Overcoming The Burden Of Childhood Trauma With Annetta Dewald

Childhood trauma often derails a person from living their best life. If this goes ignored for a long time, it could lead to seriously irreversible things. In this episode, Brian Dewald is joined by his wife, Annetta Dewald, who opens up about her mental health journey and how faith played a major role in overcoming childhood trauma. She discusses what it takes to break the cycle of abuse, how she became a Warrior Princess through a therapy program, and how to eat healthy to achieve an equally healthy mind. Annetta also shares about her work mentoring young girls on prioritizing mental health and getting past society’s unfair expectations.

—

Listen to the podcast here

Overcoming The Burden Of Childhood Trauma With Annetta Dewald

In this episode, we have a very special guest, my favorite person in the whole wide world, Mrs. Annetta Dewald. We have been married since 2001.

You better get that right.

I always get it right. We’ve been dating, believe it or not, since we were fifteen. Annetta is a different badass maverick. I’m a big believer that we all need a spiritual coach, business coach, finance coach, and marriage coach. Oftentimes, we need a head coach and a therapist of sorts. I’m a big fan of anything to do with growth, particularly mentally. In this episode, we’re going to talk about mental health. Annetta has this monstrous desire to lift others and help in any capacity. We’re going to talk about her story. Annetta, thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

This is our second episode here. We’ll jump into some stuff. To recap, a badass maverick is someone who is unconventional and independent and doesn’t think or behave as others do. Do you relate to that statement at all?

Sometimes. Not all the time.

Annetta Dewald And Her Mental Health Journey

I’m all about learning and growing physically, professionally, spiritually, and certainly mentally. The mental piece is what we’re going to talk about in our theme. We’re not doctors by any means but a lot of first-hand experience with some challenges. You’re the strongest person I know in terms of mental health.

That’s kind. Thank you. I’ll take it.

I know you still struggle at times. I’d like for you to share your journey and story with our audience. Why don’t we jump into that piece? Let’s start with your story. Do you want to fill us in a little bit?

Do you want me to start at the beginning?

We’re going to talk a little bit about some warrior princess stuff here in a little bit but when you are prepping or somebody asks you about it, what do you get into there?

It’s been a journey for sure. I didn’t realize I had mental health issues. It’s always been there since even I was a child but untreated for sure. When people talk to me about mental health, I’m pretty open about my story. I will share mine and go over theirs with theirs and give any tools that I can. My mental health journey started several years ago. I was having extreme lows. I couldn’t seem to quit crying. It was obnoxious.

I’ll back up even a little bit before that. We had a friend who was going to school to be a high school counselor. He needed patience that he could talk to for free and record the sessions as a volunteer. I was like, “Sure. I’ll go. You’re my friend’s husband. You’re a nice guy.” I’d never seen a counselor and didn’t think I needed counseling. I spent 45 minutes going back into the deep recesses of my childhood and uncovering things that had been buried.

At the end of 45 minutes, I was shell shocked like, “What happened?” Pandora’s box was opened so that’s how I got on the journey to self-awareness with my mental health. From there, I started seeing a therapist routinely and uncovering and digging up a lot of roots of childhood trauma. My mental health came to a head to the point where if I wasn’t going to take action, I was going to hurt myself and no longer be on this earth. I’m not there. It’s years of counseling and educating myself and medication. Truly putting the work in has transformed my mental mindset.

A lot of hard work has gone into that. How did you learn to tell that story?

Counseling. I grew up in a fatherless home. My father was a big-time California drug dealer in the ‘ 70s and early ‘80s. He was more or less a kingpin. He got arrested on my second birthday. The feds came in like the movies. Guns ablaze. They pointed at everybody and took him in. My mom was completely blindsided. We moved around a lot. I didn’t realize I had some trauma with that. My mom and grandmother raised me. My mom did the best she could. My grandmother, I refer to as Satan, truly. She’s no longer on this earth but I do believe she was evil. That’s who I was raised by.

I had a lot of evil spoken over me, trauma, mental abuse, sexual abuse, and any type of abuse. When I got to counseling, she was my spiritual mother. Her name is Dee Dee Woodman. She spoke life into me and told me how to tell my story. It’s okay that you have trauma and you were hurt. It doesn’t mean you have to live in that space and carry that. The more you speak it, the more you release the power of that story over you. She was an integral part of that. She is still very integral in my healing and journey.

