0:00 - My Childhood Unveiled
19:17 - The Burden of Family Secrets
36:20 - Confronting Past Traumas
59:46 - Struggles with Eating Disorders
1:01:24 - The Impact of a Mother's Visit
1:18:42 - Navigating Relationships and Red Flags
1:29:37 - Family Dynamics
1:41:06 - Boundaries and Expectations
1:56:16 - Parenting Challenges
2:28:05 - Confronting the Past
2:35:26 - Closing Thoughts
In this episode, we dive deeply into a conversation with a caller who shares her journey of navigating the effects of a tumultuous childhood filled with trauma, neglect, and abuse. She opens up about her Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) score, revealing a painful history marked by physical and emotional abuse from her parents, as well as experiences of sexual grooming from individuals in her community during her formative years in the Caribbean.
The caller recounts her upbringing in a household where she often felt unloved and neglected, particularly overshadowed by a younger brother who seemed to escape the same level of criticism and control. She describes her mother as emotionally volatile, often using fear and corporal punishment, and highlights the psychological scars left by the constant belittlement she endured from both parents. These early experiences of being treated as a nuisance or an object of ridicule set the groundwork for a lifetime of struggle with self-worth and identity.
As her story unfolds, we touch upon the complexities of her teenage years, where her family's strict, religious ideologies clashed with her burgeoning interest in dating and independence. She reflects on the suffocating control her parents exerted over her life and the isolation she felt, which only fueled her resentment and rebellion. The interaction she shares regarding her exploration of romantic relationships further illustrates the love-starved environment she grew up in, leading to tumultuous sibling dynamics where she admits to being abusive toward her brother, revealing the generational cycles of trauma at play.
Throughout the conversation, the caller also speaks candidly about her internal struggle with eating disorders as a consequence of her feelings of inadequacy. This coping mechanism, born from a desire to escape unwanted attention and abuse, highlights the complex relationship between trauma and self-image. We discuss the eventual realization that her issues are a direct response to the experiences inflicted upon her, making the connection between her past and her present significantly clearer.
The conversation grows even more poignant as she begins to navigate motherhood herself, grappling with the fear of passing down the trauma of her past to her own child. The challenges she faces in managing her relationship with her parents, who remain entrenched in their harmful behaviors, compound the pressure she feels as a new mother. Her reflections on the generational differences — the connectivity she shares with her daughter versus the disconnect with her parents — form a powerful commentary on the impact of parenting styles and the importance of breaking the cycle of trauma.
As the call concludes, we touch on the potential decision of going no contact with her parents, reflecting on the complexities and the emotional toll of that choice. She weighs the benefits of protecting her child from the toxicity of her own upbringing against the haunting thoughts of familial duty and expectations. The conversation underscores the importance of self-care, establishing boundaries, and the journey toward healing, all of which she is navigating with increasing awareness and strength.
This candid exploration sheds light on the far-reaching implications of childhood trauma while offering hope and a reminder that breaking the cycle is not only possible, but crucial for the future generations. The conversation is both heart-wrenching and empowering, showcasing the resilience found in the process of reclaiming one’s narrative.
[0:00] Okay, so I guess it's a bit of a long story, and I'm not sure exactly where to start, but maybe I'll just start with young me and kind of what went on.
[0:14] I'm all ears.
[0:15] So my ACE score is five, maybe a 5.5. Physical, sexual abuse, not by my parents, but, you know, people who were around. um and there's one item about sort of neglect i think um not having food clothes that stuff didn't apply but what did apply on that item and this is kind of my point five is uh not feeling protected at all um so i grew up in the caribbean like i said and i have a younger brother and my parents were married and we lived with my grandmother, who was my dad's mom. So both my parents worked throughout my childhood and we were primarily left with my grandmother growing up. And it was just... I always had this feeling that, like, my parents didn't really like me.
[1:27] Oh, okay.
[1:30] And for a long time, I guess I thought I was kind of wrong about that. But, you know, they did hit us. That was a very normal way of punishing children in that culture. My mom was a yeller. and you know she i'm i'm kind of having a hard time i think like just kind of condensing things oh.
