Saving Your Mental Health By Being A Change Agent With Amanda Acker

 

If you want to change your bad habits, you must first change yourself. You need to understand that nobody is forcing you to do these traumatic things. It’s your choice to do drugs, go into an abusive relationship, or go to jail. You are the common denominator. That is why you have to start changing your narrative.

 

Join Timothy J. Hayes, Psy.D as he talks to Amanda Acker about how she turned her life around from being a formerly incarcerated person and addict. Amanda is now on a mission to change the way society labels people with mental illness. She is the host of The Let Good Things In Show, where she shares her story and the stories of other formerly incarcerated people and addicts. Discover that you need to change yourself first and foremost. Start changing your narrative today!

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

 

Saving Your Mental Health By Being A Change Agent With Amanda Acker

Amanda Acker is a formerly incarcerated person and addict who has struggled with feeling less than human and not worthy of the good things in life. Amanda is now on a mission to change the narrative. She created her podcast, The Let Good Things In Show to share not only her story but also the stories of other formerly incarcerated people, addicts, and those who have dealt with mental illness.

She did this to inspire those with similar stories and also to help change the way society views those people. Amanda truly believes that before anything, we are all human first and we deserve to be treated equally. There is a story behind every bad decision. She’s determined to be part of the change that is needed to end the stigma.

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Amanda, thank you so much for being here. It’s delightful to finally see you face to face.

Thank you so much for having me on. I’m grateful to be here.

I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about how you got into the work you’re doing and what drives your passion for it.

At the age of fifteen, my parents divorced. I grew up very sheltered. Mental health was not something that we talked about. This was the ’90s. It was still something that if you went to see a therapist, you were a crazy person. There were all these different stereotypes that were fed to me. When I went to college, I started to experience self-harm. I was doing drugs and partying. I felt as though I was no longer me. Looking back, I was depressed. I had a lot of issues that I didn’t deal with because I didn’t know how to. That developed an addiction issue that led well into my adult life.

I was incarcerated due to me feeling like I had to be accepted by everyone around me because I didn’t want to be alone. I had a lot of abandonment issues. When I got out of jail, I was immersed in an intensive outpatient program where I was going to group therapy. I had individual therapy. I saw a psychiatrist and all these things for the first time in my life. This was in my early twenties. In that experience, I was diagnosed with anxiety, major depressive disorder, OCD, and anorexia.

Those were my textbook diagnoses. I was prescribed all these medications. They were supposed to make me better and help me navigate through living sober and all this stuff. Every time I would take medication, it would make me into a shell of myself. Either the medication would make me feel like I had no emotions and I hated that feeling or make me feel like I was on a cloud somewhere and not on Earth anymore. I hated medication. I didn’t want to take them.

I went through a lot of my life with no resources because I didn’t want medication. My mind told me, “If you go to therapy, they’re going to make you take medication because you have all these issues.” I stopped taking care of my mental health for a long time. If we fast-forward to now and to answer your question, I started my podcast to share my story. I decided that I wanted to share the stories of others who have been through incarceration, addiction, and mental illness.

Those were my three topics and still are. Through that process, doing research, and meeting different people from different walks of life and diagnoses, I learned that there are ways to stay grounded and still have anxiety, OCD, and things like that. I’ll be able to survive without the medication part of it through breathing exercises, going to therapy, and talking about it. I’ve been seeing my therapist. When I first started, I explained to her my past diagnoses.

 

There are ways to stay grounded while still having anxiety, OCD, and other things without the medication part.

 

She said, “You should go see your PCP and take medication.” I told her, “I’m not taking medication. I don’t want it. I don’t like the way it makes me feel.” She started to notice that I have PTSD very badly. That’s why I have nightmares and the anxiety that I have. Everything stems from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. We’re doing exposure therapy. It has been the best thing that I’ve ever experienced in my recovery. I’ve been sober for years.

I do the podcast because I want to share with the world that there are different ways to deal with things. I’ve interviewed people who do take medications and that’s the coping mechanism that works for them. That’s fine, but there are also other ways to deal with anxiety, PTSD, and these things. A lot of times, we’re told we have to be medicated. I want to share with the world that there are different ways. We can recover and choose to recover in the way that works for us.

What we’re doing here on the show is very similar. We’re trying to get people to understand there is a wide range of things to do that need to be done for an individual to have a healthy, well-rounded, joyful, and productive life. Dr. Mark Hyman, who’s a functional medicine specialist, would say, “This isn’t rocket science.” We have known for a long time that to have a healthy life, you need more than just clean food, clean water, and sleep.

