[SPEAKER_02]: For me, to finally heal, I had to hold people accountable.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that meant I will not sweep this under the rug anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you cannot have a real conversation about it, if you cannot even validate that this happened, I can't have you in my life.
[SPEAKER_02]: The one thread that runs through all the signs and symptoms of fonding is self abandonment.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so it was just like my body said I can't do it any more.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would rather have me in my life than quite frankly anybody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ain't nobody safe
[SPEAKER_03]: Hey, you're really welcome back to the Prejoy's podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: My name is Eric Squizinski.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm a former fundamentalist to now shed light on the darker sides of the church from the pulpits to the pews.
[SPEAKER_03]: And today I'm bringing in a very special guest.
[SPEAKER_03]: Her name is Dr. Ingrid Clayton.
[SPEAKER_03]: She's a clinical psychologist who is here to talk about one of the most under-discussed responses to trauma.
[SPEAKER_03]: We talk about fight, flight, or freeze often, but Dr. Clayton argues that there is a fourth
[SPEAKER_03]: and that fourth F is funny.
[SPEAKER_03]: She describes this topic in detail in her brand new book titled Fawning.
[SPEAKER_03]: Why then need to please, makes us lose ourselves and how to find our way back.
[SPEAKER_03]: And today's conversation gives you just a glimpse of this important topic.
[SPEAKER_03]: This was a really helpful conversation for myself and I know it will be for you as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: So stay tuned right here on the Prejubois podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: All right, England, thank you so much for joining me on the Prejubois podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: happy to be here, Eric.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, really excited to chat with you and really enjoyed your book.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was just saying beforehand, I went through and added all these stickers so it looks like I read it because that's that's important as a podcast host, you know, die.
[SPEAKER_02]: I perform the reading.
[SPEAKER_02]: I actually enjoyed the color coded with the cover of both so you added that extra text.
[SPEAKER_03]: it looks more official.
[SPEAKER_03]: No.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, in Austin, Serity, I got a copy of the book that your team sent over and started reading it and then I went and purchased the audio version as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I've read the book and I've listened to a good chunk of it as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a really, really fantastic read and there's a lot that, like you said, is applicable to my audience.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to start out the gate.
[SPEAKER_03]: You talk about in your book,
[SPEAKER_03]: 70% of adults in the U.S. have experienced some type of traumatic event, at least once in their life.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you said, I love this quote.
[SPEAKER_03]: You said that these things are not generally outside the human experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: They are the human experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: When we think about this, you know, whenever this comes up, we talk about, you know, the flight, we talk about the
[SPEAKER_03]: But your book is obviously focused on a fourth F that doesn't get talked about, which is funny.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you just describe for my audience in brief terms what funny is and why it's important to talk about it?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, if you have a body, then you have a nervous system.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you have a nervous system, you have trauma responses, sometimes they're called threat responses or stress responses.
[SPEAKER_02]: And to your point, we've often talked about fight flight or freeze.
[SPEAKER_02]: But fonding tends to come online when fight flight or freeze or either unavailable, or they might make things worse.
[SPEAKER_02]: all systems of power really, but a lot of my work stems from childhood trauma and you think about children.
[SPEAKER_02]: They can't fight back.
[SPEAKER_02]: Their caregivers hold all the power they hold their entire life.
[SPEAKER_02]: They can't flee where they're going to run.
[SPEAKER_02]: Freeze is a common response, but fawning tends to come online when you have to continue to navigate these
[SPEAKER_02]: ongoing situations.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's day and day out.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not safe, but rather than what appears to be like an obvious declaration of I don't want this to happen like we see in fight flight or freeze.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fawning looks like we're leaning in.
[SPEAKER_02]: because the body knows there's nowhere to go.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have to figure out how to navigate these circumstances and that means keeping my caregiver, keeping the powers that be either happy, managing their moods, doing a little performance, like your joke about your reading the book, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like that would be a fun response if you did, in fact, do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, ha, oh, Ingrid, I want to make sure that you, you know, think that I'm, that I'm here and I'm ready and I'm prepared, but I'm not really at all.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, so, or, or the body can also reflexively move into this care taking, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So if someone's neglectful or absent or they've abandoned you, it's like you're wanting to kind of pull them back upright, so that hopefully,
[SPEAKER_02]: both of you can stand.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, finding is a relational trauma response.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes it's these inner personal relationships, but sometimes it's these larger systems of power that can essentially also hold your whole world, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: We are hard-wired for relationships, for belonging, for connection and yeah, that's that's why the book centers on finding.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think one of the reasons that it's
[SPEAKER_02]: is for this reason that I've alluded to, which is that it's kind of hiding in plain sight.
[SPEAKER_02]: It looks like consent.
[SPEAKER_02]: It looks like agency.
[SPEAKER_02]: It looks like I want this thing, but it's really important to name.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just as reflexive and unconscious as a fight responses, as a flight responses.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're not choosing this response.
[SPEAKER_02]: The body or answer the response that will keep us
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I want to get back to the reflexive kind of nature of this because that's the part for me that I have so many questions about but I also want to address to I mean a majority of my audience is female just given the nature of the things I talk about and I think even when I picked up the book.
[SPEAKER_03]: you default into looking at this as being a feminine response.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think a lot of times you see this depicted in media, it is the, you know, I think of that the CW shows where you have a girl who's dating the abusive boyfriend and she acts
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, you're great and you're this just to avoid further abuse or to, you know, feel kind of place in this.
[SPEAKER_03]: But you also give examples in your books like this can be a male response to and you share a sample from Duck Shepard that I think is really relevant.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you kind of explain how funny doesn't always just look like?
[SPEAKER_03]: a relationship with a partner.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like this can express itself in very masculine scenarios where there's a threat of danger.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just for context for my audience, it might be listing going, well, this doesn't involve me.
[SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't apply to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think it does tend to
[SPEAKER_02]: We tend to think of it as a gendered response, but just like all the other responses, it's an equal opportunity defender, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So that is really important to name.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have seven clients in the book, two of which are men, and I did that by design to show how it can look differently in those settings.
