The Alchemy Of Adversity – Transforming Trauma Into Triumph With John Tsilimparis

23 Jun , 2025 podcasts

 

Grief transforms into art, and pain finds its voice: Join Katherine Twells as she explores the depths of emotional resilience with therapist, musician, and composer John Tsilimparis. Discover “inspiration exposure” and how it empowers us to rewrite our stories of loss, as John reveals his own journey from tragedy to transformation in his book, “The Magic in the Tragic.” Dive into a conversation that unlocks the secrets to embracing sorrow, finding beauty amidst suffering, and accessing a higher self to craft emotional resilience and deeper connection.

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The Alchemy Of Adversity – Transforming Trauma Into Triumph With John Tsilimparis

Rewriting The Script On Grief And Discovering Our Human Potential

Thank you for taking the time to join me in the lab. Part of the human experience is to travel the continuum of joy and pain. It’s part of the hero’s journey that we all must make as we grow into our wisest selves, but sometimes, it is so difficult and full of grief as we navigate loss and change. My guest is no stranger to this process of becoming, as he has devoted his life’s work to guiding others through the maze of human emotion.

John Tsilimparis is a psychotherapist, author, teacher, and so much more. His work focuses on grief, counseling, depression, addiction, and anxiety. He has developed a strong following after being featured on the A&E documentary called Obsessed. He has been a go-to media expert called on by many news programs to comment on a variety of psychological subjects, including appearances on The View and Larry King Live.

John also finds the time to host a podcast called Mindfulness for the Soul, which offers psychological commentary, wellness tips, and relaxation techniques to help others better manage their life. He’s a former staff clinician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and a former adjunct faculty professor at Pepperdine University, Antioch University, and UCLA. He’s a member of the advisory board for the popular mental health platform called Wondermind and an active supporter of mental health advocacy and volunteers with an organization called This Is My Brave, a charity dedicated to ending mental illness stigma.

John is someone who answered the call on his own hero’s journey, overcoming challenges to become a champion for others. I found the conversation with him rich with guidance on reframing our relationship with adversity and embracing the understanding that our pain shapes us in ways that can make us more compassionate and more beautifully human. I hope that this conversation serves you in meaningful ways. Without any further delay, let’s get started.

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John, it is so nice to see you. I want to say thank you, not only for taking the time to talk with me, but for this beautiful book. You’ve written several books, but this book that we’re going to be talking about is such a gift to the world. We’re going to dig into what it’s all about, but I want to begin with my gratitude. Thank you.

You’re welcome. Thank you.

Trauma And The Healing Power Of Art And Music

Let’s begin where I always do on the show, and it’s how our origin stories define who we become. There’s a lot there. We could speak for an hour just about the origin, but how could you sum up for our audience a little bit about who you are and how you came to do the work that you do?

In my early years, there was some trauma in my family, and then when I was a teenager, there was tragedy. I lost a sibling. I realized that because I always lacked the gift of temperance, I was very affected by my emotions. I had anger and sadness. It was a real challenge for me. Before that tragedy had happened, I had already found my curious relationship with the arts, particularly music. I felt that I had a connection to it in a way that a lot of my friends maybe did not. Even if they did, I wouldn’t have known that because I never talked about this stuff. It was personal to me.

Little by little, I found that in listening to sad music, poignant music, and meaningful music paired together with my grief opened up this portal of inspiration for me. My sad thoughts and feelings started to change, and I started associating them with curiosity, personal growth, wonderment, and even awe. I found that to be healing because it helped me to process my sad feelings in a safe environment. It legitimized them for a little while. It gave me permission to experience them without censure. Most importantly, what it did was it made me feel less alone. I started to learn how to give myself compassion. I started to give myself permission. I started to experience gratitude because of the music, in spite of the fact that there was grief in my life. It was a powerful experience.

In my twenties, little by little, I started to realize that I wanted to become a therapist. I knew that this realization that I had, what I call inspiration exposure, as you read in the book, was going to be such a good tool. If it were a good tool for me, it would be a good tool for others. I knew in some way, I was going to parlay that into my therapy. It took me a little while to get it done because I’m a late bloomer, but it did happen. That’s the genesis of the whole thing.

I love the story so much. I can relate. I remember as a child being in my room listening to records back then. They’re making a comeback. I had my turntable and records, and I could get lost in it. I don’t think I was aware at the moment how that was feeding my soul. You turned this trauma and tragedy into something so positive for the world.

It’s interesting too. As a parent, I see our development. As children, we are so open with our emotions. A child will cry and laugh sometimes in the same moment, and be so present. As we get older, we start to lock those things away more and more. You found an outlet through music that you could channel all that you were feeling versus maybe lock it away, which is so amazing.

