We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Darial Sterling a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Darial, we are so deeply grateful to you for opening up about your journey with mental health in the hops that it can help someone who might be going through something similar. Can you talk to us about your mental health journey and how you overcame or persisted despite any issues? For readers, please note this is not medical advice, we are not doctors, you should always consult professionals for advice and that this is merely one person sharing their story and experience.
As an overcomer, I have realized that healing is a journey and not a destination. I have come to recognize that despite my mental health challenges, I must persist! Although, I have not been responsible for all of my misfortunes and mental health issues, I am responsible for managing, growing, and healing inwardly, so I can impact those around me and my community in a positive manner. Let’s take a deep dive into the pool of my mental health journey and as we emerge together, see my wounds and adverse experiences, as well as my resilience and devotion to stay alive and make a difference!
On June 5th, 1983, I was born into poverty and blessing. My poverty was generational, and I could do nothing about that. I grew up poor and experienced many hardships due to limited resources, violent neighborhoods, abuse, lack of access to good healthy foods or a safe park to go and play in, single parent household, among other social determinants. However, the blessing is, I was gifted a great grandmother who was the one person in my life that showed me what unconditional love looked like in my childhood. It was through her love poured out, that I was able to find stability in a world that often felt like chaos with no expiration date. My mother was 15 when she gave birth to me. She was in and out of foster care and couldn’t raise me, so my grandmother took me in, along with my father. My grandmother and father did the best they could, and I am forever grateful for them taking me in. My father left to enlist into the Navy when I was 5 years old and made a career out of it. I only saw him about once a year and the ache of not having a father around was unbearable. My mother started raising me when I was 9 years old. I remember not understanding why I was often sad, confused, angry, frustrated. I remember the emotional pain being so severe at times, it would make me physically sick at school and I would run a fever and had to go home. I remember failing many classes because I couldn’t focus or concentrate and being bullied for being the smallest in my classrooms. Through these trying times and wounds that were created, I also remember my blessings.
My great grandmother was the one who would rub my back all night long so I could fall asleep and stay asleep and not have night terrors due to my abuse and other traumas. She blessed me with reading encouraging words from the Bible to me and often shared the love of God with me and how He was my loving father who sacrificed everything so I could be united to Himself. This was encouraging to me, because I often felt abandoned by my mother and father, insignificant and not wanted. Her ability to make me feel safe, valued and loved was unmatched and I will never forget her persistent pursuit of sharing love with me during my childhood and young adult life.
With much unresolved trauma and little direction of how to make it out of poverty, I thought college was my answer. I would be the first in my family so navigating the logistics would be difficult. After many failed attempts, I was finally accepted into a Jr. College called, Vincennes University. Through many tutors, hard work, and family support I was able to graduate from college and transfer to Ball State University. During my studies there, I majored in Psychology, and this changed my life forever. For the first time, I started to understand my own sufferings and mental health challenges. A few years after graduating and working in a community mental health center, a few things happened, and I noticed that my mental health started declining. My great grandmother passed away, and a close family member started experiencing depression and suicidal thoughts. I sought support from my church, and counseling, but I was still struggling. However, because of my education and work experience in mental health I sought out my medical doctor to discuss diagnose and medication treatment. As a Black man, it took so long for me to stop suffering in silence and seek professional help due to mistrust, stigma, and shame.
Through the grace of God, I was able to overcome the silence and seek the help I disparately needed once I reframed how I looked at my situation. In order to fulfill my God given purpose, I needed to be well, and at the moment my brain was sick. Through therapy I learned so many things about myself and my traumas that helped me to shift my narrative from what is wrong with you, shouldn’t you be much further in life, to, look at what happened to you, and despite all the trauma in your life look where you have made it! That was the start of a healing journey that I continue to build upon. As I worked with my Dr. and therapist, I learned that there were three diagnoses that I was living with unknowingly, for most of my life e.g. Adult Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), and Major Depression. Once looking at these symptoms these diagnoses carry, it started to make so much sense of what I had been experiencing throughout my life.
How have I persisted despite my challenges related to mental health issues. I focused on what I could control and ways to grow through what I have went through while helping others in the process. I focused on myself through building my relationship with Jesus Christ, therapy, medication, creating a family of my own, and being a present father to my kids like I dreamed of having growing up. I focused on learning and educating myself more in the mental health field so I would continue to heal, better support my family and others suffering from mental health challenges. Through the grace of God, I am now experiencing many 1sts in my family history. I am the first to graduate from college in my family, the first to raise my kids under the same roof with my wife, the first to become an ordained minister, the first to open my own business, called Darial Sterling Behavioral Equity Consulting, L.L.C., consulting with and training agencies, and helping others navigate through their mental health issues and providing support on their healing journey!
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
My business, Darial Sterling Behavioral Equity Consulting, L.L.C. offers two main areas of services. Mental Health and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. On the mental health side, I offer mental health guidance sessions to anyone navigating mental health challenges. For serious mental health conditions, I would refer out for more intensive services. During some of these sessions, people are wanting to start mental health services for the first time and don’t know where to go. I help my clients understand their symptoms better and the seriousness of their mental health challenges. I also empower them by providing coaching, mental health education, like on the therapy process, other services available to them in the community and coping skills to give them a head start on what their next steps should be on their healing journey.