[1:58] Listen you you don't have to condense things i'm i'm here for the duration i am happy to um hear whatever you have to say so you don't have to condense you don't have to edit i'm all okay
[2:09] I just i find myself getting sort of tense so i'm trying to relax, um some of my earliest memories are of my mom complaining to me and i'm talking i'm probably like, three years old um you know i'm sitting in a room and she's folding laundry and she's complaining about my dad seeing other women and not coming home. And I just, like, there was always this, the way I think about it is, like, she was using me as a garbage can. Like, she was always just kind of spewing out all of her complaints and frustrations, and I was just there and expected to receive it.
[3:05] Um yeah i've certainly been i've certainly been an unholy bucket for quite some time so i get where you're coming from as far as that goes so sorry about all that
[3:15] So that was a lot of it. And, you know, if she also did a lot of name calling, you know, words that were always used to describe me were selfish, lazy, worthless. Those were the main three, I think. From my dad, there was also ugly.
[3:45] Oh gosh um
[3:47] There's this word they say fully and it just kind of means stupid, um and that kind of stuff was just sort of bandied about like like it was nothing it was just all very casual all very casual yeah.
[4:07] It's it's kind of an odd thing because it's it's not even Even like there's a big hatred there. It's just, yeah, well, you are this and you are that. And it's colder in a way almost than somebody who's really angry, if I understand it correctly.
[4:22] Yeah, it was very cold. That stuff was. A lot of the name calling was very cold kind of stuff. Like, oh, my mom says to go sweep the floor. And, you know, I'm a kid, so I went and did something else or whatever. I didn't do it. um that makes you worthless right right um but then it could also get hot like i said my mom was a screamer and.
[4:53] Now we went from yeller to screamer which i'm obviously not disagreeing with it's your experience but i feel like i got the easy entry into that mindset
[5:01] Yeah so it would start as sort of yelling like it's supposed to be disciplinary or something like she's trying to correct some sort of behavior and so it would start with like, Oh, it will start with like questions, you know, kind of interrogation type questions. Like, why did you do this? What made you think that was a good idea? And then it would escalate into like shouting, you know, like, I don't understand you people. And why does anybody listen to me? And she would just kind of work herself into a frenzy until she was sort of screaming.
[5:38] And you're just watching this show, right? She's winding herself up, right? Right.
[5:42] Yeah. But like, she's very much targeting it at me, you know, like I remember times she would come to my room. Um, this would happen a lot when I was a teenager. I know I'm sort of jumping in time.
[5:57] No, no, jump around. That's fine.
[5:59] Um, so when I was a teenager, I became interested in boys, as you can imagine. Um, my parents' policy was that there was to be no dating at all um so.
[6:16] That come from religious ideas or or something else
[6:20] Um religious ideas i guess um you know virginity until marriage my mom was a big churchgoer and that was a whole other thing um so there was that but i think they were also on top of that just like weird about that type of stuff.
[6:43] Yeah, weird about that type of stuff may not be as descriptive to me as it might be to you.
[6:48] I just mean weird about sexual matters and any dating matters. So there was never any talk about how you should conduct yourself with the opposite sex. There was never any talk about how you go around finding a mate or somebody suitable. How do you evaluate somebody to see if there would be, you know, an appropriate person to spend time with?
[7:16] Gosh, well, how could they give you that advice? Yeah. Given who they chose, right?
[7:22] Yeah, they also got married really late. My mom claims that she was a virgin when they got married, and she would have been 30 years old.
[7:30] Wow.
[7:32] My dad, she also claims that my dad was a virgin, but I mean, I think that's a lie.
[7:36] Right. yeah i wouldn't put a lot of money on it but you know i'm just getting into this story so go ahead
[7:46] Okay um so, i forgot where it was i think i was talking about being a teenager so i.
[7:54] Oh yeah you got in boys and there was there there was i i drew you off sorry about that i drew you off on the event they said no dating and i was like is that religious or whatever so go Go ahead. Sorry.
