Sydney Curtin:From Diagnosis to empowerment

Welcome to Why Not Me? Embracing Autism and Mental Health Worldwide. Hosted by Tony Miantour. Broadcasting from the heart of Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join us as our guests share their raw, powerful stories. Some will spark laughter, others will move you to tears. These real-life journeys inspire, connect, and remind you that you're never alone. We're igniting a global movement to empower everyone to make a lasting difference by fostering deep awareness, unwavering acceptance, and profound understanding of autism and mental health. Tune in, be inspired, and join us in transforming the world one story at a time. Hi, I'm Tony Miantour. Welcome to Why Not Me? Embracing Autism and Mental Health Worldwide. Joining us today is Sydney Curtin. She's an inspiring speaker, author, multi-business owner, consultant, and life coach who transformed a traumatic past marked by a mother's addiction, mental illness, and family challenges into a powerful story of resilience. Now as a successful coach, she empowers others to overcome obstacles and thrive. She's here today to share her journey and insights for personal growth. 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 on. Thank you so much, Tony. Oh, it's my pleasure. So let's start off by telling people what you do. So I am a multi-business owner. I am a renowned serial entrepreneur. I own several businesses. I have published a book. I own a mobile application. It's currently in the beta phase. We have not launched the alpha phase yet. I have an exterior home and auto restoration business out here in Colorado where I live. We get a lot of hail damage that people need their insurance to pay to restore their home or their car back to its pre-storm condition. That's what I do. And then on top of that, I also do life coaching and business consulting. So businesses that have just a glitch in their system that they can't seem to identify. I go in, I get into the weeds, I fix that for them. And people who are trying to get back on track and just need that mentorship that we lack in society today that I did not lack, was very blessed to not lack while I was growing up. I have functioned as that mentor for several people in their relationships, in their business, and in their everyday life and financial management. Well, I can tell that certainly keeps you busy. Now, you do all this, but you also help people that might fall into the mental health area. How did this all come about for you? That falls into the life coaching part. So that piece where I had said the folks that just need that mentor in their life. The reason that I did not pursue psychology, when I had graduated high school, I had several scholarship offers for athletics to several different schools. And I was pursuing an athletic scholarship offer for track and field specifically. I was looking into several different schools at pursuing a psychiatry degree where I had identified in myself that I was not somebody who was going to give someone the fluff, if you will. I wasn't going to say, oh, it's okay, poor you, boo-hoo. And I decided instead to reroute four years into my degree, not pursue my masters, and instead get a counseling or coaching license, if you will. So that I could help people identify what it was in their life that was the obstacle and learn how to overcome that rather than cater to all of the politics and logistics and code that you have to live up to as a actual certified counselor. Wow. I think that's a great idea. By doing it this way, you can help those that need to help. Then if they get past what you can do for them, it will create a pathway for them to move forward to another person that can continue. Now, what are some of the challenges that you face? Nothing is as easy as it seems, yet nothing is as hard as it seems. But there's always a challenge and there's always a bump in the road. So what are some of the challenges that you faced when you started getting into this? In terms of challenges and bumps in that gap, if you will, between what does modern psychology say or rather insurance pay for versus what can a coach provide, i.e. what does insurance not pay for, there is a bridge there because people have been given the expectation, society has been given the expectation that if there's anything that we struggle with that can be classified in the DSM in terms of a mental health disorder, then this is outside of the scope or outside of the capabilities of a coach. And that's where my expertise really came in because I bridge that gap for a lot of my clients. I have been the person that was diagnosed with something classified in the DSM-5 or the most recent psychiatric disorder manual that we have in psychiatry today. And I made a decision that I did not fit the standards of that diagnosis. And I had my psychiatrist, a new one at the time, remove that diagnosis so that I was freed of the boundaries that were imposed upon me as an individual in order to help facilitate others leading a more functional life that they were in charge of, i.e. not limited to something that a book told them they were limited to. Right. So that's interesting. You actually have some lived experience of what you're coaching. So does that lived experience help bridge that gap to the people that you will be coaching so they feel more comfortable a lot quicker