“Pregnancy and Life Through the Eyes of a Clinical Psychologist, Part One” – with Dr. Aria B. Grillo, PsyD, MPA

Dr. Fox: Welcome to today’s episode of “Healthful Woman,” a podcast designed to explore topics in women’s health at all stages of life. I’m your host, Dr. Nathan Fox, an OB-GYN and maternal fetal medicine specialist practicing in New York City. At Healthful Woman, I speak with leaders in the field to help you learn more about women’s health, pregnancy, and wellness. Sara, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming in.

Sara: Thank you so much, Nady. I’m really happy to be here.

Dr. Fox: First of all, we’ve already been talking for an hour, you know, just off camera, all the things we had to catch up from literally 30 years.

Sara: That is correct.

Dr. Fox: Crazy.

Sara: It is indeed crazy.

Dr. Fox: Crazy. And as I told you before, you look exactly the same.

Sara: I’m going to take that as a compliment.

Dr. Fox: You look terrific.

Sara: Thank you.

Dr. Fox: It is so nice to see you. Honestly, it’s so nice to see you. Thank you for coming in and doing this.

Sara: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Fox: It’s unbelievable. So as I said in my intro, you’re the author of a really amazing and powerful book. It is called, “There Was Night and There Was Morning: A Memoir of Trauma and Redemption.” You’re, of course, not only an author, you are many, many things. But I read the book and I was very moved, is what I would say, (A) because I know you, but (B) because the book itself is a good word, I guess, but it’s probably not good enough to describe the book. I’m not a poet as you are. My use of words is limited in general, but it really was just spectacular. So, thank you for writing it.

Sara: Thank you so much. Thank you for reading it. It’s not an easy read. When people tell me they love the book, I say, “thank you.” And then I say, “I’m sorry you had to go through that experience” because it’s an intense read.

Dr. Fox: It is an intense read and we’ll definitely get into it, obviously. It’s not all we’re going to talk about, but that’s predominantly what we’re going to talk about and what I guess brought us together here for this podcast today although we should have done it anyways.

Sara: Agreed.

Dr. Fox: So, my bad. But I guess for our listeners, just can you give them a sense of who are you, right?

Sara: Who am I?

Dr. Fox: Who is Sara Sherbill?

Sara: Well, you mentioned that I am a writer. I am a writer. That is, I guess, probably how I think of myself most prominently, as a writer. Like you said, I just came out with this memoir. It’s something that I’ve been working on for so many years. So, to see it kind of come to fruition and come to light and for people to read it, has been super-meaningful. Before I bought this book, I’ve been writing essays for many years and I’m also a book editor. I worked in publishing for a bunch of years in New York since I left. So yeah, those are kind of the two hats that I wear.

Dr. Fox: And we met each other in high school…

Sara: Indeed.

Dr. Fox: …I guess freshman year at the great Ida Crown, Jewish Academy of Chicago, Illinois. And you grew up in Chicago.

Sara: I did.

Dr. Fox: And obviously, for those who have read the book or all of my listeners are going to read the book, they’ll hear of your story growing up in Chicago. The reason I guess it’s been 30 years… I mean, we were in college at the same time. We were separated by a year, but basically, we were in college at the same time. And since then, we went our separate ways. And we had not really kept in touch for no, you know, for no reason whatsoever, just because life is that way. And if I’m correct, you sort of came out with your story before you wrote your book, right? You published an article in one of the…

Sara: In The Forward.

Dr. Fox: In The Forward. And I read it. And obviously, it was sort of like a brief version, let’s say, of this story. Was that the first time you had really told others about your about your past?

