What Nobody Tells You About Mental Health Recovery | Leigh Marino

Leigh talks about the childhood grief she experienced, which resurfaced when she developed a panic disorder. Leigh ultimately sought inpatient treatment for her mental health and used her experiences to help others deal with pain, grief, and other difficult emotions through her Encourage Thought platform.

Key Highlights:

• How Leigh Marino found solace in group therapy.
• Learn about Leigh’s children’s book “To Be a Christmas Tree,” which seeks to help children (and adults!) deal with difficult emotions.
• How Leigh created Encourage Thought, a platform that allows her to share her mental health journey and inspire others who are dealing with similar or other challenges.
• Be inspired by Leigh’s outlook on what she went through and how she always kept a “pilot light of hope” during the tough times.

Transcript:

Kerri Fitzgerald:
Hello and welcome to another live filming of My Hero 360. We’re in the studio with Leigh Marino to talk about her story today. My Hero 360 seeks to amplify the voices and stories of individuals who have gone through some difficult challenges but are now sharing their uplifting and inspiring experiences. Leigh, thank you for joining us. We’re excited to hear about your story today.

Leigh Marino:
Thank you for having me.

Kerri Fitzgerald:
Let’s talk about your mental health journey. When you and I first spoke, you had talked about from a young age you had felt something different. Something you said, when you were 14, you felt like “it” was missing, but you didn’t know what that meant. Talk to us about that and how you were feeling and through the journey that you went through.

Leigh Marino:
Sure. I think that I’m thinking about it, and I probably would go back a couple years from there. Growing up, I had a really happy childhood. I grew up in a small little town, small little school, would play in the fields and the creeks and make witches’ brew out of sticks and mud and whatever. When I was 11, my parents got divorced, which was very sudden, had no idea that anything was going on. It was just a pretty traumatic thing for my younger sister and I, and of course, for the whole family.

I think that probably was, I would assume, the beginning of some trauma and grief for me. I think that also middle school and being a teenager and all that, hormones and things change and it’s a tough time for everyone. But I do specifically remember when I was 14 years old, writing in my journal that I felt like I had lost “it” in quotes. In my mind, at the time, it was just like this feeling of connection with something greater than myself with a zest for life, a trusting, just an openness and joy really. I found myself feeling just numb, every day was the same. I did have a lot of anger at first, when my parents got divorced, I was very, very angry, that my life’s good, I want it to stay this way. Who are these people outside of me, telling me that my life has to change when I want it to stay this way?

I was very angry. As I know now, anger is like a secondary emotion that comes up underneath that. There’s pain and grief and loss, because of course, I was grieving the loss of this family unit and my happy life and life the way I knew it. I think not really knowing how to process those emotions or even that I had them, I just numbed out and didn’t feel them. At 14, I realized I’ve lost something here and it’s just not the same and what’s going on? Luckily, I had the insight that if I wanted to be able to feel the good feelings in my life, I needed to also feel the “bad ones” in quotes, bad ones, you know?

But I didn’t really know how to do that. I wasn’t like, “All right, just let me just cry on cue,” you know?

I turned to movies and TV shows and would pick things that would make me feel something, and especially ones that would make me cry, and so that I could connect to those feelings in a meaningful way, that was also safe, because I knew I was watching a show. It was like a way to connect with myself and also someone else, and just to feel that.

Kerri Fitzgerald:
An outlet for you to express those emotions that you were trying to understand and deal with at that time. A couple of years ago, you were experiencing some insomnia and described having a panic attack. What was that like?

Leigh Marino:
A couple of years ago, I had a couple of different areas of my life that were very, very stressful for me in different ways, and they just weren’t resolving. It went on for a long time, and I kept trying to make my way through it or think, “Oh, soon this will be over,” or solve what was happening. It was just such a prolonged period of stress, that after a few months, I started getting headaches every night by 5:00 PM.

