asking when I have, I have authors on really often. And I don’t ever wanna ask them, so what made you wanna write? Because it just feels like such a insipid question. And if they’re doing the press tour for their work already, it’s out there somewhere. Or they’ll just tell me. Like if I have to ask them, then we’re not off to a great start. And so I’ve only done it once. I’ve done it once in 447 episodes. And in retrospect, I know that what that was was I didn’t know, and she didn’t tell me, that I was her first ever interview for her first ever book.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow!

Kate Wallinga: So she was incredibly nervous. And if I had known that or picked up on it more, then I would’ve taken longer with the housekeeping. And I, and I’ve added some into my housekeeping, kind of describing my show for people who aren’t familiar and just sort of easing them in a little bit. So there are certain questions like that, like I don’t wanna ask an easy question.

Some of my biggest challenges are when I have people come on the show who are like well-known actors, for instance. I’ve had a couple who get in PR mode.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah.

Kate Wallinga: And now my job is to break them out of that. Because I don’t care about you trying to fit in the maximum number of words, in the minimum amount of time to sell your stuff. I wanna get you to tell me a compelling story that makes people wanna go buy your stuff. So that can be a challenge. Like I’ve had a couple of people where I’m like, “just slow down. It’s okay. You’ll have time to say all the words you wanna say. It’s okay.”

Carolyn Kiel: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you don’t wanna be asking the questions that they probably have to answer like, in every single interview.

Well Kate, I’m so happy that you agreed to be on my show today and, and thank you so much. Where can we find out more about your work, like your podcast? Where can people listen to that, for example?

Kate Wallinga: It should be on all of the major podcatchers. My website is IWB, like Ignorance Was Bliss, IWBpodcast.com and I’m on most of the social media sites to some degree or other. I know right now there’s some chaos happening in social media worlds. So I am still on Twitter. I’m also on Post and Mastodon. I am on Facebook and Instagram, so just sort of find me. IWBpodcast at gmail dot com. Wherever. I’m around.

Carolyn Kiel: Great. Super. I’ll drop your web link in the show notes so they can find it there too.

Thank you Kate! It was great talking with you. And thank you so much for sharing so much about your experiences on my podcast. It was great talking today.

Kate Wallinga: It was great! Thank you so much.

Carolyn Kiel: Thanks for listening to Beyond 6 Seconds. Please help me spread the word about this podcast. Share it with a friend. Give it a shout out on your social media, or write a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast player. You can find all of my episodes and sign up for my free newsletter at beyond6seconds.net. Until next time!