Understanding How To Break The Cycle

I know you guys are super tight. She’s amazing. We’ve talked about this term before called breaking the cycle. My mom went through that. She was very heavily abused and left the home at fifteen to go live with somebody else. When you hear the term breaking the cycle, what does that mean? How did you notice it? Walk me through that a little bit.

I always knew when I was a little girl that it didn’t feel good being in my family. I never felt loved. I was always in the way. I was to be seen and not heard. It truly didn’t feel good. I always told myself, “If there’s a choice, I’m never going to treat people like this.” When you’re a child, you don’t have a choice in your home or what you’re exposed to. Breaking the cycle, as a little girl, I knew this was not how I was going to be as an adult. When I became a mom, I would do it differently but I didn’t realize that minutes after I became a mother, I was like, “This is not happening. My son will never experience these feelings ever.”

Undergoing Therapy And Becoming A Warrior Princess

You’ve done an amazing job of breaking that chain for sure. Talk to me a little bit about Warrior Princesses or the WPs.

They’re my soul sisters and God sisters.

Talk about how that started, where it’s at, and then anything you want in between.

Dee Dee Woodman is who I still do therapy. I’m a huge proponent of therapy. Everybody, at some point in their life, should see a therapist. Dee Dee has always spoken life into me and over me. She is a Christian woman and a devout Christian. She loves God and introduced me to God. When I was a young girl, I was always like, “I know God and Jesus. He seems cool,” but I don’t know anything else about it. I never went to church. I wasn’t raised that way. If my grandmother tried to walk into a church, there’d be an invisible force field that wouldn’t let her in.

It starts to catch on fire.

Sorry, that’s not nice. Dee Dee started this group years ago. She started a very small group called Women’s Intensive. It was to go over social media and the effects it has on women and body image. I went for the first weekend. There were 7 or 8 of us gals in the room and it was a weekend event. We cracked ourselves wide open in front of each other and told each other our deepest, darkest secrets, fears, and lies we tell ourselves. We worked through family traumas with each other. You can’t get that out any more vulnerable than we were with each other.

It’s mentally and emotionally exhausting but I have somebody like Dee Dee and her best friend and partner in crime, Jean Felding. They call themselves Raz and Daz, Razzle and Dazzle. She is awesome. They led us through with grace, love, and kindness. They affirmed that in our journey, Jesus and God had always been with us, whether we knew him or not. He was looking out for you and help make decisions that you’re making.

Warrior Princess is what Dee Dee named that because you’re facing your fears. You’re a warrior you’re showing up to fight for yourself, which is hard to do. It’s hard to bare your soul and dissect your trauma. It sucks. It’s painful. I call myself an OG. I’m an original warrior princess but there are twenty leaders. Twice a year, Dee Dee and Jean put on an amazing workshop for women to do exactly what we did and free themselves from lies, hurt, and shame that they carry over the trauma that 99% of the time was caused by somebody else and afflicted on them by somebody else.

It’s pretty powerful. It’s amazing to watch a woman look at you and say, “I’ve never shared this with anybody in my entire life. She shares that secret. You can physically see the weight come off of them and see their soul smile. It’s amazing. All the while, it is very faith-based and centered around a relationship with God and Jesus. It’s a very healing experience for everybody involved.

I love it when you get ready for those because it’s a build-up. You guys meet very frequently in between the intensives. You have a nervousness to you and then leading up to it is fear.

It is the enemy.

For sure. When you go there, you crush it.

That’s one thing I have learned. Going back to my childhood, I grew up with two women that I felt zero love from. As a young girl, a teenager, and a young adult, I never connected with women. I didn’t trust or like women. I thought they were all catty and mean. Going back to Dee Dee, Dee Dee was my lifeline. Dee Dee did the polar opposite and only spoke love to me. I’d never felt love from a woman ever my whole life.

In this Warrior Princess group, you could say anything. They’re there to lift you and make you feel good. When we all get together, it’s so uplifting and fun. There were laughs and cries. It’s a sisterhood. It’s super exciting to get ready. I get into the word of God, the Bible, and the messages that are portrayed in the Bible. It’s all good, uplifting, and soul-nurturing stuff that I get to pass on.

Reflecting On The Struggles Eight Years Ago

You started on this journey well before that but what was the struggle years ago? Dive into that a little bit.