Sara: Yes. Yes. So for people who’ve read the book who know, I grew up as the daughter of a rabbi. I’m the eldest of five. My father had a thriving congregation just outside Chicago. And while we kind of, you know, appeared as an almost kind of picture perfect, happy family…and you know, in many ways, we were happy, but we were also all carrying around this very dark, heavy secret, which is that my father was abusive, you know, behind closed doors where no one could see it. He was abusive to me and my mom and my siblings. You know, that was the reality from my earliest memories. But it was always something that was a secret. It was a secret. And what is a secret? I mean, in any interview I do, I like to mention this. What is a secret? A secret is just something that you’ve been told or you just infer or you just intuit, you cannot talk about. So while we were presenting as this kind of like, you know, happy, normal, wholesome religious family, I was carrying around this secret that I had lived through a lot of abuse and so had other members of my family. And you mentioned this essay that I published in The Forward that was in 2016, I reached a point where I said to myself…and I was an adult by then in my early 40s, I reached a point where I just decided I will not carry this secret around with me anymore.

Dr. Fox: It’s amazing that it happened when you’re in your early 40s, right? I mean, because I can tell you from an observer, we were close in high school.

Sara: We were.

Dr. Fox: It’s not like we were acquaintances. We were close.

Sara: We were.

Dr. Fox: We were friends. We hung out. We spent a lot of time together…

Sara: It’s true.

Dr. Fox: …and no idea.

Sara: You had no idea, yeah.

Dr. Fox: Zero. And obviously, at the time, in a little bit now, I was an idiot teenager, right?

Sara: As we all were.

Dr. Fox: So, it’s entirely possible that I should have known, right? But I didn’t. And not only that, you know, if someone had said to me, there’s someone in our class who has an abusive father, who is it, right? And so you go through that horrible game. I wouldn’t have in a million years, thought, right? Never. You wouldn’t have. It wasn’t like there was any signs to me. But obviously, for you, it’s probably like, why the hell doesn’t everyone know this or see this? Or, did you feel like we’re doing a good job of hiding this?

Sara: You know, this is really deep what you’re talking about. And I think it’s a really insightful question on your part.

Dr. Fox: Well, thanks for that.

Sara: You’re welcome. Because, you know, to me, it was obvious. You know, it was obvious to me. Now, looking back, I’m realizing, of course, it wasn’t obvious to anyone else. But it was obvious to me because I felt that I was… I mean, look, we all have kind of our external personas that we put out into the world, and then we have our internal realities. I mean, that’s the case, I think, probably for every person, right? Nobody walks around in the world, you know, sharing all of our innermost experiences. You know, we keep certain things guarded. All people have to keep certain things guarded. But I think that that split of feeling like I needed to portray a certain image on the outside while I was holding a different reality on the inside, at a certain point, I just couldn’t hold that duality anymore. But as you know, as a child and as a teenager, I think I definitely wanted to portray or I just felt that I had to portray, you know, this image of being happy and popular and academically successful. But inside, you know, I was dealing with really heavy depression and anxiety from the time I was a young child. As an adult, I just decided I couldn’t hold that anymore. I couldn’t suspend that anymore.

Dr. Fox: When you mentioned earlier that a secret is something…and I think you had three words where either you’re told, like instructed, you infer or you intuit. So when you were a child, which of the three was the reason you kept it a secret?

Sara: That’s a really good question. I intuited. I just felt…nobody ever told me, you can’t talk about this. It was obvious to me. Even from the age of, you know, 8, 9, 10, it was obvious to me if I did talk about this, my dad would lose his job and our family would collapse. And where would we go and who would we be? And I don’t know how I knew that or felt that, but I knew that and I felt that. And I assumed this duty of keeping things on lockdown, you know, and keeping silent about the abuse that I was facing. And to be honest with you, you know, from the time I was a kid, it was like, every day that I got up and got dressed and ate breakfast and went to school, I had this awareness, not that I was putting on a mask per se, but that I was putting on a certain outward-facing persona and it wasn’t the full picture of who I was. And that is something hard to live with.

Dr. Fox: Like you said, I think a lot of people do that when they leave the house in the morning, but to a much lesser degree or lesser stakes. Was there anybody who either did ask you, say like, what’s up? Like, you know, why is this happening? Or, you know, I see a bruise or whatever it might be that would, you know, make them think there’s something off in the family? Or just one night, sort of like, you know, you just had to tell somebody?