I would find myself working all day, making dinner at night, ending with a headache, needing to go to bed. Always thinking, “Well, maybe after a good night’s sleep, I’ll feel better tomorrow. Maybe I’ll feel better tomorrow.” It just wasn’t coming. Eventually, then I ended up with COVID. I got a really, really, really bad headache one time. I was laying on the couch and I thought, “Oh my God, there’s something really wrong with me, like I have a brain tumor or something.” In that moment, this panic just went through me and I guess it was a panic attack. It just was like this terror that wouldn’t go away, and I couldn’t stop it. I was just so, so, so afraid. It was just coursing through my veins.

Then I remember that night I couldn’t sleep, because my mind was just racing and it just kept happening, this panic. I went for 3 nights where I didn’t sleep at all. I would get into bed, the panic would start, because I would be afraid of not sleeping. I would be afraid of having this panic attack again. It would just be literally pure panic running through my veins for 13 hours straight while I was trying to sleep.

I tried everything. I love Eckhart Tolle, he’s a spiritual teacher. I would listen to videos from him. I would do meditations, I would listen to calming music, yoga, all the things that I knew would have helped me in the past. It just wasn’t happening. After 3 nights of no sleep, I was just like, “I can’t do this anymore.” I went to the urgent care. I remember pacing. It looked like someone who had an addiction problem, who was like, I don’t know, needing their drugs or something. I just couldn’t sit still. I was pacing the room. I literally could not sit down. They gave me this intake form to fill out. As I sat there and was filling out the form, I felt myself calm down a little bit.

Because I guess my mind was focusing on filling this thing out. I said to my mom, who was there with me at the time, I was like, “I think I just need to be filling out forms all the time.” I don’t know, how can I stop my mind from panicking like this? That was just the beginning of that journey.

Kerri Fitzgerald:
The fear was almost perpetuating the panic and the mental health toll it was taking on you. What happened after the urgent care? How did you come through this and find yourself in a better place or able to better cope with some of those emotional challenges you were dealing with?

Leigh Marino:
Well, immediately they gave me some strong medications that I was terrified of taking. If you know me, I’m a very natural person. High school, I didn’t even like taking Tylenol for anything. I was afraid of taking something.

I didn’t know what the side effects would be or what it would do to me. But I had just had to, so I took the medication, laid there, really afraid, but then it worked and it helped me fall asleep. I took that, but it was something that’s not a long-term solution.

I took that for 5 days I think. It helped me just start to get back into a rhythm of being able to sleep and start to heal. Then I got to a place where I was… I had already been seeing a therapist. I’ve seen the same one for many, many years. But at the time, I called her, I started seeing my therapist more often. I found a psychiatrist. I just remember that over time I wasn’t able to really fully heal from that experience. It just was still there, that panicking feeling. But I would find myself pushing it down. I was talking to doctors. I was experimenting with other medications with a psychiatrist, which I also didn’t really want to do.

I realized that I had this prejudice against medication, and I thought, “Well, people who are on meds just don’t… Or they’re lazy, they don’t want to do the work. They just don’t know about how to care for themselves,” which I found was ridiculous. I think they are over-prescribed and abused. But in my case, like I realized, “Oh, sometimes these are really needed.” I’m so thankful that they exist, because I really did need that.

I struggled for a while. I was able to slowly, slowly handle the emotions. When I would start to feel the panic coming on at night, I would have something in my arsenal to think of, to try to think of something like to distract my mind, right?

Every night I’d be like, “All right, tonight before I go to bed, I’m going to think of this.” I would do that and it would help me be distracted. But I always felt like I was like just distracting myself from something that was there and pushing it down. I didn’t really want it to overtake me, because I couldn’t handle it.

