S2E2: Learning to Love Life with MS

Dr. Kevin J. Payne

Dr. Kevin J. Payne has multiple sclerosis and has become a legitimate skydiver (600 jumps). He has spent a decade researching how to craft a life you love with chronic stress, pain and illness. He endeavors to share his journey in hopes to bring others who struggle tools so that they may live their life well.

Social media and contact information:

Email: drpayne@kjpayne.com
Personal links: (@drkjpayne) can be found in the left floating palette on https://www.kjpayne.com/
Company/book/podcast links: (@YourLLWell) can be found in the left floating palette on https://www.yourlifelivedwell.co/

Podcast Transcript:

[00:00:00] Damaged Parents: Welcome to the Relatively Damaged Podcast by Damaged Parents were pained stressed, skydiving people come to learn. Maybe just, maybe we're all a little bit damaged. Someone once told me it's safe to assume 50% of the people I meet are struggling and feel wounded in some way. I would venture to say it's closer to 100%.

Every one of us is either currently struggling or has struggled with something that made us feel less than like we aren't good enough. We aren't capable. We are relatively damaged. And that's what we're here to talk about. In my ongoing investigation of the damaged self. I want to better understand how others view their own challenges. Maybe it's not so much about the damage. Maybe it's about our perception and how we deal with it.

There is a deep commitment to becoming who we are meant to be. How do you do that? How do you find balance after a damaging experience? My hero is the damaged person. The one who faces seemingly insurmountable odds to come out on the other side, whole. Those who stare directly into the face of adversity with unyielding persistence to discover their purpose.

These are the people who inspire me. To be more fully me. Not in spite of my trials, but because of them. Let's hear from another hero.

Today's topic includes sensitive material, which may not be appropriate for children. This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as advice. The opinions expressed here are strictly those of the person who gave them.

Today, we're going to talk with Dr. Kevin J Payne he has many roles in his life guide cheerleader coach. Analyst and more, we'll talk about his experience with multiple sclerosis and the different perspectives that helped him find health and healing let's talk

 Welcome back to Relatively Damaged by Damaged Parents. Today, we have Dr. Kevin Payne with us. He's got a PhD in sociology and psychology. He's lived with multiple sclerosis for 32 years and was only correctly diagnosed in 2006. He spent a decade supporting his wife who was dying of cancer. He's an avid skydiver.

Got so many more things that I could tell you about him, but let's get into the conversation. Thanks so much for being here, Kevin.

[00:02:29] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: I am delighted to be with you today. Thank you so much.

[00:02:33] Damaged Parents: You're welcome. Now, you had multiple sclerosis for 32 years before a correct diagnosis. I would love to know more about that.

[00:02:42] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Well, it was 17 years before the diagnosis. 32 years total. Multiple sclerosis is often called a snowflake disease because no two cases are exactly alike. And because with MS and we've only really understood this in maybe a little over a decade or so that it actually is an auto immune condition and that our own immune system is attacking the myelin.

That surrounds the nerves in our central nervous system. So because it's attacking our CNS, our brain and our spinal cord. Well, everything we, think, feel, do say hope, dream, all of it passes through our CNS. So depending on where we get attacked, the symptoms may be physical. They may be cognitive. They may be emotional.

And they can manifest in behaviors and in our relationships. Most of us who have MS have relapsing remitting, multiple sclerosis, so fancy schmancy way of saying it comes and goes. And so many of my symptoms are always there. But some of them, they get worse. They get better over the years.

And we have what are called exacerbations where things get really bad and there are active attacks going on in our CNS. So it's, very unpredictable and it is capricious in what it's going to attack. So my very first symptoms I was in college. And my very first symptoms, I had weird persistent itches.

Those are a form of paresthesias. So feelings that aren't there and in MS, it can be itching. It can be pain. It can feel like you're being stung or electrically shocked.

[00:04:36] Damaged Parents: So it could be any of those symptoms on the doctor's form. It could literally be pins and needles, or it could be stabbing or it could be...

