Tony Mantor: Why Not Me ? - Dr. Kristen Viola Harrison journey as a psychologist founding Soul Wise Solutions

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

In this episode of 'Why Not Me?', host Tony Mantor interviews Dr. Kirsten Viola Harrison, a distinguished trauma psychologist and founder of Soul Wise Solutions. They discuss Dr. Harrison's career journey, personal motivations, and her work with individuals suffering from complex trauma, dissociative disorders, schizophrenia, and near-death experiences. The conversation highlights Dr. Harrison's dedication to bridging psychology and spirituality for deep, lasting healing. A significant portion of the discussion centers on Dr. Harrison's relationship with Shauna, a resilient individual dealing with schizophrenia, dissociative schizophrenia, and intersex traits, emphasizing the importance of resilience, hope, and understanding in mental health. Meet Dr. Kirsten Viola Harrison Dr. Harrison's Journey into Trauma Psychology Challenges and Burnout in Trauma Work Shauna's Story: Living with Schizophrenia The Impact of Trauma and Mental Health Advocacy Future Plans and Final Thoughts INTRO Music: T. Wild Mantor Music Publishing (BMI) The content on Why Not Me: Embracing Autism amd Mental Health Worldwide, including discussions on mental health, autism, and related topics, is provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not reflect those of the podcast, its hosts, or affiliates.Why Not Me is not a medical or mental health professional and does not endorse or verify the accuracy, efficacy, safety of any treatments, programs, or advice discussed.Listeners should consult qualified healthcare professionals, such as licensed therapists, psychologists, or physicians, before making decisions about mental health or autism- related care.Reliance on this podcast's contents is at the listener's own risk. Why Not Me is not liable for any outcomes, financial or otherwise, resulting from actions taken based on the information provided. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Why Not Me, embracing autism and mental health worldwide, hosted by Tony Matured, broadcasting from the heart of Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join us as our guests share their raw, howful stories. Some will spark laughter, others will move you to tears. These real-life journeys inspire, connect, and remind you that your never alone. We're igniting a global movement to empower everyone to make a lasting difference by fostering deep awareness, unwavering acceptance, and profound understanding of autism and mental health. Tune in, be inspired, and join us in transforming the world one story at a time. Hi, I'm Tony mentor. Welcome to Why Not Me, embracing autism and mental health worldwide. Joining us today is Dr. Kirsten

Viola Harrison. She is a distinguished trauma psychologist, spiritual integration pioneer, and founder of Soul Wise Solutions, which is dedicated to transforming lives through a unique blend of clinical expertise, soul-centered healing, and social advocacy, with over 25 years of experience supporting individuals with complex trauma, dissociative disorders, schizophrenia, and near-death experiences. She bridges psychology and spirituality to foster deep, lasting healing. She has a wealth of information. She's written a book and joins us today to talk more about that. So before we dive into our episode, we'll be back with an uninterrupted show right after a word from our sponsors. Thanks for coming on. Of course. I appreciate the invite. Oh, it's my pleasure. So if you would,

Tell us a little bit about what you do. So I am a psychologist. I've spent many years working with people who've had very severe trauma and also spent a fair amount of time doing women's group or people in transition, whether it be a life change or raising kids and dealing with the difficult teenage years or whatever. But mostly my background has been very severe trauma disorders and also near-death experiencers who are trying to kind of integrate the learnings that they've had into his sort of like everyday life again.

That's very interesting. I'm wondering, what led you to pursue this career? So I kind of always thought I would do something with languages. I love languages. I love cultures and people. And my high school sweetheart who had became my first husband had very severe childhood trauma, had been adopted, but had been in an orphanage as a child in South America. And so many things happened during our relationship that just made no sense to me.

So I got really busy trying to understand psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, like anything to do with trauma. And I'm almost 60s. So back then there was not the internet. So we had to go to kind of the back annals of a medical school library and try to find anything that I could figure out. And then shortly thereafter, I'd say a few years thereafter, my brother died in an accident tragically. So that got me not only understanding trauma from my own perspective, but also integrating what I was learning in my book from people who had had near death experiences. because I had this deep desire to want to understand what happened. So I would say, and then it just kind of snowballed,

was working on my master's in biomedical sciences, undergrad and psych, then more psych did some research at UCLA on PTSD and just kind of kept going. So you've been doing it now for what, 30, 40 years? Yeah, I'm 59. So I'd say living it kind of from age 18 on with my first husband. And professionally, I'd say from about age 21 when I first. started working child guidance and then yeah it's been a while yeah so this is interesting my question now