than they would with someone else that might just have that degree that's hanging on the wall? Very much so because I still have that piece of paper that says, hey, she's taken all the classes, she's taken all the courses, she understands how the brain works. And that piece of paper doesn't mean anything related to any of the life experience that any of my individual clients have. My clients come to me with a book of real life that they've lived through and been through and that they need real advice going through versus what the standard is imposed on us state by state or license by license that says you have to do this or you have to do that or you have to report this x, y, z. That gets removed from me significantly in this coaching license of things where I no longer have to resort to something that limits people to the capacity of the DSM criteria. I no longer have to abide by this is all that this person is capable based on the diagnosis that they've been given. And I'm able to say I see you for you and this is not something that is a permanent fixture or permanent part of you. It's a thorn instead that you deal with. And if we're looking at this as something that has been added to your portfolio of life, and if I can teach you how to manage that and how to address that, furthermore, how to make it empower you and your story, then you have the ability to influence a significant body of people who have been through similar experiences. With all this that you've done, all the people that you've worked with, the lived experience you have, what are some of the ranges of people that you might see? So when someone knocks on your door and walks through, what would you expect to see in that person of what they may or may not be going through at that point in time? Yeah, that's a great question. And without sharing, you know, personal testimony, but generalizations, I've worked with single moms and dads who have a child that they raise ranging from ages anywhere 10 to 16, where it just becomes I need my child to have somebody outside of me, they're resistant to counseling that feels stigmatized for them. They need a mentor in their life that can help them to identify these pieces about themselves that is from somebody other than mom or dad. And that goes all the way through women in their 40s, 50s, 60s who have suffered from physical relationships that they have since separated from or men that have been in narcissistic marriages that they divorced from, and then anything in between that. What about mental illness? Do you work with anyone that might have varying degrees of mental illness, such as schizophrenia, psychosis, bipolar, anxiety, anything that falls under that mental illness umbrella? Yes and no is the answer to that question. I am very willing to recognize when something is outside of my area of expertise. As a coach, I do not hold a medical license, I do not hold a degree that certifies me or licenses that certify me to support people in areas that are designated to a mental health professional. And that being said, because of my basis of faith and because of the things that I have overcome as somebody who was formerly diagnosed by something that met DSM criteria and that required psychiatrists and counselors to mitigate risk of my symptoms, I have freed myself of that. And there is a barrier that I've self-imposed on myself where if it meets XYZ standards, I allow myself to explore what that relationship could look like and how I can support that client. But if it crosses something that is beyond my area of able to help the client, their contract becomes null and void, and I no longer hold them to anything written between us two individuals. There are so many things when you get into mental illness that insurances just do not cover. Correct. Then you have situations where certain psychiatrists, etc. don't want to touch it because, well, insurance doesn't cover it. So these people are left in a big void. Do you kind of help cover some of that overlap? Yes and no. A lot of the people that I work with are referred to me by previous clients. Most coaches do not accept insurance because it's something that is not deemed a medical necessity, but rather something that is at the discretion of the policyholder. Whereas counseling or psychiatry is something that is deemed a medical necessity by most major insurance carriers. And for that reason, we have a significant bridge still that we have to cover as a team. And I mean that in the sense that I am not against counseling. I'm not against psychiatry. I think that they're one and the same thing. While I do not believe that medication is a silver bullet and it will not fix any of the symptoms that most individuals suffer with when they go to someone for professional help, I do believe that it can be a crutch that can be used very effectively while learning how to strengthen that muscle. Let's say that the client has an issue with just impulse control. Okay. And if we're dealing with somebody that has impulse control issues, maybe that results in lashouts at work or in interpersonal relationships, medication can dull the side effects of those extreme highs and lows. We treat that very similar to bipolar most of the time. And we treat that with mood stabilizers, regardless of what the diagnosis itself is. Now, if we revisit that, and we can also in conjunction with that medication, that