Holding It Together (Kinda)

Odcinki

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  Reclaim Calm in the Chaos: Time Mastery with Walt Hampton 17.09.2026 57min

  Send us Fan Mail What if “busy” is the shield that keeps you from what you most need? We sat down with Walt Hampton—executive coach, author of The Power Principles of Time Mastery, and long-distance runner—to rethink time, energy, and the stories we tell ourselves about balance. This is a lifeline for caregivers, creators, and leaders who feel stretched thin and want a sustainable way to show up for others without burning out. We unpack the 80/20 principle and why a tiny set of actions creat...
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  # 3 Episode Companion Memory Is Not A Care Plan When Stress Hits 15.09.2026 5min

  Send us Fan Mail Caregiving can feel like being the only person holding the whole system in your head and it’s exhausting for reasons most people never see. We unpack what happens when you’re expected to remember every detail, translate a loved one to rushed medical teams, and keep your cool while anxiety is doing laps in your body. If you’ve ever left an appointment and thought, “I should have said that,” you’ll recognize yourself here. We walk through a practical companion to “This Is What...
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  Kala Allen Omeiza: I Got Bullied In An Autism Lab 10.09.2026 47min

  Send us Fan Mail Watching someone succeed can fool us into thinking they’re fine. Then Kala Allen Omeiza says something that stops us cold: she worked in top autism research spaces and still didn’t learn she was autistic until 24, after a painful rupture, a mental health crisis, and therapy that finally connected the dots. We talk about what late autism diagnosis can look like when you’re a high achiever: sensory overload that gets dismissed, social communication gaps that get mislabeled, an...
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  Episode 2 Care Companion: You Can Love Them And Still Feel Worn Out 08.09.2026 5min

  Send us Fan Mail Loving someone who is still alive but no longer feels like the person you knew can mess with your head in ways most people never see. On this midweek unpack of Holding It Together Kinda, I slow things down and revisit one of the most tender topics we have talked about: caregiver grief and ambiguous loss, the quiet, unacknowledged pain that shows up when memory, personality, and family roles change right in front of you. I reflect on my conversation with Dr. Joanne Schaeffer ...
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  Justin Ray: Hospitals Without Walls 03.09.2026 1godz 3min

  Send us Fan Mail The scariest part of a mental health crisis is not the diagnosis, it is the moment you realize the system can see the problem and still tell you it does not qualify. Justin Ray, a board-certified psychiatric nurse practitioner and 22-year retired Navy veteran, joins us from the trenches where hospitals, jails, families, and community care collide. We talk honestly about what happens when someone is psychotic, homeless, or cycling through repeated ER visits, and why “not sick ...
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  Episode 1 Companion: Six Hospitals Later And Everyone Still Acts Surprised 02.09.2026 9min

  Send us Fan Mail Six hospitalizations in nine months can look like “care,” yet still leave a family right where they started: scared, depleted, and forced to explain the same story to strangers who only see a single moment. We slow things down and unpack the foundation behind “Six Hospitals, Two States, Nine Months,” the episode that set the direction for our work on family mental health, caregiving, and fixing the gaps in psychiatric hospitalization and discharge planning. We talk about the...
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  Communication and the Cost of Silence 27.08.2026 1godz 12min

  Send us Fan Mail A single missed conversation can be the most dangerous part of treatment. We start with David, a 62-year-old man living with schizophrenia who is stable on a complex antipsychotic regimen until an urgent care visit adds the wrong sedative. His family tries to warn the provider about medication interactions, gets blocked by privacy talk, and the outcome is catastrophic. It is a brutal reminder that care coordination between psychiatry, primary care, and emergency medicine is n...
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  When The Doctor Becomes Family with Dr Mohamed Elziam 20.08.2026 1godz 3min

  Send us Fan Mail A white coat can make people think medicine is all control, clarity, and clean answers. Then a crisis hits your own family, and you learn how fast that illusion collapses. We sit down with Dr. Mohamed Elziam, a family physician, to talk about his brother’s late-onset schizophrenia and what it’s like to live in two roles at once: the clinician who understands diagnoses and pharmacology, and the brother who is grieving, advocating, and trying to keep everyone safe. We get spec...
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  Elder Care Is A Life Plan with Shanika Batchelor 13.08.2026 47min

  Send us Fan Mail “A nursing home” is one of the most emotionally loaded phrases in caregiving and it often shuts down the real conversation we need to have. We sit down with Shanika Bachelor, founder of Armana Assisted Living in Egypt and co-founder of an assisted living operation in Wisconsin, to rethink what long-term care can look like when dignity, autonomy, and community come first. We dig into the practical side of elder care and senior living, including the clear differences between s...
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  The Dilemmas of Addiction 06.08.2026 59min

  Send us Fan Mail We explore the hard edge between autonomy and suffering through Jamie’s story and the wider reality of co‑occurring addiction and mental illness. We ask when saving a life becomes enough, how families hold the line, and why systems confuse stabilization with success.<br><br>• co‑occurring disorders shaping addiction and depression<br>• families as first responders at the front line<br>• the broken safety net after detox and discharge<br>• autonom...
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  The Great Earwax Contraband Caper with Jolene Breinig 30.07.2026 1godz