You also need a sense of belonging, connection in a community, purpose in life, and love in your life. If you start taking care of those things in a coordinated effort, it’s possible for most people to have a healthy, loving, joyful, and rewarding life. If those things start to get out of whack, you know that you’re going to look at those various aspects. You are given tools to treat things like the trauma and some of the body and brain chemistry issues that come with the luck of the draw when we’re born. A lot of it can be handled with nutrition, food sensitivities, and therapy.

There are people who get tremendous benefits from the medications, but there are a lot of people that don’t. If you’re on 3 or 4 medications and you still feel like your life is a mess, we’re trying to let people know that there are all kinds of other good stuff to do. You mentioned exposure therapy. Is there a way for you to describe to the audience what that looks like for you and how it’s panning out in an individual session?

Before I dove into exposure therapy, I thought I had to look at pictures and things, but that’s not what it is. What I do through this process is in the beginning, my therapist and I wrote a list of the things that triggered my memories the most, the anxiety, and the things that made the memories come back more so than living everyday life. We rated them, “This one is at 50. This was 40, 30, 20, and down.”

What I do in our sessions is I record myself telling the traumatic experience. This is a relationship. I’m telling the story of this relationship that is causing this Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in my life. After the session and I tell my story and it’s recorded, I stop recording. We will talk a little bit about it. I pick what I want to do as my outside-of-session exposure.

It’s me deciding, “Do I want to read, look at, or watch these things that trigger me?” I have to do that every single day. I have to listen back to the recording of me telling the story at least once before every session. What’s happening is habituation. I’m starting to lose some of that emotional attachment to the story. If you say a word over and over again, it loses all meaning. That’s the point.

 

 

It’s helping me to be able to function. I had this epiphany through this process that I don’t need substances to enjoy life because I smoked marijuana since the age of eighteen. Whenever I stopped drinking and all the other drugs, I thought, “How am I going to handle my anxiety?” I was prescribed medical marijuana. I was using that to curb some of my anxiety and PTSD symptoms.

I noticed I was using it as a crutch. I was high all the time. It wasn’t healthy anymore and it probably never was for me being an addict. I decided to put down the vaping of it, but to sleep without nightmares, I was taking THC pills. I would take one a night, go to sleep, and not have nightmares. I got COVID. I wasn’t taking them when I was sick. I was sleeping regardless if I wanted to or not.

Whenever I took one after I was starting to feel better, I hated the way it made me feel. I felt gross. I was like, “I don’t want to feel this way.” What I noticed is I stopped taking it. I don’t have nightmares anymore. I have trouble falling asleep. That didn’t go away. My nightmares were always about this particular person. Now, I can sleep through the night. There are no substances involved. I’m not taking a pill, a pharmaceutical, or marijuana. It’s natural ease.

I don’t know how to explain it. Breathing exercises are a part of it too. I’m learning to control my nervous system, breathing in, counting to three, and slowly breathing out. It has been a tremendous experience. That’s what it is. It’s parallel to my experience through the process. I’m still in the process. I don’t know what the end result might be, but that’s where I’m at.

We teach the breath and gain some control over it. Using voluntary control is one of the best ways to get my body to understand that I’m not being threatened. It doesn’t have to go fight or flight. It doesn’t have to release all those hormones and adrenaline. More people are finding that it’s extraordinarily useful to practice breathing exercises and then pair them with these various therapy techniques like the one you’re describing.

What we know is that years ago, when I was in therapy training for trauma, somebody said, “If you’re cruising along in life and you’re fairly healthy with reasonable relationships and functioning, and all of a sudden this horrible trauma happens, in an instant, your life has changed.” Why would the psychiatric and medical profession say, “That’s it? Traumas happen. You’re stuck. You’re going to be that way for the rest of your life.”

If my brain or internal functioning can change that dramatically in an instant, why can’t it go back in a similarly short period? That led to people starting to develop these research-based techniques for shifting the brain functioning, the value that we put on certain thought patterns, how that generates our emotions, and the emotional connection we have to certain memories.

Things that have come on board online in the research since then and are very practical in therapy sessions include things like memory reconsolidation, this exposure work you’re doing, EMDR, and Brainspotting. The list goes on. People are doing more of this. No one thing works well for everybody, but by the time you’re done looking at all of these different things, a broad percentage of people are benefiting and resolving their trauma if they’re willing to do something other than hiding from it.