[8:03] Yeah. So it's a little bit, just a little bit personal hangups, I think. So I did end up, you know, getting together with a guy at school and we would sort of sneak around to see each other and, you know, have little dates. Yeah. And I don't know, it was just always this thing of they would pretend like they were going to loosen up, but then would like, you know, take away any privileges or like pull away the hope of any privileges. So I remember my mom.
[8:36] Sorry, you're going to have to break that out a little more. Yeah. I'm not sure what you mean.
[8:40] So when I started being interested in this guy, my mom invited him to our house just to meet him and see like, okay, is this an okay person? and I think it was because he wanted me to go to like a school dance or something with him and, so she sat up on the veranda with him and sort of interviewed him and then as soon as he left she was like you know our rules like you can't date and you can't go out and you can't do anything, um so that was basically my life as a teenager I wasn't allowed to do anything except go to school and come back home and be at home like no going to friends houses no anything like that um oh.
[9:25] Wow so it's more than just dating it was like any socializing really
[9:28] Yeah wow um you know and i would obviously try to look for any opportunity to skirt around that but they were very um big on isolating me and me specifically because they were not like that with my brother, That's okay. And I do have to say about my brother, he's one year younger than me. And, you know, I don't want to paint myself as some kind of victim here because I also did, you know, wrong things when I was at home living in that situation. And I was physically abusive towards my younger brother.
[10:14] Go on.
[10:16] So during this time, I would say that my parents started sort of isolating me when I was maybe 11. And I think around that same time, I started becoming aggressive towards my brother. And the situation followed a pattern. And this is the pattern. i would be sitting in my room by myself um my brother and i shared a room by the way up until i left home but uh that's another matter so i would be in the room reading a book or something um and my brother would come in and attempt to get my attention uh he would usually do something sort of annoying, like that he knew to be annoying, like poking me or saying my name over and over again. And I would call my parents and tell them like, hey, he's bothering me. Can you get him to stop? And they would maybe sort of yell from the other room like, oh, behave yourself. But he wouldn't stop.
[11:27] That's some fine involved parenting right there.
[11:30] Yeah. And so he would continue and he would often like escalate it. And so it would turn it into a squabble and then i would like be you know sort of extremely like violent to end the situation um one time i remember like extremely.
[11:52] Violent okay yes
[11:54] Extremely violent yes the worst situation i would say is one time i um sorry that wasn't really a chuckle it was It was more of a I don't know what. I threw a size D battery into his back and hit him pretty much right on the spine. I think that, actually, no, I just remembered a worse one. I kicked a door into his face.
[12:29] Like bloody his nose or chip a tooth?
[12:32] It hit him on the forehead and it swole up.
[12:36] Okay.
[12:39] Now, I have since, you know, finding your show. I apologize to my brother for this and for, you know, the way that I treated him generally growing up. And, you know, I've attempted to make amends with him. But, you know, it'll just be forever one of the biggest regrets of my life.
[13:04] Sorry, you said, but you know, as if I know.
[13:06] Oh, I mean, but I'm saying I know that it's going to continue to be a big regret of mine because we're never going to.
[13:13] No, no. But how did he respond to your.
[13:15] Yeah, he. So he said that he, you know, he appreciated my apology and that. basically it like it's okay and i was like well it's not okay you know like i know it's not okay um so he based like he doesn't really want to uh talk about it very much right but he says that It's cool. It's cool. Okay.
[13:52] Now, has he ever talked about why he bothered you to this degree? Like why he was coming in and repeating your name over and over again or bothering you in this way?
[14:05] No.
[14:07] Why do you think he was doing it?
[14:10] I think... I don't know, maybe he wanted, I mean, obviously he wanted attention, but I don't know to what end exactly.
[14:22] It's an interesting question though, right?
[14:24] Yeah.
[14:25] I mean, obviously, you were a year older, is that right?
[14:30] Yes.
