Ask Dr. Drew - 11-Year-Old Forced To Kill: Mary Elizabeth Bailey on Trauma, Healing & Forgiveness – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 98

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

One night after her abusive stepfather got drunk and passed out, 11-year-old Mary Elizabeth Bailey’s mother put a gun in her hand and ordered her to kill him. Later, Mary’s mother told authorities that the child had acted on her own – but the truth came out and her mother went to prison. Mary is now a nurse and business owner who advocates for children who are lost in the system, and shares her shocking life story in her memoir "My Mother's Soldier" available at Amazon.com. Follow Mary Elizabeth Bailey at https://instagram.com/mymotherssoldier Originally broadcast on July 6, 2022 SPONSORED BY • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get 10% off with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation ( https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/FirstLadyOfLove). THE SHOW: For over 30 years, Dr. Drew Pinsky has taken calls from all corners of the globe, answering thousands of questions from teens and young adults. To millions, he is a beacon of truth, integrity, fairness, and common sense. Now, after decades of hosting Loveline and multiple hit TV shows – including Celebrity Rehab, Teen Mom OG, Lifechangers, and more – Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio in California. On Ask Dr. Drew, no question is too extreme or embarrassing because the Dr. has heard it all. Don’t hold in your deepest, darkest questions any longer. Ask Dr. Drew and get real answers today. This show is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All information exchanged during participation in this program, including interactions with DrDrew.com and any affiliated websites, are intended for educational and/or entertainment purposes only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. I am just on the Rumble Rants now warning them that Susan is away today. She's out on a flight, but we'll be monitoring the chat rooms and listening to us from the Twitter spaces, where if you are raising your hand there to come up, you'll be agreeing to stream out on Twitch, Twitter, Rumble, YouTube, Facebook, wherever we can be heard. Today is going to be a very interesting story. We have Mary Elizabeth Bailey. Mary is a nurse. However, her early life story

is extraordinary. And it's an extraordinary story of survival and resiliency and trauma and recovery. And she's got some ideas. Essentially, she had murder by proxy at the hands of her mother in the midst of domestic abuse and violence. If you know what, say, Munchausen by proxy is, murder by proxy, you kind of get the idea here. Pretty interesting story. Her book is My Mother's Soldier. It's available on Amazon. And we will be out there on the Twitter spaces and on Restream

watching your comments right after this. Our laws as it pertains to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic. Because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor for...

Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat.

If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want help stopping, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. Welcome, everybody. I see you on the Twitter spaces as well as over here on our usual rant, RumbleRamp, and also our restream chat. Any comments there I will try to pick up on. I apologize if I don't see some of your questions. I can't see everything. It scrolls by pretty pretty fast and usually I'm kind of focused on the interview

so I apologize that I can't quite multitask quite the way I used to as I said at the opening Susan is on a plane right now I don't see her on I'm looking to see if she is in the chat room over on the Twitter space and she does not seem to be, unless that's her, as asked Dr. Drew. Is that her, or is that Nadav, or that's you? Okay, fair enough. All right, so let's get right to it. Our guest is Mary Elizabeth Bailey. She was in a circumstance that obviously was extraordinarily disturbed ultimately resulting in her Abusive alcoholic stepfather passing out. I believe in a drunken stupor and at that time 11 year old Mary Was coerced by her mother put a gun in her hand and was instructed to go kill her stepfather

As I understand the story the safety was on the gun and she literally had to go back three times, which sounds beyond excruciating. And then to make matters worse, the mother put it all on the child when the police came for a report. So again, the book is My Mother's Soldier. The website is pinksuniforms.com, or that is her business. She's a nurse, as I said, and I was looking at her uniforms. They look pretty cool, nursing scrubs and whatnot. Please welcome Mary Elizabeth Bailey. There you are. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Did I get the story right? You did. Did I get it? Absolutely. Pretty devastating. Yeah. Please give us more on what happened, what was going on in that household at the time. Obviously, this was not Mary Poppins. And what you learned, how you recovered, and what you want other people to

know, which is really what we're about today. Yeah, well, inside the house, it was pretty much a house of horror. It was, every day was filled with violence. And as you mentioned, you know, the night that it happened, I had to go back three times. My mother handed me the gun, and the safety was was on and I had to walk down the hall three times before the gun fired. I was very, very scared. It was probably one of the worst moments of my life to think back on that. It's devastating.

It's hard to imagine a worse moment. If there are worse, I'd be interested to hear what that looks like. That's pretty extraordinary. Yeah. Yeah. So, but that's, you know, as far as that goes, like I said, it was, it was a devastating moment. And yeah, that night my mother did, she did put the blame on me, you know, and fortunately, you know, through testing, they realized that what had happened. So we, you know, it's hard to think back. I'm trying to I'm trying to remember, you know, the moments. But, yeah, she she called 9-1-1 as soon as it was over and said that she had killed her husband. But when it all came to play, she blamed it on me and said that I'm the one that got the gun and I'm the one that did that.

Was your mom an alcoholic also or was she doing drugs? I think she did probably recreational type drugs, marijuana, alcohol, things of that nature. But I didn't notice her always, you know, she wasn't what I would consider an alcoholic or a drunk. And when this all went down, I mean, you know, you said this was one of the worst experiences. Were you beaten by this stepfather? Were you sexually abused? Was there all that stuff going on in the house as well? There was. I was not sexually abused, but I was severely beaten by him. I felt like he was angrier at me than he was at anyone. I wasn't his daughter biologically, and I just felt like he took that out, took a lot of his anger out on me

because of that. And I'm sure you're aware of that data, right? I mean, the probability of abuse in the home goes up more than exponentially when the stepfather comes in, frankly. It's when somebody from outside the gene pool comes in. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I was a victim of that and I'm how was it that they I'm just I'm trying to get my head around what your mom was doing I mean I would I can imagine a mom panicking and blaming it on a kid but then sustaining it like sustaining the lies I only see really severe drug addicts do stuff like that. What was going on with mom? I feel like she was scared. She felt as though if I committed the murder that she would not go to prison, and I wouldn't go to prison. I was too young. But unfortunately, they charged us both with the murder.