[SPEAKER_02]: But to your point, I was listening to armchair expert one day and they happened to be talking about the fawn response and they were talking about it in relation to Anna Kendrick's movie, which is women of the hour all about women, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And I watched the movie and I was like, yes, every single woman in that movie if you want lots of examples of what fawning.
[SPEAKER_02]: Looks like watch that movie, but DAX said in the interview, oh, I identify with the woman, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's like, I was in my car, I sort of turned up the volume, like, okay, what's what's going to happen now?
[SPEAKER_02]: And
[SPEAKER_02]: he said, he immediately gave a quick example from, I think he was like teenager, ish, and some guy rolls up and is threatening.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think he actually took his head and sort of banged it into the side of a car.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was something awful.
[SPEAKER_02]: Along those lines and Dax said I immediately was like, bro, dude, you know Like I would never do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's this sort of like ingratiating yourself, but in in this sort of way that was like dude We're cool.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're good, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like and then he went on to say and this was the thing that really stopped me in my tracks is that
[SPEAKER_02]: What stuck with him about that situation and so many others in his life with all of these stepdad's that we're rolling in and out of his life?
[SPEAKER_02]: wasn't the incidents themselves, it wasn't even the physical abuse, what he, what really stuck with him and gave him the most shame and essentially the most trauma was the way his body reflexively responded, which was to say no big deal, right, to actually pump the other guys tires, so to speak, can be like, you're cool, we're good, right, and that
[SPEAKER_02]: he said I'm so glad that I eventually grew into what is like I think a six foot tall man and however many pounds and he's a weightlifting guy he said I I'm so glad I grew out of that response in other words he felt so entitled.
[SPEAKER_02]: to a fight response and with resource and success and all these other things, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: He kind of grew out of the need to fawn and he said how grateful he was and I thought, oh my god, how many of us don't grow into a six foot to, you know, 200 plus pound guy with all kinds of resource and success.
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't have the privilege that some people have where they kind of get to the top of the food chain and they don't have to fawn.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's any system of power, it can look all kinds of different ways.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's also why I show so many different people's experience because it's not just smiling and flirting or flattering.
[SPEAKER_02]: It could be like, oh, y'all are doing drugs and in order to stay in this club, so to speak.
[SPEAKER_02]: I need to also do drugs or we're all stealing and I can't have you guys like kick me out.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm going to go along to get along in that way.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's not always performing like a goody two shoes kind of a presentation.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's whatever the context requires.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's helpful, especially as someone who hopes one day to grow into a six to man myself, you know, it's good for us, five, 11 folks to have something to make it up.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's hilarious.
[SPEAKER_03]: You described in your in your book, and I second the woman of the hour recommendation, that's a really great movie, and I'd watch it, actually.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's funny how things work, like, and maybe it's just because
[SPEAKER_03]: we all navigate the same spaces.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we watch similar things.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I have that happen a couple of times where I'm like, I watch something.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I picked up your book and start reading.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was like, I just watched that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's just something with something else recently, where I was like, that's so relevant.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now you describe in your book, this, the Japanese martial art of
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I read that clip and listen to the audiobooks, so I don't know, I just set it out loud for the first time, but, and the whole premise of that is this idea of harmonizing with your opponent, and I thought that description was really interesting, where it's like, I'm going to match or mirror their energy, their intention like what they want out of this situation, and I want to ask you on two sides as one,
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, your book goes out of its way to not vilanize people for funning because there is benefit to it and there's a there's something your body is doing that is good for you it is protecting you, but it seems like the issue is like
[SPEAKER_03]: caring it beyond that moment of immediate survival into the next stage of life or into situations where it's not necessary for survival.
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you tipto that line between not demonizing a natural body response and also going like let's talk about when this is appropriate like how do you navigate that where someone doesn't walk away going I'm a father and I feel really bad about myself you know
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, to be candid, I think the ways that we've long talked about these type of behaviors have been so shaming and so blaming that I sort of approach this material before I wrote the book coming from a place of like, what's wrong with me?
[SPEAKER_02]: Why can't I just set a healthy boundary?
[SPEAKER_02]: It seems so simple and obvious, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Just grow myself a steam, like, ingrid, why would you care what people think about you?
[SPEAKER_02]: All these ideas, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: If you look at some of the historical language related to what I think is an update of talking about it through the lens of fonding and trauma, is codependency or people pleasing?
[SPEAKER_02]: And even codependency, it's sort of originated as a counterpoint to chemical dependency in this disease model.
[SPEAKER_02]: And really with these ideas that you have this sort of addiction to control and all of these things that just felt like it's not really speaking to my experience, I couldn't resonate with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, these ideas that there's these sort of defects of character that reside in you that sort of originated out of thin air and I go, you know what the reality is is that
[SPEAKER_02]: Not only did my body reflexively do this, but that that was a genius response, not a maladaptive response, and it was responding to a dysfunctional environment, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So it felt really important to me to put the problem back where it actually resides, which is the context itself.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the reason to that I worked really hard to make sure that all of my language was not shaming and blaming is because those things keep a fun response securely in place.
[SPEAKER_02]: The second that my body gets a whiff of like, you think I'm doing it wrong?
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm gonna perform.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm gonna go, oh, what a whiff.
[SPEAKER_02]: I need to do to make it look like I'm doing all the right things and doing my work, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, not consciously, but the shame is so great.
[SPEAKER_02]: I cannot tolerate it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I go, what do I, what do I need to do?
[SPEAKER_02]: Who do I need to be?
[SPEAKER_02]: So to your point, we have to first reduce the shame, reduce the blame, understand the
[SPEAKER_02]: and really sort of honor the origins of these behaviors why it came online to begin with.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then and only then can we start to go, oh wow, and now I can see that because I had to do this day and day out, it's as though it sort of became my personality, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't even know where I end and where fonding begins, but I can't see that until I see why I make sense first.
[SPEAKER_02]: Otherwise, I'm just going, yep, you're right, I'm broken, I'm screwed, you know, why bother?
[SPEAKER_02]: But this allowed me to see why I made sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: The whole time, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not just a problem that needs to be solved.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have a body.