[00:04:45] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: exactly. Exactly. It's all over the place. So I had that, my balance started going wonky, and I only found that out because I was taking a fencing class at the time. I love fencing and then I was also really tired, medically fatigued. , I was cognitively kind of foggy and I was very down about the whole thing.

So after a couple of months of that, I went to a physician. He looked at a young kid in a stressful academic program with squishy symptoms and decided, oh, you're clinically depressed.

[00:05:20] Damaged Parents: Can you explain the word squishy in this dynamic?

[00:05:24] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: It's me just being colloquial in this certain, you know, squishy in the sense of really hard to pin down a kind of a morphous and so, you know, more on the range of medical symptom rather than medical signs, right? So medical signs can be externally validate. Medical symptoms. That's just what we experienced

[00:05:48] Damaged Parents: And especially since they were coming and going, right.

[00:05:51] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Exactly, exactly. So he sent me to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist. Confirmed that I was indeed clinically depressed and put me on a medication and we tried a few different medications over the next few months. None of them worked. And so my case was tagged as treatment resistant depression and they left it at that.

[00:06:13] Damaged Parents: Oh,

[00:06:13] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: So a few months later the symptoms largely resolved themselves. And I didn't think about it so much. And then there were other episodes that happened over the years, but finally, in 2002, I woke up one morning and I couldn't feel my left leg below my knee.

[00:06:30] Damaged Parents: Just out of nowhere.

[00:06:31] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Yeah. Just no feeling. And, I thought at first, well I'd overdone my workout because I like to lift weights and I thought, well, maybe I lifted something a little funny yesterday and pinched a nerve. And a few days later it was gone And then it was back and then it was gone and then it was other parts of my body disappeared. And finally, one morning I woke up and I could feel my right arm and my head, but the rest of my body was gone. No feeling

[00:06:55] Damaged Parents: At all,

[00:06:55] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: At all,

[00:06:56] Damaged Parents: so you couldn't move or anything.

[00:06:58] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: No, I could, I could move. I couldn't feel there are different nerve fibers that handle the feeling as opposed to the movement and the ones that were being affected for me were the feeling.

[00:07:09] Damaged Parents: Okay.

[00:07:10] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: So at this point, then my then-wife said, I'm putting my foot down. You're going to go get this looked at so I did, and that kicked off a colorful series of referrals and tests and at one point they diagnosed me. They said, well, one thing you will be very pleased to know is that it is not multiple sclerosis.

[00:07:33] Damaged Parents: Oh, in 2002, they're saying this.

[00:07:36] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Because that was the ickiest thing that, that we were considering. And, then there was an oops and three months later my neurologist was like, oh, I'm so sorry. We should have told you our office bungled this.

Yes, it's MS. No doubt about it. you know, I had that long colorful story and that's not unusual for getting to an MS diagnosis.

[00:07:59] Damaged Parents: So how does sky diving? Cause I know that's the, I mean, it's the picture behind you right now, which you said is also the cover of your book. How does that fit into your story? Was it a way of coping? What, what went on there?

[00:08:13] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Ah, After that, then I went through a series of, after being diagnosed, I went through a series of increasingly worse exacerbations. I mean, the kind where you end up paralyzed on the floor sort of thing, and a massive right frontal temporal exacerbation your right front temporal region is controlling your emotional regulation.

It's, it's higher order cognitive function. And I was dealing with a lot of symptoms that basically read like the diagnostic criteria and for something like dementia. I do occasionally still have brain spasms.

[00:08:55] Damaged Parents: me too.

[00:08:57] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: So things got really awful, really ugly. And one of the things. We live with, with chronic illness is it too often becomes this long, slow, sad process of saying goodbye to the things that you loved about your life. And I got profoundly depressed and I got to the point where I, couldn't see a path

to a life that I was interested in living any longer. So one day my, my son, he was then a 13 or 14. And he said, dad, you really suck at doing things for yourself.

[00:09:35] Damaged Parents: That's nice of him to tell you.

[00:09:37] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Well, yeah, I mean, on the one hand I knew this, I was struggling and he's a perceptive kid, you. know, I was like, wow, that was kind of funny. But on the other hand, It was kind of crushing as well.