I had at that time hit a pinnacle within my therapy of deep diving and doing some hard, ugly trauma work. Quite honestly, I don’t think I was equipped to deal with it. I didn’t know how to deal with it. I had the tools that I thought that I had always had but it got to the point where it wasn’t enough. I remember being in the shower. I was uncontrollably crying. I got out of the shower and went into the closet. I lay on the floor in a fetal position. I couldn’t console myself. It was everything I had to not take my life that day.

I gave myself some rules of life years ago when my son was born. I set some personal rules in place. The first one was to protect your son at all costs. His soul is priceless and nothing can hurt him. I have to be there to protect him as much as I love my entire family, you, my husband, and everybody else. I couldn’t put that type of hurt on my son. I lay there on the floor a little bit longer as long as I could to compose myself.

I’ve always enjoyed yoga. Yoga is a calming release. It always helped clear my mind. I started looking for yoga retreats or anything that I thought could possibly make me feel good. I found this woman’s only trauma therapy right outside Knoxville, Tennessee. I called and spoke to the owner. She’s, “If you’re this low and you don’t have the tools, even if you’re in therapy, you need to come.” I did and said, “If I don’t go, there’s no alternative.”

Finding The Path To Healing

That was a dark time. We get to the next point here but this is such a tough scenario. I’m trying to figure out how to say this. Do you need an anchor with the kid where you’ll do anything to protect him? When people are at that low, is that helpful? I don’t even know if you know the answer. People know they’re not doing well but it’s so hard. I’ve seen you go through this. You know what to do but you can’t get out of bed or your pajamas.

You can’t shower.

I’ve been there with you when you’ve gone through some of that. You’ve got all the tools, the help, and everything at your disposal, perhaps. How do you ask for help? A drug user, an alcoholic, or something knows that they have a problem and they don’t want to get fixed. Do you have any advice for that scenario?

I don’t think that they don’t want to get fixed. Nobody wants to be depressed or suicidal. Nobody wants to be a drug addict or an alcoholic. Unfortunately, the mind is an incredibly powerful thing that takes hold of you. A lot of times, you can’t do it on your own.

There’s got to be something in you somehow that says, “I’m ready to go all in to get this worked out,” even if you fail on it sometimes. You’ve got to go back. You may be touchdown it with Alex already but how do you start to dig out of that hole?

The first thing is being honest with yourself, which sometimes is incredibly hard to do because being honest with yourself means you have to look at the ugly and not put on the front, which anybody who’s depressed or has mental health issues knows what it’s like to put on a smile and fake your way through the day. That itself is exhausting but as far as an anchor point, unfortunately, some people succumb to death by suicide. I can speak to it for myself but I do know that being honest with yourself even if it’s one person that you’re like, “I’m in a rough state. Can you talk to me for five minutes,” is hard, though.

You feel like you don’t want to burden anybody. That’s the overwhelming piece of your mind. Your mind tells you you’re not good enough. Your mind lies. Your mind makes up so many different distorted stories that it’s hard to make that connection with somebody. If you went to your best friend and told them you were struggling, they want to help you. They would much rather sit with you for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or all night while you cry than attend your funeral.

What Situational Depression Looks Like

We’re not any kind of doctors, experts, or anything like that. I was super naive to this. By the time you left and went to Tennessee, I was struggling with the piece of, “I’m a fixer.” It’s anything, especially if you’re not feeling well. I’ll run to the store for you and get medicine or whatever the case is. If you’re hungry, I’ll make you some food. I like to fix stuff. I’ve never personally dealt with depression. I feel horrible because I was naive. “Go get a hobby. Go for a walk.”

“Go outside. Go ride your bike.”

Maybe in your layman’s terms, talk about what depression looks like. How does it happen? Is this something in the brain? What does that look like?

Depression can be situational, which means there’s not a brain chemical defect. It’s called situational depression like the loss of a loved one, the loss of a pet, and something that with time will lift itself. I’m not a doctor. It might be a week or a month but you can come out of it. People have true anxiety, depression, and bipolar. We’re learning that there are so many different levels of mental health. It usually has something to do with a lack of a chemical connection in the brain, whether it’s dopamine or serotonin. Your gut health has a lot to do with your mental health. It shows up in different ways with different people.