Listening to one of your previous episodes, you had a guest who talked about accessing your higher self. That’s how I see this. Accessing my higher self means I’m going to hold my grief, which is the natural order of things. I’m going to hold my grief in high regard. This is where I always tell people, “Write this down.” One of the best things we can do for ourselves is to try to transform our pain into grief empowerment as opposed to grief avoidance. There’s a huge difference in that.

 

As we discussed a few minutes ago, no matter who you are in this world and no matter how rich you are, how successful you are, or how attractive you are, you’re going to experience pain. There’s no escaping it. Why not try to inoculate yourself with a way to find the aesthetic in that pain and the beauty in that suffering? It’s a win-win situation all around.

I find it to be a fun thing to teach as well and to show people that because it could be any aesthetic. It doesn’t have to be the music that I prescribe in the book. It doesn’t have to be the art pieces that I prescribe. It can be whatever works for you. Most of the time, people are open to looking for it. I say, “If you want to access an aesthetic mindset, which we all do, and exercise this inspiration exposure, you’ll rewrite the script on your grief, and it will be a completely different experience.”

Understanding Emotional Resilience: Bouncing Back

That’s what I loved so much about what you wrote in the book. You were never belittling the grief or the pain, or making it small. As a matter of fact, you were encouraging us to walk into the middle of it and fully feel it, but also see what the gift is in that dark walk. While I have done your intro, I want to reference the title again of this latest one, The Magic in the Tragic. The subtitle is Rewriting the Script on Grief and Discovering Happiness in our Darkest Days. Emotional resilience is at the heart of this ability to inoculate yourself into the pain that is inevitable in our lives. I feel like people are like, “I know what emotional resilience is,” but how would you define that within your practice?

There are so many different types of definitions, but one definition would be that emotional resilience is when I am able to stand up after I have fallen down. It’s when I’m able to maintain some degree of poise despite what’s going on around me. It’s not that we shouldn’t be anxious, but it’s that we shouldn’t panic. Sometimes, we do, but still, even with panic, it’s a way to manage emotions.

It’s a way to regulate when I have become emotionally dysregulated. One way to do that is to access what they call allostasis, which is a science of moving towards pain and grief as opposed to moving away from it. If you move away from it, you’re going against the natural order of things. You build resilience by not just accepting the grief, but by allowing it to be a part of your life. Imagine this inflection point. Imagine that you could have as much faith in the sorrowful as you would in the happier aspects of life. That’s going to create a very powerful insulation. It’s like putting in shock absorbers. That’s the way that emotional resilience is. It’s a way to cushion the hardness of the falls.

Beyond Happiness: Embracing The Full Emotional Spectrum

You said something in the book about how this pursuit of happiness can make us more unhappy because we’re highlighting that there’s this absence or gap that we don’t have. In the Compassion Lab, we talk about cultivating joy and happiness. These are wonderful things, but I could see how you can get caught in this feeling of lack by always trying to chase the happy, as if we have to be happy all the time.

That’s right. In the chasing of the happy, you are saying that the unhappy, the sadness, or the grief is bad. It gets into a very black and white type of thinking. It’s so true what you said. Think about it. If we rigorously, on a regular basis, search for happiness, what you’re inferring is that you don’t have it right now. That means you’re not noticing and appreciating all the things in your life that are good. That creates a very negative dissonance. It’s like, “I’m either happy and things are good, or I’m having a bad day, and all of a sudden, I deem that to be bad.” It’s not that we shouldn’t seek happiness. We all want to be happy and bring joy into our lives, but to do that, we have to be able to give a lot of respect and high regard to sadness.

We all want to be happy and bring joy in our lives but to do that, we have to be able to give a lot of respect and high regard to the sadness. Share on X

I also wanted to say that there’s a reference in the book, too, if you remember, that the ancient Greeks, many years ago, believed in the nobility of suffering, which was this pride that you would take in having suffered. To them, when bad things happen to you, such as tragedies, and you are a victim of the ills of life, you are initiated into a different class of people.

Maybe in other countries, they’re a little more lenient with that, but we, in this society in the United States, are very averse to that. We don’t like to suffer. We don’t hold it in high regard the way the Greeks did. I like connecting with the ancients. That makes me feel like if I can learn something from many years ago, I can learn almost anything.

Absolutely with these Greek tragedies, where we are experiencing the tragedy along with the players, and you see the growth and the learning. Even with the hero’s journey, there is no hero’s journey without the call, the challenges, the adversity, the cave, and all the things that you have to go through in order to come home with the elixir.

I said this in other episodes. I have to keep reminding myself as a parent how much I want to create this world of perfection for my children. No parent wants to see their child suffer, and yet your higher wisdom knows that that suffering and those trials are what will make their character and will create the strength of emotional resilience. I want to shortcut through it for them and often for myself.

Your Grief, Your Hero’s Journey

I often tell people, “Become a hero in your own life journey. Why not look at what you’ve gone through as an example of fortitude, strength, and heroic deeds as opposed to looking back at it as, “I’m so weak because I went through all of that, and I didn’t do it with strength. I was crying a lot. I was hiding. I couldn’t work for a while.” I see that as an example of heroism.