[00:09:49] Damaged Parents: Would you say it was helpful to you that he said that, that he mirrored back to you that you weren't good at that, even though it hurt and was funny.

[00:09:59] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: It was certainly motivational. It was certainly motivational and It was rather difficult for me because I've got all the professional training in the world. I know what should be done, but I wasn't able to manifest those things in my life.

[00:10:16] Damaged Parents: Okay.

So it sounds like what you're saying is you understood intellectually and you knew what needed to happen, but going through the journey was different. It is hard to do those things that you knew you might need to do

[00:10:31] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Yeah. Understanding is it is different than knowing we can know, and that's an external sort of assessment, but understanding and doing. Are our different parts of our cognition and it's a different skillset and we have to practice it and fail and grow and all of those things, even if we intellectually know it, because it have applying it as different.

[00:10:56] Damaged Parents: Right. So how hard was it for you to shift out of, you know, cause it sounds like it would be a prime, at least in my world. That would be a prime time for me to beat myself up. I know this, I should have this ability. I should, how did you reconcile that?

[00:11:15] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Well, it was a long process and a lot of it had to do with. Me coming to a point in my own life where I could let go of my expectations of myself and extend myself some grace.

[00:11:31] Damaged Parents: And what did that mean for.

[00:11:33] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: That meant that. Yeah. And it's a very core. I had to be willing to face myself where I am now. and not where I was five years ago or 10 years ago or where I wanted to be at this moment, but to acknowledge the sometimes ugly reality of where I was at that moment and to give myself permission to take really small steps and to fail

and to be inconsistent and to take the time and the effort that it required to learn and grow in the direction that I needed to. And that's where skydiving comes in for me, because from the time I was a little kid in the seventies, so I was born in the sixties. It was childhood seventies. I was a product of the Apollo era and I was fascinated as a kid with everything up in the sky

and one summer in the seventies when I was still in grade school, my grandmother and I went to a little air show at a rural airport. And the thing that fascinated me was they had a skydiver there. And this guy didn't jump around parachute. Like we'd seen in the world war II movies, but it was jumping what we call a square

You know, a rectangular parachute, ram-air parachute, that is common now. Right? And those were still pretty new and you can fly those like a fixed wing glider. So it's not like just dropping out of the sky under a big round parachute. He opened it and he flew around above us and swoops and dives and quizzed over the audience and landed on target.

And I was like, wow, I want to do that.

[00:13:18] Damaged Parents: Okay. So with that type of parachute, you have some control in guiding it. It sounds like

[00:13:23] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: You have a great deal of control. I mean, I can, on a good day, I'm still working on this. I'm only at 600 jumps or so but you know, in a good day, from a mile up, I can pick a spot on, on the ground, the size of say a stop sign and land on it

[00:13:40] Damaged Parents: That's awesome.

[00:13:41] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: That's the kind of pinpoint accuracy you can develop with a parachute with a modern parachute. And I would build my parachutes as a kid and try to figure this out. We go to the highest places I thought I could survive jumping from and try to figure this out. And I've bent myself up pretty good sometimes, but I didn't break myself completely

[00:14:02] Damaged Parents: So you weren't jumping out of planes as a kid yet when you were

making these

[00:14:06] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Well, you can't. Yeah. You can't. In the United States, USPA puts a limit to 18 years. To do a skydive. So flash forward to the nineties and I'm in graduate school and I'm working on my doctorate and I decided to finally, well, I've waited long enough. I'm going to skydive because I'd already bungee jumped when I was an undergraduate in Oxford, in England with the Oxford dangerous sport club.

And that was a lot of fun. But I thought, okay, that's one step in the right direction. So I found a sport parachute club that was a couple of hours away and arranged to do it. And back then, tandem skydiving. Wasn't really a thing. So tandems were invented in the eighties. They didn't become really common until the two thousands.

 In order to skydive, I had to go take all the training and then I went up and exited solo and did my own job. And that was the way I was introduced to skydiving. And that was commonly how you did it back then. I got a handful of jumps in, but then I'm working on a doctorate, takes a lot of time and effort and so education and career and then family, and then finally health got in the way and.