[SPEAKER_02]: My body was protecting me.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's a reason that Dr. Bessel Vandercolk's book is called The Body Keeps the Score, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because my body was like, I will never let that
[SPEAKER_02]: happen again and finding becomes like five to ten steps out in front of me at all times protecting against even potential harm.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is maladaptive because now I don't fully exist in my own life.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm completely oriented only to my external environment.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, are you good with me?
[SPEAKER_02]: Are we safe, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, can you give me permission?
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't even exist in the equation.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, of course, long term, that's maladaptive, but you can't really see the truth of it or certainly how to start to work with it unless you understand.
[SPEAKER_02]: the origins.
[SPEAKER_03]: It would be like if you defaulted to the fight response and you've solved every problem with violence.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not going to be a good mock strategy, yeah, even though it's that's right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Good to be able to take care of yourself in a moment where you need to you mention when the fight goes.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the other things, can I say one quick thing?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because you bring a sort of a good point adjacent there.
[SPEAKER_02]: No one is rewarding the fight response in that way.
[SPEAKER_02]: No one's like, yeah, bring it on.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're doing great, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: But funny, highly rewarded, absolutely expected, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Completely applauded.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, yes, abandon yourself for my greater good.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, do whatever I need you to do so that I can feel safe so that my feathers aren't ruffled, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So even though, yes,
[SPEAKER_02]: taught, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's modeled.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's encouraged in all of these ways.
[SPEAKER_02]: So the context of our lives are absolutely wanting us to keep finding.
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's another layer there that we're sort of extricating ourselves from.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, especially in the environment that I was raised in kind of religious fundamentalist world, speaking to the female experience, you know, which usually I've guessed on from that world that can be better than I can, but you know what I hear all the time is, you're taught to be submissive, you're taught to keep sweet and calm and gentle and soft spoken, and that is deeply rewarded.
[SPEAKER_03]: which leads to obviously very bad things when you get into marriages with an abusive husband, a church with an abusive pastor, you know, down the line.
[SPEAKER_03]: You mentioned when the body keeps the score and there's a story in that or an example in the book that's always stuck with me and he gives the example of, you know, I forget the exact item of clothing but it basically was akin to saying if a woman is sexually assaulted by someone wearing a trench coat
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, then I think it was like a red trench coat or something, and they're walking on the street, and they see a random person wearing a red trench coat, that can immediately snap them into a response of going, okay, I'm in danger, and their body reacts before they get a chance to even process it.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you talk about your book, this kind of reptilian response, we're in a nanosecond, our body sees something and goes to the greatest chance of survival.
[SPEAKER_03]: What can we do?
[SPEAKER_03]: My question reading that in your book was,
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, obviously, that's not helpful if we're in a Walmart and everybody we see that wears red, you know, is triggering us in that way or everybody that looks like the same height as our abusive ex-husband or whatever that, whatever that thing is, is there a way to increase that nanosecond gap to where we're not constantly in that mode of going, okay, my body's responding before I can even process the information, um, like how do you get out
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, essentially what you're talking about is that we're walking around triggered all the time, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So if our trauma is relational trauma, I guess what you do encounter in every Walmart, other people.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's a problem, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, the potential for someone to be mad at you, the potential for conflict.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, sorry, I got in your way.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's like I talked about this idea, even we're afraid to take up too much room in the overhead bin on the plane because someone's going to get mad, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So everything starts to revolve around this,
[SPEAKER_02]: How do I make sure everyone is okay around me just so that you're not gonna lash out?
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think essentially what has been snuffed out when we are in this chronic fawn response is a relationship to a healthy fight response.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that does mean I can have a voice.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can take up space.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can set a boundary because I can tolerate conflict.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And so part of what we're doing is starting to grow as Dan Seagull talks about our window of tolerance.
[SPEAKER_02]: When we are chronically fonding, we are outside of our window of tolerance all the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything feels crispy.
[SPEAKER_02]: It feels like I'm going to get in trouble.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, just the other day, the other morning, my husband was going to take my son somewhere
[SPEAKER_02]: And he wasn't leaving when I thought that he should leave.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I go, you don't have any sense of time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he goes, yes, I do.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't have a sense that I'm gonna get in trouble.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I went, ooh, fair, fair, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So me constantly being oriented to like, well, don't make them mad.
[SPEAKER_02]: You gotta pick them up on time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's like, he's not worried about that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So he can orient differently in the world.
[SPEAKER_02]: So part of how we come out of chronic fonding is we have to grow our capacity to tolerate the very things we've been running from our entire lives, which is conflict, which is taking up space, which is having a voice.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, there's a reason when I start to talk about, I move from the book from talking about fonding and what it is and how it presents and how it sort of supported into what I call unfawning.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a reason that I start
[SPEAKER_02]: the work internal with ourselves.
[SPEAKER_02]: I do not ask us to move directly into relationships.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, well, I've been learning about funding and I'm gonna tell you how I really feel.
[SPEAKER_02]: That would be retraumatizing, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: That would reinforce, oh my God, that went horrible, I'm never gonna do that again.
[SPEAKER_02]: So before we can do things differently in the world, we have to change our relationship to ourselves.
[SPEAKER_02]: We have to shift our gaze from only orienting in this hyper-vigilant way, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You're going to get in trouble.
[SPEAKER_02]: You better leave the house.
[SPEAKER_02]: To doing that all the time to going, wait a second, how do I feel?
[SPEAKER_02]: What do I notice?
[SPEAKER_02]: What am I feeling right now?
[SPEAKER_02]: We start orienting to ourselves.
[SPEAKER_02]: And
[SPEAKER_02]: Oftentimes, this feels terrifying.
[SPEAKER_02]: It feels like, oh my god, I'm taking my eye off the prize.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like something bad is going to happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: Or people will genuinely start to say, if they notice this, like, you're being selfish.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, why are you?
[SPEAKER_02]: If you've been so caretaking and appeasing your whole life and suddenly, you're noticing how you actually feel.
[SPEAKER_02]: You also might get a little push back from people.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, well, you're not being really accommodating.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's kind of mean.
[SPEAKER_02]: But we're essentially growing our ability to tolerate what is just normal rupture and repair in relationship, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no avoiding that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And over time, the body starts to learn.
[SPEAKER_02]: It can discern between what is genuine danger and what is discomfort.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, I did roughly your feathers in the Walmart.