I don't think I even realized it at the time that I was charged with murder as an 11-year-old child. But that was her plan, the thought that if I did it, we would be free and we could move on with our lives without this person. Sheesh. Was there any time in which she just thought about moving away or just getting away from the guy? Or had she tried that? Yeah, we had moved away on several occasions. And unfortunately, he would always track her down and she didn't have a lot of places to go. She'd go stay with her mother, which is my grandmother.

He always knew where she was and he would call and threaten to kill her if she didn't come back and things of that nature. And obviously in a domestic, you know, situation like that, you're, you're scared. So you come back. Did, yeah, I'm sure. Did you maintain a relationship with your mother after all this? I did not initially. I went into foster care. I was allowed to visit her. They did encourage that. So I'd visit her in prison periodically. It wasn't initially. She was in prison for about a year before I got to see her. It was a high profile case at the time. So I was moved away. They really didn't want us communicating. Apparently, there was some things being said. She had written some letters to my grandmother, you know,

encouraging her to tell me to, you know, take the blame for it, that she had nothing to do with it. Obviously, she was looking at a life sentence. So they kept they kept us apart, um, for, for many, many years. Crazy. And, and once you could maintain a relationship, what was that like? This is the person who's trying to hang a murder on you. Yeah. So once I realized, um, what had happened, I, I didn't realize it until I think I was probably 17 years old. I had gotten the videotapes of the murder trial. And then I was, I never watched them until I was 33. And I think then is when I realized what had happened, that she really tried to pin this on me.

And I understand. I mean, it was a survival technique on her part. So I watched the videos and I realized what had happened. And it was tough because at that point I had already went and, you know, fought for her at her parole meeting so that she could get out on parole. She, she, she got life in prison with the possibility of parole. So after 10 years, I went to the parole hearing and, you know, I asked them to release her. I said, you know, I haven't had a mother, you know, I wasn't adopted. I hadn't had a mother in my life. And I really wanted and hoped that, you know, we could have a relationship. Did that happen? that time, it did not. She was released from prison. She stayed with me for about a year. I helped her get a job. I helped her in an apartment, took her back and forth to her meetings.

And I felt like at that time, it was like she was still stuck, you know, 10 years ago, you know, in that mindset. And she never made a lot of changes at the time. So I moved away, didn't see her for about 20 years. And recently I did a documentary for People Magazine Investigates. And that's when I saw her for the first time. How was that? It was good. I think at that point I had forgiven her. I had been working on that for many years.

I just, I felt after my book came out in August, she asked for a copy and I sent her a copy of the book. About eight months later, I got a letter from her kind of explaining her side. She didn't really, she didn't blame me and she didn't make excuses. And I was really impressed with where she had come from, from that time to where she was. And, and I, and I felt good about it. I felt good. I felt like she had really taken the steps to, to, to accept responsibility for what had happened. How does she support herself now? Now, unfortunately, she's disabled.

She has metastatic cancer. She has cancer in the lung, her hip, her spine, and her brain. So it's a very unfortunate situation. Before that, how did she support herself? She worked at, I think she worked at dry cleaners. She did some odd jobs. She was able to work. Did she have a relationship again? Not really. She never remarried. She probably maybe dated here and there, but she never got

involved in a serious relationship. What happened to your she never got involved in, in the series. What happened to your biological father? Where's he in the picture? He passed away. I had never met him, um, up until I was about 22 years old. Um, and someone had called me one day on the phone and said, Hey, I'm your sister. And I was like, you know, you know, and know, and she said her name and said, your dad is, she told me my dad's name. His name was John Bryant. And she said, he'd like to meet you.

So at the time he was living, I believe in Ohio, near Columbus, Ohio. And so I drove to see him. We visited for a few hours and I went back home and probably less than a month later, he passed away. And did he explain what happened to his relationship with your mom? I'm just trying to get my head around these relationships and this pathology. Did he say what was going on, why he left? Yeah. Well, unfortunately, he was married. When my biological mother got pregnant with me, he was married to someone else. So he wasn't there to see. So he was cheating with your mom.

He was. I see. Okay. Wow. Quite a story. And one last thing. You said you were in foster care briefly. Was that across your teens until you were 18? Yes, it was. Yes. And then you just started taking care of

yourself after that? I did. I went to college, um, at 17. I was actually went to college a little bit, just a little bit early. Um, was in college at 17. And again, I wasn't adopted at the time. Nothing. I really didn't feel like I had a family. So I got an apartment and I just, I realized, you know, life is tough. And, but you, you know, it's up to me now. What had happened to me and what had happened up until then, I had no control over, but I had control of my life after that going forward. Do you have children now? I do not just for babies. Okay. Uh, and how did you deal with this? What, what was the,

I mean, what was the path to managing all this trauma? Well, as a young child, I, um, I did get therapy and counseling pretty much every day. So that was very helpful. But I also had a very, I'm very spiritual and had a real close relationship, have a lot of faith with God. So to me, I was alone a lot. So I wasn't allowed to go back to school when I was 11. I was taken out of the school. And so all I had, I had no one to talk to. So at that point, I just started talking to God. And I had been baptized probably less than six, eight months prior to that. So I'm very thankful for that. And I'm very thankful for that time in my life because that's what led to my healing and to my faith and to my hope and hope for everyone. And you said you had therapy every day. Was that after age 11 and for how long? It was, I would say I was in therapy for a couple years, but it was every day. I feel like it was every day after school to at least at least three to four days after school.