Along this period when I was having my most difficult stretch with MS. I had had a an exacerbation when I was mowing the front lawn one summer morning, and I ended up paralyzed and passed out from the pain in the front yard. And as I'm coming to, I'm looking up at this beautifully blue sky and a warped thought came through my head.

Wow. What a beautiful day to skydive. And then, I laughed. I said, well, what, I can't even move. There's no way I'm ever going to skydive again. And I gave up on it. So my son tells me you really suck at doing things for yourself. And I really started thinking about it and I thought, there's so much more I want to do in my life, but I have become afraid of my own body.

And it has caused me to draw into the world and make my world smaller. And. It was really frustrating because I love collecting experiences. I love travel. I love meeting new people, doing all kinds of new things, but my illness had in my response, I was closing myself off from the world. So I said to myself, I need to reclaim a childhood dream and I need to.

Face my fear of my body. And I'm going to do that through an extreme version of exposure therapy. I'm going to throw myself into the sky, hurl myself at the earth at 120 or more miles an hour and save myself. and if I can do that, Repeatedly. Then maybe I can trust myself again.

[00:17:02] Damaged Parents: So you thought this might be a way to trust your, not trust your body, but trust your soul.

[00:17:08] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Well, trust my ability to negotiate something with my body. That's going to allow me to get what I want out of this one.

[00:17:16] Damaged Parents: Mm.

[00:17:17] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: No. And, and I went back and of course had to do the training again. It was because I can't feel my legs below my knees. Most of the time, that was a real challenge for skydiving because, and it's not the landing, you would think it's the landing, but I, I mean, yes, that was an issue.

I had to learn how to feel. That I had contacted the earth from the pressure at my knees rather than my feet. But if you are out of balance in air, then you start spinning radically out of control. And I had some skydives that really terrified my instructors. Cause because when I first came back, I didn't tell them I had MS

because I figured that they probably would just say, don't do it. And so I waited a few jumps in until I demonstrated that, yes, I can get myself down and safely every time. And they were saying, you're having a really difficult time controlling your legs. And I said, well, yeah, let's because I can't feel them.

So then they were like, wow.

Okay. Normally it takes you 25 jumps to get your, A license. And you've got, over a hundred things. You've got to check off skills that you've got to check off on your A ref card. It took me 47 to do that. And I had to go to the vertical wind tunnel. You know, You've seen pictures of people doing indoor skydiving so I could go there and I could have an instructor right there with me holding on to my legs, saying this is exactly where they need to be. And then I could learn, oh, okay. I can't feel where my legs are and I can't feel the wind on my legs, but I can feel the tension in the tendons right behind my knee.

[00:19:10] Damaged Parents: So it's almost like you were learning how to feel from a different perspective. So, Because you didn't have that sensation on your calf or foot that you had to figure out. Okay. What do I feel? And what does that feel like? So that I could recognize it. Okay.

[00:19:26] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: I had to get creative.

[00:19:27] Damaged Parents: Yes, you did.

[00:19:29] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: So they got the A license and the B license and, logged another hundred jumps or so in 2019 that first year I came back. So then for 2020, I set myself a new goal. I said, and you also have to remember that one of the first things they tell you, when you get an MS diagnosis is avoid stress

[00:19:48] Damaged Parents: Oh, well, stress happens. So how do you do that?

[00:19:52] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: exactly. I think it's the stupidest advice

[00:19:55] Damaged Parents: Well, my thought would be okay. Let's teach people how to cope or manage or

because stress inevitably is going to show up in my life. And I think sometimes maybe more so when I'm trying to avoid it.

[00:20:10] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Well, and what we forget is that. There, there are two forms of stress. There's you stress, good stress and distress, bad stress, and they are right next to each other at the edge. And this is a major topic in my book and all of the good things that we most look forward to in life had that good stress associated with it.

Trying a new experience, demonstrating your competence in some task, getting close to another human. All of those things have stress. Good stress You stress.