is you've been doing it so long have you had any burnout where you've had to psychoanalyze yourself at times oh absolutely i would say the hardest was so i had a biologic i have a biological daughter and then i had three stepkids along the way and one of my stepkids has special needs she has something called smith mcginnis syndrome she's 20 now but cognitively more like five and i've been raising her since she was three. I would say that during those years, it got very difficult to also balance clients. And I was finding that I was losing my filter, the inability to be able to process what was handled in session and so much trauma, and then come home and be all happy, go lucky and very present with my children. So I didn't need to take a bit of break. I would say for a good 10 years there in terms

of individual clients. And then like I said, I started segueing into kind of women who are what they consider worried well, which is sort of more everyday concerns, not necessarily tapping into deep trauma. As my kids have gotten older, my daughter's done finished her master's degree at Johns Hopkins. As they're kind of moving on, I'm finding myself back into the trauma field in a way that I feel like I can make a real difference. Do you see a difference from your earlier years from when you started to what you were doing in today's world? Absolutely. I mean, first of all, the field has changed so much in traumatology because back in the day, I was that annoying student who would put articles in my professors mailboxes and say, have you read this one yet? I've gone to this conference.

You know, I was constantly educating myself and then also trying to bring it to the classroom. And back in the day, there wasn't a whole lot being taught specifically just on trauma. And that was really disheartening. However, now it's so wonderful. People are getting degrees in trauma studies. So I just feel like the field has definitely evolved. And in parallel, the field of near-death experiences has involved. Now, everybody kind of knows what a near-death experience is. Back in the day, I would say in the mid-80s when I was first learning and going to conferences, late 80s, it wasn't very talked about. And there were journals like Thanatology that you could never find. And that was little bits and pieces that people were bringing together.

With all the changes with people talking and discussing it openly now? Yes. Yes. That does help when people will talk about it. how did you handle it back then when it wasn't as open people wouldn't discuss it everyone kind of thought that well do i know if this is true or are they just making it up how did you get through that where you could still help the people that needed the help but yet tell them don't worry about it and don't worry about what other people are thinking because it doesn't matter i've asked myself that as well i mean my parents kind of you know

they raised me on books like anne frank and uncle tom's cabin and books I had to do with survival and resilience and being victimized. And then what it said about the greater collective and how we could then help, I would say being brought up as a global citizen and having that awareness. But it has been a bit of a lonely road sometimes. And I think my brother's death was the thing that sort of catapulted me at a very young age. I was only 22 when it happened. It was 20.

I think it made me cocoon a little bit and go, you know what? The things I thought were so important or the friends whose opinions I valued so much, It was the ones who kind of went in the darkness with me and kind of went in that deep night of the soul with me that I kind of thought, okay, these are the people that get it. The rest of the stuff is just fluff. And so then over time, through some difficult relationships, dealing with people with a lot of severe trauma, my stepdaughter who does some really interesting things in public sometimes, I've just sort of learned to just sort of laugh and go with it, ignore the haters. I did write this book with Shauna, who I've befriended for 10 years, who was living on the streets and schizophrenes. And also the most positive joyous person will ever meet. After 10 years and writing the book and supporting her, I gave her an experience to travel outside of the country for three weeks to promote the book and visit all the pride parades because she's something called inner sex. And I saw firsthand the hate sometimes.

I just kept saying, just smile. Shauna, just, you know, we're doing our thing and we know why we're doing it and just sort of keep going. And in the meantime, we've educated her TikTok got a million views on one of the posts and people are having real discussions about what it means to understand somebody that's not wired exactly how they are. So you mentioned she had to deal with schizophrenia at times. Absolutely, yes. How did she deal with that?

Was it medication, medication and therapy, just therapy? How did it all evolve? One of the things I advocate for in the book is she walks a half a marathon a day. Wow, that's impressive. Like I can't even fathom that. It is called her mood walk therapy and it's how she regulates her symptoms. It's difficult sometimes she has some, you know, a lot of flailing about it, unwanted movements. Sometimes she definitely has very strong and can be perceived as angry verbalizations that scare people.

Okay. Rightfully so. But I have tried to teach the community if you just say, hey, Shauna, she will snap right out of it. All of that, you know, medial prefrontal cortex stuff that's a little bit dysregulated, like comes back online and she's able to completely join the conversation with unbelievable insight. During this whole process, was she dealing with anticsinosia at all? Can you give us a little insight to what she was going through on a daily basis? So it really impacted her.