Sara: So, I mean, from the time I was a kid, I did confide in my best friend growing up. I actually dedicated the book to her. Her name is Nicole. I dedicated the book to her because she was the only person I was fully honest with from a young age, from maybe, you know, third or fourth, fifth grade. So like, we’re talking about secrets. You know, I was keeping a secret, but I wasn’t. I was only mostly keeping it. I did share honestly and truthfully, probably, you know, with my best friend growing up. And then as I got older, you know, with a few chosen close friends, I was open about what was going on. But, you know, we were all kids. It’s not like your friends, you know, at 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, they’re kids, too. They can’t help you. What are they going to do? But I do write in the book I did have a really meaningful connection with a teacher.

Dr. Fox: Yeah, I was going to ask you about her.

Sara: Yeah. I had a really meaningful connection with a teacher in high school my senior year. And she noticed, she picked up on it. And she is the only teacher I’ve ever had who picked up on it.

Dr. Fox: I was going to ask you why do you think she was able to do it? Just, she had a wisdom about her?

Sara: Yes.

Dr. Fox: Just because, you know, she understood family or…?

Sara: Yeah. I think she was, she is a deep and wise person. And I think, you know, and a smart person. I don’t mean book smart. I mean, emotionally smart. And, you know, I have a son and I tell this to my son all the time. I was like, being smart is just about paying attention. And I really believe that. And, you know, you asked me, how did this teacher know? I think she was paying attention. And I think most of us don’t pay attention. Whether, you know, most of us don’t pay attention. And she was paying attention and she saw me somehow. And beneath the, you know, veneer that I was putting out of being happy and “normal,” she kind of saw that there was something brewing underneath the surface. And I confided in her in high school when I was a senior and she didn’t… It was a different time also. We need to talk about that.

Dr. Fox: Oh, yeah. This is the ’80s and ’90s.

Sara: This is the ’90s. And I think it is different today in schools, you know, where there’s more of a system in place for reporting and for really trying to extricate kids who are in an abusive situation. But at that time, you know, this was 30 years ago. It wasn’t so much about, well, we’re going to call the police and we’re going to call child services. It wasn’t that kind of approach. But she was there and she was with me. And she sat with me while I cried. And she invited me to her home. And I spent, you know, a lot of time at her house and that was extremely, extremely meaningful. And it made me feel like there are people who care. And, you know, in a way, saved me. You know, that did save me for that time. It made me feel less alone, for sure.

Dr. Fox: It is amazing. I mean, to think again, I remember those times back then, it was different from now. You know, our only guidance in the high school was one of our friends’ moms who helped people apply to college. Like, that was guidance. That’s all we got guided on. There was no mental health, that’s for damn sure.

Sara: It’s so crazy. You know, I have talked about this on other podcasts. But, you know, I look at our high school and there were what, 300 kids, something like that? Not a single social worker on staff. I mean, not a single one. Like, what happens to a kid who’s going through a hard time at home, who’s having a mental health struggle, who’s depressed, who’s anxious?

Dr. Fox: You stayed home. That’s it.

Sara: You stayed home and watched TV. And, you know, I mean, where were the resources? I mean, when it was the ’90s, we didn’t think of it as the Dark Ages. But now that we’re looking back, it almost feels prehistoric.

Dr. Fox: It was, yeah. I’m impressed that you had a teacher who picked up on this because I would have predicted nobody would have, you know, and I think it definitely speaks to her care and her skill, obviously as a teacher and as a human. But I mean, that’s the exception, I would imagine.

Sara: It is the exception.

Dr. Fox: And do you think that had you been a child today instead of then, it would have been different?

Sara: You know, that’s a good question. Would it be different today? Let’s put it this way. I would hope so. I would hope so. Like, would it be? I don’t know. You know, I feel like almost I would want to turn the question to you, Nady, because you have four kids and your kids have been through the school system. Like, do you think there is more awareness in the school system today when kids are going through something hard at home?