A lot of people say, “I had no choice. I had to take care of my kids.” That’s not true. You do have a choice. A lot of people give up. A lot of people say, “I can’t deal with life anymore.” Unfortunately, they let grief take them down. I’m not saying that I was a hero or I was braver than anybody else, but I did not want this thing to take me down.

There was something in you. Even as I think about how you’ve chosen to take your life path, you work with people in your practice independently, but you are a voice through your books, and you’re out in the media speaking these things. Not only did it deeply affect you, but you are sharing that wisdom with so many others. That is a beautiful thing if you’re called to do it.

Thank you.

I want to return to this idea of the human experience of emotion. You had a quote in the book by Kahlil Gibran about viewing grief as an opportunity, and what we’re talking about, which is to take these scars and have them be a part of your growth. The quote that you referenced was, “The deeper the sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

We live in a society where we don’t want to suffer. We want to be happy all the time, so we numb out. There are so many ways in modern society to not feel. We can doom scroll and find all these ways to get these cheap dopamine hits so that we don’t need to be with ourselves. How would you guide us to be able to live a more fully emotional life to feel the symphony, every note, and every experience? How would you guide us to do that, and why?

It’s because we don’t need to induce tragedy, adversity, or challenges. It’s going to come. My takeaway from this book, in many ways, is that if I deepen my experience of feeling my feelings, I take happiness less for granted. When happiness does return, it feels so much more meaningful and joyful to me. If I allow myself to experience my grief through inspiration exposure, I increase the sensitivity of my heart.

 

It means my experiences with others will be deeper. I will love more. I will let people love me more. I will be moved by simple things. The sunsets will be more colorful. Moon glows will be more poetic. Mountains will have majesty. It opens me up to so many new things, but I will take all of those things for granted if I’m always trying to be happy and always avoiding the important things in life, which is to feel the totality of being human, and that is to give my sadness as much reverence as I give happiness.

Reverence is the word. It’s like there’s a respect for that journey through darkness. Without darkness, we would not know light. You mentioned the return to happiness and how that feels when you’ve gone through this time of grief. It’s a walk that we will all make at different times in our lives. I have such dear friends going through that. We’ve had an unbelievable amount of loss in our circle. To be walking alongside people very dear to me who are going through deep levels of grief is affecting me. You realize it is a shared experience. We take turns holding each other up and being the one who needs to be held.

Beautifully said. That’s where the spirituality component comes in, too. Before we get into that, I also wanted to say that there’s a lot of neuroscience around this, too. We can learn to be our own electricians. We can rewire our brains to be inspired by sadness instead of being afraid of sadness. There are all these studies out there about awe inducement. Awe inducement means that I am creating an ability to transform these sad feelings into something completely different. I can find ways to secrete more serotonin and oxytocin in my brain, but I have to do it with intention.

That’s the point of the book. That’s the point of this conversation. That’s the point of your Compassion Lab. It’s to create the intention to do that. We have to find ways not to fall victim to the reflex to push it away because we are very averse to feeling uncomfortable and attached to the guarantee of feeling good. We know what happens when we do that. We end up being extremely unhappy. We can’t have too much happiness because it doesn’t exist. It’s good to look at the science around that, too. I go into that a little bit in the book, but I didn’t want to go too deep into it.

I love the science. Even in the Compassion Lab, we talk about the invitation into this work of looking at all the ways that we need to create resilience, strength, connection, and understanding of the human experience that we’re having. Some people aren’t sure what to make of it. They’re like, “What is this thing? Is it like this squishy thing? Do I have to sing Kumbaya? Are you going to make me cry?” Neuroscience is a powerful conversation because it’s saying, “We have an operating system, our brain and our heart.” I’m fascinated by the wisdom of the heart and all we’re learning about what the heart does, but it’s to help us learn that this is as much about science as it is about faith.

That’s right. People will follow a treatment suggestion to the letter. If I tell them, “You have a kidney ailment. Take this medication or do this exercise,” they would do it immediately. Trust the fact that I’m saying that you’ll traverse through your grief a little bit better if you can heighten your awareness and see yourself, your feelings, and your emotions in an objective way. Get outside of Katherine and look in. In other words, do not judge without bias, and see what the process is that’s happening and what I need to do to try to make myself feel better.

Unlocking Your Aesthetic: A Personal Path To Healing

It’s maybe a cliche. I’ve always heard, “You have to feel it to heal it,” for things to exist within us. I want to return to art and music. We touched on that at the beginning of our conversation when you were talking about the genesis of how your own journey led you into this work and this book. People reading are like, “I get this, so how do I do this? I want to summon the courage to be more intentional, to go into these feelings and understand them.”