 

You don’t need to take substances to enjoy life.

 

It’s hard. It’s not like I go into these sessions excited. I hate doing it and telling the story. I don’t like the emotions it evokes in me, but I noticed that each time I do it, it gets less scary. More things are coming up that I had forgotten about in telling it over and over again. It’s like, “I forgot that happened.” It’s letting my brain release it. That’s what needs to happen to get through it.

It’s in there. Every time it gets activated, it’s driving either your perception and/or your behavior. We understand, “I don’t want to go look at this. This is unpleasant. If I don’t look at it, I’m dragging it around with me everywhere I go.” Is there another aspect of your therapy that you would say has been particularly helpful?

I like having somebody that’s not my friend or family to talk to about things. I talk to my husband about everything. He’s my best friend, but at the end of the day, I need a third-party perspective on certain things, or maybe I’ve told him the same thing so many times that he’s tired of hearing it. It’s very healing for me to know that there’s somebody else that I can go to with these issues that I have in my everyday life and get advice from somebody who is completely unbiased and doesn’t have any connection to me outside of the therapy session.

Here’s one thing I made clear to my therapist when we started because I’ve had bad therapists in the past. I told her, “I’m not here to be your friend. I don’t want to know about your life. This has to be about me.” That has helped me so much. That’s huge for me. I don’t typically stand up for myself and create boundaries. Through the process, before I was in therapy, my husband helped me a lot. He’s in tune with certain things that I’m not.

I went to him for help when I had my last rock bottom. He taught me about setting boundaries and values, speaking them, putting my foot down, saying, “This is what I want,” and not allowing people and things into my life that are going to hurt me knowingly. We don’t always know if someone is going to hurt us. That’s impossible, but there are certain warning signs and character traits.

I don’t hang out with people who party and drink all the time because that’s not healthy for me. That’s creating these boundaries. In therapy, I put that boundary up because I’ve experienced therapy in the past that didn’t help me because all the person or therapist was doing was comparing my life to theirs. That’s not helpful for me. It could be for somebody else, but for me, that didn’t work.

This is the most beneficial therapy I’ve ever had in my life through the talk therapy, the exposure therapy, and then also not having my tools from before therapy like positive affirmations, realizing when I’m having negative thoughts, and taking a moment to say, “Why am I thinking that way? Why do I feel I’m not good enough? Is there anything that can prove the fact that I’m not good enough for this certain thing that I want?”

I’ve lived my life in that fight or flight mode since I can remember. It’s foreign to me not to be in that mode. It’s keeping myself grounded and aware of what’s real and what fear is because unless my life is threatened, it’s not fear. It’s not like if I do it, something horrendous is going to happen. It’s just that it’s uncomfortable. It’s getting comfortable being uncomfortable.

 

 

It’s getting some balance and limits. One of the things you said was about the setting of boundaries. The way I’ve talked about it to people for years is that anybody can do something abusive towards me. I can be walking down the street and somebody can throw something at my head or insults. I can’t prevent that. However, I have to actively participate in an abusive relationship pattern.

I start to uncover, understand, and do some research about what’s a healthy relationship communication pattern, what’s unhealthy, and what’s abusive. There’s a book out there titled Boundaries. Cloud and Townsend did that very popular book on boundaries. There’s a book out there, The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond by Patricia Evans. There’s the Codependent No More book by Melody Beattie.

There are good descriptions in these books of abusive patterns, how we fall into them, and what we might do to get out of them. For those who are willing to have a better life, there are some good things you can learn in terms of patterns. There are other techniques and there’s good therapy that can be done. Congratulations to you for being willing to turn and look at the difficult things that each of us needs to look at to make our lives better.

Thank you. It’s not easy, but old Amanda would never have done this because I was so stuck in self-sabotage and feeling not good enough, “I’m a felon. I’m an addict.” I would label myself. There’s a part of me that wishes I would have done this sooner in my life, but at the same time, now that I’ve experienced all those things and I’m here, I can help spread this word to people who may be still in that shame cycle that I was in and help them get out of it sooner. It’s my purpose to be here to spread that word.

You mentioned old Amanda. Do you have a line of demarcation? Was there a defining moment for you that helped you understand it’s time to switch out of the old pattern that Amanda was doing into a new pattern that Amanda can do?