Dr. Fox: I would say it depends on the school. So my experience with schools, first of all, it’s limited because all my kids went to private Jewish schools. So, that’s like two limiting factors.

Sara: Sure.

Dr. Fox: But we’ve been through many of them just because we moved and this or that. And I would say some of them are very, very good. Recognizing problems is, I don’t think, an issue with the schools. They’re not on the prowl looking for kids who are being abused. It doesn’t work like that, right?

Sara: Sure. Sure.

Dr. Fox: And obviously, there’s some teachers who are more insightful than others and whatnot. But I would say once something’s clear that there’s something going on with a kid, I think they’re all better than it was when we grew up, right?

Sara: Yeah.

Dr. Fox: All of them across the board. But I would say some of them are much better than others in addressing it and how to do it thoughtfully, how to do it in a caring way, professionally. There’s all these things that have to be…you know, to do it well is so hard. And it’s a real skill. Yeah. Some of the schools have been unbelievable, amazing, that I have a lot of pride in them and others fall short. But I think they all intend to be better.

Sara: Yeah. I mean, from what I’ve gathered from different people I’ve talked to about this subject, it does seem like now, you know, there’s more mental health awareness in general and particularly more mental health awareness for kids. And, you know, it seems like there are social workers on staff now, even in, you know, private Jewish schools, which, there weren’t when we were growing up.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. I mean, so where my kids went to high school, the Frisch High School in New Jersey, so, they now have a thousand students.

Sara: That’s a lot of students.

Dr. Fox: It’s a lot of students. And so actually, [inaudible 00:17:05] works there now. She’s a psychologist there.

Sara: That is so important.

Dr. Fox: They have a full staff. There’s several of them, right. I think it’s eight or something, you know, psychologists, social workers, counselors, because it really, really matters to them.

Sara: So, this is a change. This is a change.

Dr. Fox: Yeah. So, it’s one of the places that does it really, really well, is what I would say. Thank God. And all of them have… It’s just an issue obviously, how good are they? How many are they?

Sara: Sure. Sure.

Dr. Fox: You know, there’s varying levels of talent, but definitely the effort is there.

Sara: There’s a shift.

Dr. Fox: And we’re at 100%.

Sara: I do think there’s a shift.

Dr. Fox: A 100%, that is a positive change. What led you to turn your story into a book specifically? So you said you wanted to tell your story, right? So you published a piece, shorter, you know. But what led you to say, I want this to be a book that people can open and read and have hundreds of pages or, you know, get on an electronic device and read it that way, whatever, you know, because that’s a big, big difference? There’s a lot more choices that have to be made, a lot more work that has to go into it. Why a book?

Sara: Why a book? So, I actually started writing this book when I was in college, if you can believe it. I was taking a writing course and the professor just gave us a very open assignment, which was, you know, turn in 40 pages without any guidelines about what we should write about, subject matter. It was very wide open. And, you know, I was 20 at the time and I sat down at the computer and this story just kind of came pouring out of me. So you ask, how did I decide to make this a book? It’s really been something that I’ve always been working on. So I did start working on it, you know, in college. And then I put it aside for a long time because I had a lot of reservations about publishing it, as you can probably imagine, you know.

And when I first started working on this book, you know, my father was still a pulpit rabbi. He was still the head of a community. My parents were still married. I still had young siblings at home. You know, if I would have published this book years ago, you know, it would have caused a real and very serious crisis in my family and for my parents and for the community. And I was still feeling quite protective of my family. And I did I know that my father had been abusive? Of course, but I still felt protective of him. And I felt protective of my mother, who was still married to him. Now, whether or not she should or shouldn’t have been married to him, put that aside for the moment. But she was married to him. And I didn’t want to hurt my mom. And I didn’t want to, you know, ruin our family’s reputation, so to speak.