[14:31] Yeah, so I mean, you're a year older, so there's a little bit more responsibility, but he wasn't behaving perfectly either, right?
[14:39] Yeah.
[14:39] I mean, you weren't just out of nowhere, right? I mean, he's coming up and he's just kind of poking at you and inflaming you and knowing where it's going to lead. And of course, that doesn't mean that you're without responsibility, but he ain't a snow angel in this situation either, right?
[14:58] Yeah, that's true.
[15:02] So was he, I mean, I assume he was hit or beaten or that kind of stuff too?
[15:10] Yes, for sure. The way that usually went down was, my dad, he had a special belt. In fact, he had two, and we could choose which one. So that would be the deal. If we acted up during the day, our grandmother would sort of report to our father, and then he would decide how much we should be hit and if we should be hit.
[15:38] And do you think you got it about the same as your brother did he get it more or you more
[15:45] Um i think we got it about the same because i remember some a lot of times we would be both getting hit at the same time because we did the same thing you know.
[15:56] Oh maybe that's the two belts one chooses one the other gets the other yeah oh and how often would these beatings or hittings happen?
[16:08] I would say when we were smaller, I don't even know when they started. That's another thing. But now that I have my daughter, I suspect that it started pretty young, like around the age she is now.
[16:24] I mean, a lot of parents, regardless of race, are hitting babies. Like it's really jaw-dropping what goes on in the crib and the nursery.
[16:34] Yeah, it's horrifying.
[16:36] Yeah. So you don't remember a time before, but then how often would it happen that you can recall? I'm sure this is a bit variable and stuff like that, but just in general.
[16:47] Maybe once a week, and then it would decline maybe to once every two weeks. One of the strategies that we figured out was that if we could get our dad to laugh, he would often not bother beating us. So we became quite funny.
[17:07] Right bit of desperate comedy going on there but i yeah i get that i get that okay so i mean you would have received i guess did it taper off sort of in your in your teens early mid-teens
[17:20] It tapered off but there were a few um pronounced incidents with my dad during my teenage years.
[17:32] So you would have uh what three four or five hundred times you would have received these kinds of attacks oh
[17:39] I'm shaking i.
[17:40] Mean i'm just going with you you said once once every week so that's five uh sorry well so that's 50 times a year right and then over 10 years that's 500 um and so i'm really going low on the estimate but it would have been probably five to seven hundred if it sort of fades out in your mid-teens and so on five seven eight hundred uh could be up to a thousand uh especially if we go back sort of early on but that is a that is a lot of beatings my friend that is a lot of beatings too for your little for your little body to absorb right yeah i'm so sorry that's just oh it's just oh it fills me with such contempt and disgust to to think of of how the poor children are treated i mean you're a mother you you get it right I'm so sorry how awful how absolutely awful and unnecessary it's so unnecessary it's so unnecessary
[18:34] It is so unnecessary.
[18:35] I mean all we want to do is please our parents anyway they just have to ask nicely right yep And the number is hitting you in the fields, right?
[18:48] It really is.
[18:52] Yeah, I'm so sorry. Take your time. Take your time. I mean, it's important to really get just how much. And that doesn't even count the screaming, the yelling, the intimidation, the name-calling, the neglect, or the confinement, or the isolation, or the control. That's just one aspect of this. and it's, you know, 500 to 1,000 beatings with a belt.
[19:18] Good Lord, that's just appalling.
[19:32] Well, thank you for saying that, because it just really allows it to land for me.
[19:37] Oh, big virtual hug time. Big, big virtual hug. As best I can. Mental, big virtual hug. Well, and it's also within a society, right? So it's not just your parents. It's your parents, your extended family. It's not like the church is opposing it. It's not like the teachers are exposing it. It's not like you knew...
[20:03] The churches encourage it, too. They encourage it.
[20:05] Right. And it's not like you knew a lot of other kids who had a whole lot of a different experience, I assume.