I would I would walk to the therapist office and he was he was fantastic. And he really it was it was a blessing that I was able to have that and to talk about what had happened and to better understand that it wasn't my fault. I blame myself for a long time. You know, I thought, you know, I'm the reason that my mom's in prison. You know, I'm the reason that our family's not together. So I had a really hard time dealing with that. But he helped me to realize that it wasn't my fault. Which is normal, right? Normal for an 8 to 11-year-old to, oh, my gosh.

8-year-olds, 10-year-olds think everything is about them. If their parents are fighting, it's because they don't love them enough. If there's whatever it is, you know, they can't see the pathology of the parents. Did it help you? Did he help you form a secure attachment? I can't imagine your attachments were very powerful prior to the therapy. With people? very powerful prior to the therapy with, with people. Um, you know, it, it's, I, I had to work on trust and I had to work on relationships, but I always believed, I always tried to see the good

in people. And I believe people, and I did trust people. Surprisingly, I trusted people a lot more than, than you would think. Um, I didn't allow one individual, um allow one individual to change that for me. I just couldn't allow him to. Were you subsequent to that? Had you been taken advantage of at any other time in your life after this event? I had none as far as like any abuse or. Well, I don't mean the overt. I mean, were your relationships stable did we were you exploited

in your relationships in any way did a boss ever take advantage of your charity you know what i'm saying no as a matter of fact i didn't really talk a lot about my story um so most people didn't know about it as i grew up through through when i I mean, uh, my classmates didn't really know what had happened. It's kind of funny. They reach out now and they're like, I had no idea you were this bubbly person who played, you played sports and you were fun loving. And I would have never dreamed that you had went through something like that. Um, and, and as I moved to life, I did not want to, I just didn't want to talk about it. I just wanted to create who I was. I didn't want to define myself by my past. Did you have siblings? Yes. Yes. How were they affected? How were they

affected by this? Well, you know, one of my brothers passed away young. He got into a situation. He was only eight months when this happened. So the situation in itself, I don't believe, affected him completely. He was just a little too young. My sister, she was four, and my brother was eight. I think they were affected by this. They still remember.

They know what's happened, and they're having a hard time in life. Even now, um, they're struggling. They're dealing with some, a lot of issues. Um, they haven't really been able to break free of that cycle.

And it's, it's sad for me. Um, because the whole point of this is to help. Sub substance and domestic violence or what, what cycle are we talking about? Yeah. Both substance and substance abuse, domestic violence or what cycle are we talking about? Both. Substance and substance abuse, domestic violence, foster care.

You know, my sister, you know, most of her children are, well, all of her children. She don't have any of them. There's three of them and they live with different people. And it's just very unfortunate. You can just see the cycle and, and it's so obvious. And, um, we talk and it just, she just can't seem to break it. And, um, I don't know. It's, it's tough. So, so you're a nurse now and you look and you're, you've been through these experiences and you're looking at the cycle of abuse, you know, and substance abuse in your family of origin,

what do we do? What do we do with these problems? What is an answer? These are common problems in our country, and woefully little is being done about it, let alone even just addressing it. What do you think? You're right. Little is being done about these situations. My husband is an attorney,

and he deals with family law, and he deals a lot with domestic situations, domestic abuse. And it's so unfortunate. We're not addressing it the way we should. We need to find a way to deal with this and to deal with this population in this group of people. We need to help, uh, you know, foster kids, uh, foster children who are aging out of the system. We need to make sure that they have hope and they have a plan for their future. We have to, we have to stop, stop the violence. Well, they end up on the street or, uh, or they end up, you know, you know, substance use, or they end up in another domestic violence relationship. And even the ones that I've noticed, I've been involved with organizations that get kids like this out and into college, they can't get through their freshman year because

they're not psychiatrically supported sufficiently. I mean, you had therapy every day for three years. That works. Did your siblings get therapy too? Yes, they did. And they also were adopted by a family as well pretty early on. They had that stability. Did they stay with the therapy as long as you did?

I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so either. I doubt it. In fact, I doubt it. I mean, not that therapy always works, but it does. Treatment usually works. At least it works marginally, if not completely. Okay.

So here's the deal. We can take calls out of Twitter spaces, those of you that are there. You need to raise your hand, and that will request me to come look for you and get you up to the podium here. You can ask Mary Elizabeth questions that way or myself. If you have other questions, I saw there was a tweet earlier today about a Suboxone question, which I'm happy to answer. So you just raise your hand and I will click on your icon here and we'll bring you up to the podium. Realize that you will be streaming out on multiple platforms, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, Rumble, everywhere else. So just raise your hand

like we're going to do right now for Josh. We'll see what uh josh wants to say josh what's up or question he has dr hey there um my question is something that um i hope isn't too probing uh for your guests but i know that when i think your your wife talked about a trauma bond, which was a new term for me, but I think the question I have is about that. And I want to know if there was a bonding moment between your guest and her mother over this incident and you can imagine how damaging that would be um and i feel like for me that's just what struck out i mean it's a weird thing for me to think not at all not at all listen was there was there a bond formed and how do we go through that so josh i'm gonna guess so so trauma bonding for that j Josh is referring to is something that people,

it's a feature, not a bug in our brain. It's a feature that when we were in very intense situations, we become very tightly bound to the people we are in those situations with. Soldiers, band of brothers, you hear about these stories all the time. People that go back to military environments because they can't leave their comrades behind, this kind of thing. I've been through something recently, which will be on TV in the winter, where I was trauma bonded to a bunch of people. I'll talk about it when I can. And I bet, I'm going to just throw this out there, Mary Elizabeth, that you were already sort of bound in that way to your mom from the domestic violence perpetrated by the stepdad.