I was able to heal and be okay for a few months. I was able to travel out of the country, went on vacation, everything was okay. I was able to wean myself down, so that I was on very low doses of a medication. Then when we came back from vacation, I was so tired from traveling, which I was fine, I knew that. But I remember laying there in bed and thinking, “What if?” That was the thing that I would always think, I would think, “What if?” I wouldn’t even complete the sentence, “What if it happens again?” Is what it meant. It would be there. I was tired and I thought, “What if it happens again?” It did. Just this panic came over me and I couldn’t handle it and I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t sleep. Then it became a month of, “Well, let me go back on this medication and let me try this thing. I’ll go back to the things that worked for me the first time.” They just weren’t.

It got so bad after a month that I was then having these rolling panic attacks, I wasn’t sleeping. All day long, for anyone who’s had been in labor and had a baby, it was like contractions. It was waves of these, like I was in labor and birthing something. I remember saying to my mom, “If I knew there was a baby at the end of this, I could get through it, but it seems like it’s just not stopping.”

My nervous system couldn’t regulate, because it couldn’t sleep and it just couldn’t reset. I got to the point where my psychiatrist said, “I don’t think I can help you anymore. I think you need to seek further help, like a IEP, PHP program,” which is intensive therapies, which I had no idea what that was, and that scared me. He said, “Or check yourself into a facility.” He told me the name of one and I was like, “What? Oh my god.” That scared me even more.

At first I said no. I said, “Well, I think I can handle this.” Then a couple of days later I just realized, it was like, “I can’t, I can’t get through this. It’s just not getting better and I need real help.” I called the place and I was able to get in. I checked myself into the psychiatry ward of a hospital and was there for 13 days. The typical stay is 7 to 10 days. It’s generally, just to stabilize you. Whatever is going on for you, it’s not to heal you, it’s to get you stable enough so that you can leave and then have deep therapies and treatments that can help you heal and move on with your life.

I was there for 13 days. It was terrifying, and it was really, really scary. I had no idea what I was getting into. It was also really special, I don’t really know how else to describe it. But it was a place where I felt like I could completely be myself in public. If I was just sitting there crying or blowing my nose or laying there or like stretching or whatever I had to do, nobody looked twice or was like, “Oh look at her.” Because they had their own things going on and we were all just normal, you know what I mean?

It was just all okay, we were all in it together. I found that very freeing. I also found a lot of really good support from other patients, not just the nurses there and the doctors, but yeah, the other people who were going through it. You had to pick and choose who you felt comfortable with, because there were some very, very ill people there. But I had to come to terms with the fact that I needed to take medication, because I was still afraid of it then. I still wasn’t sleeping very well. One of the patients who helped me a lot was like, “Leigh, you just need to…” He’s like, “I understand. I don’t want to be on meds either, but for you right now, this is a matter of life and death. You can always come off of it. You just have to take them and you have to be okay with taking them.” I was like, “You’re right.”

So I did. It didn’t heal me right away, but I was able to stop having the panic attacks, so I was stable in that sense. Then I was able to advocate for myself and say, “I’m ready to go home.” Then they released me. Then I was enrolled in the long-term therapy that I mentioned earlier, where it’s 5 days a week, 5 hours a day, and it’s a group therapy program and I went to that. For the first week, I had to do virtual because I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t really walk down the street or up the stairs. I was so weak and then in so much pain just from the panicking, all of what I had gone through.

Kerri Fitzgerald:
You’ve talked about how impactful group therapy was for you during this journey. Why did that make such an impact on you?

Leigh Marino:
I was able to connect with the material, and also with the other people there, the other patients and the people who are running the program in a way that I felt like I could share my story and help everyone from… Because I knew both perspectives, I was a patient and someone going through something hard so that I could say, “Well, when this happens, I think of this or I try to do that.” People would be like, “I never thought of it that way.” I just felt myself returning. I felt like being able to help people by telling my story and sharing what I was going through and what I had done and what worked for me, made what I went through have a purpose. Because otherwise, it’s like why would I have gone through that?

Now I look back at it and I’m grateful for it, which at the time I never, ever would never wish that on anybody. But because it allows me being able to tell my story, people say to me, “Oh I resonate with that.” Or they’ll even get emotional. Just that interaction is healing for them and for me and it makes me feel like I’m on my purpose. By the end, people were like, “You should be one of the counselors here.” I was like, “Yeah, I would like that.”