This was years ago. I had this job that I thought was my dream job. It was everything to me, but I lost the job. I almost destroyed my marriage during this employment. I was doing things that were completely out of character and sabotaging myself. I don’t know why. When I lost the job, I was sitting in my closet crying. I was by myself. Nobody was home but me. I told myself, “I need to die. I need to end my life. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I keep ending up here.”

I kept ending up alone, crying in a closet, a corner, or wherever. I didn’t understand why. I was so sick of people hurting me and being used and abused. You name it. At that moment, I had this spiritual awakening, epiphany, or however you want to label it that told me that I needed to keep going, do the hard work, and figure out who I am. I was the common denominator in all of these scenarios that happened throughout my life. Nobody did it to me.

There were some situations where I was not at fault to some degree, but I made the choices that led me to those situations. Nobody made me get into that abusive relationship and make the choice that got me incarcerated. I had to look at that. That was the moment when everything changed. My life has drastically gotten better since then. We moved out of the apartment. I’m living in this dream home. My marriage is better than it has ever been. I’m better than I’ve ever been. I’m sober. I’m living life the way I always dreamed of living it through that experience. That was the turning point.

 

Don’t go to therapy to make friends. It has to be all about you.

 

Congratulations again for that. Much of what you were saying reminds me of James Purpora, who wrote the book Perception: Seeing Is Not Believing. He had a very similar story. When he got out, he started taking 100% responsibility for what he is thinking, feeling, and doing. It was the beginning of his learning all kinds of good stuff to turn his life around. If you think back to the interviews you’ve done on your show, what are some of the more powerful people you have interviewed or lessons you’ve taken from the interviews you’ve done?

I interviewed Mark Hattas. That was one of my favorite interviews because I’ve never met anyone prior to him who was diagnosed with bipolar in the manner that he was diagnosed. He went through a lot of his life without this mental illness. To not be on any medications surprised me. It was so interesting to talk with him. What I learned from him was a sleeping thing with nightmares.

I forget who it was that taught him this. He shared it with me and my audience. It was about taking those monsters from your dream and turning them into something else. That was pivotal for me because there are a lot of nasty things that our brains produce when we’re having bad dreams. To look at it differently in that manner, I never thought to do that. That was a huge learning for me.

I have sleep problems. Sometimes I can’t fall asleep and I’ll be up. You sit there and go, “If I fall asleep now, I’ll get 2 or 3 hours of sleep.” He said to not do that, “If you’re awake, you’re awake for a reason. Get up and do something. Don’t beat yourself up over it.” That was a huge shift in my thinking around it. Sometimes I don’t remember to do that, but there have been times I hit him up with, “But why?” Nine times out of ten, if I start thinking about why I’m awake, I’ll fall asleep because my brain is focused on something else rather than trying to fall asleep.

I had this one guest, Joseph Reid. He’s amazing. He has a whole program for people who suffer from mental illnesses. Broken People is the name of his company. He has a book. He’s a very inspiring person. Of some of the formerly incarcerated people I’ve had on, Craig Stanland is by far my favorite. His story is inspiring. He was in federal prison. Now, he helps people reinvent their lives. He’s pretty great.

All my guests are great. There are so many. I’ll go into an interview. All day, I get nervous. I’m like, “I don’t want to do it. Maybe I should push it off.” Once I do it at the end of it, I always leave being like, “I was meant to hear that story and be inspired by that person.” Every one of my guests has inspired me in some way. Some have taught me things too.

I had somebody on early for one of my first interviews. She does a lot of meditation work. She did a guided meditation at the end of the episode for my audience. It was beautiful. Her name’s Eliana Barosco. She’s in England. She’s not in America. She’s beautiful. I’m not a meditator. I don’t practice meditation at this point in my life, but it gave me goosebumps and made me cry. It was great.

What’s the name of the podcast again?

 

 

It’s called The Let Good Things In Show.

How long have you been doing it?

Since July 2021.

How often do you post episodes?

Typically, it’s once a week. When I first started, I released twice a week because I was doing solo episodes and the interviews each week, but that got to be a little bit overwhelming for me to promote and all of that. I only do interviews now. I release every Saturday at 8:00. I’m becoming more consistent as I go. When I was sick, I didn’t release. It’s every week on Saturdays at 8:00 Eastern Time typically.

If you take a breath, settle in here, and think, “I’ve got this opportunity with this other audience,” what’s something we haven’t even touched on yet that you want to share with us, or 2 or 3 things?

