Dr. Kristen Viola Harrison journey as a psychologist founding Soul Wise Solutions

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one story at a time. Hi, I'm Tony Mantour. Welcome
to Why Not Me? Embracing Autism and Mental Health Worldwide.
Joining us today is doctor Kirsten Viola Harrison. She is
a distinguished trauma psychologist, spiritual integration pioneer, and founder of
soul Wise Solutions, which is dedicated to transforming lives through
a unique blend of clinical expertise, soul centered healing, and
social advocacy. With over twenty five years of experience supporting
individuals with complex trauma, dissociative disorders, schizophrenia, and near death experiences.
She bridges psychology and spirituality to foster deep, lasting healing.
She has a wealth of information. She's written a book
and joins us today to talk more about that. So
before we dive into our episode, we'll be back with
an uninterrupted show right after a word from our sponsors.
Thanks for coming up.
Of course, I appreciate the invite.
Oh, it's my pleasure. So if you would tell us
a little bit about what you do.
So, I am a psychologist. I've spent many years working
with people who have had very severe trauma, and also
spent a fair amount of time doing women's group or
people in transition, whether it be a life change or
raising kids and dealing with the difficult teenagers or whatever.
But mostly my background has been very severe trauma disorders
and also near death experiencers who are trying to kind
of integrate the learnings that they've had into sort of
like everyday life.
Again, that's very interesting. I'm wondering what led you to
pursue this career.
So I kind of always thought I would do something
with languages. I love languages, I love cultures and people.
And my high school sweetheart, who had became my first
husband had very severe childhood trauma, had been adopted but
had been in an orphanage as a child in South America,
and so many things happened during our relationship that just
made no sense to me. So I got really busy
trying to understand psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, like anything to do with trauma.
And I'm almost sixty so back then there was not
the Internet, so we had to go to kind of
the back annals of a medical school library and try
to find anything that I could figure out. And then
shortly thereafter, i'd say a few years there after, my
brother died in an accident tragically. So that got me
not only understanding trauma from my own perspective, but also
integrating what I was learning in my book from people
who had had in your death experiences because I had
this deep desire to want to understand what happened, so
I would say, and then it just kind of snowballed.
Was working on my master's in biomedical sciences undergrad and
psych then more psych did some research at UCLA on
PTSD and just kind of kept going.
So you've been doing it now for what thirty forty years?
Yeah, I'm fifty nine so I'd say living it kind
of from age eighteen on with my first husband, and professionally,
i'd say from bad age twenty one when I first
started working child guidance, and then yeah, it's been a while.
Yeah, so this is interesting. My question now is you've
been doing it so long, have you had any burnout
where you've had to psychoanalyze yourself at times? Oh?
Absolutely, I would say the hardest was so I have
a biological daughter, and then I had three step kids
along the way, and one of my step kids has
special needs.
She has something called Smith McGinnis syndrome.
She's twenty now but cognitively more like five, and I've
been raising her since she was three.
I would say that during those years it.
Got very difficult to also balance clients, and I was
finding that I was losing my filter, the inability to
be able to process what was handled in session and
so much trauma and then come home and be all happy,
go lucky and.
Very present with my children. So I'd need to take
a bit of a.
Break, I would say for a good ten years there
in terms of individual clients. And then, like I said,
I started segueing into kind of women who are what
they can considered worried well, which is sort of more
everyday concerns, not necessarily tapping into deep trauma. As my
kids have gotten older, my daughter don't finished her master's
degree at Johns Hopkins. As they're kind of moving on,
I am finding myself back into the trauma field in
a way that I feel like I can make a
real difference.
Do you see a difference from your earlier years, from
when you started to what you were doing in today's world?
Absolutely.
I mean, first of all, the field has changed so
much in traumatology, because back in the day, I was
that annoying student who would put articles in my professor's
mailboxes and say, have you read this one yet?
I've gone to this conference, you know.
I was constantly educating myself and then also trying to
bring it to the classroom. And back in the day,
there wasn't a whole lot being taught specifically just on trauma,
and that was really disheartening. However, now it's so wonderful.
People are getting degrees in trauma studies. So I just
feel like the field has definitely evolved, and in parallel,
the field of near death experiences has evolved. Now, but
he kind of knows what in your death experience is.
Back in the day, I would say in the mid
eighties when I was first learning and going through conferences.
