215: Mental Health with Dr. Sherry Walling

What It Covers

Clinical psychologist and author Sherry Walling joins host Ben to discuss practical mental health support strategies, grief navigation, emotional expression, and finding effective therapy. Walling draws on personal losses — her father's death from cancer and her brother's suicide — to offer concrete, experience-based guidance for supporting others and oneself through hardship.

Key Questions Answered

• •Supporting grieving people: Skip the open-ended "let me know how I can help" — it transfers cognitive burden onto someone already at capacity. Instead, make a specific, concrete offer: bring food, walk the dog, handle yard work. The decision about what help to provide should be made by the helper, not the person grieving.
• •The six-week grief window: Support from friends and community typically peaks in the first two to three weeks after a loss, then drops off sharply. The person grieving, however, remains in acute pain well past that point. Deliberately delaying or spacing out gestures of care to the six-week mark delivers higher impact when loneliness tends to peak.
• •Language to avoid in grief support: Phrases that project meaning onto loss — such as "everything happens for a reason" or "they're in a better place" — impose conclusions the grieving person may not share. More effective responses stay present-tense and use first-person statements: "I care about you" or "I don't know what to say, but I'm here."
• •Emotional release and crying: Crying produces a measurable physiological release — a sensation of physical lightness and reduced tension — because it moves processing out of the cognitive brain and into the body. People who identify as intellectually oriented can shift toward this by examining internalized beliefs about emotional expression and gradually reframing crying as a deliberate, beneficial physical process rather than a loss of control.
• •Finding an effective therapist: Reduce logistical friction first — choose someone with online scheduling, a convenient location, or telehealth availability. Trust initial intuition about basic human connection. Expect to sample two or three therapists before committing. A therapist is working well when the client notices internal shifts in self-perception and behavior, not when they feel strongly attached to the practitioner.