To bring it all full circle, when I was young and I found film and television to help me process my emotions and connect with myself in a safe way, and then now as I’ve grown and gone through all the ups and downs in life and had really difficult things happen and I’ve grown from them and learned and changed, and then I went through this mental health crisis, now I feel that I’m even more empowered to take my background, because I went to school for film and television.

To take that storytelling talent and combine it with the lessons I’ve learned, so that I can tell stories in a way that allows people to connect with the characters, to connect with a different perspective, maybe with their own perspective, see themselves in the story and allow themselves to heal.

Kerri Fitzgerald:
What would you say to someone that’s still in it, still struggling, still going through some mental health challenges, what would you say to them?

Leigh Marino:
I would say to just keep going. When I was the lowest, lowest part of my journey, I remember just feeling that there… The doctors would ask me, “Are you hopeless?” Because they would try to diagnose me. Did I have depression? Did I have panic disorder? Did I have bipolar disorder? Whatever it was. They would ask me all these questions and when they would say, “Are you hopeless?” Even if I was hysterically crying while they asked me that, I would say, “No, I’m not hopeless. If I was hopeless, I wouldn’t be here.” There was a tiny pilot light of hope inside of me that was still knowing that, “Just keep going, just keep going. It will work out. You will get through this.” Even if I had no idea how. You just take one tiny, tiny step at a time, even if it’s just a breath and connect to that hope.

Kerri Fitzgerald:
Who or what has helped you or inspired you when you’re in a particular position of struggle or discomfort?

Leigh Marino:
As I mentioned earlier, the spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, I love him, I love his teachings. I followed him for a long time, I’ve read his books. I love watching his videos. Actually, last summer, 2 summers ago, I forget what it was, it was after I came out of the program, he’ll have these intensive classes. I joined one, it was called Becoming a Teacher of Presence. That was really inspiring for me.

Kerri Fitzgerald:
That’s awesome. You have launched a personal brand, Encourage Thought. You have used it as a platform to share your personal story to help other people. It’s also a multimedia outlet, and we’ll get into that a little bit more. But what inspired you to create this brand and what inspired you to be very vocal and visible and public with your story, when that can be really difficult for people to do that?

Leigh Marino:
Encourage Thought has been many things. It’s evolved over the years, as I’ve evolved. It started off as just a media company when I lived in Los Angeles. Then when I moved here to New Jersey, it completely changed into like a healing spiritual type company. I enjoyed social media, I was doing some writing and photography. Photography has always been something like a throughline in my life. I started off offering those services for people. That’s what Encourage Thought became. Then that slowly evolved over time as I got more clients and more clients, and I was able to quit that job that I hated. It became then my skills evolved and I started doing website design, graphic design, and always photography, still writing. Eventually got rid of the social media, I do a little bit still. That’s what it is now. But now, I’m also in this place where it’s evolving even more again to the next step, which is me telling my own stories.

I do have one major client that I work for, it’s in my family, it’s the Homestead Coffee Roasters. They’re my boyfriend and partner, who we’ve been with now for 11 years. It’s his family’s business, so it’s my family’s business too. I do all those things for them. Now, I’m at a point where I have all of these things to say, and all of these creative stories that I want to share with the world, and so that’s begun. It’s now morphing into, I have 2 children’s books that are available. The first one I self-published, the second one I found a publisher and an illustrator.

It just came out this past holiday season. It’s about Christmas. It was a Christmas-time launch. I had book signings and readings and amazing, amazing feedback from people and interactions with strangers. I was at a bookshop, this was not uncommon, where I found myself just sitting there, no one knew who I was, just a little sign like, author signing. People would meander over and they’d be like, “Oh, what’s your book about?” I would give the synopsis and they would start crying, strangers.