And I don't like to think of it as our fear response, and it's certainly not in fight or flight. It's freeze flight fight fall in fried faint. And you can add a couple of others in there if you want, but it's our challenge response.

It's this primal response that is our only tool that our body gives us to ramp us up. When we think we're going to be challenged and there's an uncertain outcome.

[00:21:09] Damaged Parents: So I think it was, I think I remember reading somewhere that about the stress and I think you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong, but stress and excitement have the same physiological reaction.

[00:21:20] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Yes, It is the same physiological response. What is different between fear and excitement is in cognitively, emotionally, we frame it

[00:21:33] Damaged Parents: okay.

[00:21:33] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: So that's a huge part of the process of skydiving. Skydiving is inherently scary because humans were not intended by any stretch of the imagination to fling our bodies from great heights. And when you come to the door of an airplane, That acute stress response, that fear response will kick in.

Doesn't matter who you are because your primal brain is screaming. This is not a good idea.

[00:22:03] Damaged Parents: Right.

[00:22:04] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: And once you go through that door, then you find that there is joy and wonder. And an amazing experience just on the other side of your fear.

[00:22:16] Damaged Parents: It's interesting that you say that because the term I use when I'm doing something new is I'm jumping off a cliff because that's literally what it feels like I'm jumping or for this conversation, I'm jumping out of the airplane and that is a little bit scary or a lot, it's also exciting sometimes.

[00:22:35] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: it is. and once you do it enough time, so then in, in 2020, I set myself a new goal because screw what they say about stress. This is about reframing it all. And so I set myself a goal of in 2020, I was going to jump at least once a day in that year.

[00:22:53] Damaged Parents: Oh, wow.

[00:22:54] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: So I set myself. So for, for, I mean, some days weather doesn't allow us to, but I was going to total more than 366 jumps in that year.

And I managed 370.

[00:23:06] Damaged Parents: Wow. So you were jumping more than once a day in some cases.

[00:23:11] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Yeah. And some days, we had six weeks where everything was shut down due to COVID. Yeah, there were days, I mean, where I would jump six, seven times a day.

[00:23:20] Damaged Parents: What would you say was the biggest learning from that year of skydiving jumps?

[00:23:26] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Well it's so we go back to that edge concept that I was talking about and. Something that is really crucial, especially if you're living with an ongoing health condition and many of those conditions mean that we are dealing with fatigue, mean that we're having a difficult time resting, sleeping, recovering, that sort of thing.

[00:23:51] Damaged Parents: Yeah.

[00:23:52] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: The edge that you want to be comfortable with is not just an edge, but your repeatable edge. So in other words, every day, where can you take yourself, your body, your brain, your emotions, your relationships, yada yada yada all those things, where can you take them and still be able to recover? To deliver consistently the next day.

[00:24:19] Damaged Parents: I love the way you just framed that

[00:24:22] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Thank you.

[00:24:23] Damaged Parents: because you know, living with a chronic illness. It is so easy to see the limits, but not be able to pay. So I think the way you defined that is how I would define what I call pacing, and where can I go to be consistent in that day or in that? Well, really it's day to day.

[00:24:47] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Right. It's every day it's every day, but that's the thing that, cause people will say, oh, well, why should I exercise? Or why should I eat right? Or why should I do all those things? And my simple answer is you want your system to be able to consistently deliver at whatever level is necessary so that you can get what you want out of each day of your life.

[00:25:10] Damaged Parents: Right. So what do you do on those days? Maybe you've been pretty consistent for a while and now there's a flare up or what have you, right. What do you do or how do you talk to yourself in your mind to, to work through that? Because I think sometimes we don't have control over whether or not you're going to have a flare up or something.

[00:25:30] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Exactly. And that's why I came up with plan C

[00:25:34] Damaged Parents: That sounds great. I'm excited.

[00:25:36] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Everybody has plan A and everybody knows plan B, and those are great. But what we have to understand is that the actions that we commit are not only about getting things done, but they're sending messages to you and to other people around you that shape your identity and your self worth and the way you think about yourself and the way other people think about you as well. A behavior is like an iceberg and you see this little tip, which is the external thing that is being done, but inside there's all this emotional work and identity work and all these other things that are going on. So when we have a day when we are so overruled, That we can't get something done.