That's exactly right. I was definitely drawn to her through that. And so when I would see her being abused, especially that weekend leading up to the murder, watching her being abused, watching her being punched and him holding a knife to her throat. And when she came to me and said, you know, I need you to do this. I have this gun. I need you to do this. You know, I have this gun.

I need you to do this. I couldn't say no. Right. That's right. And so there are, and Josh, it's a really interesting topic. I'm not an expert in it. You might read a little Erickson on the topic, I think. But it goes into the Stockholm syndrome.

It's a relative of hypnosis. When you're in these states, you feel like the other person has persuasion over you, like you're enmeshed in some way, where if that person asks you to do something, you just do it. It's a weird thing in our brain that is normal. It's not an abnormal thing. It's a normal thing and the where it becomes abnormal is where you bond to the perpetrator and so there's a certain amount of i and i don't know if mary elizabeth you experienced this with your stepdad but but because he was from wasn't your biological dad it's not quite as common but if he had been your biological dad and he was physically abusing you, you become the person, the attachment object, the attachment object

becomes the source of the love and the distress simultaneously. So the child is stuck in this conflict of going tighter towards that individual and wanting to get the hell away from that person and hating them at the same time.ary elizabeth anything like that for you no i never felt that that kind of bond with him it wasn't we never had that good fortunately i wanted him to love me and want him to care about me but he didn't yeah so yeah it's different when it's a biological dad but josh does all that kind of make sense to you yeah it does. And I would just say, you know, I really like what you said. And I think for a child, an 11-year-old child who's so dependent, it can be thrilling to have a parent pay attention to them in such a way and do something like that with.

I mean, it seems so grotesque and so horrible. But for the child, it's almost like it's a sense of power. Now they're a grown-up. Now they're adult. And the mother is taking the child under its wing or whatever it is. Let's see. The child's experience is completely just blown out of proportion. Yeah, it gets weird.

But Mary Elizabeth, anything like that with you? As far as my mother taking me under her wing at this point? Yeah, feeling empowered by that? Yeah. I don't think so. I don't feel empowered. I don't think she feels empowered. I mean, our relationship is based on forgiveness.

I have forgiven her for what has happened. I need to forgive her. She's asked for forgiveness in her life, and that's where we are. Josh, to kind of drill in a little more on what you're talking about there, it's a very common thing, this weird thing that our brain does. When children are needy, like they're not getting their needs met in the home they drift outside of the home and become easy objects of exploitation they get sexually abused commonly and are stuck between like feeling the closeness that they craving at the same time

the horror of the body boundaries being violated it's really these conflicts that make kids give such kids such difficulty as they grow up they can't regulate they can't reconcile these things they can't forgive themselves for them uh let's bring russell up here and russell be aware your microphone will be muted as you come up it's down there you are what's up hello drew can you hear me i do hey um i just had a quick question this is nothing compared to uh what your guest has gone through but when i was about four and a half years old my mother went away to get alcohol treatment like back in the 80s and i don't remember necessarily much of it just little flashes but the therapists say that had a huge effect on me even though i can't remember it at all so have you dealt with that a lot in your treatment of addiction yeah i

will tell you well just having a parent with substance use disorder is considered an adverse childhood experience, considered one of the check marks on the ACE score. So just having a substance using parent, intoxicated parent, is traumatic for kids. My experience was when the identified addict patient was in treatment, the children were usually relieved. And what we would tell the kids, almost any age, we would just go, look, your mom has an illness. It's made her behave strangely. She's getting well, and we that seemed to relieve all of their anxiety. Whatever impact was prior to treatment or if they didn't stay sober subsequently. Does that make sense? It does. It does. Yeah. It's interesting. I didn't get told much about it as far as I can remember. And I remember it being like a hospital hospital, not like a modern treatment center. Yeah. That's where we used to do it. Used to it in hospitals. And there'd be a lot of mommy's ill, we'll go visit her, she's in the hospital,

she's doing great. And that's a lot of what people tell, particularly the younger kids. But the treatment is never the problem, in my experience, unless somebody mismanages something. The problem is the out-of-control using... And by the way, having a parent that has sufficiently severed

a substance, they have to be hospitalized. That tells you a shit was going down in the home also, right? Yeah, probably. So I have a very, my family's very quiet about stuff like that. We never talk about negative stuff.

So yeah, that's much more of the issue is that she needed treatment, not that she was in treatment and that's the impact on kids. So interesting. Russell, thanks for the question. Yeah, sure. Thank you. You bet.

Okay, here's what we're going to do. More questions, just like Russell and Josh, just raise your hand, I'll bring you up, and you can talk to Mary Elizabeth. If you have questions for her about her story or resiliency, obviously Mary Elizabeth is an extremely resilient person, I mean, as evidenced by how she was perceived by her peers as she moved through grade school years. And of course, you can read more about it in her book, My Mother's

Soldier, to hear really what this was like to experience something like this. But trauma, this is sort of a vivid, extraordinary experience that Mary Elizabeth had, but there's a lot of trauma in this country. A lot of the stuff that's going on right now, you can trace right back to people's traumas. And acting out politically or acting out socially or acting out with substances or acting out online, not going to make people better. In fact, it makes them worse.

So we might be thinking about what we can do to make ourselves better. And I don't know if that whoever was on Twitter, let me see who that was earlier today that tweeted me about Suboxone treatment. And I didn't really want to get into it. Yo mama, shady at best, whoever that is, if you're there, please let me know. And Alessia Amor, I see you there. Thank you for the positive tweet about what we're doing here today. And if you have stuff you want us to talk about, write into contact at drdrew.com, or if you disagree with me or whatever it is,

I'm open to conversation. So here we'll take a little break, talk about our friends at Genucel. We'll be back with Mary Elizabeth Bailey after this. I think we have found the holy grail of skincare. Genucel has absolutely changed, certainly my skincare regimen. I like that vitamin

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Every single product is developed by a pharmacist, making sure that all the ingredients are safe and effective. Right now, you can try GenuCell's most popular collection of products and see what I'm talking about for yourself. Go to GenuCell.com and enter code DREW for 10% off. That is G-E-N-U-C-E-L.com. And the code is D-R-E-W. Thank you, Caleb, for covering for me while I put my ears back in. I am alone here in the studio, a one-man band. So when things happen, I've got to get up and take care of them.