mood stabilizer, treat the highs and lows of the emotions themselves, provide that client with the basis of what it means to self control those impulse and to use tools from dialectual behavioral therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy to level those extreme reactions that we had to things previously, that medication will help us to strengthen those muscles because it's almost like somebody spotting you if you think of a bench press. Instead of carrying the weight all yourself, you've got somebody that's helping you lift that. And that is really what it is when you treat medication in conjunction with cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectual behavioral therapy or coaching, right? It's just different licenses, different permissions to treat, if you will. Sure. Now, what can you tell us about what you went through that changed your life when you got diagnosed? And of course, when you got re diagnosed and it was taken off. Number one, how did it affect you when you got diagnosed? Then how did it affect you when you got it removed so that you could continue doing what you're doing now? Yeah, absolutely. No, I love that question. So I grew up with a mother that had a drug addiction, and it started in college for her. It was all of the things that kids commonly experiment with in that platform where you're free of parental control, but you're not free of financial freedom, perhaps. When she had my two younger brothers, she suffered serious medical complications that led her to also be on narcotics drugs. And I think for her, the combination of the narcotics plus her past of what one might call street drugs or something that is not prescribed, that just let her back down the rabbit trail of addiction. So when I was 13 years old, my mother took her life of a drug addiction. And I was the only female. I was raised by a single dad and I had two younger brothers. So I was the only girl in my family. Because of that, it really led my dad to want answers. I believe as a parent now that it's strongly because he wanted to protect me from the what ifs of having an only girl that had a strong genetic disposition to her mother's genes. That made sense. So what happened from there? So after my mother had passed, he had gone to a psychiatrist and said, this is who my wife was. This is what she struggled with. Tell me what she had so that I can protect my daughter from it. In different words, of course, but that was sort of the gist of it. What did the wife have that I was unable to save her from? It may or may not have contained any information about me at that time. The psychiatrist that he saw then had said, based on what you've described to me, it sure seems like your wife may have fit the criteria of border aligned personality disorder. As I grew up in my dad's home with my two younger brothers, I started displaying very similar personality characteristics of that of my mother. When I was of an age that it was appropriate to do so, he took me to a psychiatrist and disregarded the fact that I had lost my mother to a drug addiction and that I was being raised by a single dad and all of the trauma that my mother had put me through and instead wanted a label for it so that he could control what the outcome of this was. So with all this happening, what was next on the list that came up? When he took me to that psychiatrist, the psychiatrist diagnosed me with exactly what the psychiatrist that had spoken to my father about my mother had said, he said, your daughter most likely has border aligned personality disorder. Well, currently, that is a relatively new psychiatric disorder according to the DSM-5 or the most relevant form of psychiatric disorders that we have and border aligned personality disorder is treated such as bipolar disorder is. Well, the fundamental difference is that bipolar, it's not a psychiatric disorder in the sense that it doesn't. It's not borderline is called borderline because it borders neurotic and psychotic. Whereas borderline, sorry, my apologies, bipolar is mostly neurotic. It's a chemical imbalance. Whereas borderline crosses that boundary of, okay, well, we're fading into this psychotic in the realm of psychology disorder. So that's why it's called borderline is because it has that very gray boundary of the two disorders. That's the answer to your first question. How did you feel when you got that diagnosis? What did it do to you mentally? What it did to me mentally was enable me if I'm being entirely honest, like very honest, that it gave me an excuse for my behaviors because now I had somebody in my life justifying my actions based on a psychiatric label that I had no control over. I didn't choose this label, a professional that had a license chose this label. So why should I be held accountable to my actions as long as it meets the criteria of what a doctor has prescribed me medication for? Right. Okay. So let's get into this. Why did you have this removed from your records? And then once it was removed from your records, how did it or did it liberate you from that point moving forward? In college, when I had moved away from my dad's house, I found myself in several abusive relationships that I continuously justified based on that criteria of my diagnosis of the impulsivity and the lack of control. When I found myself pregnant with my oldest daughter in a very, very