[20:11] No. I didn't know any. And this is just an aside, like, thankfully, it is getting better because I do have a cousin. Granted, I have a cousin who has a son and he grew up without being spanked at all, you know, in the same country, down the street from my parents. And I remember I used to babysit him, you know, when he was a baby. And as he was getting older, my parents were advising my cousin that she should be hitting him. And she was always so offended and indignant about it, but she knew that that's kind of how everybody got it. Right. But just the fact, you know, when I think about it now, the fact that after all these years, they're still like saying that this is a good thing to do.
[21:06] Oh, you mean your parents are still saying this?
[21:08] Yeah.
[21:09] Oh, no, they can't. But they can't go back. The conscience would just be too horrendous. I mean, they can't like I can't imagine that they would be able to let go of this and say, I beat my children hundreds or thousands of times combined. mind and it was just evil and i just did wrong and i mean i don't think people's conscience can i think that just i don't know i don't know how you'd get out of bed if you were able to accept that in any way
[21:39] Yeah. And that's why I find myself here. Like, I just can't continue to be, to pretend to be in any kind of relationship with them because it's so hollow and fake.
[21:55] Right. I mean, it's dishonest, right?
[21:58] Yes.
[21:59] Now, are you Christian? Have you retained the values?
[22:04] These um well i guess i discarded them and then i sort of reacquired.
[22:10] Them right you had your rum spring spring so to speak like the army right so okay so i mean yeah thou shalt not bear false witness and honor thy mother and thy father which means tell the truth and and i i will not dishonor my family of origin by lying to them so um so yeah if you have a relationship where you just can't be honest can't be direct or the price of doing that is so appalling and escalating that you know i don't know i and it's the older i get pull like old guy privilege a little here but just the older i get the less i just have any interest in being in relationships where i can't tell the truth that's like a survival mechanism when you're a kid and a teenager and a young man or a young woman, but as you get older, I mean, this whole, like, I have to lie to get through life just kind of falls away.
[23:06] Yeah, I think I'm arriving there. You know, it's kind of been a long journey, but I'm, you know, I'm starting to feel that in a way that I wasn't able to before.
[23:18] Right. Now, we'll get to that, and I obviously, I'm hugely impressed and appreciate your journey here. Yeah. What was the story with the, I think I've got the verbal abuse. I think I obviously understand the physical abuse and the neglect, the confinement and so on. You did pass by and obviously don't talk about anything that you're really uncomfortable talking about. But I didn't get a sense of the scope of the sexual abuse other than you were saying that it was not your direct family.
[23:46] Right. Yeah. I'm just going to take a deep breath. Okay, so I think I was around six or seven when this guy started working at a business across the street from my house. And my dad was friends with the guy who owned this business. And this guy was the employee of my dad's friend. and he started i guess you would call it grooming behavior so it was like a customary thing that if they needed like refreshments like water or whatever during the day they would come over to our house and my grandmother would have me or my brother just fetched him a glass of water, um so i would be fetching this guy a glass of water and he would start doing things like trying to hold my hand or like trying to touch my legs. Yeah.
[24:50] All the stuff that can be laughed off initially. Right. But breaks down your sense of bodily autonomy.
[24:55] But like, you know, it became every single time. So I started not wanting to carry water for this guy. And, you know, it's not like my grandmother wasn't like, she was there and he was still kind of doing it. So it became a thing where like, Even if I was sitting outside, like playing in the front yard, and he saw me there, if I was by myself, he would come over and he would start talking to me. And, you know, just a lot of creepy stuff, saying a lot of creepy stuff, asking me to be his girlfriend.
[25:29] I'm sorry, what age were you again?
[25:31] I was around six or seven, I think.
[25:34] And was he a teenager or 20s?
[25:37] He was a grown man. He was probably in his 30s.
[25:41] I mean, it's tough to tell when you're that age, but yes. Yeah. So basically a grown man, okay.
[25:46] Yeah, but because he's sort of a person that's around, as I got older, I was aware of him, and then I sort of figured out the age thing. He's dead now, though, so that's good.
[25:59] Yes, it is.