I was like, “Wow, this is a powerful story.” It was very unexpected. I found this story really touching people’s hearts. It feels to me like it’s just the beginning. I have lots of plans and things I want to make and ways that I can help people.

This specific book is called To Be a Christmas Tree and it’s a children’s book, but it’s also for adults and people use it for… There’s a strong element of grief and loss that goes throughout it. It’s very healing for not just reading yourself, but also for reading together with children or other family members. Also using in school settings or group settings where children are going through some sort of a grief and loss. You can break the story down and say, “Oh, how do you think this makes this character feel?” Or, “What does this character represent? Do you have a friend like this in your life? Do you have someone who you can talk to? Do you feel this way? Did you get to say goodbye to your loved one?” Conversations you can have to help them process. It’s this beautiful story that’s touching and has a purpose.

Kerri Fitzgerald:
To Be a Christmas Tree, everyone should go out and read it.

Leigh Marino:
Yes, they should.

Kerri Fitzgerald:
I love how you talked about it’s to help children, also adults, to process big emotions, like grief and loss. Do you feel like maybe something like that would have helped you process your emotions? Or are you looking to almost help that inner child provide something for children now to be able to learn to process their emotions and how to navigate them?

Leigh Marino:
Absolutely. Yeah, I think that I didn’t really know that I should be doing that at such a young age when my parents first got divorced. I think they just didn’t know, or maybe the opportunity just wasn’t presented to be able to… Or maybe I didn’t want to talk about it, I don’t know. I don’t remember back then.

But being able to really process that grief at that time, I’m sure would’ve helped me. But I guess I learned to do it on my own in some way. That’s what I like to try to give back.

Also, I do remember during that time when I was so out of control with these panic attacks, I was crying so much. I remember saying to the psychiatrist, “I just have so much grief, it just feels like grief.” It wasn’t a specific thing that I was grieving. Of course, I was upset that I was out of control and what was happening to me, but then it was just this heavy, heavy grief. I feel like it was probably my lifetime of grief also coming out.

Kerri Fitzgerald:
Encourage Thought is doing a lot of really great things. Thank you for everything that you’re doing.

Leigh Marino:
Yeah. I also want to say a diagnosis doesn’t define you. You can always move through that. It doesn’t mean you’ll always have it. You might, you might always struggle with something, but you also might not. It’s not who you are.

Kerri Fitzgerald:
Right, yeah. My Hero 360 likes to focus on individuals who have not let their personal challenges impact their life. How would you say you’ve not allowed your circumstances or experiences to define you and what you’re going to do with your life?

Leigh Marino:
I think if you go through a challenge or something happens to you that’s upsetting, you could see yourself as a victim and get stuck there, especially if you feel like you don’t know how to get out of it. But for me, taking responsibility for my role in a situation, whether it’s someone does something to me and it completely was out of my control, that situation wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t there. I like to view things as it takes two to tango, and I am just as much a part of this event and the situation as whoever else or whatever else is, and what I can control, is me.

To me that feels empowering and it makes me not identify as a victim and not feel like a victim. I can say, “Well, what can I take from this and how can I grow? How can I turn this into something that I’m grateful for in the end?” You might not know, you might not see that or even think about that at the time, but just recognizing that you’re in control of yourself, and you can take a step at a time to get yourself out of that situation or heal from something, I think is very empowering.

Kerri Fitzgerald:
Absolutely. We like to conclude our interviews asking, and I feel like this is particularly poignant for you and what we’ve talked about, is if you could talk to your younger self, what would you tell them?

Leigh Marino:
I would say, “It works out. Just keep going. It works out.”

Kerri Fitzgerald:
That’s great, short and sweet to the point. Well, thank you Leigh so much for speaking with us, telling your story. It’s really important and I know it’s going to continue to help people. You’ve already helped so many people by sharing. But for everyone watching and listening, it’s going to be really, really great.

Everyone should go to EncourageThought.org and Encourage Thought on Instagram. You can buy your children’s novel there as well on the website. Thank you for joining another episode of My Hero 360.