Jenn Turner
Jenn, welcome to on trauma and power. I'm your host. Jenn Turner, co founder of the Center for trauma and embodiment. I'm so glad you're here with us. You each episode, I sit down with different experts, educators, authors, survivors and practitioners sharing different trauma informed experiences across various fields, join us as we explore the complex intersections of trauma and power through embodied healing and diverse perspectives in both our Personal and collective healing journeys. Let's dive on in.
Hey Natalie, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you, so I will do a little introduction to let folks know who you are, and then we're gonna try a little grounding exercise that we'll share together. Sounds good, excellent. So Natalie Silverstein, MPH is an author, speaker and passionate advocate for Family and Youth Services. Natalie holds a Master Degree in Public Health from Yale University. She's also the co founder of the Silverstein foundation for Parkinson's with GBA, which funds research to cure Parkinson's in GBA mutation carriers. She's written simple acts the busy families guide to giving back and the busy teens, guide to making a difference. And host the award winning podcast, simple acts, big impact, celebrating teen change makers, a sought after speaker, her work has been featured on NBC Today, good housekeeping and numerous media outlets. I am so honored to have this conversation with you.
Natalie Silverstein
Thank you. Thanks so much, Jenn. I was very honored and humbled to even have this invitation because the topic of your podcast is a little bit different for me, typically on parenting podcasts. So I'm excited for our conversation and where this is going to take us. Great.
Jenn Turner
Me too. Me too. So for our listeners, we are going to experiment with a sort of tandem grounding exercise. It's a way that we like to start the podcast and inviting people to drop into their kind of whole self or more of themselves, maybe by tending or noticing their bodies and maybe getting into a reflective place. So we're going to share, I'll do a little kind of dropping in, and then you'll read us a poem. So absolutely, I'm interested to see how this lands for folks. So whenever you're ready, you're welcome to have your eyes open or closed. That's always your choice, possibly taking a moment to acknowledge that you have arrived and that you're here, and that these next few moments are time and space where you're welcome to notice your body, to notice your breath, and to maybe listen and notice What comes up inside of your felt experience, your thoughts, your emotions, a possibility to as we kind of prepare to listen here that you might notice that you're breathing. You could breathe through your nose or your mouth. That's always your choice, and whenever you're ready, Natalie, if you want to shift into
Natalie Silverstein
absolutely so this is a poem that most people may have heard. It tends to make the rounds, I think, when something really tragic happens and around Mother's Day, Maggie Smith, she likes to call herself the other Maggie Smith, because there was a very famous British actress by that name. It's called good bones. Life is short, though I keep this from my children, life is short, and I've shortened mine in 1000 delicious ill advised ways, 1000 deliciously ill advised ways I'll keep from my children, the world is at least 50% terrible, and that's a conservative estimate, though. I keep this from my children. For every bird, there is a stone thrown at a bird, for every loved child, a child broken, bagged and sunk in a lake, life is short, and the world is at least half terrible. And for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though, I keep this from my children, see, I'm trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor walking through a real shit hole on about good bones, this place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful. You.
Jenn Turner
I love that I love that
Natalie Silverstein
I love deliciously ill advised ways. She's she's brilliant. I think that poem speaks to my parenting journey and my journey in helping people to figure out ways to repair a broken world, which is really my goal, and my work and my passion, and it also speaks to, I think, where we are right this second right, a pretty broken world, and we're trying to keep that from our children, and yet we expect our children to fix it. So
Jenn Turner
that is a beautiful I mean, maybe we can even start there, right, like because that is it's it. I feel that in my body on a daily basis, too, with my children, who are still quite young and curious about the world. And how do we, you know, right? Have those, those conversations in a way that are that are not overwhelming to our children, but are also honest and honest about the things that we are, in fact, also unsure about and afraid of,
Natalie Silverstein
right, right? And how do we sort of smoke and mirrors make them feel like everything is okay, everything is okay because we are so as parents, and I think in this generation of parenting, I love that phrase that, you know, parenting became a verb at some point in the last 20 years, it wasn't when we were kids, right? Our parents were just our parents, and they just put us out into the world. How do we sort of hide these things from them and save them from the pain of it, and yet also prepare them for what is of super challenging, broken world that they are going to walk into and weirdly be expected without any real preparation for how to how to do that. You know, I in my work with my podcast and interviewing these young change makers, my goal there is to inspire others to do something, to get up and make a difference. Because here these kids are, some of whom Young is eight or nine years old, see a problem in their community and go out and fix it. But I'm also really motivated to tell a different narrative about this generation of young people who I think get a bad rap and this notion that they are just consumed with social media and navel gazing. We're all consumed with social media and navel gazing, so like, Get over yourself. But also, I find this generation to be very passionate, to be very concerned about issues, to really want to make a difference in the world. And again, they don't get hung up on the red tape and what's right and what what people should do. They see a problem, and they go out and they they try to find a way to fix it. And I've met two men to believe that this generation is just a lost cause. I think this is going to be a great generation. And I'm hopeful. They give me hope that's