That's not just a practical issue because, if you're a quote unquote healthy person and you recover easily from overexertion then yeah. It's no big deal. You shrug it off and you say, I'll do it tomorrow. And then probably do it but if you have a chronic health condition, if you like me, where chronic fatigue is part of that, you understand that the idea that you can push through it is the privilege of a healthy person.

And if I am tired, medically tired, when I pushed through it to the other side, I'm in medical fatigue. But when I'm in medical fatigue and I pushed through it,I'm in medical exhaustion

[00:27:09] Damaged Parents: Okay.

[00:27:10] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: and that is dangerous. So your fatigue is not just more tired is qualitatively, different exhaustion is qualitatively different and they get worse.

And part of the characteristics of fatigue and exhaustion is it takes longer for you to recover on the other side. So I have to be mindful of that. I know that when I'm really fatigued, that's a hard and fast limit. And , if I broach that it's going to take days or weeks to potentially recover.

[00:27:41] Damaged Parents: Of like increased self care. Right.

[00:27:44] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Yeah. I've increased self care and it's not going to come quickly. It's not just taking it easy for one or two days, because when you're in medical fatigue, you're exhaustion, it takes much longer to recover and you can't just can't sleep an extra couple hours and do it.

[00:28:01] Damaged Parents: and I would think that in that medical exhaustion, though, if coming from the mindset of, I should be able to recover. Like I used to be able to that it would be really easy for people to overdo it, get into that horrible mindset because then they overdid it and they're exhausted and now they're recovering.

So it would be really hard to have a what's the word I'm looking for? Consistent performance of any.

[00:28:28] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Yeah, exactly. And when you become inconsistent, you. Not only send a message. You probably don't want to send to the people around you. You send a message to yourself that you're untrustworthy. Because one of the things that, that we have to recall is that we have a much greater understanding now in our public consciousness about relationships care

and what goes into quality relationships with other people and being caring and supportive and all those other things. So we have this greater understanding that we should be more caring with our relationships with other people. But what I want to emphasize is every single thing you have learned about maintaining a good relationship with another human being applies to maintaining a good relationship with yourself and, I want people to just stop and ask themselves for a second. If someone else treated you, like you treat yourself, would you stay in a relationship with that person?

[00:29:35] Damaged Parents: Oh, that's a fantastic question.

[00:29:37] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: And most of us wouldn't and So, is it any wonder that so many of us have awful relationships with ourselves?

[00:29:46] Damaged Parents: I know we're, We're getting close to time, but how did you start that journey? What were some of those first steps or how did you start having that loving relationship with yourself?

[00:29:59] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Well, you know, I'll go back to something that I said earlier, and it's one of the most important tools that we get out of mindfulness and meditation is an acceptance of our world and our environment, the way they are. And you know again, this is like massive topic and part one of the book, but it is so crucial that we start learning to, because okay.

Let's phrase it this way. We don't see the world as it is. We see the world through this set of, value filter. Okay. We're always attaching values to everything in our, environment. Some of those values are emotional. Some of those values are sematic. They bottling, they feel good, right?

Some of those values are, oh, this is likely to happen and not likely to happen all these things. And what that's doing is it's an emergence system that is happening in our brain and our mind that keeps us moving and focused in different directions. Okay. And what we have to do is we have to learn and by learning, not just cognitively, we have to do it.

We have to practice it. We have to fail at it, that there is a world and there is also this layer of value. That you have placed on it and have to learn to distinguish them.

[00:31:27] Damaged Parents: Yeah. And I think when you say the values, we've placed on it in my mind, what I use are the stories I tell myself about what's happening.

[00:31:34] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Yeah. I mean, that's what identity is. Identity is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and. And there's some other components in there as well, but it's our central executives in our mind trying to impart some kind of coherence story on our existence. And that's why you can have an experience and you can frame it one way.

And then 10 years later, you look back on the experience and you frame it in an entirely different way.