Art and music are a way in. In the book, you talk about music and art. I know you yourself are a musician and composer, so you are an artist yourself in this. How would you guide people? You’ve touched on this, but let’s go a little deeper. What might they do to start having this inspiration and inviting the beauty into this?

You don’t have to be a musician, a writer, a philosopher, or even a successful person in your life to access what your aesthetic is. What I tell people to do is to carry around a dictation note form pad or something to note to self on their phone to record their voice. Start being a feelings detective. Start noticing when your feelings change, especially when you feel inspired.

What is it about that song that you heard? Was it the intonation or the chords? Was it the lyrics that reminded you of something? Does it remind you of a time in your life when things were easier or when you were happier? You’re like, “Why is it that sunset, this vista on the top of a mountain, or this art show that I’m seeing, why do all of those things move me? What is it specifically about that?” You are already creating intention because you are describing what it is about that that moves you.

We take it for granted. We say, “The song Hey, Jude by the Beatles, what a great song, but why is it a great song? What is it about it?” I love so many things about it. I could write a book about it. Maybe I will. It’s that. It’s starting to introduce you to higher awareness about all the things in your life that are not artificial. They’re all real. They’re all there. You have to notice it. That’s the beginning of it. Also, as you saw in chapter three, Accessing Important Spiritual Components, I have four pillars in there. I have purpose, gratitude, and awareness. What’s the fourth one?

They’re awareness, gratitude, connection, and purpose.

You and I already talked about connection and how important that is. Purpose, too. Another way I can start accessing this inspiration exposure is to create a purpose for myself. I don’t mean some lofty goal, like you have to find the cure for cancer. What’s your purpose today? Ask yourself, “What am I going to do today? What’s important to me? Whose life can I change today with a smile? What things do I have to do today that are important for my future?”

All of those components together, as well as noticing all those ways that I can inspire myself each day, create it. I say to people, “I want to teach you how to give yourself chills every single day.” It could be anything. It could be rap music. It could be polka music. It could be any kind of art. It could be nature. It could be watching your favorite sport. It could be anything that makes you feel good. Ask yourself, “Why does it make me feel good?” The why is more important than the how.

I love that so much, how to give yourself chills every day. Many things came up for me as you were talking, John. One of them was that I remember when I was grieving the loss of my father years ago. He died fairly young. He was only 61 when he passed. I would be fine. I would even keel months after. A song would come on, and it was over. I went into this experience of such deep grief, but to your point, in a more beautiful, melancholy way of how much I missed him and appreciated him. It was an honorable experience. The music was that unlock, which was so powerful.

The other things you’re talking about are so important for us to point out in this conversation. We talk about this a lot in the lab. Like we chase happiness, we are wired to be looking out to some future state of, “When I,” fill in the blank. It could be, “When I find a partner, buy this house, get promoted, and move to California, Hawaii, or Fiji,” or wherever you want, “Then some magical thing’s going to happen.”

I’m sitting here speaking with you, and the gifts are abundant in this conversation. I’m sitting here having a regular day. After this, I’ll be able to have lunch with my sons or have my dog sit on my lap. These are not big graduations, big awards, and big things. They’re just moments of beauty. We miss them. We’re so focused on the big, the grandiose, and this quest for the happy that we miss what’s right here.

You are talking about an aesthetic mindset right there, which is not difficult to do. You appreciate the company of your sons. You appreciate those little moments that you know are going to be so important for you in the future as well. Savoring those moments in the long run is best. I want to go back to the example that you gave of how hearing a song brought a lot of grief back about your father, who died young.

I assert to you, and this is what I have my patients do as well, that if one can stick with that song and listen to that song often, even though it might harken back all of those sad feelings that sometimes feel unbearable, little by little, the sadness that you feel for that person that passed will start to shift into gratitude about having known that person and being grateful that he lived for 61 years. That’s the shift. The problem is that some people are quick to turn that music off. I try to say, “This is where the rubber meets the road. This is your inflection point at this moment. If it’s too much, you’ll turn it off, but what would happen if you stayed with it a little bit longer each time?” That’s where the magic starts to happen.

Navigating Grief: Supporting Yourself And Others

I was having lunch with such a dear friend. She lost her husband very suddenly in a surfing accident. She’s about six months into this. She said to me, “I had no idea how hard this would be.” What do you say to people when they’re in the middle of the deepest part of that pain? We want to say there’s beauty there, but when there’s no light in their world, maybe it doesn’t come across well. How do we walk beside people who are going through that? What would be your guidance?

I try to introduce the idea that this is going to be a process. Healing is not a destination. Healing is a lifestyle change. Healing is heightening awareness. It’s accessing beauty, appreciation, and gratitude. I also try to remind them, “Everything that you are feeling is temporary. Since the beginning of time, people have felt grief, and people have survived it. You will, too.”