Jenn Turner
amazing. I love what you just said too around like this piece of I was just talking with a client about this actually has young, young children, and then reflecting on, how do we, how we often will rob our children or the people around us, or, yeah, we rob them of the opportunity to feel pain, to feel grief, to feel fear, and because we want to make everyone comfortable or feeling Okay. And I such a disservice, and it totally it's a reframe as a parent, because you, of course, you want your children to be okay and feel good, but also that is not the human experience, right, right? The human experience is one of pain, of grief, of loss. I mean, you know, so much of that that we can kind of just dive into today, but it is such a disservice when we don't sit with them in that or show them how we metabolize that too, right,
Natalie Silverstein
right, right to never show our kids that we're in pain, that we're grieving, that we're suffering, that we have some despair, some loneliness, to have this happy, happy face all the Time is is is really it is unfair we are not giving them the chance to just understand that it's okay to not be okay. Sometimes I also find, and I say this a lot to my kids, you need to be able to sit with discomfort right again, back to the social media, or back to the kind of instant gratification. Unfortunately, because of these devices in our hands, we all expect to be able to get our food in 20 minutes and our answer immediately. And so this is a generation that's been raised with that. And so if there's any need for patience or boredom or discomfort in a feeling or in a situation, they are very, very uncomfortable with it, and they can't handle it. And I I think that that's, again, something that we all have to work on a little bit more, which is, this is life. Life is hard. I say this to my kids all the time, like, Wow, it really sucks sometimes, and I can't take it away. I can't take this pain away, this heartbreak, this frustration, this. Loneliness, physical pain. You know, there is this, like, let's fix it, let's fix it. Let's fix it. There's no fixing it. As the wonderful Kate bowler says, there's no cure for being human. This is it, right? And so they just have to learn the hard way, unfortunately, and I think I agree with you, it's a complete disservice to snow plow or helicopter or do all the things that we've been doing. I think the pendulum is swinging again. I think we, the last 15 or 20 years has been a lot of that fixing, fixing fixing for them. Now I think we're figuring out that, that they need to figure out how to fix it for themselves, right? Because we all did
Jenn Turner
one way or another, right, right, right? I mean, that's an interesting kind of segue to to think about that experience of, you know, maybe you can share a little bit with us around what it was like for you when and your family with your husband's diagnosis and the moment that's so profound, right? And you know what? How can you fix anything about that,
Natalie Silverstein
right? Right? Well, particularly my husband has a genetic disease, right? So there's a 5050, chance that my children have inherited the gene for it, but he was diagnosed young with a genetic form of Parkinson's disease, which is very rare. It is sort of typical in Ashkenazi Jews, but not 100% you know, it's not only in people of that heritage. He was less than 50 when he started to notice some things that were not normal and they were unexplained. And unfortunately in our society, I think when a young person has something that they shouldn't have, a tremor, a pain here or there. They tend to be dismissed, unfortunately, by also by the medical profession, women in particular, I think. But he was told by a lot of doctors that there was either nothing wrong with him or there couldn't be Parkinson's, you know, because it just didn't make any sense for a 40 something, late 40s person to have these symptoms, but he knew, I think, instinctively, that something was wrong. And he finally did receive that diagnosis. Our children were very young, like maybe 1513, and seven or something like, really young. So we kept it from them for a little while. And I say that after just saying that we need to help our kids face their tough realities. But the truth is, you know, a seven year old understand that, and I think, I think this often happens with Parkinson's diagnoses. It is a disease that you can kind of hide a little bit for a while. You don't necessarily need everyone to know, because I think people start to look at you differently, and pity is a big thing that comes into play. And we can talk a little bit more about that, and my thoughts on that, but so we did keep it from them for a bit, and then we decided to go public with the information when we decided to start our foundation to really try and effectively do something positive to get busy, you know, having finding some purpose in this very painful situation. And if we were going to do that, we would obviously need to tell them. So we sat them down on a Sunday evening, and actually my husband let me tell them, and my oldest certainly understood what that meant. And she cried. She was, she really internalized it. Our son, who was, you know, in middle school age, who's sort of very silly kid, was like, so is that why this happened? Is that why he has that? Is this what you know, he didn't, you know, he didn't quite understand what it meant, but he was, he actually made us laugh a little, which is a which is, you know, we were grateful for. And the little one, I don't know how much she understood so and what's interesting about that is she's still here in the home with us. The other two are graduate of college and in college, so the little one's really the one that has lived with it the longest, and she is a typical youngest child. I think she understands that her father has a an incurable disease, and it's challenging, but he's still her dad. You know, we still laugh, we still vacation together, we still do stuff. So it's not, I don't know, I'd have to ask her what her experience with it has been. We, we just kind of go about living our lives, and it's just a reality that we, that we face day to day.