[26:01] Yeah, so he would be doing creepy things, like asking me to be his girlfriend. And there was just a lot of touching, like touching on the legs, going higher, um trying to beckon me into places you know like wooded areas kind of deal and that just sort of went on like i was just kind of living in fear of this guy and trying to dodge him and.
[26:30] You hadn't been street proofed or anything by your parents like if any guy ever tries you know, this kind of stuff, come right to us and get away from him. And had you had the conversation, so to speak, that kids need to have in this fallen world?
[26:46] I remember... My mom saying something like that to me, like talking about how people would want to touch young girls in particular, but I don't remember a part about what to do if that happens.
[27:08] Right.
[27:10] You know, they street-proofed us in the sense that we had a safe word for school pickups and stuff like that, which was never necessary because my parents always came to pick us up or we took the bus so.
[27:24] Right it was kind
[27:26] Of a useless system.
[27:28] I mean it's and i'm sorry i don't mean to drop the story but i'm just sort of wrap my head around this this hyper controlling like you can't go out you can't date you can't go to friends houses but you can be lured into the woods by this creepy pedo guy right yeah i'm trying to sort of figure out this is an opposite pole that is making my brain hurt, if that makes any sense.
[27:51] Yeah, it makes sense, and it doesn't. So the hyper-isolating stuff came when I was a bit, like, it came later.
[28:00] Oh, like when you were a teenager, so maybe because you could get pregnant or something, it was something like that.
[28:05] Yeah. Okay. Yeah, probably. Before that, I remember a time my mom started telling me that I wouldn't be able to go play with the boys anymore you know because I was a girl and blah blah blah and I think she caught some, older guy like looking up my skirt when I was climbing a tree okay but I was like why did you dress me a skirt if you know I was gonna be climbing trees.
[28:37] Right. And I mean, very often, I obviously we don't, I mean, I don't know anything about your mom in this way, but often a failure to protect children comes from a history of having been violated oneself.
[28:50] Yeah, I have my suspicions about that. If you don't mind, when my mom was a teenager, she told me that her and one of her other sisters, my mom is one of like 15 siblings. I'm sorry, 15? yeah yeah yeah okay holy.
[29:11] Spray and pray but yeah
[29:12] I don't uh one mom but three different uh dads, so one um her and one other sister was sent to live with a couple who attended the same church as them um and it was odd why two teenage girls would go stay with like a married older couple, um but my mom is very like secretive about those years and my dad has always alluded to my mom and her sister is having a lot of secrets about you know growing up um so i think some there are some skeletons there but sorry.
[30:01] It's the idea that they were either maybe molested at this house or that they were sent there to get away from somebody who was preying upon them locally
[30:11] Yeah it could be either i'm not sure right.
[30:15] Okay all right okay so what happened with uh this uh horror show of a worker from across the street
[30:25] Um so that kind of creepy stuff just sort of continued um there's one incident like i know that i have memories missing from this time so there is i just have this kind of snapshot of this one incident where he is trying to beckon me into this like it's sort of an old house i'm sorry i'm getting very like shaky talking about it, um so he was trying.
[30:53] It's amazing how deeply embedded in the body this stuff is right Bye.
[30:58] Yeah. So he's sitting in the doorway of this sort of, like, abandoned house, and he's calling to me. I was, you know, walking up the street, and he's calling to me, and I, like, that's kind of where it ends. I don't remember going towards him or running away. I just have that sort of image. And it's one of these memories that I've tried to work with in therapy to figure out what is the rest of that. But I know that it just makes me very fearful and jittery when I even think about it.
[31:43] Um so you eventually based on your physical reaction that it went a lot further than you remember is that right i
[31:49] Think possibly so right okay but i i do not feel that it was like a full penetrative like anything like that but i think you know it it escalated from what it had been before potentially um and then he sort of he went away after a while like he just wasn't around anymore um he moved on from the job i guess he was fired for not actually being very good at it and then yeah when i was a teenager he died in a car accident well.