Healing isn't a destination; it's a lifestyle change. It's heightened awareness, accessing beauty, appreciation, and gratitude. Share on X

The problem is that it’s so uncomfortable that, evolutionarily, the brain is programmed to prioritize negative thoughts. That’s how we’ve stayed alive these thousands of years. That’s why we haven’t been hit by a car or you haven’t died of a disease. That’s why you haven’t died after a long winter, because you have to get shelter and protect yourself. We look at that in the same way.

If I can explain to them, “This is your opportunity to hearten your pain and look at it in a different way to process that, then try less to accelerate the process. When you try to accelerate it, that’s where you are impairing your ability to heal. There’s dignity in this process of healing. There can be beautiful thoughts and splendor, even, attached to the grief.

You mentioned there’s a whole chapter in your book about timeline and not rushing it, and knowing that it’s unique and different. It’s going to ebb and flow and change all the time. That’s important. We probably have well-meaning friends who are like, “It’s been X amount of time. Get over it. Move on,” but that’s not the way it works, is it?

It’s not. I used to do groups in grief counseling, and I would say, “Look around the room. You feel alone, but you’re not alone.” This was a group for people who were grieving the loss of a loved one. I’d say, “If you read philosophy and poetry and listen to music, you’re going to see that all these other writers, composers, and poets have all felt exactly what you felt.” It’s this brotherhood or fellowship of grieving souls that we all are in many ways.

In the book, I mentioned this philosopher,  Arthur Schopenhauer, who is known to be a pessimist, but I find him to be very enlightening. I don’t believe this, but he believed that all of life was suffering and our job was to find pockets of happiness within the suffering, and that every person was a fellow sufferer. A little bit of an extreme, but point taken.

If we can find some faith in sorrow as much as we do in the aspects of happiness and seeking joy, we’re going to have a very full transformation in how we deal with the next bit of challenge and adversity. I mean any kind of adversity. It could be divorce, breakups, financial hardship, or lost dreams. Anything is applicable in this circumstance. That’s why I think that inspiration exposure and having that awareness about all those things around you is the best place to start.

 

Those pockets of happiness, as he talks about, in between the suffering, I feel like that is the same thing as cultivating that gratitude practice, where you are teaching yourself to look for the good. You know and expect the hardship to be there. Look for the good, going back to the small things and the everyday things, that can be like, “This is a pretty awesome moment. I feel the sun on my skin. I’m sitting out in a garden. This is pretty amazing right now.”

What if the negative feelings were not negative? That’s a hard sell with people who are in the midst of deep suffering. Their sorrow is so intense, and they are borderline inconsolable. I always say this, and I put it on the board sometimes. What if the negative wasn’t negative? Sometimes, reality is kinder than my thoughts. In other words, what if my thoughts are being skewed by my depression, and I’m thinking in negative ways because I feel so bad?

In other words, what if the negative was later on something that I look back at as something that’s positive? That is a hard sell at the moment, but if you implant that seed, people start to have faith in it because they’re going to see, whether you’re a believer in God or not, that maybe there’s a purpose to all of this, and that maybe there is some good in this. Yeah. That’s a huge game-changer.

The truth is, most of us know how real that is. I look back and call it my plot twist. When something hit the fan in the middle of my path, those are the things that have shaped me the most. It’s not like, “When you look back, what was the thing that shaped you?” and I answer, “It was this happy thing.” No. It was usually a challenge I had to get through.

I grew and I had a deeper understanding, or people in my life showed up for me, and that made me grateful. Most of us would have that story when we look back. We’ve lived it. We know it’s true. When you’re in the middle of the next plot twist or the next challenge, you’re like, “This is not fun, but I do know that there’ll be a gift in it at some point once I get through the hardest part of this.”

Beautifully said. Spoken like a true therapist. We have to be good historians. We have to be able to say, “I remember when I went through something like this years ago. I didn’t like it and I suffered, but I did get through it.” Life has to be understood looking backwards, but it has to be lived moving forwards with the knowledge of the backwards.

Remember, the knowledge of the past has to be from an open-minded place. I can easily get into, “I should have done this, and I should have done that.” We don’t want to do that because that would be going against the grain. We want to be able to look back at how we got through it without judging what the actual thing was. There’s a lot of strength in that.

Not a lot of people are good historians, and I’m happy to teach them to do that. I have them make a list. One of the exercises in the book has that. I’m like, “Look at five, six, seven, ten, or however many you want, ways that you suffered and how you feel that grief from the past still has a hold on you. Let’s talk about that.” Slowly, you start to dilute the pain around that because you are bringing in a new set of tools to think about it. It’s best to do that with the aesthetic that I mentioned.

We’re such storytellers. We create stories, and we put meaning into those stories. Maybe that meaning isn’t necessarily always accurate. Our inner critics about what we should have done and how we should have done this are so difficult. I was in a workshop one time. The exercise was to write down what you admire about your journey and what you admire about what you’ve done, not like, “Here’s where I screwed up. Here’s where I didn’t do this or I haven’t met my expectations,” which is the negativity bias. You’ve already talked about the wiring of our brains to look at what’s wrong versus what you have conquered and what you have done, which is badass and amazing over time.