The late eighties, it wasn't very talked about, and there
were journals like Thanatology that you could never find, and
that was little bits and pieces that people were bringing together.
With all the changes with people talking and discussing it openly, now, yes, yes,
that does help when people will talk about it. How
did you handle it back then when it wasn't as open,
people wouldn't discuss it. Everyone kind of thought that, well,
do I know if this is true or are they
just making it up? How did you get through that
where you could still help the people that needed the help,
but yet tell them don't worry about it, and don't
worry about what other people are thinking, because it doesn't matter.
I've asked myself that as well. I mean, my parents
kind of you know, they raised me on books like
Anne Frank and Uncle Tom's Cabin and books I had
to do with survival and resilience and being victimized, and
then what it said about the greater collective and how
we could then help. I would say, being brought up
as a global citizen and having that awareness. But it
has been a bit of a lonely road sometimes. And
I think my brother's death was the thing that sort
of catapulted me at a very young age.
I was only twenty two when it happened, he was twenty.
I think it made me cocoon a little bit and go,
you know what, the things I thought were so important,
or the friends whose opinions I valued so much, it
was the ones who kind of went in the darkness
with me and kind of went in that deep night
of the soul with me that I kind of thought, Okay,
these are the people that get it.
The rest of this stuff is just fluff.
And so then over time, through some difficult relationships, dealing
with people with a lot of severe trauma, my stepdaughter
who does some really interesting things in public, sometimes I've
just sort of learned to just sort of laugh and
go with it, ignore the haters. I did write this
book with Shauna, who I've befriended for ten years, who
was living on the streets and schizophrenic and also the
most positive, joyous personal up or meet.
After ten years and.
Writing the book and supporting her, I gave her an
experience to travel outside of the country for three weeks
to promote the book and visit all the Pride parades
because she's something called intersex, and I saw firsthand the hate.
Sometimes I just kept.
Saying, Jess Shanna, just you know, we're doing our thing,
and we know why we're doing it, and just sort
of keep going. And in the meantime we've educated her.
TikTok got a million views on one of the posts,
and people are having real discussions about what it means
to understand somebody that's not wired exactly how they are.
So you mentioned she had a deal with schizophrenia at.
Times, absolutely, yes, How.
Did she deal with that? Was it medication? Medication and therapy?
Just therapy? How did it all evolve?
One of the things I advocate for in the book
she walks half a marathon a day. Well, that's impressive, Like,
I can't even fathom that. It is called her mood
wall therapy, and it's how she regulates her symptoms.
It's difficult.
Sometimes she has some you know, a lot of flailing
about unwanted movements. Sometimes she definitely has very strong and
can be perceived as angry verbalizations that scare people. Okay,
rightfully so, But I have tried to teach the community
if you just say, hey, Shanna, she will snap right
out of it. All of that you know, medial prefrontal
cortex stuff that's a little bit dysregulated, like, comes back
online and she's able to completely join the conversation with
unbelievable insight.
During this whole process. Was she dealing with annisignosia at all?
Can you give us a little insight to what she
was going through on a daily basis?
So it really impacted her.
I would say she had her first probably psychotic break
back in college. She was a student athlete, and one
of her dear friends took her to the mental health
center and tried to figure out what was going on.
She was having a lot of voices, very threatening voices
inside her head. I have been around her enough now
to understand that there's like a sir and guys and ma'am,
you know, all the things that she does and she'll
kind of hold up a peace sign or do a
stop sign, and that's when I you know, okay, she's
talking to obviously voices that I can't hear. What makes
her situation a little more complicated is she's also got
dissociative schizophrenia. So she has a very rare condition that
I recognized early on. Again, I've never been her therapist,
just a friend who happens to be a psychologist. I
worked with doctor Colin Ross and he's a huge guy
in the trauma studies field, and he delineated a group
of symptoms that he called dissociative schizophrenia, and it's very rare.
It never got accepted by the APA because there just
weren't kind of enough agreements on what that constituted. But
because I've spent so much in my professional career working
with what they used to call multiple personality disorder, which
is now did I saw the overlap and Shauna, and
so I saw that there were part little kid parts,
little girl parts. There were parts of her that were
distinct from the voices that were more of like a
menacing traditional schizophrenic presentation.