tricky situation that I've spoken on several times and won't get into the full story here, but I had to mostly for the sake of time, but I had to find a reason bigger than myself to change. And for me, that reason was my daughter. As I continue in this train of thought of I need something bigger than me to change, it had to become one, my daughter was the trigger, right? My faith was the second. I had not grown up in a home of faith, but I had found faith along my early adolescence, but I hadn't really abided by what the principles of my faith were, because it was restricting, it felt coercive in some ways. A lot of people in my life had convinced me that it was something that was kindering me rather than giving me strength. And then the third thing was that I had really just decided that all of the people in my life that were telling me that I wasn't enough for my daughter, that generational trauma would continuously repeat itself, that that wasn't a good enough answer for me, because I was not just a byproduct of my mother. If somebody were to ask me who I was, I was more than the daughter of my father or more than the daughter of my mother. And I was not going to allow people to just label me that. And when I talked to my friends about who I was, that wasn't even how they were like that most of them didn't even know my mom had struggled with drug addiction. It wasn't something that I openly publicized. Sure, that's understandable. I had gone to a psychiatrist, I said I was diagnosed with this at one point, I'm not going to tell you what it was, I would appreciate if you don't pull up my profile or my medical history. I would really like a completely, absolutely untainted view of who I am. We talked for just under two hours, and at the end of it, he said, you may struggle with ADHD to some degree, but outside of that, I wouldn't diagnose you with anything. In that moment, it was the most freeing experience I had ever had because I was no longer tied to not only anybody's opinion of me, but I had no excuses for my behavior anymore. Everything that I did was fully in my control. And I did not have a reason to justify anything that I was doing. If I felt short, I had to take accountability. Sure, that's great. Now, with that new lease on life, so to speak, what were your next steps? That was tough. That was the tough part because I had leaned on that label for so long that I had even damaged some relationships because of it. So it started with a lot of apologies. It was a lot of forgiveness that I needed, even just if it was to clear my conscience. Some people told me that it was not something that they held against me, but my faith played a lot into it. I'm an avid believer now. I am a Christian. I had to turn back to Jesus and say everything that I've turned against you from in conjunction with the diagnosis that I've had, I need your help fixing. Every time that I did that, in my relationship with God, He showed me where I had a bridge that I needed to mend or where I had communications that I needed to cross the bridge with. It was a slow but steady process. I had to go back to people and say, look, this is where I messed up. If you don't want a relationship with me, I understand, but I just want you to know that this was something that was not appropriate. Here's why. Here was my perspective. It wasn't okay, and it doesn't justify my behavior. I hope that you'll forgive me for that. That's not who I am anymore. Yeah, that's great. So it's kind of like the 12 steps. You have to go through each one to get to where you landed. Yes. Yes. Removing a piece of your identity that you've clung onto for so long requires revisiting relationships that you've had, because some of those relationships have been built on the foundation of who you are. Some of those relationships are, I have a relationship with this person because once you remove that piece of you as a foundation, sometimes you have to revisit that, and it's not always fun. Yeah, and it's a really hard step to go back to someone and say, you know what, I screwed up. Sorry about that. It is. Forgiveness is not something that's easy to ask for, but it's crucial. Absolutely. So when you went back and asked for forgiveness, how did they receive you? For everyone, except for the exception of a handful of people, it was in my benefit. And what I actually found was that in some cases, it was not myself that was instigating or propagating the self-imposing boundaries that I had had. I found that there were some people in my life that had been restricting me to the limitations of the diagnosis that I had previously held. Okay. My only conclusion now that I've healed from that encounter and from those relationships is because of their own unhealed trauma. But there are some people in my life, my dad is one of them, and I love my dad dearly, and we have a great relationship now. But I strongly feel that some of the reasons that he treats me the way that he does and has in the past is related to the unhealed things that he has in his relationship with my mother. He was married to her for 13 years, and that's reasonable. That's a long marriage. And he did not understand all of the things that happened to her as the only woman left that has my mother's DNA as his daughter. I think I would be in a similar boat to him, so I don't hold it against him. There are several relationships like