That is very nicely said. Hence, going back to that hero part. I can look at my last five years of being a depressed person as, “I’m pathetic because I was depressed for five years,” or I can say, “I’m pretty strong. I’m still here after five years. Somehow, I managed.” That’s like choosing a benevolent God to believe in or to choose a judgmental God. You have to make the choice, and you have to create the intention. You have to have the courage to be able to look at not just the positives, but also the beauty.

We’re not frivolously saying that it’s easy to get through grief. We’re not minimizing the power of grief by saying, “Listen to good music or sad music. That’ll make you feel better.” Not at all. You are not saying to be positive. I’m not telling somebody to think positively or that tomorrow’s another day. I’m saying introduce a different way of seeing things, bring beauty into that, and see what happens. Couple the two together. You’ll see little by little that the splendor that you find is going to defy the gravity of the suffering that usually brings you down.

I love the way you said that. You’re talking about this rewiring, this idea of starting to look at it almost from a different angle from maybe where you were looking at it. I want to touch on two tracks. One is depression, and then I want to return to this idea of connection. First, on the depression piece. You talk about the historian, I went through a year right after college of a pretty deep depression. My adjustment from college into the world and my first job was rocky and rough.

I remember, when I went through that, having the conscious thought, “I thought I knew what depression was.” You’re in a funk. You’re like, “I’m not feeling it.” I was losing weight. I couldn’t sleep. I was having a tough time functioning. I was like, “This is a whole other level.” As I sit here so many years later, I’m very grateful for that because now, I have a much greater empathy if someone’s in the darkness not to be like, “Snap out of it. Let’s go see a show.” There isn’t a lot of light or maybe no light in their world. For anyone reading, and it’s in the book in more detail, but what’s the difference between, “I’m bummed out,” and real depression?

Sadness Vs. Depression: Knowing The Difference

As I mentioned in the book, everyone experiences ups and downs. We have blue days. We have black days. We have sadness and difficult times that happen episodically because there are things that happen in our lives that happen, such as losses and stuff. People will be depressed, sad, or incapacitated about that for a little while, but usually, they reconstitute.

If you are in a place where you are so incapacitated that you’re unable to work, and 2 to 3 weeks have gone by where you’re unable to fulfill role obligations, you can’t take care of your kids, you can’t do chores, and you can’t do responsibilities that are important to you throughout the day, then it’s important to look at, “Where is this coming from? I might have clinical depression.” That means that there’s some kind of imbalance in the brain. The serotonin is not flowing well, and your neurotransmitters are not firing right.

You’d have to look at it in terms of severity, if you are unable to function, and duration. If it has lasted two weeks or more, you should be like, “I should talk to somebody about it because maybe I need some therapy around it. A lot of people will resist that, but I say lean into the idea that maybe you’re going to need some help.

The work that we’re talking about, this inspiration exposure, and finding the magic in the tragic, it is important to say that it’s not a substitute for psychotherapy and not a panacea for all ills of life. It’s simply a tool as an adjunct to psychotherapy and grief counseling. Duration and severity would be what you want to look for in terms of your depression.

Thank you for sharing that. It’s important. For anyone reading this conversation, you said it beautifully. This is a tool. It’s a way to start creating greater resilience in yourself. When you’re in a place where you need that help, it’s important to get those resources. Sometimes, we think it’s weak to ask for help, but it’s not. It takes great strength to ask for help and to reach out to have those connections. It’s important that people have that awareness of where they are on that continuum.

That’s right. Acknowledging weakness or acknowledging those vulnerabilities is important because that connects us to other people. I can build strength through my weakness.

The Power And Importance Of Connection

You talked about connection and connecting to other people. One of the four pillars is connection, and how important that is. Back to COVID, we’re several years past that, but it was such a dramatic isolation for people. Suddenly, we realized, “This separation is not the way humans were designed.” I want to talk a little bit about the importance and power of that connection, the shared journey, and also the value of healthy aloneness. As an introvert myself, I gain a lot of energy from my alone time. It’s very soothing and healing for me, and then I’m ready to re-engage. Can we talk about both sides of that, the importance of our connections and the power of learning how to be alone in a healthy way?

I’m glad you brought that up because new data is coming out from the CDC about what this forced isolation did to a lot of people. We all got the benefit of Zoom and all kinds of video chat platforms, but it wasn’t the same, and it isn’t the same as person-to-person contact. The data is coming out that the rates of depression and the rates of other types of mental conditions were elevated during the pandemic.

It’s more confirmed and more substantiated that human beings are wired for connection, but for whatever reason, we sometimes default into protection. During the pandemic, we were unable to be together. There are so many outshoots of that, like wearing masks, depersonalizing our experiences with people, not seeing people, and children and young kids not getting their socialization needs met. All of that put together gave us much more insight into human beings.

