Sheri Heller is many things. She is a psychotherapist, a coach, an interfaith minister, and a supremely talented writer. She is also a trauma survivor, having been raised in the chaos and pain of a home where her mother was suffering from chronic paranoid schizophrenia. Sheri wrote the piece, “An Orphan’s Memorial to Her Dying Mother” and sent it to us, years ago. Our filmmaker, Glenn Holsten, was so moved by the piece that he collaborated with Sheri and animators Sandra & Paul Fierlinger to create a beautiful animated short about her relationship with her mother.

On our podcast, Sheri talks about how creative expression—writing, psychodrama, performance—can open doors to healing. She offers practical markers of readiness, why a stable witness matters, and how to pace work when somatic memory surges past your defenses.

We also dig into the broken architecture of mental health care: fragmented services, prohibitive costs, and the patchwork of county policies that make crisis responses inconsistent. Sheri recounts the plainspoken guidance NAMI gave her—advice that balanced compassion with realism—and how it reshaped her approach to caregiving and self-preservation. Her story arrives in the present with a quiet kind of hope: sobriety, a marriage rooted in mutual understanding, a steady practice in Montreal, and the capacity to regulate and re-center when old echoes return. Listen, and share.

Conversations like the ones on this podcast can sometimes be hard, but they're always necessary. If you or someone you know is struggling, please consider visiting www.wannatalkaboutit.com. If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please call, text, or chat 988.

https://recoverydiaries.org/