The point I was trying to make is that yours wasn’t situational. It was a full-on chemical imbalance in the brain and I didn’t realize that. I feel like sometimes a little bit of a jerk at least at the time. I’m like, “Get a hobby. Let’s go for a walk or something.” If people don’t know this, they should look into how would they start to get some expertise or help to determine if it’s not situational.

I’m a huge proponent of therapy. You might have to go through a couple of therapists or psychologists before you find one you like, which is hard.

How do you want to open up to somebody and all of a sudden you’re like, “This person sucks?”

“They suck. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” The worst thing I could imagine, which thank Lord Dee Dee is so interactive with you, but having somebody say, “How’s that make you feel?” You say something.

“Tell me about your feelings.”

“Elaborate on that. Interact with me. Talk with me.” To your question, how does somebody go about it, it’s being open, talking to your doctor, friends, and family, and trying therapy. There’s so much research and it’s truly being your best advocate, doing the research on what your symptoms are, and going from there.

I have this thought in my head and I’ve had that conversation hundreds of times when it comes to people who do whatever job they do. They could be a physician, plumber, mortgage lender, or real estate agent. Anything in the therapy world is the same way where you’ve got the bell curve of the average. You’re going to get a handful that sucks and then you get a handful that is kick ass. I like that advice of maybe having to go through it a little bit until you find the one that you connect with. That’s great advice.

Even asking your close personal friends or family, “I’m thinking about going to therapy. Do you know anybody?” Everybody knows a realtor, a doctor, or a dentist. It’s no different. There should be no taboo for asking that.

I was going to bring this up too. For a long time, there was so much taboo around mental health, depression, or whatever the case may be. Luckily, it seems like that’s lifted quite a bit over the last few years. There are all sorts of stories in the news about mental health and stuff like that. We won’t get into that but when you started, you had no shame in any of that.

I didn’t want to hide it because if I can share my story and make it so one person gets help and doesn’t have to continue to feel that way, my job on earth is done. Sharing my story has never been a problem.

Mentoring Young Girls On Mental Health Care

I know. You’re amazing at that. What you’re talking about is you can help one person. You’ve mentored some young teen girls. Tell me about that experience a little bit. What are your thoughts on that?

I don’t want to say boys don’t have it hard because boys do too but the girls are so inundated with social media and what they’re required to look like. There were always been celebrities in magazines, even when I was a young girl but I never looked at them and thought, “I have to look like that.” There are girls who are 12 and 13 years old that are asking for nose jobs, boob jobs, or, “Can I get a rib removed so I can have a waistline like a Kardashian?” It’s ridiculous.

When we were growing up, we didn’t have social media or phones. Every young girl and boy in middle school is awkward. They’re self-loathing sometimes on the way they look but they can’t get a break from it. If they’re getting teased, harassed, or had a hard time at school, they come home and they’re still barraged by their cell phone.

I’ve mentored girls that their body image has truly driven them to the point of wanting to hurt themselves, cut themselves, detach, or take their lives. I give them the skills I was taught at the women’s intensive, which for anybody out there reading, is called DBT or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. It’s how to control your feelings when they arise. They’re so intense and they take over. Also, how to give yourself a timeout and a moment to breathe and let it pass.

What does it do for you in your soul to talk to these young women, teens, and stuff like that? How does that make you feel?

It fills me up. It feels like it’s my purpose. If I can help these girls to become healthy, young adult women and healthy mothers, raise healthy kids, and not pass on that cycle of mental hatred or mental abuse that they suffer with, that’s massive. I feel like there’s a ripple effect that would happen with that. If they can control it and learn it, they can then pass that on. One of the things that I enjoyed when I came back from my women’s intensive was I could teach the tools I learned to you and Alex. “Try this tool when this happens.” Giving it language is huge. Anytime I work with adult women or teens, it’s life-giving to me but I feel like I’m just giving back what was given to me.

Getting back to the thought of this taboo that is so wrong, regardless of people’s age at the intensive, mentoring, or whatever the case. You were told to shut up and weren’t allowed to have feelings and things like that. I don’t know if that’s part of the taboo from back in the ‘80s or whatever it is but do you find that people are a little afraid to open up or this is BS? Is it still your great-grandfather talking like, “Put your bootstraps up. Let’s get to work?”