I would say she had her first probably psychotic break back in college. She was a student athlete. And one of her dear friends took her to the Mental Health Center and tried to figure out what was going on. She was having a lot of voices, very threatening voices inside her head. I have been around her enough now to understand that there's like a sir and guys. and ma'am, you know, all the things that she does and she'll kind of hold up a P sign or do a stop sign. And that's when I know, okay, she's talking to obviously voices that I can't hear. What makes her situation a little more complicated is she's also got dissociative schizophrenia.

So she has a very rare condition that I recognized early on. Again, I've never been her therapist, just a friend who happens to be a psychologist. I worked with Dr. Colin Ross, and he's a huge guy in the trauma studies field. and he delineated a group of symptoms that he called dissociative schizophrenia. It's very rare. It never got accepted by the APA because there just weren't kind of enough agreements on what that constituted. But because I've spent so much in my professional career working with what they used to call multiple personality disorder, which is now DID, I saw the overlap in Shana. And so I saw that there were part, little kid parts, little girl parts.

There were parts of her that were distinct from the voices that were more of like a menacing traditional. additional schizophrenic presentation. How did they handle this? Did they give her medication to calm her down? Or did they give her therapy? Or is this all self-regulated and she handles it herself? So I would say her early years during her first set of treatment was a little bit spotty. I know that she was in various shelters, various hospital situations.

So I'm not sure exactly what they tried. But I also know that she is averse to medicines because, because of the side effects. As an athlete, they were very uncomfortable to her as what I'm gathering. And also that her mom and dad had also died very young before age 50. And she was scared of some of those cardiac effects and whatever. Okay. So let's fast forward to today. Are there any medications involved or is she handling it all internally? She works it out within herself. And I would say she's catered her life to kind of adapt how she needs to adapt. It would be, nice if some medication were there that would really ameliorate some of her distress sometimes.

But I think she's coping in an incredibly resilient way. She is very unique. She's very unselfconscious. She wears extremely flamboyant bright outfits. Part of her schizophrenia is that her intersex nature because she's born what they used to call hermaphrodite. I feel like it's had an adaptive effect. I feel like when she was living on the streets, not being so aware of her,

condition actually helped her thrive and survive. So it's kind of this paradox that those who live sort of on the edge of mental illness or what we would call like maladaptive brain functioning, to her has been very adaptive. It's helped her. So you wrote a book about her life. How deep a dive did you do? Do you take it from beginning to today or are there certain parts of her life that you focus on one more than another? What can people expect for a read? if they picked this up. So it does cover enough of her backstory. I mean, I've been in her life daily now for 10 years.

And after getting her housed and supporting her now, after the two years of GoFundMe money ran out, I've been supporting her for the last eight. I've gotten to know her sister, some of her nieces and nephews. And so I've gotten a very comprehensive picture. But again, it's sort of limited because based on her, I don't want to call it revisioning of her history,

but in her mind she really believes certain things about her parentage that may or may not be, actual verifiable fact. Though I present all of that in the book, Shauna and I wrote it together, so she knows every little last thing. The schizophrenia chapter was a little challenging to write with her because obviously the delusions of grandeur were kind of like,

no, not me, Doc, you know? But in the end, she kind of, she looked at me one time when we were in Paris. I'll give you an example. And I sat across from her, we had having a really stressful day. We went to Paris Pride, which was wonderful. We had a great time,

but the voices were starting to act up. And she was starting to incorporate me into the delusion. So she was having conversations with Doc put over on the side inside her system. So how did you handle that? So I just looked at her deep in the eyes and I said, Shana, it must be so difficult to just function. When all day you're getting these messages of people telling you that things aren't so great or beating you down. And how you still stay positive is beyond me. What was her response to that?

She looked at me with this deep, soulful look instead, Doc. Thanks. Yeah, it's kind of hard sometimes. And I was like, that was the moment of connect where the soul is in there trying to work through the brain. Yeah. Okay, you've known her for 10 years. She's had all these voices. I think you know where I'm going with this. Is there any chance that any of these voices could turn violent at any time? No, and I think that's the hugest misconception. I mean, it's the same thing with DID. It's so not as common as the press would make you believe, especially. a DID that people are going to turn violent like that. I mean, as soon as you kind of like, as long as there's no other substance going on, I mean, Shauna, thank God, is not on any drugs or alcohol, which makes it so much easier to be in this with her. That is a misconception. It just feels to me like it's something that the public should become more aware of that truly, if you approach with a very

non-threatening, just friendly energy, not trying to step into the delusion and not trying to challenge the person, but if you're just sort of there in a supportive manner, I think quantum physics, shows that our energies interact in a certain way that instantly kind of helps calm the system. Okay, that's good. So what happens when people she does not know interact with her and there's no other way to say this, but when the haters start hating, how does she respond? Okay, so she, it's different, she and I have different responses to that. At first, I'll get hurt for her or I'll try to absorb or I'll have this righteous indignation of, oh, they just don't understand, right? Yeah, unfortunately.