So I apologize for that. And indeed, because I am alone today, Caleb, you're going to play the Susan Pinsky role on Genu cell uh which again i don't have the products in front of me because i'm not well organized enough to have that but i know you use it on a regular basis right caleb oh yes absolutely i i'm using this stuff every day even i feel like i'm probably not the best reflection of the brand at the moment because i'm getting over my sinus infection but otherwise your sinuses have nothing to do with your skin i'm sorry to tell you that but that's a different organ system it's true but the lack of sleep let's see where's my where's my face over here you could probably you could probably actually somebody's at our front door you can see just eve this is me at my sickest right now and i like those circles are going looks

good the skin looks great with as sick as i am so thank you jenny cell very impressed hang on a second uh this is a really unfortunate and rare thing uh the front door is being banged on uh aggressively by someone and i'm gonna sit here and complete our our program you're not even here the dogs are working in the background swatted what is that oh somebody sent the swat thing in you know okay good they'd be fantastic wouldn't that let me look out let's this is a this is a live broadcast so let me look out the window and make sure that's not something that's going on i think that's a reasonable and don't give anybody any suggestions so hold on a little interlude music of course it was nothing and the old picture of susan and drew is certainly not adorable those you on restream think it's so funny it's not it's not that funny but caleb is is uh so that is a picture that we took in like 1989 or something

uh where we thought we had to fit in with the pasadena society susan insisted on those pictures and um my daughter found them about five years ago and made uh purses and instagram posts and all kinds of things out of them to humiliate her parents. And, of course, my friend Caleb Nation then picked up on it and made a post out of it. And so we really appreciate it. We appreciate it very, very much. So let me go.

We've got people with hands up in the Twitter spaces. Go ahead and bring Mary Elizabeth back, and we'll try to get some questions going here. Mary Elizabeth, thank you. Sorry about that weird delay. But it kind of adds to the intrigue of the situation and bring Mary Elizabeth back, and we'll try to get some questions going here. Mary Elizabeth, thank you. Sorry about that weird delay. But it kind of adds to the intrigue of the situation when it's live like this. So we'll bring Olivia up to speak.

Olivia, go ahead and unmute your mic, which is muted right now. It's down in the lower left-hand corner. And there you go. What's going on? Oh, you went back to listener. Wait a minute, Olivia. I think you screwed yourself up

there. Hold on a second. Hold on here. I have to find a way to get her back. Although she may have left the room. Is that possible? Well, try again next time. uh no problem we'll get you up here uh timothy get you in here timothy your mic is muted just unmute the lower left hand corner there hey dr drew can you hear me i do what's going on man hey uh yeah i'm a returning. I mean, I think you remember talking to me like last week. I do. Yeah, yeah. So like, I'm sorry. Sorry, Mary Elizabeth Bailey.

It's kind of off subject. I've been kind of going through COVID. And anxiety as much as COVID. Yeah, I had a therapy appointment session yesterday with a lady therapist and she was really helpful. She was talking about how she sensed almost some post-traumatic stress disorder stuff with me. Probably from childhood,

I had crazy dynamics between my mom and my dad growing up you know yeah ptsd i i look a trauma is one of the most significant and underreported sources of anxiety let me tell you and and dysregulation i mean you have underneath your anxiety of all kinds of vague dysregulated emotions that you're not connected up to because you didn't get the proper kind of rapprochement, we call it, or feedback from your primary relationships. And yeah, it creates terrible anxiety. And then when you have an illness or something's threatening, you're walking around in a full-blown panic all the time yeah and and like so like this this illness having covid it's like hard it's hard to really understand what symptoms are really bothering me and how much of that is actually just my anxiety and paranoia and can't like panic attacks because

i have panic attacks you know and yeah i get it i get it did she give you some suggestions on maybe what to do when you start getting confused or out of body or whatever however you experience these things oh man well i used to get because i rode the bus and skateboarded i've been at uh this grocery store it's a very popular grocery store i've been there for like 10 years and i rode the bus and skateboarded everywhere. But I used to get panic attacks, like severe, severe panic attacks on the bus.

Timothy, me too. When I was 19, I'm disabling panic. Disabling. Did you have panic, Mary Elizabeth? Surprisingly, I haven't. I have never had a panic attack. But I hear people that have them and I've seen people that have them, and I'm very fortunate. They're miserable.

They're terrible. Yes. They're horrible. And Timothy doesn't – I don't tell Timothy how horrible they are. They're horrible. Oh, yeah. My chest would tighten up and super tight. I'd get numbness in my jaw, numbness tingling in my hands and my

legs would stop working i'd have to walk around the bus because i felt so frightened like freaked out right and you know see you have a you have though you have a prominent somatoform component to your anxiety in other words you your body is a source of the distress and you lose track of is this distress of an emotional basis or is it of a somatic basis? Is it coming from the body itself? And if you're not, again, if you're not hooked up to your emotions, which is, again, a secure attachment, reduced PTSD symptoms, it's very hard to tell the difference. But I can tell just talking to you that you're better off this week than last. So was it two weeks ago or last? Whatever it was, congratulations on taking care of yourself and getting proper care.

And then starting to sort out what is chronic COVID and what isn't. Most of the chronic COVID stuff gets better. And so that's the thing you can look forward to. I know there was a scary study that came out just yesterday, I think, that suggested there's all this end organ destruction in every organ of the body. According to Vinay Prasad, the entire study is bunk, to use his words. I can tell you clinically it does not at all fit with what we see, which is people with long COVID have a lot of miserable symptoms.