that, though, where even if I did ask for forgiveness and we've mended things to a degree that people still see my mom and me to some capacity, we call it in psychiatry just radical acceptance is really what it is. I've had to radically accept the things that I cannot control, and it means that I can appreciate somebody for their intentions and their perspective without holding their opinion true or gospel. Sure. So now what about your family? Have they accepted you as well? Yeah, so I think that one of them has more so than the other. My two younger brothers, because they're younger than me, they grew up obviously also heavily under the influence of my dad as a single dad. One of them who's closer in age to me still struggles with his own set of problems, and I almost feel that he's in the same boat as I am or was at some point. At one point, I used that diagnosis that I had as a justification for my actions, and I love him dearly, and I see similar tendencies in his life now. I see him using the things that he's been told he struggles with and the excuses of his life circumstances to justify where he is in life. But the bottom line is that everybody's got stuff. Everybody has things that they deal with, and it's not an excuse or a justification for how you turn out, because we're not ultimately in control. If we're coming from a position of faith, which now me and all three of my brothers, or sorry, two of my brothers, all three of us is what I meant to say, because we all come from a position of faith, we don't have that control over our lives. And if we're here to influence the greater good, then whatever we went through was actually a blessing that equated us for the greater good. I have only recently come to understand that more, whereas my middle brother, he's young, and I don't expect that of him yet. I hope that he comes to that. My youngest brother, ironically, astounds me all the time, his maturity and his relationship and his faith. Sometimes will even call me out on things to this day. Call me and be like, Hey, I saw this post that you made, or I saw this video that you did. And I'm just curious, where in scripture did that come from? And I love that about him, because he constantly keeps me on my toes. There's nothing wrong with that at all. That's great communication. And it just shows there's something there that's worthwhile. Absolutely. No, I love them both dearly. They're just at different stages, for sure. Yeah. Now, what would you like to tell the listeners that you think is very important that they hear not only about what you're doing, but about everything that you've gone through and how you're thriving because of it? I would tell everyone that's listening that follows you for the mental health aspect of your podcast, that whatever you have been diagnosed with, it's not a limitation on your capabilities, that it is just an indicator of the areas of your life that may need reformation or improvement or mentors, self-imposed limitations or restrictions on any given individual. It gives us a compass where we can improve and grow as individuals. Yeah. Now, one last question. How has your dad accepted what you've done? You've kind of shown the world what you want to be, and you're going out there, and you're doing it, which is probably completely different than what he anticipated from you. So how does he accept it, and how has that created a place where the both of you can thrive because of it? I actually, that's one question I haven't been asked before of all the podcasts that I've done, and so that one is probably one that I'm going to coin token that I appreciate a lot. It goes back to, I have to start with, I love my dad, in case he listens to this, of course. He has his own unhealed stuff. Because of that, he doesn't always acknowledge the wrongs that he has had in our relationship. I always say, even when I'm coaching people, right, trauma attracts trauma. So when I'm speaking with somebody that has an abusive relationship and what they're talking to me about, is their abusive spouse or their abusive partner, okay, what is it in you that's attracting that? And I don't mean that to negate responsibility from the other person, because of course, I'm going to help someone get resources and gain information and sharpen their tools that they need in order to get out of that situation. That if we don't address the root of that poisonous tree, then we don't kill the tree. We just kill the branches. My dad and I have had a similar relationship in the sense that he has never acknowledged the wrong that he's done in my life, and it always gets passed on to my mom, or it gets passed on to my behavior and my adolescence. I forgive him, and I give him grace for all of the other areas that he's compensated in my life without negating the responsibility that he held in the circumstances that I had to endure because of that. Sure. That makes sense. Well, it's been really great. I appreciate you taking the time to come on. Thank you. No, it's been fantastic. And I hope that your listeners get something out of this and that it's relatable. I'm sure they will. 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 who has a story to share, tell them to contact us at whynotme.world. One last thing. Spread the word about whynotme. Our conversations are inspiring guests. 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