Getting back to your question about healthy aloneness, there’s a big difference between feeling the distress of being alone or accepting that I can access some of my alone time and use that as a poignant time in my life for me to take stock in all the things in my life that are important to me. I can still access people, but it’s not the same as being with somebody. Healthy aloneness is a healthy time.

There’s an exercise in the book where I have people schedule alone time. Let’s say you live in a big family or you live alone. If you schedule the intended alone time for 10 to 15 minutes, little by little, you’re going to start experiencing something different. There’s going to be a shift. The inflection point in that is going to be that I’m going to feel less afraid of the fact that spatially, I have nobody with me in this moment, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not alone. It’s more about heightening awareness of the aloneness and not labeling the aloneness as “something is wrong because I’m alone.”

Also, in our society, there’s a lot of labeling around, “If you reach a certain age and you’re unmarried or you don’t have children, something’s wrong with you. You should be married, or you should have a partner, or you should have lots of friends.” There are a lot of people who have tried to do that, and it hasn’t worked for them. Maybe their alone time is a little bit easier for them. For most people, alone time is a scary time, so I try to change that into a more productive time.

That’s great. It’s probably a real continuum. People with social anxiety might be like, “If I’m alone, I can at least feel safe.” The more they have to be with people, it’s tougher. I imagine it’s very different for different people in how they can be alone. I love the distinction that you offer in what healthy aloneness is. It is knowing that you can be with yourself. Going back to all the distractions, so much of it is, “Can I just be with me, with all that I am, the good parts and the parts I don’t like very much?” Much of this journey is into full acceptance and love of self in becoming all that we are.

It also acts as an inducer. If I take the time at 11:00 AM this morning to be with my alone time, the inducer effect of it is, “This is your time for 5 minutes to be okay with the highs and the lows and with today not going the way you wanted it to go so far.” This is a time for me to rethink some decisions that I’m struggling with. Maybe it’s time for me to make a plan to call somebody up. It’s a cue. It’s an inducement to slow down and take stock. It’s pretty powerful.

I find it very sacred when I have that time because I am able to process, reflect, and think. It fuels those moments of awareness that we talked about earlier. The more I can reflect on the last 24 hours or the last week and see what beauty was given to me helps me become more aware of it as I leave that alone space.

I want to be as well as I want my patients to be. I want the world to be more reflective than reactive. If we wake up every morning and we’re anxious, which many of us are, what we’re doing is we’re reacting to things. I call myself a walking impulse. Some people do yoga in the morning. Some people do meditation. I do that inducement moment where I take 5 or 10 minutes and do some breathing and some stretching. You brought this word, so thank you for saying that. It helps me be much more reflective. That builds strength. I do that by recommending people to do the delay tactic.

Whenever you’re about to do something and you know you’re in that state of anxiety and reactivity instead of reflectiveness, in that moment, try to delay whatever you are about to do for 2 minutes or 3 minutes. You’re going to notice that your thoughts are going to be different. If you wait another minute, your thoughts are going to be even different again. The hard part is to be able to stop and take that moment. It comes right back to intention. The delay tactic can give me much more insight into what I thought about a minute ago and I was about to react. I don’t want to react. I want to reflect.

That’s beautifully said. This has been such a rich conversation. I’m so grateful for it. I’m watching our time, knowing that we are coming to a close of our segment here. I’d love to ask you one more question before we close out on this. The question is, we’ve already talked about how much we want to avoid discomfort. I love something you say in the book where you say, “Relax. Nothing is under control.” Usually, we say, “Relax. It’s all under control.” You talk about this concept of learning to live like the ocean and being in that flow. Can you comment on that as we start to close out?

Living Like The Ocean: Embracing Uncertainty

Yeah. I love that concept. It’s always a hard sell to tell people, “Relax. Nothing is under control,” as opposed to the reflex we have to say, “Everything’s under control.” It’s a tactic that people use to de-escalate a situation. If you think nothing is under control, then it gives you permission to let go. Letting go does not mean being irresponsible. It’s not compromising the quality of your work or the quality of the way that you relate to others. It’s saying, “Sometimes, the universe is going to give me what it’s going to give me. I don’t need to fight it today. I have to get through the day.” That similarly works with learning to live like the ocean. Otherwise, you’re going to be seasick every day.

Relax, nothing is under control. Share on X

As we know, sometimes, the ocean is calm. Sometimes, it’s choppy. Sometimes, it’s stormy. Sometimes, it’s scary. If we can develop sea legs with the metaphor of seeing life as an ocean, we’re not going to be so seasick about it. We’re not going to feel so beaten up and so beleaguered by it because we’ve developed sea legs.