They get better. And we don't see significant severe end-organ dysfunction unless the person was in the ICU for a long period of time, which what we see is the same as we see from long ICU hospitalizations of any cause. So it doesn't really, it's not, don't be scared by it is my point. So maybe that can reduce a little bit of the cause. So it doesn't really, it's not, don't be scared by it's my point. So maybe that can reduce a little bit of the anxiety. Uh, and of course you're a nurse, uh, Mary, any, any thoughts on your end? No, I mean, obviously I'm, I'm, I'm seeing some people, um, you know,

comment there, definitely get treatment for this. He's doing the right thing. Um, you know, he's going to therapy, he's learning, you know, learn the triggers, learn, you know, what causes it and go from there. He's better. I can tell. He was really struggling last time. Jackie, unmute your mic and you can speak with us. A lot of support for Timothy out there, which is nice. He'll need that too.

So please keep giving him support. Jackie, go ahead. I see you're ready to speak speak but we don't hear you maybe it's muted on your end on your phone or something it says you're not muted on the yeah no it says connected on my end what do you think there caleb is it uh uh they might be having an issue what do you think there caleb is it uh they might be having an issue okay it's still so jackie if you do connect yeah if you do connect don't speak i'm going to bring ryan up uh let ryan give a chance a shot at oh you're you're muted now jackie stay muted we'll let we'll let uh ryan come up ryan what's going on

hey doc i have a question for Mary. Yeah. So I've been through quite a bit of childhood trauma when I was growing up, pretty much every form except sexual. And I've been in therapy for about eight years now. I feel like I'm doing great. But my biggest issue is learning how to trust people again. I just can't. I get thoughts, just doubtful thoughts, just out of instinct.

And it's one thing that I feel like hinders my life, and I really want to change it. I just don't understand how, I guess. Marian, any suggestions? Yeah, that's a good question. want to be in your life and want to support you, you'll know who those people are. I don't know if you're talking about relationships or employers. I'm not sure, but, you know, I think it's good to at least open yourself up, allow people to come into your life. You know, again, you know, you know what you went through and you know, you can read people a lot of times. At least I feel like I can read people. I've gotten to the point where I'm very aware of people and what they say to me and how they are.

And you can pick up on those things. Yeah, that hyper awareness is very familiar with me. I do that a lot. It's like I don't want to say I judge people because I don't want to say they're good or bad. But I try to maybe defend myself or protect myself before anything even happens and um i've seen it just destroy like relationships i mean even close ones and uh it hurts and i know it's my fault but i do want to and i want to fix it so so here are the the basics obviously is in therapy where you learn to be more open and vulnerable with your therapist that's your first place to test these things that person that person's job is just to be totally available

to you confidentially without reservation completely open non-judgmental supportive i mean that's the job and so you should be able to build trust there. It takes time. But you must, unfortunately, you have to go out into the world and test it. You have to, you know, you may not, if you have a bad picker, if you pick untrustworthy people, then also work on that. But you're going to have to kind of slowly work yourself into increasing levels of trust with people. If you don't change that, if you do nothing, it's really not going to change. Yeah. Right?

I mean, it sounds scary, but yeah. You don't have to jump all the way in. You don't have to jump into a marriage or something or a business partnership. You kind of jump into day riding bikes or something or meeting at a restaurant. Can I rely on them to show up on time? And if they show up and I tell them, I'll tell them something intimate. Did they deal with it properly in a respectful way? That kind of stuff.

Test it, okay? Just try it out. Try it out. Try it out. Try it out, yes, to quote a famous meme. All right, so Jackie's back again. Let's get Jackie in here. And all you got to do is turn your mic on, Jackie.

The mute is on. How about that? There you are. I got you. What's going on? Hi, Dr. Drew, and hi, Mary. Mary, I've read your book, and your sense of focus is really inspiring. It's like you manifested your healing and somehow channeled your energy into finding solutions like sports or your studies.

And I was really inspired by the fact that you chose a healing career in nursing. So can you speak to how you found that mindset at such a young age? And I'll go ahead and mute back so other people can talk. Go ahead, Renara. Yeah. As far as my nursing career and healing, I was drawn to nursing and I was drawn to the geriatric nursing because of my relationship with my grandmother. I loved her deeply. The relationship we had was just, it was amazing. And so to be able to work in that environment and to have that relationship and with those types of people, they all have this wonderful story. And you feel like each of those

individuals are like your, your grandmother, your grandfather. And so having that relationship, um, with those, with, with my patients, it really helped. I think, uh, in some aspects, it helped me to heal. Um, because unfortunately when my grandmother passed away, I think, in some aspects, it helped me to heal. Because unfortunately, when my grandmother passed away, I was supposed to visit her in the nursing home. And she passed away a couple days before I got a chance to go see her. And it was devastating for me. I had not seen her in a while. And so to lose her so quickly, I didn't even realize, you know, and I was about 13, 14 years old. And so to be able to go into the hospital and to spend time and have the relationship with those individuals and those patients has just been such a blessing to me. Are you working in, are you working and have you always or generally worked in extended care facilities?

Mostly, mostly that's what I did. I did, I was a nurse consultant, so I would go out and assess, you know, patients in hospitals, you know, for nursing and for rehab. But mostly, yeah, mostly that's the area I kind of stayed in. Rehab, you're talking about transitional care units? Yes. Yeah. So when she says rehab, she's not talking about substance abuse treatment. She's talking about physical rehab, coming back from a hip replacement, strokes, that kind of thing. Correct.