[00:32:01] Damaged Parents: Yeah, I think there's something to those stories.

[00:32:04] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Yeah.

[00:32:05] Damaged Parents: Am I, going to tell this story from a victim perspective or am I going to tell the story from a survivor or am I going to tell it from a hey, that was hard. And I did it and it just wasn't surviving, but maybe conquering right.

[00:32:18] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Yeah. I was skydiving, not just to reclaim something that I found joyful and that I find meditative and extraordinarily mindful experience, because I can tell you, we live in such a distracted mattering world, but when you exit an airplane, you are focused. There are no other concerns in your mind

because the clock is ticking

[00:32:42] Damaged Parents: yeah, I think before the recording started, you said there was something like 82 seconds for you to consciously a decision about

living.

[00:32:50] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Yeah. When I exit the plane at 14,000 feet, for me on average, that's 82 seconds that it would take on my belly for me to fall. So my life expectancy is 82 seconds at that point, unless I make an active decision to live, I am making a decision for life and that, that picture on the front cover of my book that tells the story of the book.

I explained it in the intro, but you'll see right there. That's at 5,000 feet. At that point I have 27 seconds left to live and so what I am doing is you see, my hands are up by my head and I'm about to make this sweeping gesture out. And that's a universal skydiving gesture. It's called the wave off. And the wave off is how we tell everybody in our airspace that we are about to take action, to save ourselves by deploying our parachute

so we wave off. I say, when you pick up this book, you are in the same spot, you are actively making a decision to save yourself. And that is the warning that you're giving everybody in your airspace.

[00:34:02] Damaged Parents: I love that question. In my, in my mind, I'm thinking of like a random reminder, what am I doing to live right now? You know? And randomly asking that question of, it's almost like, what role am I playing in this moment?

Yeah, I think those are great. things to think about.

[00:34:23] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: well, and, and for me, every sky dive is the perfect biochemical reset. So you exit the plane, you get adrenaline you open your parachute and you get a dopamine serotonin chaser. You hang around on the drop zone with your friends afterwards, swapping lies about.

how well your skydive went and you get oxytocin. Yeah.

[00:34:45] Damaged Parents: That's beautiful.

[00:34:47] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Oh, that's true. We always want to embroider just a little bit, but you know, in skydiving, as they'll tell you a video or it didn't happen cause after a couple of hundred jumps, most of us were cameras. And I like getting good video of my friends that they can use.

[00:35:04] Damaged Parents: Yeah. And it's interesting how that story inside of our minds. It's interesting. I love how you framed it as the lies we share about how well we did, because the experience can be so different afterwards, unless we go back and really see it on camera or listen to the conversation, because I think sometimes those emotions of what's happening again the cloud, my experience of what happened.

So if I had good emotions or not good, I'm going to say regulating emotions, then it was great. If I had disregulating emotions, then maybe it wasn't so great. That is a really interesting conclusion to come to. I think, I don't think many people get to experience that or see that in their lives where it's played back in front of them.

And it's like, oh, that's not what I remember.

[00:35:56] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Well, this is, yeah, it's a pretty dramatic thing. I mean, I've now spent 11 hours of my life in freefall and you have a fair amount of time just fall under earth. But on the other hand, I'm kind of clumsy on the ground and I'm falling anyway because of my MS I might as well go up and follow a style.

[00:36:11] Damaged Parents: That's right.

[00:36:12] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: And, there was also this issue of, I wanted to jump every day. I want to jump with that kind of consistency, because that means triggering my acute stress response every day and learning. To work with it and guide it and find it as exciting and see myself as competent again. And I'll tell you what if you are a person who can hundreds or thousands of times fling yourself out of an airplane and then deploy your parachute and landed on target all those times that.

A massive boost to confidence that you can carry out into the world.

That's not something that most people do.

[00:36:57] Damaged Parents: Into the other aspects. So whether it's for you, it's jumping out of an airplane, maybe for someone else it's something different. But having that success at something it overflows into other areas, I think is what I hear you saying.