She takes a very, this is why I call her a walking spirit. She takes a very spiritual approach. In D.D., we call it an inner self-helper, which is sort of like an ally that bridges the divine and the human experience. And that's the closest I can come to explaining it. Like, she just has this very spiritual palm effect, well doc, you know, some people don't understand, you know. It's remarkable. I mean, on a city bus, she was really teased and harassed one time. And she said she just kind of like Rosa Parks, she just sort of stared.

straight ahead and just kind of waited for it all to calm down. She is not confrontational in the least. It's just years of practice through misunderstanding, I think, but I still feel it for her. That's awesome that she handles it like that. Now, what's the next step? You've written a book, you help her from day to day. What do you see on the horizon? What do you see coming up next? Well, I think, okay, so I've been in education my whole life. And so has she, she's a certified PE teacher four-year college degree. And I think education and getting the word out, which is why we love doing things like podcasts and just finding a way to just keep letting people know a little bit more about resilience and hope, post-traumatic thriving, post-traumatic growth, that truly anything is

possible and that you just have to keep going and keep believing. She attends a lot of spiritual services online and keeps her strong and fortified. So the next steps are just keep getting the word out. And I wish in some great plan that there would be some sort of streaming or movie or something about her life. Because I think she's just that charismatic and that influential in terms of her ability to get through hardship after sleeping on cardboard for eight years and navigating the world. Right now it's just little by little, just getting the word out and just hoping that people can feel that they're never alone and that they're always connected to something bigger. And that if you just keep believing, there might be somebody that crosses your path and can help you along the way in that journey. journey. Yes, that's great and so true. So you've been promoting this book, you've been traveling the US and some places around the world. What else are you doing? Are you working on your career?

Or have you put the career aside for a little bit so that you can do this project? Can you give us a little insight? I'd say it's a combination of all of the above because like I said, eldest is now kind of done with school. My stepdaughter is with her mom a lot. So I have more sort of space and bandwidth to kind of refocus. I do still do consultations, some speaking, some groups. So yes, 100% still doing things. I have a website that I filter a lot of that through. But mostly right now, I'm just trying to help Shauna really find some footing, which is kind of funny because she does walk so much, but some footing where she can feel like she's really starting to make some income on her own, possibly through sponsorship. She wears athletic gear that we were like, okay, let's explore that.

My whole field is, you know, helping. It's not so much business. So I am trying to brainstorm with lots of different people how to start to get the word out. You just brought sponsorships up. Do you see her getting in a position to where she can travel around the country, speaking, engagements,

and start spreading the word that way? Well, I would say, okay, if that's going to include her, kind of usually I'm with her, I think that her capacity to kind of like spread joy and everything that she does incredibly is best done in a very short period of time. I think she gets a little restless and her mind will wander if it's more than 15 minutes. I'd say she did exceptionally well at our book launch, but there was still a lot of kind of agitation and nervousness.

So when we do things together, it does help regulate a little bit. I think I help her regulate her nervous system a little bit just by my presence. And then I think also on her end, she takes everything and makes it that much more rich and powerful. So we are looking at ways to be able to do that. But she lives in Palm Springs. I live in La Jolla. So it's a couple hours drive. She hasn't quite navigated Zoom and all the different platforms. And she's a little, this is part of the schizophrenia, a little bit fearful of some things like that. So it's a work in progress. I mean, every day is a new learning, a new challenge. But getting her message out as much as possible, that's why we were at all the pride events.

We made sure to avail ourselves of every little chance to have a conversation with somebody to enlighten them about what's going on. Sure. What was the response you received? Was it good? It was so good. So I would say in the moment was amazing. Online it was a little harder.

Some of the TikToks were confused. But I loved how communities started showing up for each other. Like you'd get certain communities going, hey, didn't your mama raise you right? You shouldn't talk to somebody like that. And another community say, well, we're just confused. We don't understand. And it was like the dialogues were fascinating and heartening.