So, there were a bunch of things that shifted as I got older. One is that after 40 years of marriage, my mother finally left my father. He was actually becoming increasingly abusive to her as they were getting older after the kids left home. You know, when the kids left home, there was a moment where I thought, you know, well, maybe this will be like a nice, quiet retirement for my parents. They had moved to Florida by then. And I thought, “Well, God, you know, maybe their story could have a happy ending somehow.” But of course, that’s a mirage. That’s wishful thinking. And the abuse actually accelerated. And my mother, to her credit, and it takes tremendous, tremendous, tremendous courage to leave an abusive marriage. I don’t think there is full understanding, even today in 2024, of how hard it is to leave an abusive marriage. But my mother did. And once she left, that did create an opening where I started to feel, “Wait a minute, maybe I can talk about this now. Maybe this is the time.”

Dr. Fox: I mean, there’s definitely logistic hesitations, I guess I would refer to them. You know, if I publish a book, all hell’s going to break loose.

Sara: All hell’s going to break loose.

Dr. Fox: I want to ask you about another hesitation like that sort of internal part about coming open, because I’m actually going to read you a quote from your own book that particularly moved me.

Sara: Oh, good.

Dr. Fox: You write: “It will take a lifetime to understand that I can record everything I know, everything I think about and everything that happened to me, and I will not vanish.” This idea that if I write a book, it’s going to somehow not empower me, which is probably what it did, but that it will somehow diminish me. It’ll make me disappear, will make me go lower. And that was something at least earlier, that you felt if you tell your story, you’re going to go away. How long did it take for that mentality, if ever, to sort of go away?

Sara: Decades, actually. Decades. It took decades. I felt that, you know, “if I expose what’s going on in my family,” like you said, Nady, it’s all hell will break loose. It will be the destruction of my family. And my deepest fear is it would be the destruction of myself because everything that I know and hold dear is just going to come apart. And really, like the beauty of life and the beauty of this experience for me is what I found is that the exact opposite is true, the exact opposite. So, writing this book is something that I was very nervous. I mean, nervous is an understatement. I was, you know, in a way, terrified to write it. But what I found was that the process of writing it and even, you know, perhaps even more so than the process of writing and the process of publishing it, not only did it not destroy me, but it has been absolutely life-affirming and life-giving. And it has opened up so many important dialogues.

So I should just say, you know, since the book has come out, I’ve heard from so many people, both from my own past and, you know, congregants, former congregants of my father who have reached out to me and either shared their own stories with me or they’ve reached out to me wanting to learn more about my experience. Either way, it’s become this starting point for dialogue. And it has not destroyed my family, but I would say really given strength to my family. And I’ve been very lucky that, you know, I’ve gotten a lot of support around this book.

Dr. Fox: It’s so interesting because, you know, I took some notes before and this just came to me when you said that. So, I’m jumping around, obviously.

Sara: Please, jump.

Dr. Fox: The book part sort of ends right after your father dies, essentially. And you sort of describe, you know, that you weren’t at the funeral, COVID, you know, some of your brothers were there, but you were watching. And you didn’t really have that Jewish experience of a loss in terms of the funeral, in terms of Shiva, in terms of people coming and telling you stories about your father. You know, like, a lot of people sort of envision, right, that Shiva’s like…you didn’t really have that, obviously, for many reasons, right?

Sara: True. True.

Dr. Fox: But clearly, that didn’t happen for you. And so in that process, you don’t sort of get some closure. You don’t get those memories you never knew about, those stories, good and bad, that you never knew about, sort of this idea to wrap up someone’s life over time. But I wonder if the book is sort of like a surrogate for that if you think about it, right? So, you know, what does it mean to sit Shiva for your father, who you obviously have very complicated emotions about because he was abusive, but he was your father? And, you know, you didn’t have a chance to do that. But by writing the book, you’re sort of getting the same idea, people are coming to you and telling you things about him that maybe you didn’t know or just to comfort you because of your past, in a way, that you weren’t expecting people from the past, you know, that show up, you haven’t seen forever. I can see why that would be therapeutic in a way.