One thing that I often talk about is the labels that society puts on us, whether you’re a formerly incarcerated person or an addict, you have a mental illness, you’re overweight, or whatever the labels might be. One of the main things that I always like to say is that before anything, we’re all human first and we deserve to be treated as such. It doesn’t matter what happened in your past or what you look like. We are all equal. We all put our pants on the same way when we wake up in the morning. We all deserve the good things in life. I try to convey the message that our past doesn’t have to define our future. Those all coincide with each other.

I lived in shame and a horrible dark place mentally for so long. Now that I’m getting myself out of that and seeing the world for what it is, anything is possible. It doesn’t matter what has happened to you. I’ve interviewed and met people who were incarcerated for twenty-plus years and are now motivational speakers and life coaches. They have jobs at Microsoft. I have talked to people who have mental illnesses and are doing amazing things. Anything is possible. You have to learn to love yourself first and know what you want. You’ve got to figure out your purpose and passion in life and go for it. The sky is the limit. That’s how I feel.

 

We are all humans and deserve to be treated as such.

 

Krishnamurti would say over and over again, “The word is not the thing. You are not what you think you are and you are not what anybody else thinks you are.” What’s another aspect of your life or the work you do?

One thing I haven’t talked about in a while is that I’m a huge fan of affirmations. They helped me before I started therapy again and all of that when I first had that pivotal moment in my life. I’m telling myself positive things all the time and waking up in the morning. When I’m in the shower, I’m telling myself. You don’t even have to say them out loud. Think them. It’s whatever works for you, “I am good enough. I am mentally and physically strong.”

It’s telling yourself these positive affirmations. It’s not like you say a positive affirmation and your whole life is going to change, but it’s a step in the right direction to help stop the negative self-talk because I was consumed with negative self-talk. I still am mean to myself. I was abusive to myself. Let’s put it that way. Repeating these things to yourself helps you to see yourself in a different light, “Didn’t I say I am good enough? Why am I now saying I’m not?”

You start having those conversations with yourself. Your values and figuring those out are huge. What do you value in life? What is important to you? What will you not tolerate? That is something that I started thinking about. What is it that I won’t tolerate in my life? It’s holding yourself to that. When you tell yourself that you’re going to do something and then you don’t, you let yourself down.

The more you do that, the more you’re going to not trust yourself. We have to be able to trust ourselves or we’re not going to be able to trust anybody else. How can we expect someone else to trust us? It’s doing those personal inventories and taking the time to talk to yourself. You’re not crazy if you talk to yourself. Do it and examine why you’re thinking the way you are. It’s so important.

It’s a powerful pattern that we can get into and a powerful tool we can use. Michael Singer talks about it in The Untethered Soul. He says, “We have grown so accustomed to the negative self-talk in our heads that we act like it’s not there.” However, if we had a transcript of my negative self-talk and you gave it to one of my best friends and had him or her follow me around all day reading it to me, I would probably kick them out of my life by noon.

I wouldn’t tolerate anybody talking to me the way my negative self-talk pattern runs in my head. When we wake up and recognize that, then it seems absurd. We can start doing something with it, but if we aren’t even questioning it and bringing our awareness to it, we have gotten so used to it that it runs in a pattern. We don’t question it. The more we let it run in the background, the more it programs us to believe it.

It’s crazy how our thoughts are so powerful. There’s another podcast guest I had, Sam Led. He talked a lot about our thoughts, anxieties, and how our thoughts aren’t the reality. They’re just thoughts. They will pass. These things that you worry about all the time will pass. You have to keep moving forward. I probably botched what he said, but it was something along those lines. That was a powerful interview as well. I like Mike Dooley. He always says, “Our thoughts become things, so choose the good ones.” That’s very true.

 

 

It’s the difference between creating consciously and unconsciously. If I’m going to let this stuff in the background, push it aside, and ignore it, it’s still running. It still has an influence on me and it still creates and shifts my perception. That leads to the building blocks of what I end up doing and my behavior. I get conscious about it and I’m willing to monitor my thought process, call a timeout when it goes in a negative direction, and do something, whether it’s your positive affirmations, EFT tapping sessions, or reading the list, “Here are my values and priorities. Here’s what I truly feel about myself on my good days.” If I read that, I’m disrupting that negative pattern. I don’t let it keep running unconsciously and then I choose that direction for my thoughts, consciously creating a better tomorrow.