[SPEAKER_02]: I took that last can off the shelf and you really wanted it and that does kind of suck for you, but I also got here first and I'm just as entitled, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: I deserve to exist in the world as essentially what we're teaching our bodies.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's a process and it's one that I don't think we ever graduate from.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, here I am.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've just written the book and I told you just a few days ago that I'm telling my husband, you better leave, you know.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's like, no, it's all good.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not going to get in trouble and I go, all right.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the difference is he can say that to me and I can immediately go, oh, yeah, that was that reflexive thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're adults.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're not going to get in trouble.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's all good and that feeling just dissolves.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I didn't have this on my notes, but now I'm kind of curious like you write as much as you're writing from like a very research perspective like you put yourself in this book a lot, you know, and this is something that obviously hits very close to home for you as a topic.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am curious as someone who is putting yourself out there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like you're not just in the aisle at Walmart, grabbing a can of food, you're publishing a book that's going to be, you know, criticized, you're going to have people with viewing it.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're going to be on podcast for people misunderstandings or take you out of context or people with your book.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm curious, like,
[SPEAKER_03]: How did you mentally prepare yourself for publicly putting yourself out there in a way where you can be critiqued by everybody?
[SPEAKER_03]: You're essentially saying like, here's my ideas, let's see what you think about them.
[SPEAKER_03]: How did you navigate that as a creator and a writer?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's such a great question.
[SPEAKER_02]: And first of all, I'll say, I really believe in the power of story as a teacher that if I'm just talking theory, people go, well, how does that relate to me?
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm not only invited my clients to share their experience, but I brought in my own.
[SPEAKER_02]: Also, to reduce the shame, if I'm saying, well, yes, I'm Dr. Ingrid Clayton, I'm a clinical psychologist, I've been in private prepped, you know, it's like, okay, great,
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is other people's problems, you know, that's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: But tell me how you actually understand it and are walking this walk, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: I think too many times you do a disservice to other people by performing this like level of expertise and I've got it all together.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that might be a good sales pitch, but I also think it's a lie.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I just like to keep it real with people.
[SPEAKER_02]: But you know, interestingly before I wrote this book, I wrote a memoir on complex trauma.
[SPEAKER_02]: on the road to writing that and publishing that.
[SPEAKER_02]: There came a point where I had to go on social media the thing I never said I would do.
[SPEAKER_02]: And be a therapist and make the videos and do all the things.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I
[SPEAKER_02]: And not just a clinical psychologist.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not just a childhood trauma survivor.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm a former singer songwriter, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I have a sense of humor and it's a little irreverent and wacky.
[SPEAKER_02]: And all of a sudden, I was like, there's a way for me to be all of these things in one place at one time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And yet I really believed that if I did that, if I put my whole self out there, Eric, I was like, I'm gonna tank my career.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like any credibility that I have is gonna be gone.
[SPEAKER_02]: Essentially, I didn't know it at the time, but it was like, if I stopped falling and only bring forward how I'm gonna be helpful to you and I'm gonna give you these nuggets and I'm actually just gonna be me.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm gonna take up space.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's all over for me and I really in my body came to this line where I was like, you know, what if I lose all my credibility, because I'm going to be all of me in one place, it makes me emotional to this day, then I guess I'm not supposed to be a clinical psychologist.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I cannot keep living my life so that you're comfortable and that you see me in a particular way I have to live my life so that I can be comfortable and I can see all of me, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I kind of
[SPEAKER_02]: And I see this happening with my clients every single client they get to this point where it feels like their the risk is so big it feels like they're jumping off a cliff just to be themselves and so I've had a lot of these both in going on social media and publishing stories people didn't want me to talk about in publishing this book now mainstream publisher a wider audience so more push back and.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, feedback that you don't necessarily want to hear, and I couldn't have prepared for an advance to be really candid about your question.
[SPEAKER_02]: There is no preparation in advance.
[SPEAKER_02]: What there is is when I get pushed back or
[SPEAKER_02]: commentary, whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: I then I have to do the thing that I'm asking people to do in the book, which is say, okay, yes, that might be painful.
[SPEAKER_02]: I might not enjoy this.
[SPEAKER_02]: It does not define me.
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't mean I did anything wrong.
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't mean I'm in trouble.
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't mean I'm decimated.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can actually hold myself more in the face of the pushback.
[SPEAKER_02]: And all of this work is experiential.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the other reason I talk about this work through story.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's because we have to walk through it.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's how the body learns and changes.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's in the body.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not the rational mind going.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, yes, I understand, of course, I'm going to, you know, not be bothered and take care of myself.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I'm going to be bothered.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm going to notice how that feels and I'm going to see what it's like to take care of myself as a result.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I've had lots of growing pains, but ultimately they've all been in service of me holding on to myself more and more and more.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's a good reframe to say like if this is going to be the thing that ends this, you know, maybe I'm not meant to do this, you know, and I've
[SPEAKER_03]: big things I've been working on like project-wise and you know where there's other people involved and and I
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I, I fell myself one day.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was like, I should think about before I post XYZ and think about, you know, with this and then I started thinking, you know, I have a friend that always talks about this like with podcasting.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's like, you can't, you can't fake it for an hour every week, you know, talking.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like eventually your mask is going to slip.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Who you actually are is going to come out.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you might as well just get that out of the way immediately.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like this is what I think, this is how I talk and I kind of had to
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, if this is the reason this isn't going to happen, like that's going to come out at some point, you know, like many things have over the years, over the last five years, I've been doing the show.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, yeah, people have a pretty good sense of who I am, and that's repelled some people, and that's drawn some people in, and it's led to where I am now, and it's, it's,
[SPEAKER_03]: it's cool being able to embrace that and accept whatever that looks like in your life.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I know that it's a genuine relationship and a genuine audience, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So the reality is just like you, I'm not for everyone and guess what?
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't write the book for those people that don't have any personal experience here or who go, that's just manipulation.
[SPEAKER_02]: I go, God bless you, you've never spent today disempowered your entire life.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not my experience and that's not my reader's experience.