How did they handle this? Did they give her medication
to calm her down, or did they give her there
therapy or is this all self regulated and she handles
it herself?
Though I would say her early years during her first
set of treatment was a little bit spotty. I know
that she was in various shelters, various hospital situations, so
I'm not sure exactly what they tried. But I also
know that she is averse to medicines because of the
side effects as an athlete, they were very uncomfortable to her,
as what I'm gathering, and also that her mom and
dad had also died very young before age fifty, and
she was scared of some of those cardiac effects and whatever.
Okay, so let's fast forward to today. Are there any
medications involved or is she handling it all internally?
She works it out within herself, and I would say
she's catered her life to kind of adapt how she
needs to adapt. It would be nice if some medication
were there that would really ameliorate some of her distress sometimes,
but I think she's coping in an incredibly resilient way.
She is very unique, She's very un self conscious. She
wears extremely flamboyant, bright outfits. Part of her schizophrenia is
that her intersex nature, because she's born what they used
to call hermaphrodite. I feel like it's not an adaptive effect.
I feel like when she was living on the streets,
not being so aware of her condition actually helped her
thrive and survive. So it's kind of this paradox that
those who live sort of on the edge of mental
illness or we would call like maladaptive brain functioning, to
her has been very adaptive.
It's helped her.
So you wrote a book about her life. How deep
a dive did you do? Do you take it from
beginning to today? Or are there certain parts of her
life that you focus on one more than another. What
can people expect for read if they pick this up?
So it does cover enough of her backstory. I mean
I've been in her life daily now for ten years,
and after getting her house, supporting her now after the
two years of go fund me money ran out, I've
been spreading her from the last eight I've gotten to
know her sister, some of her nieces and nephews, and
so I've gotten a very comprehensive picture. But again it's
sort of limited because based on her I don't want
to call it revisioning of her history, but in her mind,
she really believes certain things about her parentage that may
or may not be actual, verifiable fact. Though I present
all of that in the book. Shanna and I wrote
it together so she knows every little last thing. The
schizophrenia chapter was a little challenging to write with her
because obviously the delusions of Grander were kind of like, no,
not me, Doc, you know, but in the end she
kind of She looked at me one time while we
were in Paris, I'll give you an example, and I
sat acrossroom where we had having a really stressful day.
We went to Paris Pride, which was wonderful. We had
a great time, but the voices were starting to act
up and she was starting to incorporate me into the delusion.
So she was having conversations with Doc but over on
the side inside her system.
How did you handle that?
Though?
I just looked at her deep in the eyes and
I said, Shauna, it must be so difficult to just
function when all day you're getting these messages of people
telling you that things aren't so great or beating you down,
and how you still stay positive is beyond me.
What was her response to that?
She looked at me.
With this deep, soulful look and said, Doc, thanks, yeah,
it's kind of hard sometimes. And I was like, that
was the moment of connect where the soul is in
there trying to work through the brain.
Yeah, Okay, you've known it for ten years, She's had
all these voices. I think you know where I'm going
with this. Is there any chance that any of these
voices could turn violent at any time? No?
And I think that's the hugest misconception. I mean, it's
the same thing with DID. It's so not as common
as the press would make you believe, especially with DD,
that people.
Are going to turn violent like that.
I mean as soon as you kind of like, as
long as you know other substance going on. I mean, Shauna,
thank god, is not on any drugs or alcohol, which
makes it so much easier to be in this with her.
That is a misconception.
It just feels to me like it's something that the
public should become more aware of.
That.
Truly, if you approach with a very non threatening, just
friendly energy, not trying to step into the delusion and
not trying to challenge the person, but if you're just
sort of there in a supportive manner. I think quantum
physics shows that our energies interact in a certain way
that instantly kind of helps calm the system.
Okay, that's good. So what happens when people she does
not know interact with her. And there's no other way
to say this, But when the haters start hating, how
does she respond?
Okay, so she it's different. She and I have different
responses to that. At first I'll get hurt for her,
or I'll try to absorb, or I'll have this righteous
indignation of oh they just don't understand, right. Yeah, Unfortunately,
she takes a very This is why I call her
a walking spirit. She takes a very spiritual approach in
DD we call it, and in her self helper, which
is sort of like an ally that bridges the divine
and the human experience. And that's the closest I can
come to explaining it.
Like, she just has this.