Yeah. Okay. So I want to follow on with Jackie's question a little bit because I kind of feel like two things happened to you that were sort of lucky. One, you're a very positive, resilient person and you're sort of overly trustworthy and that's how you were taken advantage of by your mom, essentially. But that makes for great nursing. That makes for good, that kind of, that already, that sort of reaching out and caring about people and being open to them. That makes for a great nurse. And so you sort of were resilient. You were sort of set up that way. But now I'm hearing you say you had this very deep attachment to grandma. And I kind of feel like that was the life and death line for you.

That was what made the difference between a Mary that's what we're talking to now versus a Mary that would have been more like her siblings, I suspect. Maybe not substance, but with somebody with a substance problem, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. My grandmother, she, she raised me pretty much. My mother had me when she was, um, she got pregnant with me when she was 15. So had me when she was 16 years old. So I lived with my, my grandmother for the majority of, of my young life. She was there. She was very protective of me. She tried to keep me, um, you know, out of that environment, you know,

with my mom and, and mom and my step stepfather, she tried to keep me away from that as much as she could. Um, every time they would bring us back to the house or bring us back to wherever they were living or wherever they were moving to, they drag us with them. My grandmother would always come with, and I would stay with her. And she was just, it was just like, she was my protector. She was like an angel. And I don't know what I would have done without her. I don't know where I'd be without her. I just know that her presence was vital in my life.

We have somebody named Miss B in our chat room from YouTube. I'm guessing she's somebody you grew up with because she said that she knew you played softball and basketball and track, or maybe she just read the book, and that that was an important part of your resiliency. Oh, Mishmi has been your friend for 20 years, it says. It just came up. Yes. Yes. We've been best friends for over 20 years.

She's a fantastic friend. She's been very supportive. We had a lot of similarities in life, a lot of trauma in different aspects, things that she deals with, things that I've dealt with. And so having her in my life has been a blessing. She's a good friend. But you both found relief in sports, in women's sports? Absolutely, yes. So there's three things,

well, four things really. One is your positive attitude and resiliency, which can be cultivated, let's be clear. The trust part is a little rougher, as Ryan points out. Number two is that attachment

to an adult figure. Somebody, somebody's got to be there for that child over an extended period of time. It can be outside the home, ideally from the gene pool. It doesn't have to be. Sports, we're hearing, was an important piece of this. Therapy was important for you.

You did a lot of therapy. And then very, very close, supportive friends. So it's sort of, there it is. I mean, those are the elements that make people recover fully. And I'm sorry, you mentioned a sixth and equally important, maybe more important, a spiritual program. So if we listed, like if we listed the, I don't know if this is in your book or not,

but if we said, here are the things that Mary, how did Mary end up as good as she is? Well, here they are. Very secure attachment to a loving, sustained adult who is structured with good boundaries. Resiliency, cultivated or not, or born with it.

Sports, activities, close friends, therapy, spiritual program, and then now service. You're able to take all that and use it in your profession. Absolutely. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, and what's interesting about that is if you wrote them all down on a piece of paper, they would map on to the 12-step of recovery, which is why I always tell you guys that it's ridiculous that people don't take more advantage of a free mechanism that has been shown to be useful if people apply it.

And it's a model that recapitulates things that we know work for people recovering from all sorts of mental health issues, particularly trauma. And so please take advantage of those things. Fellowship, right? You've got the spiritual program. It's all these things. And you can do it on your own terms. How you make sense of it is how you use it. Well, Mary, I really appreciate you telling us your story.

I hope people will get the book and read it. It's extraordinary, but it's thrilling to see you doing as well as you are. And so I hope it gives people hope. I hope Ryan, who called and still doing his work in therapy, maybe another way to have trust. Mary, why don't you speak to this? Because spirituality to me is sort of outside of the medical realm and it's sort of, I don't feel right even talking about it. But talk to him about how having a spiritual program would help him trust and deal with circumstances where the trust is violated. Yeah.

Well, just having a spiritual relationship for me, you know, my relationship with, and really a spiritual relationship can be whatever you want it to be. I don't, you know, not everyone's going to, you know, believe a certain way or believe, you know, in God or this or that, but just to believe in something and to, you know, so to have a relationship and to open up to people, you know, pray about it, talk about it, you know, seek people out that are spiritual. Maybe that's what you need to do. Um, and, and like you said, open up to those people, talk to those people, share things, uh, with them and, and just see where it goes as far as, uh, the relationship. And that's just a good way to start building trust.

You find people and you find your tribe and, and, um, and that's what you do. And you do have to put yourself out there sometimes, you know, it's, it's whether you choose to trust someone or whether you choose not to. It can happen either way as far as them trusting you. But I've noticed that people that have a spiritual connection, they can take that so-called leap of faith more effectively. When they have that faith, you know, when they're worried about trust, they can make that leap and they can deal with the disappointments and they can, you know, maintain that through line spiritual connection that gets them through that stuff. So there it is. That's how this stuff works, everybody. And the therapy part, frankly, is just the connection, just the secure base is just what Mary got from her grandmother done properly. That's what therapy is essentially. And it's a

few other little professional sort of managed nuances, you know, pushing here and pressing there and getting certain things to help for you. But ultimately, it's getting that safe environment, that closeness, that rapprochement. Okay, Mary, thank you so much. Any place else you want to send people? That's it. Just definitely, you know, check out my book. You've been showing it, My Mother's Soldier. It's a fantastic, fantastic book. And please reach out. You know, I have, um, ways to contact me. So if people have questions, they can certainly reach out, uh, Facebook,

Twitter, Instagram. So thank you so much. My people will, they will reach out. So we appreciate you being here. Thank you so much, Mary. Hope to see you soon. Uh, tomorrow, I believe we're just doing calls is that right caleb is that yes that's correct so far we're gonna do take calls all right so calls from you guys um whatever topic you want to get into uh let me uh i guess i was gonna bring susan up here but she can't really talk on the plane they won't let her do that so i'm not gonna bug you to come on up.