[SPEAKER_02]: So as much as I have to tolerate maybe some other, you know, criticisms, what we also get along the way, and I'm sure that you've experienced this too, is these emails from people that are like, Ingrid, you've written my life story in this book and you don't even know me.
[SPEAKER_02]: How did you know these secret thoughts, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And I go, that's who I wrote it for, I wrote it for me and for them.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in a way, no one else really matters.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's not me and it's reality.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am curious like one of the things you just mentioned, you know, when you're talking to an adult, you know, you can say you're not getting in trouble for this.
[SPEAKER_03]: You live by yourself, you know, you've got your own life.
[SPEAKER_03]: What would you say to someone who finds himself living with family?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the kid basically who's having to make themselves small because they have a parent that's taking up the space or they're in a context where they can't express themselves.
[SPEAKER_03]: They have to be in
[SPEAKER_03]: Survival mode all the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: What would you say to them in those moments?
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, it's so complicated.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't want to over-generalize too much because every situation is so unique.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I also want to be really careful that I'm not encouraging someone just to tolerate the abuse because those are that's your lot in life, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: But mostly what I want to do
[SPEAKER_02]: is let people know that if they're in this situation and their body keeps going oh my gosh it's my livelihood or it's my financial security or you know there are all kinds of needs where people are having to
[SPEAKER_02]: Tolerate, maybe bad behavior or shrink themselves in order to get other really vital needs met.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I guess I just want those people to know that that makes sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's complex.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's so much nuance and a lot of what we've done is kind of shrink these ideas down into a one-size-fits-all like empowerment, sort of, you know.
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything gets wrapped up in a big red bow and shouldn't you feel great about how you're just, you know, taking care of yourself and I go That's just not reality that that we live in these really complex systems more than you can Ultimately even name each of us if you start to look at all of the different systems of power in your life that you're having to navigate So I don't know that I have a real thing that I would say except
[SPEAKER_02]: you matter and this is hard and I'm here for you as you start to explore and try to tease apart like are there areas where I can have more of a voice or have more of a say and honestly even if you can't my greatest hope is that someone knows internally that
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a circumstance that they're navigating right now and that it doesn't mean it has to be like this for the rest of their lives.
[SPEAKER_02]: But even as I say that, there's always an exception.
[SPEAKER_02]: I go, no, some people are going to be navigating that forever.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's a hard question.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's an important question, but it's a hard one day to answer.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe this is a better question.
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the things that I think comes up a lot, and there's a couple of things I'll kind of move through as we move to the second half of the conversation.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like one of the tricky pieces, especially for those of us who like to find, you know, that's kind of our default reaction.
[SPEAKER_03]: The idea of boundaries is a really scary thing, and I think there's a lot of
[SPEAKER_03]: How much do you have a responsibility to keep people in your life that are pushing you into this reactive state?
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm thinking of the parent when you're with them at Thanksgiving, you know, we're in November.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's going to be people who are sitting and their mom is just being their mom and they feel this really strong survival mechanism kick in every time they're in that room.
[SPEAKER_03]: Responsibilities are to grin and bear it how much is responsibilities there to to just establish a boundary and those people probably shouldn't have a core part of your like and again this is brought there's a lot of different instances and experiences, but how do you determine when to finally draw that boundary of like okay you're just not part of my life at this point and you make that actual like severing there.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because it's so deeply personal, I think the way I'm going to answer it is talk about my personal experience with that line, and then I also just want to say everyone is entitled to their own process.
[SPEAKER_02]: I could never tell someone when they hit the line in their life of whether to stay or go as an example.
[SPEAKER_02]: But here's the realities.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have this childhood trauma.
[SPEAKER_02]: I turn to my mom as a kid.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I actually have an intervention.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I call in.
[SPEAKER_02]: I call in with the help of the school counselor social services, the spig intervention.
[SPEAKER_02]: And essentially, the long ensured is my mom says, mmm, I don't believe you.
[SPEAKER_02]: I actually think you're kind of being selfish and made it all up and you're upset about these other things, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So she told me it didn't happen and I don't believe you.
[SPEAKER_02]: We never deal with that into my adulthood and I'm kind of giving her a pass because she's still married to my stepdad who's the abuser and then he dies and I go, oh, it's finally going to be possible, Eric.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to have a real conversation about this thing and that is not what happened.
[SPEAKER_02]: What happened is more of the same, more denial, more sort of I need to either sweep this under the rug or make you the problem.
[SPEAKER_02]: And after going to great lengths in my life of becoming a therapist and going to a million trainings and sitting on other therapist's couches and doing the workshops and reading the books and trying to rise above, I wrote my dissertation research on spiritual bypassing because I did that for a long time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, if I pray about it and meditate long enough, if I do all these spiritual things, maybe then I can rise above in this won't hurt so effing bad.
[SPEAKER_02]: kept me stuck.
[SPEAKER_02]: All of it was a repetition of the original wound.
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't matter.
[SPEAKER_02]: Get over it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're being ridiculous.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're being selfish.
[SPEAKER_02]: Knock it off already.
[SPEAKER_02]: So for me, to finally heal, I had to hold people accountable.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that meant I will not sweep this under the rug anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you cannot have a real conversation about it, if you cannot even validate that this happened, I can't have you in my life, okay?
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was similar to going on social media in a way where there was this dividing line.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I felt intrinsically in my body, I would rather have me in my life.
[SPEAKER_02]: because I had gone missing this whole time, I would rather have me in my life than quite frankly, anybody else.
[SPEAKER_02]: The one thread that runs through all the signs and symptoms of fawning is self abandonment.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so it was just like, my body said, I can't do it anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know what happens for some people, for some people, they go, ugh, I can't do it anymore and the other people in their lives, they go, oh my gosh.
[SPEAKER_02]: I get it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm so sorry.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can't believe I did that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I've seen incredible repair, but I've also seen what happened for me, which is like, I'm still going to make you the bad guy.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're going to be the scapegoat.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now, if we're not in relationship, that's also just going to be your fault.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I had to tolerate that for many years with my own mom.
[SPEAKER_02]: because I needed to heal and I could not heal, I could not take care of me and still be in a fake relationship with someone who saw me through these really negative, like no one else in my life thinks I'm a selfish liar, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: No one else in my life would sort of ascribe those things to me that she was holding on to and so,
[SPEAKER_02]: For me, there came a point where I said, I can't do it anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I will also say that years later, I had done enough healing.