For example, many of my clients that have come to me for support are from the Black community. They feel comfortable with me because I look like them. Many of them have never had any education on mental health and don’t know what they are experiencing, which can be very scary. Once I educate them on what they may be experiencing, recommend options, share my own experiences with seeking mental health supports, their stigma to mental health wall starts to lower and many have received support from me or have been referred for more intensive treatment.
I also train agencies, Churches, groups and individuals on how to use Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, (DBT) skills and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, (CBT) skills to improve their overall functioning abilities. Some of the newer work I have been offering are called healing groups. Healing groups is a Native American practice that focuses on connection, restoration, and healing. These groups can be used to discuss any difficult topic with cultural and trauma informed care. I have also created a model to train the trainer so that agencies that would like to continue using the healing groups after I have trained them can foster sustainability.
Some of the most passionate things I enjoy about my work is seeing people practice new skills and see it helping them in their lives. A short success story to share would be when a young Black mother who was a single parent, came to me for support. She had always wanted to be a firefighter but kept failing the lie detector test they administered. I educated her on how lie detector test measure physiological responses and if she is telling the truth, maybe she was struggling with anxiety and the test was picking that up. We worked on some grounding skills to help her learn how to lower her anxiety levels and she put it to practice the next time she was scheduled to take the test. She passed and is now a firefighter and providing for her son like she had desired to do.
On the DEI side of my business, I consult with agencies, train them on best DEI practices or how to implement DEI practices. I have trained on many topics, but here are some to name a few, e.g. Social Determinants of Health, Racism, Racial Trauma, Implicit Bias, Cultural Competency, Cultural Humility, Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Service (CLAS) Standards, methods for starting and sustaining DEI work in organizations and more. For example, an agency reached out to me to speak with their diverse staff on the racial climate of their organization. This was after a serious racial trauma had occurred in the community where they work. I led racial trauma healing groups to help support their BIPOC staff while simultaneously gathering data to assess the cultural competency and psychological safety of the organization where they work. I then reported recommendations to their CEO and executive leadership to promote further healing and increase behavioral health equity in their organization.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The three most important areas of knowledge that were most impactful on my journey were, spiritual care, coaching, and resiliency. If someone is early on their healing journey, I would recommend talking with a trusted person that has their best interest at heart about what they are experiencing. When I was suffering in silence, I was not gaining any ground on improving my situation or making any steps towards healing. Once I stated to tell my story to trusted people, I felt some empowerment, and motivation to take next steps. The more you tell your story, to the right people, the more freedom starts to take hold.
I highly recommend taking care of your spiritual health, e.g. growing in your faith, joining a ministry community who loves you and supports you, working on eliminating unforgiveness you have towards others and yourself, working on discovering your purpose! Then I recommend receiving some mentorship and coaching, while providing the same thing to someone else that could learn what you have already learned. This keeps you accountable for growth and giving to others will make you feel better about yourself.
Lastly, I would focus on resilience. I would ask myself, what are my strengths? What have I overcome, or went through that was difficult but I am still here to tell the story? What are the things I have control over in my life? What can I do to improve my situation and myself, e.g. talking to a trusted person, therapy, reading books about your situation, joining a ministry group focused on your area of need, going to your medical Doctor for advice, etc.. It’s important to remain teachable and humble so that as you are working on yourself by receiving support from others, you are receiving information with the intent on processing it and putting what you are learning into practice. Resilience is about bouncing back, but in order to do that, your mindset has to change from a victim mindset into a growth mindset. That will take dealing with the hard truths about your life and taking responsibility for your past actions and actions moving forward.
Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?
When I feel overwhelmed, I read and meditate on Biblical truth to take my lies in mind hostage and replace those lies with truth. It’s like saying, thoughts, you have the right to remain silent, anything you say will be held against you by the word of God. I use the 3 C method of cognitive therapy to help with this. First, I Catch my thoughts. Then I Check my thoughts and then I Change my thoughts. Catch it, Check it, Change it!
I catch what thoughts I am currently thinking, and what thoughts have I been thinking most of the day. If you are a visual learner, writing them out can be helpful for you to see them. Many times, people avoid what they are thinking, then it turns into a feeling, resulting in an undesirable action. So, I keep track of what I am thinking if I start to feel any feelings I don’t want. Then I check my thoughts. I evaluate, interrogate them, I ask myself, what is the evidence that this thought is true? If, I don’t have any proof, then I must dismiss the thought, and change it to a more accurate truthful thought, which most of the time aligns with a Biblical truth I was reading over and over, mediating on.
For example, If I start to feel like I am going to bomb a presentation and my anxiety is increasing, I ask myself, what have you been thinking all day? If I was thinking, am I prepared enough, will I mess up while I am talking, will the information be relevant, am I really qualified, then I remind myself two things, stay in the present, anxiety lives in the future. Okay, what do I have proof of right now? I usually do really well with presentations. I get positive feedback from others I train, and I have spent a lot of time on preparing for the audience. Thoughts you are dismissed. The truth is, I am smart, engaging, gifted, and fearfully and wonderfully made by God! I would then find a Bible verse that is similar to this experience and meditate on that truth.
Contact Info:
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61557890274215
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darial-sterling-6ab33059/
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