It’s family-dependent. Some people still live in a household where what happens in this family stays behind closed doors. That’s poison. That’s not okay. I do feel like a lot of people still don’t talk about it and they’re only putting up their happiness on social media. It’s only their highlight reel to come out and say, “I’m struggling.” It’s taboo because you feel like there’s going to be so much judgment. “What do you have to be upset about?” People from the outside probably see me and think, “She’s got it made.” They don’t understand the clawing, the tears, the heartbreak, and the soul-sucking thing that you had to swim through. To come out in the generation above us, feelings were not allowed.

Taboo probably in a lot of instances but also liberating, would you say? Wouldn’t you break through that?

Managing Episodes And Its Impact On Work

Yes, 100%. It’s one of those things where when you start, you’ve opened a box. You’re releasing a lot of feelings and emotions that you may have never felt before because you buried them so deep but if you’re with a good therapist and somebody that can help you dissect and get through it, you shed all that negativity. I call it episodes because I don’t live there anymore. They’re an episode I get every once in a while. When you get all that negativity and nasty out of your body and brain, you physically change. Your outlook on life is substantially different. Everything is different. Talking about it is life-changing.

Do your episodes still show up? Are you still affected by what’s happened a long time ago? I’ll give you an example. I see this every day. Does it shape the way you work?

I was to be seen and not heard but I also knew in my life I had to be perfect. As a child, my grandmother would make me make the bed over and over again until the corners of the bed sheets were tight. I have friends and you guys laugh at me because I still make the bed that way. It was ingrained in me.

When I made the bed, you corrected me.

I have a girlfriend who calls me out on it all the time and she giggles. She’s like, “Do you know how bad I want to rip the corner out?” I’m like, “Don’t do it. Don’t you dare touch that bed corner. I will hunt you down.” As far as my work goes, it’s 100% because I had to be so perfect. I feel like I have to be perfect in my everyday work environment. I don’t do so much on a personal, which is interesting but my trauma shows up every day at work, the way I handle my desk and workload.

You get the cleanest email of anybody on earth. We should take a screenshot and include it in the episode or something.

I sent this to a good friend of ours once. It was a screenshot of somebody’s cell phone. There are people who open up their phones and there are 70 million red alerts, 10,000 unread emails, and 6,000 text messages. There’s a person like me, who if I get one red alert, I have to go into that app. Even if I’ve not used the app in five years, there’s an alert of some kind in there. I have to clear it because it will drive me insane. There are two different people. I’m the latter. That’s how I handle my work. It’s a blessing and a curse because I take it to the extreme but I was raised to be extremely perfect.

Recommended Tools For Mental Health Care

I’m going to jump around here on a couple of things. Let’s talk about some tools. Elaborate on a couple of things wherever your heart takes you, your mind, or whatever the case is. In terms of tools, do you use them daily? Do you have a tool belt that you can pull out sometimes? Is it always easy to pull those tools out?

The answer is yes. I have an immense toolbox mentally to help myself. Do I always pull from it? No. Sometimes an episode is so intense. I can’t see the forest through the trees. I still have moments where getting out of bed and brushing my teeth or mustering up the energy to use the bathroom is all I can do. On days like that, I find it incredibly difficult to pull from my tools. Those are the days that my family gets involved and knows I’m struggling. They come beside me and help lift me, which is so important to be able to tell somebody you’re struggling because they can be that person to help.

I’m going to replay that part for you sometimes. I can read you like a freaking book. I know you better than you know yourself. How do you open that up to allow somebody to help? I know that’s difficult sometimes.

It’s hard.

If you can’t get into the tools and I’m trying to grab shovels, pickaxes, or everything else to do everything I can to fix, how do you let somebody in to help you with that, or can you all the time?

I don’t think you can all the time. Sometimes you want to be left alone and let it pass. I do think the person on the other end who’s trying to help that their persistence is wearing and you’re like, “Fine. If I have to talk, I will but I don’t want to.” As soon as you purge it, you talk, and you get the tapes and voices out of your head, it’s almost an instant relief.

I get that. You mentioned tapes. I have that written down. Explain what tapes are, especially for kids who don’t even know what the hell a tape is.

It’s something that plays on a loop in your head. It’s a lie you tell yourself of some kind.

What would be an example?