[SPEAKER_02]: I had enough space.
[SPEAKER_02]: I could hold on to myself enough where maybe I'm not doing it this year, but maybe at a Thanksgiving I could go, okay, I can tolerate it now.
[SPEAKER_02]: But not until I...
[SPEAKER_02]: was allowed to do the real inner work.
[SPEAKER_02]: And by real, I mean, we have to accept the genuine reality.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no more bypass.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no more override.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what real healing is to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: We get to metabolize the truth.
[SPEAKER_02]: So for some people, they reach that line and they're able to work it out.
[SPEAKER_02]: And for some people,
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not, and neither is right or wrong.
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess that's the real point to me.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, it's not putting this thing on people.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're like, well, if you were healed enough, you would put up with this, you know, kind of approach.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, it's tricky, because there is such a fine line that and we like, you know, we like, I'll speak for myself because it's broad, but I know often,
[SPEAKER_03]: in my life, I've straight up lied to myself and said that I was healed and that's why I wasn't going to let these things affect me, but really I was just, I was basically just blocking out these really bad things that certain individuals were saying or doing.
[SPEAKER_03]: and in the name of going like, well, I'm strong enough to handle that, you know, I was discounting my actual response to it, which was hurt or whatever that thing was, it was causing.
[SPEAKER_03]: I got to grab this thread before it leaves, but you talked about spiritual bypassing.
[SPEAKER_03]: I had it at my notes under toxic positivity of, you know, spiritual bypassing, you talk about forgiveness
[SPEAKER_03]: And you define in your book, spiritual bypassing is using spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional, unfinished business and to shore up a shaky sense of self or to be little basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.
[SPEAKER_03]: You give that definition from Dr. John Wildwood.
[SPEAKER_03]: My audience obviously is going to be very familiar with spiritual bypassing even if they don't know it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's talk about that a little bit and how that functionally plays out because I think the first time I ever heard that and I forgot where I heard it but I remember it was a big light bulb moment for me.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you kind of give a definition for that and how that functionally plays out?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so you're right.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's John Wellwood's definition.
[SPEAKER_02]: He coined the term, and he was a therapist, but also a Buddhist meditation practitioner.
[SPEAKER_02]: So what he saw was that a lot of his clients were coming to the meditation practice with this idea that if they meditated in the right way, they would sort of override the human condition.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he was like, hmm, that's not the point, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: That the point is that meditation becomes the container for it, not that you're not meant to live in the mess of it all.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I similarly had a light bulb moment.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was in grad school when I heard about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I to this day.
[SPEAKER_02]: I remember it's like time slowed down and my mouth got all dry and I was like, what do you mean?
[SPEAKER_02]: I could use my spirituality to avoid myself.
[SPEAKER_02]: Listen, the fun response will attach itself to anything.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anything that allows you.
[SPEAKER_02]: to manage those external expectations, manage other people's perceptions, in order to sort of maintain this illusion of safety.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so for me, I'm sober for 30 years.
[SPEAKER_02]: I got sober in 12-step recovery.
[SPEAKER_02]: You go into a spiritual program designed to help you with your addictions and
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, a lot of us just switch from like, oh, I'm not going to drink to now.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just going to do all these spiritual things.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I'm expecting it to manage my overwhelmed, to quail that upset in a similar way, sort of like a light switch.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I did my dissertation research on spiritual bypassed 12-step recovery for people that had long-term recovery.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I saw that a lot of us hit a wall where at some point you go, well, this isn't working, because it's just like meditation wasn't designed to help you override the human condition, right, we're sort of doing this spiritual program expecting similar results.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we go, well, this isn't working.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I know what is I'm going to go back.
[SPEAKER_02]: to drinking or using drugs, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: There was a high relapse rate, which there is generally anyway, but so I kind of wanted to gift people in recovery with the light bulb moment that I had so that we could start to be more conscious so that we could start to
[SPEAKER_02]: fold in more of, oh, it's okay to have more of a human experience even as I'm practicing these spiritual things.
[SPEAKER_02]: And also that spirituality or religion or anything for that matter is not a panacea.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no sort of blanket top down like this will cure what ale's you forever.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's such a compelling idea.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's one I've gravitated towards and
[SPEAKER_02]: Lots of different ways, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: When I make enough money or when I'm married or when I'm a mom or what, you know, all these milestones and every phase I go, oh my gosh, I'm still here.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm still me.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: with the heck, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So, if felt important to me in a book about the fond response to name, again, all of the things that continue to support it and expect it, and I think in a lot of mental health circles in recovery and spiritual circles,
[SPEAKER_02]: We love this idea that if you're doing it right, it's kind of what you said.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I'm so healed, I'm no longer bothered, and I lived there for decades.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, and part of it was true.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was doing my work, quote unquote, I was really trying to be all the things, do all the things.
[SPEAKER_02]: that I thought I was supposed to, and actually was just writing about this this morning, how in the serenity prayer, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.
[SPEAKER_02]: I kind of saw that through the fawn response, through a bit of a bypass too, where it was like, well that means I have to accept everyone's doing their best.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, the past is in the past and it's not going to change, and in other words, I accepted all the external things as being exactly as they were supposed to be, but I wasn't including myself in the equation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, it's this self abandonment.
[SPEAKER_02]: Acceptance means also accepting.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm still hurt.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm still stuck in these patterns of relationships over and over again where my needs are being met.
[SPEAKER_02]: I cannot find a reciprocal healthy relationship to save my life.
[SPEAKER_02]: Acceptance means looking at my pain, looking at what hasn't been processed and saying that matters too.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's what had gone missing for me for a long time.
[SPEAKER_03]: my friend might send me a meme, I think it was like seven or eight months ago, and it said, the worst part of drug addiction is becoming religious, you know, and the meme was essentially saying,
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, you go from this one thing to like throwing yourself full throttle into another and it's interesting and again, alcoholics and anonymous, I've read so many different perspectives on and obviously has helped a lot of people and then there's people that are critical like anything, you know, and but it is one of those things that you do see a lot, I think you just alluded to is like,
[SPEAKER_03]: There's people who go from, you know, strong addiction to this very strong, like religious focus, but they're essentially just treating their religion with the same addict personality, like they're trying to fill this void, they're trying to do this thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they're essentially just keeping really busy.