Jenn Turner
There's so much in there that I would love to like, sort of tug at little threads. But I guess what I'm what I'm wondering, is if you can kind of share the process that you or some of the process of how you turned from, okay, this is a diagnosis. We have to accept it feel, you know, go through that, and now we want to sort of shift and pivot and do something positive. We want to put energy into something that is outside or that is bigger than us. What was that like, and is there something you can share a bit about that? Well,
Natalie Silverstein
I think it's a tremendous privilege to be able to take a really challenging, difficult diagnosis of any kind and turn it into something. Positive, potentially for for him and our children, but certainly for others. You know, people talk a lot about Michael J Fox, who took, you know, a similar situation, and has now raised literally billions of dollars and changed the way that we think about Parkinson's disease. And there, I mean, we can name of people who have taken this very difficult thing that they've been faced with and turned their their energies outward to help others who are suffering from it. So I think the impetus there is, you know, the old, get busy living or get busy dying, right? You can take this and say to yourself, Okay, well, I'll just get my house in order, and we'll just enjoy our time that we have and turn inward towards our family and just kind of cocoon or we can take the particular set of skills and contacts and resources and abilities that my husband and I happen to share, which is completely coincidental, and say, Okay, well, can we affect some change, potentially for him and hopefully for future patients and families. So my husband worked in healthcare venture capital for many years. He was very successful and invested in his firm invested in drugs and devices to cure rare diseases. It's just coincidence that this is what he did for a living. He was not a clinician, he was not a scientist, he was a business person. He has an MBA and a JD, and he was a venture capitalist, which many people view as as dirty words. We don't because his venture capitalism was in finding cures for rare diseases. So there are people alive today who take drugs who allow them to be alive, that my husband's firm invested in, and that's what private investment in in healthcare research can do. And so he was exposed to and connected to through his work and through his board memberships and things like that, to the most incredible, most brilliant scientists and physicians and researchers and healthcare experts in the world and so at a particular niche expertise in this area of finding smart researchers who can cure things or figure out ways to cure things. And I had a background in healthcare. As you mentioned, I'm a master's in public health, so I had worked for healthcare companies, and I had written grants, and I had worked for nonprofits, and I'd done communications. And you know, my skill set was just as a business person in the healthcare field, just coincidentally, just randomly, that's not how we met, but it just so happens that we both worked in different pieces, different sides of that industry. So when he said to me at some point, after diagnosis, after, as you mentioned, after grieving this, after really feeling it, after feeling this like, Why? Why us? Why me? Just to be clear, he has a genetic the particular gene that he has the mutation only less than 9% I believe, of the people with his mutation will develop Parkinson's and so he has the gene mutation, and there was a very small chance that he would get it, and he did. And the parent that he got that gene from doesn't have it, and others, perhaps in his family, who have the mutation do not have it. So it was just kind of really bad luck. And so it was, you know, devastating for my young husband to face the future of this. We'd only been married, you know, 15 years. We had these little kids, and you know the idea of being able to dance at his children's weddings and things, you know, these are all things you have to suffer through and grieve and and really deal with, but you also have to find the positive and the ways that you're going to get out of the bed every morning and put one foot in front of the other. So at some point, over the course of some period of time when we were still keeping it to ourselves, he came to me and said, I think that if we started a foundation and focused specifically on this, this gene mutation might be able to affect some change, and I'd like to start a foundation. So I said, Let's do it. So we became a 501, c3, and set up a Scientific Advisory Board filled with all of these wonderful people that he knew we were just kind of lucky, and we used those contacts and those resources to try and do something positive. That was it. And
Jenn Turner
were you already doing the sort of the work that you do in the world around changing service, service? Yeah,
Natalie Silverstein
yeah. To To some extent, my first book came out in 2019 so I had started that process while I was home with after my third child was was born, I stopped working outside of the home and and I became really interested in ways that families with young children. And could serve others in the community. Because as as anyone listening who has children knows that many nonprofits will just shut the door in your face if you have a child and you want to come and work in the soup kitchen like No, no, no, we couldn't possibly have children here. And so I pushed back on that. I started with a nonprofit called Doing good together, which and through them, I curate and distribute a listing of family friendly volunteer opportunities every month. So I became this, became, like this weird little niche thing that I started to be really interested in, and I started writing around that, and it was kind of simultaneous to his diagnosis. I will be honest. You know, his diagnosis happened again. We continued to live our lives. He was still functioning. He was still working at a high level, we were still vacationing with our family, like we were still living our lives. And I thought and knew it was important for me to continue to pursue my interests. And so I started writing the first book, and etc, etc, and he's absolutely supported that, you know, it is a full time job, you know, being a caregiver and starting a foundation and doing all of this good stuff, but I needed something that was mine as well, and so I just kept doing it.