I like that you mentioned tapping too. I forgot about tapping. I love tapping. I don’t practice it regularly, but I did have someone on my show who did tapping. I had never experienced anything like that. Even in one sitting of doing that, I felt like I had a weight lifted off of me afterward. Tapping is so powerful. Thank you for bringing that up.

Ever since I learned that, I teach that to every one of my patients that’s willing to learn. Some people love it. Some people think it’s silly, but I’ve given the ones that like it and/or love it a tool they can use between sessions. You don’t need an apparatus or a book with you. You’ve usually got your fingertips and your mind with you wherever you go. That’s all you need.

I follow a lot of people who do tapping on social media and stuff like that. It’s crazy that something so simple can completely change how you feel at any moment, like breathing, tapping, and all these things. You don’t need anything outside of yourself to do them. They’re so powerful.

It’s blending the knowledge of the acupuncture and acupressure meridians, breathwork, and the power of intention and the focus of your thoughts. The knowledge about acupuncture and acupressure meridians has been around somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 years. We’re not talking about anything new. We’re talking about somebody by the name of Gary Craig, who had taken a whole series of very expensive proprietary energy medicine techniques. He said, “This is powerful and effective.” He had this God moment where he realized, “I don’t think it has to be that complicated.”

He created the EFT tapping and put it on the internet for free. He put up an 80-page PDF file long before we had videos like this. There weren’t any videos up. There was no YouTube and all that good stuff. It’s free. You can download the PDF file and read it. There was a twelve-page segment in the middle that I used to make copies of and give to patients if they were willing to learn it. We would do the tapping in the session. I would send them home with a PDF file or a hard copy of the twelve pages in the middle. Many lives have been transformed by the use of that tool.

There are people like Brad Yates who are staying close to what Gary Craig did and then expanding on it in a useful way. His YouTube channel has millions of views. I recommend that to people these days because it’s right there. Almost everybody has their phone with them wherever they go. You go on YouTube, type in Brad Yates, and look for the one that says, “How to Tap.” There’s a 7 to 9-minute video on what EFT tapping is and where you tap on your face, body, and fingertips. You can type, “Brad Yates anxiety, sleep, or back pain.” There’s this beautiful resource of YouTube videos available.

I’ll have to check that out.

 

Anything is possible. You just have to learn to love yourself first.

 

He was an actor who thought he needed something to fall back on. He took hypnosis training and became a hypnotherapist. He found out about Gary Craig, took training with Gary Craig, and found out that most of his sessions with people were more EFT tapping and a little bit of hypnosis at the end. One day, he got the idea to put a video on YouTube. It was Tap O’ the Mornin’. It’s a play on words top of the morning. He thought that would be it, do one pass-off interview or YouTube video.

A little bit later on, somebody said, “Why don’t you do another one? It may be Tap O’ the Evenin’.” He’s got over 1,000 videos. It has taken off. Something like that, in my opinion, doesn’t take off unless you’re pouring all kinds of money into it to advertise it, which he didn’t, or it’s just useful. People are getting good results and telling other people about it. I realize we’re running close on time here. I am very grateful that you would share with us. One more time, what is the podcast?

It’s The Let Good Things In Show.

Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your story. I wish you all the best as you move forward.

Thank you so much for having me on. I enjoyed the conversation.

 

Important Links

• The Let Good Things In Show
• Amanda Acker
• Boundaries
• The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond
• Codependent No More
• Perception: Seeing Is Not Believing
• Mark Hattas – The Let Good Things In Show episode
• Joseph Reid – The Let Good Things In Show episode
• Craig Stanland – The Let Good Things In Show episode
• Eliana Barosco – The Let Good Things In Show episode
• The Untethered Soul
• Sam Led – The Let Good Things In Show episode
• Mike Dooley
• Brad Yates – YouTube
• Tap O’ the Mornin’ – YouTube
• Tap O’ the Evenin’ – YouTube

 

About Amanda Acker

As a formerly incarcerated person and addict who has struggled with feeling less than human and not worthy of the good things in life, Amanda is now on a mission to change the narrative. She created her podcast, The Let Good Things In Show to share not only her story but the stories of other formerly incarcerated people, addicts, and those who have dealt with mental illness to not only inspire those with similar stories but also to change the way society views us. Amanda truly believes that before anything we are all human first and deserve to be treated the same. There is a story behind every “bad” decision and she is determined to be a part of the change that is needed to end the stigma.

 

 

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