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, you could argue, like,
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a better, you know, but it's also not addressing the, like, what's that whole you're trying to fill?
[SPEAKER_03]: What's the reason that you're doing this?
[SPEAKER_03]: And, um, and certainly that, that came to mind as you were talking about that in this idea of like, I'm going to throw myself into this and, and do all the right things and hope that addresses this core problem that I have never even dug deep enough down to address.
[SPEAKER_03]: One thing I wanted to ask
[SPEAKER_03]: the toxic positivity side and it's on the backside of spiritual bypassing is this idea forgiveness and this is something obviously is a big part of your story you've had to grapple with it's something that many of your clients have had to deal with you know we talk about all the all the cultural things past is the past you know forgiveness is for you you can't you'll until you forgive yeah
[SPEAKER_03]: I've asked as to a lot of people, I've got a million different answers.
[SPEAKER_03]: What's a healthy reframe of forgiveness as a concept?
[SPEAKER_02]: To me, forgiveness, genuine forgiveness, tends to come at the end of a much longer process.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's a spontaneous experience that arises when we actually feel free.
[SPEAKER_02]: then I can forgive.
[SPEAKER_02]: Often these notions of forgiveness is for you.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's this, we think that it has to come first and that that's gonna be the thing that's gonna open the door to the rest of the process.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that that is backwards, that when we place forgiveness first, we're placing yet another block, another sort of performance of healing or spirituality or even forgiveness.
[SPEAKER_02]: For me, forgiveness is not necessary to heal.
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't even always have to come at the end of the process.
[SPEAKER_02]: But when it's genuine, as I've seen it, it tends to come at the end.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's not like a requirement to.
[SPEAKER_02]: No.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it safe to say,
[SPEAKER_03]: forgiveness is kind of contextualizing that action like I'm going back to the example of like dealing with people who don't give you a lot of space and you have to kind of grapple with like do I set a boundary do I completely remove them from my own a for like again for my using myself as an example there's people
[SPEAKER_03]: I used my parents.
[SPEAKER_03]: I would be very good relationship with my parents, but there were things in high school that were very difficult and a lot of circumstances that my listeners will kind of know some of that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there were a lot of things that a lot of it was just the environments that they placed us in, was like a big, a big thing for me to overcome, specifically the religious environment that we grew up in.
[SPEAKER_03]: And now, I contextualize that action, although I wouldn't have had them put me in the same place again, I know that they were doing it from a place of love.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they thought that was the best thing for me.
[SPEAKER_03]: They thought that was the safest environment I could be in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I've contextualized the action and understand where it was coming from.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I'm able to forget, I got to hold any resentment,
[SPEAKER_03]: To me, that's kind of forgiveness is be able to contextualize the action, even when you don't excuse what happened in every case.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because sometimes there's much more extreme examples where there's assault or there's physical abuse and things like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I feel like being able to...
[SPEAKER_03]: understand why is kind of a key component for me and how I understand forgiveness.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you feel like that's in a language where you're talking to me and I'll just use again my experience because I
[SPEAKER_02]: Listen, I knew as a child that my mom wasn't taking care of me because she was already really absent.
[SPEAKER_02]: I saw her disappear when she married my stepdad, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: She became a shadow of her former self.
[SPEAKER_02]: I knew that she was trapped.
[SPEAKER_02]: I knew that as a kid, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's why I gave her a free pass for so long.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh my gosh, she didn't have a choice, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: She just didn't have a choice.
[SPEAKER_02]: when I saw his passing as an opportunity for her to have a different perspective for her to have more choice and agency for her to be able to cop to some of these things.
[SPEAKER_02]: Her version of, you know, I was doing the best I could.
[SPEAKER_02]: I did it because I loved you.
[SPEAKER_02]: I put you in those situations.
[SPEAKER_02]: I wouldn't do it again, but you know, I was doing it because I loved you.
[SPEAKER_02]: She was incapable of doing that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's different.
[SPEAKER_02]: But what's interesting to me along these lines is, okay, so I knew better my whole life.
[SPEAKER_02]: I knew I could contextualize it.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it also stopped me from going and it really hurt me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm still carrying stuff that is
[SPEAKER_02]: deeply, deeply impacting me in my life today.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I've tried so many things to try to, you know, better myself and they haven't worked.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so for me, contextualizing became a blocker to seeing the reality of how I was still hurt.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so many years later, I was able to have a follow-up conversation with my mom, and she basically said,
[SPEAKER_02]: I can't do it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I said, well, then I need you to know you're still choosing not to be in relationship with me.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know you can't change the past.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm asking us to have one genuine conversation about it now.
[SPEAKER_02]: The bar is as low as it could possibly be set.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I know that this is what I need, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And she said, okay, I can't talk about it, but I'll listen.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I said every single thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean every single thing that I ever would have or could have wanted to say and I said it all and she heard it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And at the end of that conversation, she said, Ingrid, please forgive me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Please forgive me and in that moment, I could.
[SPEAKER_02]: But not before then.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I said, I do, I do, I forgive you.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was real.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was genuine.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what's interesting is that I came back to the same place of she literally can't this is her capacity.
[SPEAKER_02]: She lived with this man for decades, and she lost herself, she's in her 70s.
[SPEAKER_02]: She's never going to be able to look back on a whole life and see all of the wreckage and the damage is just not going to happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I needed her to hear me, and she did.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in that moment, it's like we both got a little more free.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hmm, I mean, we could talk about this a long time because there's so much nuance and and well, and I think to the part that comes to me is like, I think the difference.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's people in my life that I do not forgive in terms of like, and again, I look at forgiveness.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think there's just so much mess around the definition where it's like, I see that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I don't hold, I'm not holding energy for it, but which, which some people say that's forgiveness is you don't hold energy for it anymore.