“I’m a horrible mom,” which as a woman, that one’s brutal. The scientific word for this is rumination. It’s when your mind focuses on one thought and you tell yourself that same negative thought in twenty different ways. You cannot turn it off. “I’m a bad mom. I wasn’t on the PTA because I had to work full-time. I’m a bad mom. I missed a football game because I had something else. I’m a bad mom because I don’t cook. Anybody who knows me knows I can’t boil water.”

You can’t toast a piece of bread.

I can’t. That’s true. These are things that you get hung up on. Sometimes, I would have 20 or 30 different tapes playing at one time.

The Dangers Of Fact-Checking Yourself

Dee Dee taught us this a long time ago. She taught you and me, both of us or whatever the case is. At the moment, it’s hard but explain to me what fact-checking is.

Fact-checking is when you take one of the lies you’re telling yourself. “I’m a bad mom because I can’t cook mac and cheese. My son’s not going to love me anymore because my mac and cheese is runny and hard noodles.” The fact check of that is, “Would my son miss me if I wasn’t here tomorrow? Yes. Does my son still hug me and tell me he loves me?” That is the fact versus the lie. You have to take each lie and combat it with a real truth. Not a truth that you hope for but a real tangible truth.

I’m good at helping you fact-check. He loves you. Those are all great things. A lot of people do this where they measure themselves to stack up how good they are whether it’s a mother role or whatever the case is.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

That’s huge. I love that you said that.

Your qualities and strengths are not mine. My strengths are not yours. That’s what the beauty is of being a human. Every single person has their strengths and weaknesses. You surround yourself with people who can help you during your weaknesses and when you can help them in theirs.

Powerful Routines Towards Better Self-Care

That’s huge. Somebody should reread that ten times or more. Do you have a list of some methods of things that you continually work on, whether it’s a routine or getting together with your sisterhood every so often?

My God squad.

Share 2 or 3 things that are either a power list, a routine, or something that you have come hell or high water unless you’re having an episode, which I totally get. You’re like, “This is what I have to do to operate.” Are there a couple of three things that you can key in on maybe?

Yes. One of them is my morning routine. I pray every morning and start my day with gratitude. It’s neurologically impossible to be grateful and negative at the same time. If I can start my day with gratitude, that’s a must. I pray and read the Bible every morning. I have a devotional that I read every morning and that fills me up, whether you’re a believer or a non-believer, whatever works for you, but as long as you’re feeling your cup up in the morning. I’m not always good at what I intend to do like I say I’m going to walk or drink water for the day but my day has to start for me.

I love the gratitude piece. Any person that I follow who’s wise beyond their words talks about gratitude. A good buddy of mine and coach, JJ, talked about a challenge in the shower. It’s crazy.

I love this challenge.

You have to keep telling yourself things that are grateful and when you run out of things, you have to turn the water off no matter how much soap, shampoo, or anything you have on yourself. It’s wild.

Your water bill is going to be high because there’s nothing that you can’t run out of.

I love that piece but how simple can gratitude be? Give me two examples of basic like, “I’m grateful that this.”

I’m grateful that I woke up. Some people don’t get that. Not a dear friend of ours but we have a friend of ours who has been passed in the middle of the night and he wasn’t even 40 yet. He went to bed and didn’t wake up. I’m grateful for the air in my lungs and for the feet that will walk me to get my coffee.

Eliminating The Taboo On Medication And Healthy Diet

It’s very basic. JJ told me once that he’s grateful for the smell of freshly cut grass or the smell of rain. It’s simple stuff like that. This is very taboo I feel like or it used to be and it’s gotten a little bit better but what are your thoughts on medication?

It’s a huge proponent. You and I have gone down a healthy lifestyle. We’ve opened ourselves up to learning about what’s in our food and what we’re eating but for people who may not be as honed in with their food, there are so many chemicals in food and all that fun stuff. Your gut health is a huge piece of your mental health. If you’re not taking care of your gut, that will wreak havoc on your mental health, which I’ve learned later but I don’t think medication should be taboo at all. I’m a huge proponent of it. Let’s say you have a vacuum and you want to plug it into the wall. You’re like, “I am 6 inches short of the wall with the plug.” All the medication does is give you that 6 inches to make the connectors connect. Some people truly genetically and chemically can’t connect on their own.

We’re not doctors, dieticians, nutritionists, or anything like that. You mentioned about food, intake, and things like that. Maybe give a little bit of a highlight of some things you’ve changed and what you’ve noticed.