There’s a big difference between saying in the morning, “I’m going to let things happen the way they happen today. I’m going to not resist whatever the universe sends to me, however the ocean is going to be. I’ll give you an example.” During the pandemic, I used to drive down to Orange County to do home visits with somebody. What I would do is I would say, “I’m not going to look at my Google Maps or my Waze. I’m going to get on the freeway and listen to my podcasts or my music. I don’t care what the quality of the traffic is.”

Otherwise, I’m going to be a little bit crazy about, “I have to find the right window of time to get down there.” I’ll be yelling and screaming about living in Los Angeles and all this traffic, and why I live here. I accept that, however the freeway is. I’m deciding that I’m going to have a good time, even if it’s bumper to bumper the whole way. I’ve got my music. I’ve got my air conditioning. I’ve got everything that I want. I can talk to people on the phone if I want.

That’s one way to live like the ocean. It’s like, “I’m going to go out to sea no matter what. I’m not going to let the conditions of the ocean or the freeway affect my day because I’m going to use inspiration exposure, I’m going to listen to good music, and I’m going to inspire myself. I’m going to give myself that inspiration EpiPen before I go so that I’m inoculated correctly.”

The delightful paradox of what you’re talking about is the agency we have within the no control. We get to choose how to surf the waves. There is a visualization that I used to call on quite a bit if I was in a meditation. I would imagine the surface of the ocean being stormy and choppy, but knowing that as I drop below the deep, there was a stillness always underneath that I could tap into no matter what the weather was up above. It would calm my nervous system to think about going down to that stillness underneath the waves.

Beautifully said. I do mention that in the book, too, but remember, that’s a choice that I’m making. I’m choosing to go under the waves. Another way to look at it in terms of choice is, let’s say you’re the captain of your ship. You’re in control of a lot of things, but you’re not in control of the weather. However, you can adjust your sails.

You can use the knowledge that you know about your merchant, how to be a mariner, and all of your tools to adjust to the conditions of the ocean in the same way you can choose to go underwater and be in the stillness, even though there’s chaos going on above. That’s what finding your quiet mind is all about. If you wake up and you’re in that anxiety, you need to find that place in you to go underneath the surface for five minutes.

A few minutes can make all the difference. Thank you. This has been wonderful for me and, I believe, for anyone who has read this conversation about all the ways that we can navigate the world that we’re living in. I want to ask you for any kind of closing thoughts. We’ve talked about a lot, but it could be central ideas from the book or some closing wisdom you want to leave people with, in addition to how they can find the book or you, or anything else you want to share with them.

I would say try to lean into the concepts that we talked about. Even though they feel uncomfortable, imagine that doing this for yourself is the highest form of self-care, holding all of your feelings in high regard, the happy ones, the sad ones, and even the worried ones about the future. If worry had no purpose and feeling sadness had no purpose, evolution would’ve eliminated it a long time ago. It’s there for a reason, so coexist with it and know that it’s going to help you be a stronger person in the future.

That’s wonderful.

I’m an example of that as well as you. The book will be released on June 17th, 2025, in all bookstores. It can be pre-ordered on Amazon. It’s available as a hard copy and also as an audiobook.

The timing of this conversation is perfect because with the production team, it will probably be released the following week of the book’s coming out. Probably by the time people are reading this, it will have been released. Head over there and pick up a copy. You will not regret it because it truly is beautifully written. I want to thank you for spending time here with me, for sharing your wisdom, and for putting it out into the world for so many others to benefit from. I appreciate you.

Thank you. I appreciate you. Besides this being a fun conversation, it’s nice to hear some of your personal stuff. I’m grateful to you for self-disclosing. I learn from people as I tell people what I know about this. Hearing their stories, there’s always something new that I learn to add to the repertoire of inspiration. As my father used to say, it’s fun to be inspired and to inspire others. That’s my goal.

That’s why we’re all on the journey together, right?

That’s right.

Thank you again.

Thanks.

 

Important Links

• John Tsilimparis
• Mindfulness for the Soul on Apple Podcasts
• Wondermind
• This Is My Brave
• The Magic in the Tragic: Rewriting the Script on Grief and Discovering Happiness in our Darkest Days

 

About John Tsilimparis

John Tsilimparis, MFT is a psychotherapist, author and teacher. For over thirty years, he has owned a private psychotherapy practice in Los Angeles. His work focuses on grief counseling, depression, addiction and recovery, anxiety disorders, like OCD, PTSD, phobias and panic disorder. John reaped a strong following after being featured on the A&E reality show Obsessed. He was also featured on John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA, Khloe & Lamar, Collection Intervention, and In the Name of Science. In the past twenty years he has been a go-to media therapist, called on by many news programs to comment on a variety of psychological subjects. For example, he appeared on The View and Larry King Live. (See below for videos)

 

Emotional Resilience, Grief Empowerment, Healing Through Art, Inspiration Exposure, Magic In The Tragic, Sadness Vs Depression

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