[SPEAKER_03]: And like there's a bunch of, but like I think what you mentioned too is,
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the amount of willingness to not excuse it, but like contextualize it, like you said, comes from the willingness of the other party to admit that harm was done.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that's kind of the difference, like especially in an environment where you have like,
[SPEAKER_03]: an abusive grandparent or parent, and you've got the grandmother or, you know, or mom who was a shell of themselves, and they were surviving too, and they were like the victim abuser kind of role.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like...
[SPEAKER_03]: It's sometimes easier to give them some of that space when they, you know, when that person passes and be able to text lies it, but the actual abuse of themselves, they'll never admit that harm was done.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is that, you know, so there's so many ways that and again, we could talk about that for hours and that could be a book.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, say one more thing, just because you're right, we could keep going, but first of all, my stepdad did die without ever taking any responsibility.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't feel like I owe him any forgiveness or felt bad when I wrote about his story.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the other thing is, is I endowed my mom with all of this goodness for all those years that I was sort of, so I contextualized it for her, but it just wasn't true.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was my own fantasy, my wish for it to be real.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was funny, thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, these are all of the layers.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I guess, you know, beyond the language of it and beyond other people's expectations, my greatest hope is just that we, if you start with what feels real in your body, what feels true, and even the stuff that might feel shameful or gross, or I'm not supposed to feel that way, can we make space for it?
[SPEAKER_02]: I really believe,
[SPEAKER_02]: that that's the compass that it will orient us towards the most true, most holistic, most you know, healthy and healing orientation.
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't have to figure it out in advance and name it and it's not a prescription.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's it's can I include myself in this equation, notice what's
[SPEAKER_03]: We just hit her hour, there's so much left on my notes.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's so much I would love to talk about.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think I'll definitely have to bite you back on at some point because there's a whole host of questions I'd love to keep asking.
[SPEAKER_03]: I do want to ask, and if you're a hard out right now,
[SPEAKER_03]: I know I have time, it's a big hit.
[SPEAKER_03]: I do want to ask this one thing because I don't want to be people with, here's a bunch of problems and things are bad and there's,
[SPEAKER_03]: Beyond obviously buying your book, and there's a lot of resources that are very helpful within it.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you could give my listeners who are going something in this describes me, something in this relates to me, and I want to unfawn, you know, you mentioned earlier, what's like one actionable step you think would be helpful to anybody listening to this, who is taking their first step out of this mindset,
[SPEAKER_02]: It's such a great question, I'm going to make it a literal answer, and the first actionable step is taking an actionable step into your own body.
[SPEAKER_02]: Go take a walk around the block, go outside, be in the world, and move your body.
[SPEAKER_02]: And here's what every single trauma training I've ever been to.
[SPEAKER_02]: We use language of what are you experiencing?
[SPEAKER_02]: What are you noticing now?
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't say, what's your opinion about that?
[SPEAKER_02]: Or what do you think about that?
[SPEAKER_02]: And that moves us back up into our rational mind, our head, being embodied, all trauma healing involves coming into the body.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I say, move your body to the degree that you can and notice what you're experiencing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the reason I also suggest to do it outside.
[SPEAKER_02]: is orienting to the natural environment, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: I live in LA, I'm in the city, it's not like there's like a lush forest out my backyard.
[SPEAKER_02]: I wish that there was, but I can even notice whatever trees are there.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can notice the clouds in the sky.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is called orienting.
[SPEAKER_02]: I talk about this in the book, but it's based on Peter Levine's work, who's the founder of somatic experiencing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he reminds us that the language of the nervous system is the senses.
[SPEAKER_02]: So even if you don't walk outside in this moment as you're listening to this podcast, look around your environment and notice what you see.
[SPEAKER_02]: See if there's a place that your eyes want to linger.
[SPEAKER_02]: notice what you notice when you do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Most of the time, I see people take a spontaneous deep breath.
[SPEAKER_02]: They go, which means they're becoming more regulated.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're more in their own body.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's practices like this, okay?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's
[SPEAKER_02]: might not seem like it's moving the needle in a huge direction, but it's why I talk about unfawning, starting with our relationship to self.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're starting to build our relationship to internal safety for the first time ever, and its practices like this, learning how to regulate our own nervous system, noticing what we notice.
[SPEAKER_02]: It goes a long way, it's it's
[SPEAKER_02]: the stuff that I still return to over and over and over again, no matter where you are in the process.
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, those are my little takeaways.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's huge.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have a friend who's a trauma therapist and and I always say like this advice saved my life and it sounds over the topping cliche but um you know I was talking about doing the podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: I said I'm talking to victims of the worst abuse every single week and I said and you feel like you're getting secondhand smoke you know it's like this kind of second
[SPEAKER_03]: take a walk between interviews.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I was like, okay, you know, take a walk.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's some sort of like.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then you go out and you're like, it really does help to really sit there, not with air pods, not with whatever, like disconnecting going out.
[SPEAKER_03]: And just feeling.
[SPEAKER_03]: your breath feeling, you know, like hearing the wind go through the treat, like it is so powerful, and it's, it's really, really helpful.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the other piece I'll just stock on top of that is Dr. Hilary McBride's, but on my show, two or three times now, and she always reminds that you don't have a body, you are your body.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, I thought about that so many times during this conversation, this feeling of like, my body's doing this to me.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, and that kind of oppositional approach to yourself versus going like what am I feeling, you know, and taking a second to think through like what's my body telling me and and I am myself and embodying that is is so helpful.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I echo I echo all that and seriously I'd love to have you back on some time because this is a conversation.
[SPEAKER_03]: I hate is ending right now and I appreciate your work so much.
[SPEAKER_03]: So thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you for making this.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would love it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And maybe, yeah, if your listeners have specific questions, they can guide a part two.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I'd be happy to do it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love how engaged you are with the material in the topic.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm so grateful for all the work that you're doing in this world.
[SPEAKER_02]: So thanks for having me be a part of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: You've been listening to the Prejubois podcast hosted by Eric Squizinski.
[SPEAKER_03]: The intro music Bible Belt was performed by Lou Ridley.
[SPEAKER_00]: Come on, we are gathered here today It's a praise to the Holy Father, fill the glory of His name Anyone can worship here so long as you act straight Pay your ties and follow rules even the ones God didn't make