Sara: Therapeutic is a great word to describe it. So, everything you’re saying is true. I did miss out, like you said, for multiple reasons on some of those traditional rituals, you know, attending a parent’s funeral, attending the Shiva, which is the Jewish seven-day morning period. All of that was, you know, kind of not available to me. But writing the book, that’s a really…I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you capture it very well. It did serve that same purpose in the sense that so many people reached out and so many people wrote to share their stories with me, like you said, good and bad. And that’s been extremely powerful and extremely moving.

Dr. Fox: Because I mean, you know, reading the book, you would think, right, if someone said, “Hey, someone you know wrote a book about growing up in an abusive home,” one would think that the book is just going to be like a total dump on…against the father, right?

Sara: A takedown. A takedown.

Dr. Fox: As well it should be.

Sara: Sure.

Dr. Fox: But reading the book, it’s not that kind of read. You can sort of from the reader’s perspective, it’s like you’re grappling with this idea that you have an abusive father who, like, ruined your family. But he’s your father, right, and you can’t pull out your emotions of your father, because not every experience in your life is bad with your father.

Sara: A 100%.

Dr. Fox: And so, you have a lot of beautiful experiences and wonderful. And similarly, your father, the man, the rabbi, the person, right, not your father, had a lot of horrible things he did in his life and things he did to people, but also a lot of amazing things he did for people and to people in his life. And it’s sort of this back and forth in your mind of how do I process a person who I have such polar feelings about at the same time? It’s part of the reason this book is so moving, again, because, you know, it’s not just saying how horrible everything was. You kind of like come through your emotions with the reader.

Sara: Yeah. I’m really glad you mentioned that, because that was something that was super-important to me when I was working on the book. I didn’t want to write a takedown. I didn’t want to write a book about my father where he’s, you know, a monster because he’s not a monster. He was not a monster. He was a man, a broken man who, himself, was traumatized. You know, and it’s like when you look at intergenerational trauma, because that’s what this is, you know. So, we were abused because my father was abusive to us. But why was he abusive? He, himself, had been abused by his father. Why was his father abusive? Probably because he had been abused by his father. And you can go back and back and back. And so, I think there is a humanity we need to recognize when people, you know, that saying, hurt people, hurt people. You know, I think when someone’s abusive, it’s easy to kind of write them off and say, well, this person is a terrible person and they have no redeeming qualities. But we’re all human and we’re all broken to different degrees and in different ways. But I wanted to write a book that showed my father in the full scope of his humanity. And I wanted to show that no person is all bad or all good. And we’re all containing, you know, both at the same time, essentially.

Dr. Fox: Is that how you picked the title for the book?

Sara: It’s so funny. The title of the book, it went through so many iterations. This is probably maybe like the sixth title that we came up with. And different titles were rejected by the marketing team and other titles were rejected by the editorial team. And honestly, my editor had said to me, “You need to think of a title” because the one I had been using, they didn’t like. And so, all of a sudden, this just popped into my head. It was really like an inspired moment when I remembered this quote from Genesis for the title. But I’m really happy with it.

Dr. Fox: It has a lot of meaning, obviously.

Sara: Yeah. I feel like it’s open to…you can interpret the title in a lot of different ways, which I like. I think it’s evocative.

Dr. Fox: Thank you for listening to the “Healthful Woman” podcast. To learn more about our podcast, please visit our website at www.healthfulwoman.com. That’s healthfulwoman.com. If you have any questions about this podcast or any other topic you would like us to address, please feel free to email us at hw@healthfulwoman.com. Have a great day. The information discussed in “Healthful Woman” is intended for educational uses only, it does not replace medical care from your physician. “Healthful Woman” is meant to expand your knowledge of women’s health and does not replace ongoing care from your regular physician or gynecologist. We encourage you to speak with your doctor about specific diagnoses and treatment options for an effective treatment plan.