Jenn Turner
Wow, that's amazing. What an interesting parallel process, too. I guess, you know, that's
Natalie Silverstein
sure you could argue, right there, there are two, there are two pieces of the same pie, right? Like, you know, we are out there with this foundation, and we fund, we used to fund grants to academic institutions and to biotechnology companies to find the cure. Right simultaneously, we were setting up a fellowship program. So we are trying to raise money to grant fellows, money to do this research, you know, to sort of get the mind share around this particular kind of disease, as opposed to just Parkinson's generally. So it's it's service, it's philanthropy. It is helping others, hopefully. And that's really where my mindset was, right, like, I am all about helping people to serve, hands on, direct service, and I'm also very interested in philanthropy, and I'm just a believer that if you have enough, you should share what you have with others. This is just how the world works. And also I believe that others now, because we are capable of doing so, because we, at some point in our lives, are going to need help as well. So it's a it's a two way street here. This is not, we're not saviors running in to like, save other people, and I don't like that concept. We are here serving our community or giving philanthropy that we can afford to give, because at some point, for sure, and for certain, we're gonna need help ourselves. And so it's all it's all kind of part of the same story and sort of our brand as a family. You know, I say this a lot to families. When we're talking about doing service, I always say like, what is your family mission statement? If you were to go out into the world and ask people who interact with your family in your community, your faith community, your school community, how would your family be described? And I hope that our family is described as people who give back and people who care about others and people who would help you if you needed help. That's, that's who I hope that we are remembered.
Jenn Turner
I love that. I love the way that you describe the giving, as well as from a place of, I mean, talking about power, it's like equity, right? It's like, right? I will need help. I am not coming in to disseminate this wealth. I have this knowledge, I have this healing, I have which I'm giving, because we all need to give, and we all need to receive, and that is part of the human experience too,
Natalie Silverstein
right? That's what equity is, right? Equitable. It's, it's, it's all of us being able to live, you know, to share, share, such that we can all live, right? There's this concept in Judaism, which they call it sadaqah, which at a basic level, for young children, it's like putting coins in a jar at the end of the week on Shabbat or something, and then that money is given away. So if you ask a Jewish person on the street, they would say that sadaqah means charity. It actually doesn't the word Sadek means justice. So the giving of coins is such that I have enough, going to give some of my coins so that others who don't have enough will have a little bit more, so that that will level the playing field. So it's it's this idea of justice, of economic justice, of justice that we should all live and be well, and that we have enough so that everyone can do that. Sadly, we don't distribute it in a way that that makes that so that's
Jenn Turner
right, it's making me think about and wanting to pick back up on when you mentioned pity, because I'm not sure how it fits in here, but I feel like there's some thread also that around your experience, and also just your experience around community and interpersonal relationships and how people have responded to, you know, your husband's diagnosis and everything your family has gone through, and that sense around kind of pity, yeah,
Natalie Silverstein
and it, I think it also plays into my work with service and with volunteerism, because there is this notion that others are needy, right? It's. Under resourced, needy language is super important, I think, in this work, but I really try and encourage people to not view those who are the recipients of the service that we're doing as somehow lesser than ourselves, right? We're all here. I remember once I was in a conference, and someone said, there's this notion of Nothing about us without us, meaning you know, if you're in a community, a nonprofit, and you're serving others, look around you and see who the other volunteers are, and see who the leadership of the organization is, and make sure that everyone at the table, everyone who's participating here represents, or there are representatives in the room of the folks who are the recipients of the care and of the help. Because, again, this work is so vitally important, an obligation to serve others in a meaningful way, but it should not be done at it from a place of pity or looking down upon all these poor folks who can't afford Nope. No one wants to be pitied. No one, even the person living on the street, does