Very spiritual palm effect. Well, Doc, you know, some people
don't understand. You know, it's remarkable. I mean on a
city bus she was really teased and harassed one time,
and she said she just kind of like Rosa park,
she just sort of stared straight ahead and just kind
of waited for it all to calm down. She is
not confrontational in the least. It's just years of practice
through misunderstanding, I think, but I still feel it for her.
That's awesome that she handles it like that. Now, what's
the next step. You've written a book, you help her
from day to day. What do you see on the horizon,
what do you see coming up next? Well?
I think, okay, so I've been in education my whole life,
and so has she. She's a certified pe teacher, four
year college degree. And I think education and getting the
word out, which is why we love doing things like podcasts,
and just finding a way to just keep letting people
know a little bit more or about resilience and hope,
post traumatic driving, post traumatic growth, that truly anything is possible,
and that you just have to keep going and keep believing.
She attends a lot of spiritual services online and it
keeps her strong and fortified. So the next steps are
just keep getting the word out, and I wish and
some great plan that there would be some sort of
streaming or movie or something about her life, because I
think she's just that charismatic and that influential in terms
of her ability to get through a hardship after sleeping
on cardboard for eight years and navigating the world. Right now,
it's just little by little, just getting the word out
and just hoping that people can feel that they're never
alone and that they're always connected to something bigger, and
that if you just keep believing, there might be somebody
that crosses your path and can help you along the
way in that journey.
Yes, that's great and so true. So you've been promoting
this book, I've been traveling in the US and some
places around the world. What else are you doing. Are
you working on your career or have you put the
career aside for a little bit so that you can
do this project. Can you give us a little insight.
I'd say it's a combination of all of the above, because,
like I said, all this is now kind of done
with school, my stepdaughters with her mom a lot, so
I have more sort of space and bandwidth to kind
of refocus. I do still do consultations, some speaking, some groups,
so yes, one hundred percent still doing things.
I have a website that I filter a lot of
that through.
But mostly right now I'm just trying to help Sean
to really find some footing, which is kind of funny
because she does walk so much, but some footing where
she can feel like she's really starting to make some
income on her own, possibly through sponsorship, she wears athletic
gear that we were like, Okay, let's explore that. My
whole field is, you know, helping, It's not so much business.
So I am trying to brainstorm with lots of different
people how to start to get the word out.
You just brought sponsorships up. Do you see her getting
in a position to where she can travel around the
country speaking engagements and start spreading the word that way, Well, I.
Would say, okay, if that's going to include her kind
of usually I'm with her. I think that her capacity
to kind of like spread joy and everything that she
does incredibly is best done in a very like short
period of time. I think she gets a little restless
and her mind will wonder if it's more than fifteen minutes.
I'd say she did exceptionally well at our book launch,
but there was still a lot of kind of agitation
and nervousness. So when we do things together it does
help regulate a little bit. I think I help her
regulate her nervous system a little bit just by my presence.
And then I think also on her end, she takes
everything and makes it that much.
More rich and powerful.
So we are looking at ways to be able to
do that, but she lives in Palm Springs.
I live in La Joya, so it's a couple hours drive.
She hasn't quite navigated zoom and all the different platforms,
and she's a little this is part of the schizophrenia,
a little bit fearful of some things like that. So
it's a work in progress. I mean, every day is
a new learning, a new challenge. But getting her message
out as much as possible. That's why we were at
all the Pride events. We made sure to avail ourselves
of every little chance to have a conversation with somebody
to enlighten them about what's going on.
Sure, what was the response you received? Was it good?
It was so good, So I would say in the moment,
was amazing.
Online I was a little harder.
Some of the tiktoks were confused, but I loved how
communities started showing up for each other. Like you'd get
certain communities going, hey, didn't your mama raise you right?
You shouldn't talk to somebody like that. In another community
say we're just confused, we don't understand. And it was
like the dialogues were fascinating and heartening because at the
end of the day, people were like, Okay, if I
can get my head around this, maybe I can start
to be a little bit more curious and help your cause.
So what she's diagnosed with, is this a rare situation?
What part of the population is it? Yeah?
Well, this is the reason I call her like a
one in a million, because I mean one in a
Brazilian because not only was she homeless for all that time,
like chronically homeless, but with tons of optimism and incredible resilience.
Being intersects is less than two percent of the population
to begin with, although some people say it's as common
as red hair, so it's not as rare as we
would think.