Or you can raise your hand if you want. If you feel like you could talk, I'll let you come in here. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of interesting stuff. Alex Berenson is back on Twitter. And he had a really interesting construct. I don't know that I agree with it, but it was very interesting. He said we should be looking at the vaccines.

I'm laughing because it was such a clever construct. We should look at the vaccines not as an immunization against infection, but a therapeutic that helps decrease the impact of the illness, but you have to take it before you get the illness. It's a therapeutic that you take before you're infected. And I thought that is a really, really, really clever construct. It is kind of what it is, but it does it through activating the immune system. So your immune system does the work, therefore it is a vaccine. Now, if it helps people sort of get their head more around what we're doing by thinking of it that way or helps them make their decisions better based on that construct, then I'm all for it.

But as always, Alex Berenson is the gadfly creating lots of noise out there. He was silenced by Twitter. Maybe we should try to get Alex back in here. He's been here a number of times. Yeah. I had to actually go look that up because I didn't believe it. I thought he was suspended and he was, and it looks as if they reinstated him and acknowledged an error. And then Elon Musk replied to that early. What? I didn't even notice that. Wow. Correct. Not only that, oh, we have a forensic doctor on for tomorrow. Michelle just texted me.

We have a forensic physician on, which is awesome. We're going to talk about a lot of things COVID as well. But yeah, Elon Musk was interested in the fact that Alex said that one of the reasons Twitter canceled him was because of pressure from the government. And Elon Musk immediately went, tell me more about that pressure from the government you were talking about. Did you see that whole exchange, Caleb? Did you see that whole thread? Oh yeah, I'm putting it on the screen right right now i did not see it till just now so you have yeah uh how did i like wow i got something on social media before alex did before caleb did so there it is he says shady's back which is hysterical uh tell a friend which we're doing right now uh and uh i can't read the rest of it. Maybe you could read it, Caleb.

For the full story. For the full story of my reinstatement, including Twitter's acknowledgement of error, see my sub stack. That's, I've never seen anything like it. This makes me feel, reminds me of when Twitter, I mean, when YouTube took down the Dr. Zelenko interview and then all of a sudden out of nowhere,

a few days later, they put it back up, took the strike off and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a few days later, they put it back up, took the strike off, and then didn't even acknowledge it, acted as if it never happened. Well, this, in Alex's place, I believe he took them to court. I believe this was a lawsuit, and I believe this was a settlement before it got to court. In fact, I'm fairly certain that's what happened. I'd heard that yesterday, that there had been a settlement for Alex Berenson. And people were a little upset because they were saying, hey, there was a big crowdfund for him to go to court. And they were like, were we crowdfunding a settlement? People felt weird about that.

That's how lawsuits work. Most of them are settled. If you're going to crowdfund a lawsuit, the probability is you're going to crowdfund a settlement, something that settles. And evidently, part of the settlement was an acknowledgement of wrongdoing and a reinstatement on Twitter. Oh, there's Elon Musk. Can you say more about the pressures that the government may have placed on Twitter?

Right? Isn't that something? That's the thing that really caught my eye. Wow. I was like, oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah, yeah right it's a pretty good thread isn't it and then go ahead and why not put the one up just just before elon said that alex went out and so he's saying alex michelson who was my co-host on a local news show

here alex went out and talked about his construct of how we should look at the vaccine as a therapeutic, a therapeutic that you take before you get sick. It's clever. It's funny. It's not wrong. It's just not wholly the truth because, again, there it is. Don't think of it as a vaccine. Think of it at best as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy, true, and terrible side effect profile, too, true, that must be dosed limited window of efficacy. True. And terrible side effect profile. Two.

True. That must be dosed in advance of illness. And then he goes on to say, and you want to mandate that, that's insanity. Well, uh-oh, it's a misleading tweet. Wow. I think that was a- It got tagged. That's a screenshot of what got him suspended, I think.

No, no, no, no, no. This was today. That was not tagged two hours ago. That little thing at the bottom where it says misleading was not there two hours ago i assure you so so the that part where it says it's misleading that's in the screenshot that he posted of the old tweet that he had penned before that's not from today's that's why yeah it's in the screenshot you posted i see yeah you're That's his, that's what got him canceled. That's no way. It looks like, it looks like that was his last. That's just a clever, clever

idea. It's a clever idea. It's not wholly true. It's not wholly untrue. What's wrong with that? What is wrong with us? What do you, my God, people, what is wrong with us? Seriously, what is wrong with us? I don't get it. I don't know why we can't have just, I don't know. I'm far from, again, I'm just trying to help people understand things. I got some stuff wrong. He got some stuff wrong. I got some stuff right that people still haven't acknowledged yet, by the way. And I apologize where I get things wrong. I got some stuff right that people still haven't acknowledged yet, by the way. And I apologize where I get things wrong. I have no problem with that. I have no problem with that.

When I get things wrong, first thing I want to do is acknowledge where I've got it wrong as quick as I can possibly rectify it and get my boat right and on course. It's fine with me. The way science works is you never always right all the time. It just doesn't happen. It does not happen. Okay. So be that as it may, I appreciate you all the time. It doesn't happen. It does not happen. Okay. So be that as it may, I appreciate you all being here. I appreciate the questions. We appreciate you all on Twitter spaces. Caleb, thank you for helping. Susan, thank you for listening.

I know you're somewhere over, let's see, where are you now? You would be probably over Illinois somewhere. And maybe over Chicago, Cincinnati, something like that as they head you on across the country. So have a nice flight. I love you. And we will see you all tomorrow at three o'clock. We have a forensic physician in here that Michelle is very excited about. And we'll see you then.

Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today,

some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me. Call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. You can find more of my recommended organizations and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.