[00:37:10] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Exactly and and I'm not here to encourage anybody else to jump out of a perfectly good airplane if they don't want to. But what I am encouraging everyone to do is to find the thing that, that they're doing just for joy and just for learning and just for growth and they can suck at and it's okay.

But that. On average, get a little bit better each day.

that is something you can take into the rest of your life.

[00:37:40] Damaged Parents: Yeah, for sure. Okay. Three top tips or tools. Someone going through a similar struggle could do today or steps they could take that might be helpful

[00:37:52] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Okay. So first would be a mindset shift. And that is that we get really frustrated when our mind doesn't do what we want it to do when it's always ruminating or it's always distracted or, all of those other things. And what I want people to understand is that your mind isn't a unitary hole.

Your mind is a society of mind. And there are lots and lots and lots of different brain and mind functions that are just really targeted. And they're all trying to have their say, and they're all trying to do their little thing because they only see part of the world it's really telling their perspective is circumscribed.

So you have to give your mind more patience and you have to be kinder to all of your little cave children running around in your mind because we see development in the wrong way. We don't actually all, we don't grow up. It's more like adding more layers to the onion. Right. And all of those.

Old parts. And that's why I call them cave children because genetically and developmentally, they're old, right? They come first and they're still there and they still need to be acknowledged and still need to be dealt with. And they still need to be honored. You can't make fun of them. They're doing their best job with how they see the world.

And so I had two. I had to really make this mind shift myself because I didn't want to acknowledge all that about myself, but that's just part of being human

[00:39:30] Damaged Parents: Yeah.

[00:39:31] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: and that's okay.

[00:39:32] Damaged Parents: Yeah.

[00:39:32] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Second thing is back to plan C and what plan C is, is so I first developed it for my workout. So like, I like to lift weights every day

and plan A is best case scenario. This is the weightlifting routine I would like to do that day. Plan B is, oh, it's pretty good day, but I can't quite give it everything I normally could. And so that's my backup plan. C is the day is so awful and rather than doing. This is the bare minimum that I know I can do, even if it's embarrassingly, really humiliatingly small, small is better than nothing cognitively emotionally, because if you string a whole bunch of days of nothing together, That's not the message you want to send yourself.

That's not the identity you want to be constructing for yourself, but by making room for just a little bit each day, I'm still protecting that part of my identity. I'm still protecting the habit that I'm trying to keep in my life. I'm still emotionally doing something. And if I can come to the end of the day and look back on the day and say, this was a really ratty plan C day, but here I have these things that I can carry into the next day saying I didn't do

[00:41:04] Damaged Parents: Okay.

[00:41:04] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: That would be the second one. Third one is, I am all for everybody getting down with their bad self and being a warrior and, all those things because sometimes we need to dig deep and fight. But what I also want to remind everybody is that mindset that set of behaviors is adapted to be a short-term response and it's damaging to try to with all of your life there.

So if you want to protect your ability to really do that, when you need to, you also need to respect and protect your ability to rest. And recuperate and relax and recover and be kinder and more gentle to yourself.

[00:41:54] Damaged Parents: That's awesome. What great tips I am so grateful to have had you on the show.

[00:41:59] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Oh I'm delighted to be here

[00:42:00] Damaged Parents: Now you guys can find Dr. Kevin Payne at http://YourLifeLivedWell.co YourLifeLivedWell.co he's got a preview of his book on his website, a 30 second commercial, where he's actually in free fall, and you can hear episodes of his podcast.

[00:42:21] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Yeah.

[00:42:22] Damaged Parents: we'll see you there. Come on over.

[00:42:24] Dr. Kevin J. Payne: Well, thank you so much. And thanks again for having me.

[00:42:26] Damaged Parents: Oh, no problem. Thank you.

 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Relatively Damaged by Damaged Parents. We really enjoyed talking to Dr. Kevin J. Payne about how he found ways to give himself grace and really feel like he is living well. We especially liked when he said the idea you can push through it is the privilege of having a healthy body.

To unite with other damaged people, connect with us on Instagram. Look for damaged parents. We'll be here next week. Still relatively damaged. See you then.