not want to be pitied. And so language is super important. Someone is a person is not homeless. It is a person is experiencing homelessness or is unhoused currently, because the idea is that they once had a home, and they hope to have a home again, and they are suffering from some very complicated problem, which means that they're living on the street right now. So it's a mindset thing, and I do try and encourage people to think differently about service in that way, and philanthropy certainly, but pity in terms of where where we come from with a diagnosis like this, I think this would be true for anyone of with any kind of diagnosis, a terminal cancer diagnosis, a child with significant challenges. I can promise you that no one wants to be pitied. I'm sure that all of the listeners would agree with that. And yet, I think that sometimes we approach people who are suffering with a variety of different things, either in themselves or in a family member, and there's this tendency to have the kind of the face and the oh, you know, I wish I could do something, you know, or, you know, trying to make comparative, you know, comparisons to their experiences or someone in their family, there's just so much stuff around this that from the receiving end, doesn't feel great. And I've learned a lot through this experience of the ways in which I now approach other people who have suffered a loss or who are suffering with a diagnosis, about the things to say and the things not to say, the ways to show up, which I think are genuinely helpful versus performatively helpful, or most importantly, actually, I think the centering of the person who's suffering versus centering yourself in in the situation. Right? So instead of running to a person who's gone through something or is going through something, and saying, What can I do to help? How can I help you? What do you need? What do you need? Now you're burdening that person with this, telling you like, now, now I have another job in addition to grieving my loss or dealing with my spouse who has a diagnosis. Now I have to give you something to make you feel better about it, right? And so I just think we all need to kind of take a hard look at where the pity is coming from. And I believe that it comes from fear and a worry that this could happen to me. Because if it's happening to you, maybe it could happen to me or it comes from, gosh, I'm I'm sorry that this is happening too, but I'm so glad it's not happening to me, which is, PS, here's the spoiler alert, everything is going to happen to everyone. Like I say this all the time. We know my husband and I know we don't know exactly what our future looks like, but we have a sense of it because of his diagnosis. But there's something coming for everybody, right? We just happen to know what our thing is a little sooner than others, and we know exactly what we're dealing with in terms of his health. We don't know what's gonna happen to me yet, and something's gonna happen to everybody. Nobody gets out of here alive, so that's right, that's right, or unscathed.
Jenn Turner
That's right. That's, I mean, it's so powerful, and I think that is a kind of reality that a lot of us don't want to face on a daily basis, that a diagnosis like this forces it to kind of come into your scope vividly
Natalie Silverstein
right? The chaos of the world. I think people don't want to see the chaos of the world. These things are terrifying to people, right? Because they don't know how they would deal with it. You know, there's this thing that I get and that I've heard other people say who are dealing with similar situations is, is the old, I don't know how you do it thing? Yeah. Yeah, and I've had people say that to me or whatever. I do it because I don't have a choice, right? You have to, you have to, you have to do it. And it's not actually, it's, it seems like a complimentary thing to say. And again, people are just doing the best they can with the tools that they have. I'm not passing any judgment, right? I have said and done all of the things that I'm sure were not necessarily appreciated by the bereaved or by the person suffering in my lifetime, we all do it at the same time. Just take a beat. You know that? Gosh, I don't know how you do it. You're so incredible, you're so strong, you're so amazing. Really, am I or am I just a person who was handed that I have to play now, and I'm trying to play them with a positive attitude, right? Because I don't know how to do it differently, and I would rather view the world in a positive way than in a despairing way. Actually saw a quote recently by an author. It was the difference between despair and hope is just telling different stories about the same set of facts. And I love that right, because you could have received a diagnosis like what happened to us, and you could have been despairing of it and gotten angry and become bitter and closed off. Or you could take it and say, A, there's we have tools and resources and people in our lives that can maybe help to affect some change. B, we're so blessed and lucky. We have wonderful friends, we have wonderful family, we have these three healthy, beautiful children. We're we view ourselves as as very lucky, even with this terrible diagnosis, and I think the people I've not seen the research on this, but I would suggest that the people who view things in that way are going to do better in terms of their prognosis, in terms of the time that they have left, and how they feel about it, right? Even a person with a terminal cancer diagnosis who views every day as a gift, versus as a like, Why me? Why me? Why me? I think they're gonna live longer and happier and and feel more at peace, which is, you know what, what I I think we should all be striving for.