Because at the end of the day, people were like, okay, if I can get my head around this, maybe I can start to be a little bit more curious and help your cause. So what she's diagnosed with, is this a rare situation? What part of the population is it? Yeah, well, this is the reason I call her like a one in a million because, I mean, one in a bazillion, because not only was she homeless for all that time, like chronically homeless, but with tons of optimism and incredible resilience, being intersex is less. and 2% of the population to begin with.

Although some people say it's as common as red hair, so it's not as rare as we would think, but having ambiguous genitalia and where that fits in your self-concept is difficult and how your body responds. Then on top of that, schizophrenia, about 1 to 2% of the population, and then you get the dissociative schizophrenic part,

which is very rare. I'd say she's pretty rare. Yeah, I would say you're right there. Now, with the two different forms of schizophrenia, how does that interact with each other? How does she handle that? So what I noticed is like the dissociative part, she might go into a thrift shop and buy like a strawberry short cake t-shirt, right?

And it's like, okay, you know, that little girl and her that never got a chance to be that little girl and that never got seen and it got teased. That's more of like the little parts that see themselves in the mirror add that. That's more the dissociative part. And then the schizophrenia part is all this kind of like chorus of voices with constant judgment and constant sort of menacing, where she's physically reacting more, like she'll step back for a second or she'll flail or she'll push her hand up saying, stay away, that much more clearly representative of what we would call traditional paranoid schizophrenia

with delusions of grandeur. Now, I've spoken with several people that deal with schizophrenia with their loved ones. It can get out of control at times. They're not touching on reality. And sometimes it can get violent. They don't mean it to be that way, but unfortunately it happens. So nothing like this affects her. Well, she hunkers down.

I mean, she's in her apartment a lot. She lives in a place that's very hot. So it's kind of disguised as I'm staying inside from the heat. But really, that's where she can sort of unravel. She has learned different situations that are more triggering. For instance, in La Jolla, she way early on before I knew her, she was arrested for false imprisonment. And what that meant was a lady was so scared of her voices

and menacing behaviors with her arms flailing, that she locked herself into a bathroom in a public place and then called the police. She supposedly had different members of the community, like at CBS and Vons, places that knew her and said she doesn't mean any harm. She's certainly very gentle, but the lady was scared. So things like that happen a lot, and that's why I say sometimes it's a little bit of our interpretation too. But honestly, our neurobiology is so different and varied.

We can't make one hard and fast rule. I mean, my stepdaughter is a great example. The first day of school, she used to bop every head in the classroom with a sharp pencil, you know, and just do all these really. She'd moon the class one time. I mean, she just did some really interesting things. Obviously, with medicine in her case, it dampened that down a lot, and she was able to sort of learn and whatever. But still, that took its own toll.

She gained about 80 pounds. And, you know, it's just a balance. It's so hard to know. It is. It sounds like she has a certain control where she can handle it. I would say with Shauna, she knows that she used to sit at a suit corner and almost in a catatonic state. She would just sit there for hours. We're talking like 10 hours and not really doing much, just stare into space.

But then if people came by and said, hi, I love your outfit, she would 100% be able to snap out, engage them in conversation. And then as soon as they left, she was back in that kind of state. And then I've also noticed traveling with her, certain substances do not interact well with her. And so I've actually told her and she's taken notes because she can't be a very important. get a witness of her own behavior. So I was trying to tell her. I said, I notice if you have a cup of coffee, you seem to do a little better. If you take one of those calming gummies, not so good.

What about textures? Food, clothes. Does anything like that affect her at all? Not noticed that. Again, with my stepdaughter, it was like she could only have white foods. They had to have certain textures. So she had much more of that. Shana, I'm not noticing that.

Okay. So for people that want to get to know you, find out by the book. How do they find you? So they could go to my website. I'm starting to use that by default as sort of like catch-all for everything that we're doing. So it's soul-wise solutions. S-O-U-I-S-E-E Solutions. S-O-L-U-T-I-O-N-S dot com. From there, it directs you to the Amazon link to buy the book, which we would love. Get to know her whole story of resilience and then our story together, how we met it, how this has all happened. And then it's also, also at Barnes & Noble, different places.

So then there's some blog on the website. They could get more of an idea. Yeah. Well, this has been great. Great conversation. Great information. I really appreciate you taking the time to join us today. Oh, it's been a pleasure.

Thank you. And I love that you're so informed. I mean, you're just trying to, you know, get everybody's ideas to be able to help. So thank you. Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thanks again. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to listen to our show today. We hope you enjoyed it.

as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. If you know someone who has a story to share, tell them to contact us at why not me.world. One last thing, spread the word about why not me. Our conversations, our inspiring guests, this show you are not alone in this world.