  Send us Fan Mail Caregiving gets called a “labor of love,” but that phrase can hide the bruising reality: the physical work, the mental load, the split-second decisions, and the guilt that keeps families trying to do it all alone. We’re joined by RN Jolene Breinig, a home health nurse who works at the intersection of medical necessity and personal connection, to talk about what caregiving actually looks like day to day and why dignity matters as much as any task list. We dig into why familie...
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  The Future Proof Parent: Special Needs Planning Without Panic with Rebecca Iantuonni 23.07.2026 1godz 3min

  Send us Fan Mail The scariest caregiving question isn’t medical. It’s the quiet one that shows up at 2 a.m.: “What happens to my loved one when I’m gone?” I sit down with my friend of 40-plus years, attorney Rebecca Iantoni, to make special needs planning feel human, doable, and real, not like a pile of legal forms you will “get to someday.” We talk about the fragile “house of cards” so many families build with public benefits like Medicaid, SSI, housing supports, and waiver programs, and wh...
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  Understanding Hoarding 16.07.2026 1godz 4min

  Send us Fan Mail A home packed with newspapers, dogs, broken toasters, or “valuable” scraps can look like a simple cleanup problem until you hear what the objects mean. Hoarding isn’t a character flaw, and it’s rarely about laziness. For many people, a pile is a memory system, a shield, or a last connection to someone they lost and trying to remove it can feel like real physical pain. Michael sits down with Angela and Stephanie to unpack what hoarding disorder actually is, what it isn’t, and...
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  All the Wrong Doors 09.07.2026 1godz 10min

  Send us Fan Mail “No wrong door” is one of the nicest promises in mental health policy. It’s also the line that can break you when you’re living the reality: months-long waits, intake appointments that lead nowhere, referral lists that are outdated, and a loved one who keeps getting discharged back home while you’re told to “just make some calls.” If you’ve ever felt like the door is there but your hand can’t find the handle, we made this one for you. We talk through what we call the loop of...
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  Set Boundaries And Still Love Them with Dr Michelle Sherman author of Loving Someone with Mental Illness 02.07.2026 58min

  Send us Fan Mail Your loved one can be struggling in plain sight, and somehow the whole family learns to whisper about it. We sit down with clinical psychologist Dr. Michelle Sherman, author of *Loving Someone with Mental Illness or a History of Trauma*, to talk about the hidden workload of family caregiving, the silence that grows around stigma, and the very real barriers in the US mental health system that keep people from getting support early. We get specific about the emotional side too...
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  Caregiver Stress Reset with Alicia Feller 25.06.2026 1godz 10min

  Send us Fan Mail Your shoulders are up near your ears, your jaw is locked, and you are running on adrenaline again and calling it “fine.” If that sounds like caregiving life, you are not imagining it and you are not weak. I’m joined by Alicia Feller, LCSW and former Department of Mental Health executive, to get specific about the physical toll of caregiver stress and the smallest moves that can bring your nervous system back from the edge. We break down what chronic stress does to the body o...
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  Make The Strawberry Bunny Then Eat It with Kathy Micheel 18.06.2026 45min

  Send us Fan Mail Caregiving can look heroic on the outside while you’re shaking behind the safety gate on the inside. We name that gap and get honest about the cost of trying to be endlessly patient, present, and “fine” while managing chronic illness, mental illness, appointments, meds, and the constant emotional load. For us, the real breakthrough is accepting a truth most caregivers were never taught: self-care is not self-indulgence, it’s the fuel that makes you competent, steady, and able...
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  Is This Mushroom Edible with Emerson Kerr 11.06.2026 1godz 13min

  Send us Fan Mail AI is everywhere right now, and the noise makes it easy to assume one of two extremes: either it saves healthcare or it destroys it. I sit down with Emerson Kerr, a longtime sleep medicine leader and C-suite executive at Nox Medical, to talk about a third path where AI supports clinicians and caregivers while the human touch stays in charge. We dig into what “precision medicine” can actually mean on the ground, how large datasets can surface patterns no person could realisti...
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  Why Your Brain Wants Jelly Beans with Dr Matthew Galati 04.06.2026 56min

  Send us Fan Mail Your brain is not a fixed object, and neither is your future. I sit down with Dr. Matthew Galati, a family medicine and rehab physician who also survived a severe traumatic brain injury after a brutal car crash. He spent days in a coma, woke up unable to talk or walk, and had to relearn basic skills from the ground up. Then he did the thing the “experts” warned might never happen: he returned to medicine, finished his MD, and turned his recovery into a framework that helps ot...
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  Caregiver Misconceptions with ("Host") Victoria Cuore 31.05.2026 56min

  Send us Fan Mail HIPAA gets thrown around like a brick wall, guardianship gets sold like a silver bullet, and families get blamed for not having “the right paperwork” while they’re actively in crisis. We slow all of that down and get specific about what’s true, what’s hype, and what actually helps when you’re trying to protect someone you love during a mental health emergency. Michael Mackniak and Victoria Cuore unpack five common misconceptions that show up in real hospitals, real courtroom...