Jenn Turner
It's so powerful in there. There's so much in there that I'm thinking about, in particular, this piece around resilience and how, you know, in our work, at the Center for trauma and embodiment, in my work as a therapist, a lot of times trauma survivors who are often dealt these terrible hands and and again, to remind ourselves that 70% of us will experience a traumatic event in our lifetime. But you know, folks who have had that kind of snowball effect of things piling up over the span of their life or a period of years, and that impact often are called resilient. You're so resilient, similar language, right? I don't, I don't know how you do it, right? Or you're so strong. And there's something I think that's missed in that, in that it, it denies the suffering and hurt that someone has gone through in order to be resilient. And it's sort of like, let me put a bow on it, or, like, wave a wand and sort of make this like Disney fight. This is such this wonderful story of how you've risen out of these ashes when it is a daily, I think, a daily practice and choice and work to continue to show up like you're describing, and choose, how am I going to contribute in the world? How am I not going to get pulled into despair? How? How do I, you know, wrangle with this sense of imminent, sense of mortality, or, you know, all of the things, and still see the world as a blessing, see my family as a blessing. I mean,
Natalie Silverstein
right, right, right. And I think dwelling on anything you know, repeating it, even verbalizing the negative aspects of all of this, we know that to be not particularly healthy, right? You are what you repeatedly do. And I would argue, your emotional state, your feelings about something, are a reflection of how often you repeat negative phrases about them, about your situation, or what's going on, or why me. Why me? You know again, this is that whole gratitude practice thing that we know about, which is if you verbalize gratitude or write it down, the physical act of writing it down on a daily basis actually makes you feel more grateful. So I would imagine that the opposite would be true if I kept saying like, Oh, I can't believe this happened to us. Oh, my God, this is awful. Oh, my God, it's of course, there are challenges to be faced by our family with this particular diagnosis from my husband, but by every family in the world in every possible way, whether it's a health issue or a mental health issue or an emotional issue or a financial issue, dwelling on it and perseverating on it, ruminating on it is not going to make us feel better about anything, and it's probably. Going to make us feel much worse and make the dealing with it that much harder. And so for as much as I can, staying positive, staying purposeful, staying, you know, forward, moving right, also, also pursuing my other work, right, my podcast with these wonderful young people, the books that I write, the people I meet in podcasts like yourself, you know, speaking engagements that I have, like, if I'm if I'm able to still have that time to do those things before our lives get a little a little tougher and a little smaller over time, as they as it, probably will, because I can do those things, I will, because they fill my cup and they renew me, and they give me energy and joy and pride in the stuff that I'm doing. I help my husband with the foundation. Obviously, we co founded it together. I do a lot of work for that as well. That feels tremendously, tremendously meaningful. You know, there was an elderly gentleman who reached out to my husband right at the beginning. I believe he was on like, CNBC or something, talking about starting the foundation and and a gentleman from Ohio or something sent us $5 and said he had Parkinson's, and that hearing my husband talk about the research and what we were trying to do to affect some change really gave him a lot of hope. So, you know, and this and $5 was all he could afford to send and whatever, and was just thanking us for doing the work these tiny little things. They matter. They matter. And so my husband, when he receives an email from someone saying they have recently been diagnosed, and what should they do? Again? My husband's not a doctor, but he gets a lot of these emails, because he's a public face of this disease. He writes back, he tells them a few ideas, or whatever, and he signs off by saying, Be hopeful. Be hopeful, because that's all you can do, right? You're waiting on someone else to come up with a cure, and if you lose hope, then you've really then you're really sunk, right? So if you can maintain some thread of hope and some sense of purpose, I think it will make your days a little easier, and it'll just be it'll keep you moving forward, otherwise you'll get stuck.