Everything that I eat is 100% organic or at least I try hard for it to be. Grass-fed or grass-finished, I’ve noticed that I feel more level. I know when I’m having an episode but they’re not nearly as extreme. They’re shorter. The lifespan of them is cut in half.

We big time got into biohacking and followed some pretty interesting folks in that world. When you start going down the path of paying attention to what you eat, there are a million books. If you want to reach out to either of us, I can share some of that. There are all kinds of great podcasts and influencers to follow. That’s been a huge freaking game-changer for all three of us. I’m a big proponent of that for sure.

What if I start to learn about all of these things but I can’t necessarily get motivated to kick it into gear? I want to learn more about therapy or taking better physical care of myself but I can’t seem to put one foot in front of the other. Do you have any words of wisdom in terms of some of that stuff? It’s as simple as putting one foot in front of the other or finding a mentor. What are your thoughts?

Reach out to a friend like, “I want to get going on this. Any suggestions? Do you want to come along with this journey with me and do it with me?” Sometimes it is hard. You feel like you got cement on your feet and sometimes it is one foot in front of the other. There’s nothing more powerful than speaking up and reaching out.

Final Words Of Wisdom

That’s all I’ve got. Any final thoughts?

If you’re truly struggling with mental health, you are not alone in the fight. Nobody wants you to feel alone in the fight. Remember that anybody in your circle or family would much rather have you call them at 3:00 in the morning saying, “I need help,” than attending your funeral. I know that seems extreme. Mental health is a nasty thing. The more we can tell people it’s okay to not be okay, be broken, and have trauma, all of these things are part of the human experience. There are maybe different levels for different people but getting help and reaching out is always a good thing.

This has been amazing. If somebody wanted to connect with you, is Instagram probably the best way to do that? How do they find you? What’s your Instagram handle?

It’s @NettieLovesGoldens. I like golden retrievers.

I know you do.

They’re my spirit animals.

That’s awesome.

Important Links

• @NettieLovesGoldens on Instagram
• Maverick Lending Solutions on Facebook
• Brian Dewald on LinkedIn

About Annetta Dewald

In the dynamic world of mortgage financing, one name shines brightly as a guiding force in delivering tailored solutions with a personal touch – Annetta Dewald. With an impressive career spanning nearly two decades, Annetta has become a prominent figure in the industry, celebrated for her meticulous attention to detail and her exceptional proficiency with numbers. As a true visionary, she thrives on thinking outside the box, skillfully navigating complex loan scenarios while ensuring compliance with mortgage guidelines.

Since joining the mortgage industry in 2005, Annetta has displayed an unwavering commitment to her clients, approaching each case with utmost precision and empathy. Her clients often describe her as a trusted confidante, knowing that she will go above and beyond to secure the best financial outcome for them.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better mortgage advisor than Annetta. Her expertise and ability to understand my unique needs set her apart from the rest. She truly cares about her clients and works tirelessly to ensure their dreams become a reality,” said one of Annetta’s satisfied clients.

Beyond her unparalleled professional capabilities, Annetta’s personal life is a testament to the power of love and devotion. She married her best friend and junior high sweetheart, Brian Dewald, over 20 years ago, forming a formidable partnership both in their personal and professional lives. As key members of Maverick Lending Solutions, they have set the standard for a family-oriented and client-centric approach, fostering an environment where everyone feels like part of the family.

Annetta’s dedication to her family extends further, as their son Alex has followed in their footsteps, becoming a licensed loan officer with Maverick Lending Solutions. This three-generation team combines their shared expertise, unwavering support, and genuine passion for the mortgage industry, making it a powerhouse of innovation and excellence.

But Annetta’s commitment to making a difference doesn’t stop at the office door. She is an ardent advocate for mental health awareness, understanding the importance of mental well-being in the pursuit of a fulfilling life. Furthermore, her love for animals shines through, making her a devoted supporter of all things animal-related, advocating for their welfare and supporting animal rescue organizations.

When she’s not busy crafting financial solutions or championing meaningful causes, Annetta enjoys indulging in her love for adventure and relaxation. Snow birding in Florida offers her the perfect escape, providing an opportunity to unwind and rejuvenate. Amidst her travels and commitments, Annetta cherishes spending quality time with her beloved Golden Retriever, Jimi, who holds a special place in her heart.