But having ambiguous genitalia and where that.
Fits in your self concept is difficult and how your
body responds. Then, on top of that, schizphrenia I about
one to two percent of the population, and then you
get the dissociative schizophrenic part, which is very rare.
I'd say she's pretty rare.
Yeah, I would say, you're right there. Now with the
two different forms of schizophrenia, how does that interact with
each other? How does she handle that?
So what I noticed is like the dissociative heart, she
might go into a thrift shop and buy like a
Strawberry Shortcake T shirt, right, and it's like, okay, you
know that little girl and her that never got a
chance to be that little girl, and that never got
seen and it got teased. That's more of like the
little parts that see themselves in the mirror as that.
That's more the desi a part, and then the schizophrenia
part is all this kind of like chorus of voices
with constant judgment and constant sort of menacing where she's
physically reacting more like she'll step back for a second,
or she'll flail, or she'll push a hand up saying
stay away. That much more clearly representative of like what
we would call traditional paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of grandeur.
Now I've spoken with several people that deal with schizophrenia
with their loved ones. It can get out of control
at times. They're not touching on reality, and sometimes it
can get violent. They don't mean it to be that way,
but unfortunately it happens. So nothing like this affects her well.
She hungers down. I mean she's in her apartment a lot.
She lives in a place that's very hot, so it's
kind of disguised as I'm staying inside from the heat.
But really that's where she can sort of unravel. She
has learned different situations that are more triggering. For instance,
in La Joya, she way early on before I knew,
she was arrested for false imprisonment. And what that meant
was a lady was so scared of her voices and
menacing behaviors with her arms flailing, that she locked herself
into a bathroom in a public place and then called
the police. She supposedly had different members of the community
like at CBS and Vond's places that knew her and
said she doesn't mean any harm. She's certainly very gentle,
but the lady was scared. So things like that happen
a lot. And that's why I say sometimes it's a
little bit of our interpretation too. But honestly, our neurobiology
is so different and varied. We can't make one heart
and fast rule. I mean, my stepdaughter is a great example.
The first day of school, she used to bop every
hat in the classroom with a sharp pencil, you know,
and just do all these Really, she mooned the class
one time.
I mean, she just did some really interesting things.
Obviously, with medicine in her case, it dampened, not down
a lot, and she was able to sort of learn
and whatever. But still that took its own toll. She
gained about eighty pounds. And you know, it's just a balance.
It's so hard to know it is.
It sounds like she has a certain control where she
can handle it.
I would say with Shauna, she knows that she used
to sit at a stuite corner and almost in a
catatonic state. She would just sit there for hours. We're
talking like ten hours and not really doing much to
stare into space.
But then if people came by and said.
Hi, I love your outfit, she would one hundred percent
be able to snap out, engage them in conversation. And
then as soon as they left, she was back in
that kind of state. And then I've also noticed traveling
with her, certain substances do not interact well with her.
And so I've actually.
Told her, and she's taken notes because she can't be
a very good witness of her own behavior.
So I was trying to tell her.
I said, I notice, if you have a cup of coffee,
you seem to do a little better if you take
one of those calming gummies.
Not so good.
What about textures, food clothes, Does anything like that affect
her at all?
Not notice that?
Again with my stepdaughter, it was like she could only
have white foods. They had to have certain textures, so
she had much more of that, Shana, I'm not noticing that.
Okay. So for people that want to get to know
you find out by the book, how do they find you?
So they could go to my website.
I'm kind of starting to use that by default as
sort of a catch all for everything that we're doing.
So it's soul Wise Solutions s o u l wisee
Solutions s o l ut io ns dot com. From there,
it directs you to the Amazon link to buy the book,
which we would love get to know her whole story
of resilience and then our story together, how we met
and how this has all happened. And then it's also
at Barnes and Noble different places. So then there's some
blog on the website they could get more of an idea.
Yeah, well, this has been great, great conversation, great information.
I really appreciate you taking the time to join us today.
Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you, And I love
that you're so informed. I mean, you're just trying to,
you know, get everybody's ideas to be able to help.
So thank you.
Oh it's been my pleasure. Thanks again. Thanks for taking
time out of your busy schedule to listen to our
show today. We hope you enjoyed it as much as
we enjoyed bringing it to you. If you know someone
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