Jenn Turner
One thing that I'm really moved by in listening to you is the how you show up in vulnerability, right? And the vulnerability of sharing your story and and what it's been like for you, and is that something that came naturally to you was challenging at first. I mean, it's, it's such a beautiful quality, and we're not often taught how to do that in a public way. Sure,
Natalie Silverstein
I was definitely not taught how to do that. So I was, I was raised by two folks who came from Ukraine after World War Two, which is a whole other podcast, but so and there was, you know, there was trauma. There was my dad was an alcoholic. He was a tremendously difficult person. It was not, it was a fairly tense and challenging childhood. I was the youngest of four. My eldest sibling is 20 years older than I. My mom had him at the age of 18. Had me at 38 and it was tough house to live in, and they came from just they survived starvation, forced starvation of the Ukrainian people by Stalin. So the Holocaust was the Holocaust. And then there was also, you know, millions of others who suffered, you know, other happening simultaneously during World War Two. And they walked across a continent. They lived in a in a DP camp, a displaced persons camp, which we would call a refugee camp today. And then they made their way here with, you know, classic story, no money, no language, no prospects, and they married, and they had a family, and my mother did what she needed to do to survive my dad and his addictions. And, you know, this was not Ozzie and Harriet for a childhood. So there wasn't a lot of talk or emotional support, or, you know, let's talk about how we're feeling. It's like the opposite. So I think I'm just a cycle breaker, classic, like, I don't want to raise children in this way. I don't want to there was fair amount of negativity and misery and and those, those unfortunate, you know, tapes that would run in my immediate family and extended family. And so I just really needed to get away from it. So I did. I broke away from that, and after graduate school, moved to New York and and just decided, I don't know, I'm just lucky in that way that I said to myself, I could, I'm just going to try and be a more positive person in the world and put good stuff out into the world. And that's just what I've done and and because what I saw, what the I saw, what the opposite looked like, and I didn't want to, I didn't want to be that, and I didn't want to, didn't want to do that. So I hope that I have raised. My kids in a in a very different way, and my husband and I have a loving and supportive marriage, and, you know, so I think I'm kind of a classic cycle breaker in that way. But I yeah, that vulnerability piece is, is, again, like me sharing this is, I hope it helps somebody to think differently about their situation and and I don't want anyone's pity. I don't we're very lucky people, and this really terrible thing has happened to our family, and yet here we were still here. And so I hope that we can just be an example for how to, you know, take what life hands you, because it's going to hand you something. Here's the hot tip, something is coming for all of us. Take what's handed to you, and you know the old take the lemons and try and make some kind of lemonade out of it, if you can, if you're privileged enough to have the resources to do that and but attitude is free, right? Positivity and and hope, hopefulness and kindness, which is a word we haven't used on this podcast yet today, but it's kind of my brand here, like just, just be kind to yourself and to others, and that will come back on you.
Jenn Turner
Well, we are all so lucky that you broke that cycle and get to share all of that with us through your work and through the foundation and through your podcast. Thank you so much for being here with me. It's completely inspirational and has me thinking in a lot of ways that I think our listeners will be too. So thank you so much. Natalie, thank you, Jenn, yeah, yeah. And we'll have, I don't know if there's anything you want to highlight now, but we'll definitely have things in the program notes around the work that you do in the world, in your podcast and foundation, sure,
Natalie Silverstein
yeah, no, it's listen. It's all simple acts Guide, which is sort of the name of the books, and that's the blacks. Big Impact is the podcast. It's really short, and it comes out on Wednesday morning. And I like to encourage my friends to have their kids listen to it like on the way to school, because it's just, you know, a young person who's doing something really wonderful, who's telling their story. I just wanted to amplify and celebrate these wonderful kids. And you can't listen to it and not have a smile on your face and go off into your day thinking like, maybe, maybe all is not lost. So
Speaker 1
my kids have been enjoying it immensely, so I share that with them. I'm so glad.
Natalie Silverstein
Yeah, Jenn, thank you so much for this conversation. It was really wonderful.
Jenn Turner
Thank you so much. Natalie,
thank you so much for being with us today to find out more about today's guest. Head to heal with cfte.org/podcast follow us on Instagram at on trauma and power, to stay up to date on future episodes, and be sure to like and subscribe to on trauma and power. Wherever you listen to your podcast, we'll see you next time take care you.