[32:27] I think good
[32:28] Riddance to rarely um and worked at the same place when i was a teenager and i remember coming home from school and he was there one day and he tried to speak to me and i kicked him in the shins, and then he never tried to speak to me again sorry.
[32:52] I wasn't sure how the sentence was going to end i kicked him in the good yeah it
[32:58] Was in the middle of the street so i just stuck with the yeah.
[33:00] Yeah fair fair fair okay all right okay well i've certainly heard worse but you know who knows what's yeah it's very in the body in in the memory and so on so again and and you didn't tell your your parents of course right or or did you i
[33:19] Didn't tell them i've never told them why.
[33:22] Do you think or i was it was it because you just weren't close to them or what why would you because i mean I think that these creeps prey on girls who they know, or boys sometimes too, who aren't going to tell their parents. So he must have been able to figure that one out ahead of time. So I guess he sensed the distance between you and your parents. Something like that?
[33:43] Yeah. I think I was a pretty withdrawn child from pretty early. A lot of that was just reacting to the stuff, but a lot of that was training too. People were always telling me not to talk. Yeah, so I didn't talk. I also had the sense that they would be really mad at me.
[34:08] Oh, that you had done something to bring this on,
[34:10] Right? That I had done something wrong, yeah.
[34:13] Right, like climbing the tree in your skirt, right?
[34:16] Yeah.
[34:18] Right.
[34:20] And I think, sadly, I found out that that was pretty much true because, sorry, but there's another kind of a heavy thing.
[34:30] We're here to talk heavy, so don't apologize. Go for it.
[34:33] Yeah, so after I moved to Canada, I was 19, my parents had found this family from the same country, but they had immigrated a long time ago. So my parents didn't know them, but they met through a mutual friend. Actually, a mutual sort of acquaintance, because my father didn't know this lady who introduced them to this family very well. Um, so let's just call this lady Anna. Um, my, when we first came to Canada, we would stay at Anna's house and, uh, she had a husband and two boys. And after, you know, I got settled in during my first year of school here, the husband sexually assaulted me in their house. Oh, gosh. This was another situation where, thankfully, it didn't go very, it didn't go far. I was able to, like, shut it down. But, I mean, it was still, like, a massive violation, obviously. And so I did tell my mother what happened. And her response was basically that this would now make things inconvenient for her when she travels.
[35:57] Oh, gosh.
[35:58] So she was like, oh, why did he have to go and do something like that? Because now this is going to be a mess. And then she told me not to tell my dad because he would be upset and wouldn't want to stay with them. if he knew that.
[36:21] I mean, you know, I hear terrible things, of course, over the course of these shows, but that's up there as far as just absolutely appalling goes. And also no sense of being able to protect other girls, right?
[36:36] Yeah.
[36:37] The need to get this guy in front of a judge, right? Yeah. Get him out of society so he's not preying on, you know, who knows how many. It's just, oh, inconvenient for me.
[36:49] Yeah, totally.
[36:50] Wow.
[36:53] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, it's so hard thinking back to that time in my life because, you know, it was very difficult. Like, they were sort of my only, like, connection here because I picked this country because I didn't know anyone here and I just wanted to go away from my parents and start over. They would have preferred me to go to the UK where we have family or go to the states where we have family. But I was pretty adamant that I didn't want to stay within the family system. Like my instincts were just get out of here. Right, right. Yeah. Then I got here and it was like, oh my gosh, I'm not out. I'm not out yet.
[37:48] Well, you're in almost worse, right? Right.
[37:50] Yeah. It's like, oh, I got to get out again.
[37:55] So what happened to where you were staying and your living arrangements and all?
[38:00] Luckily, I wasn't reliant on them for that. They were sort of like, you know, a nice to have. I was staying on campus, but I would go like the first because it was my first actual year here. year um i stayed with them for the first two weeks um of the term just to like help get situated and before like my um my actual rental was available and i would go see them on the weekend you know and have home-cooked meals and like family time family like time um and just to be around people of the same culture because there's kind of a a little bit of a language thing going on too you uh.
[38:45] You mean like a patois thing,
[38:46] Or what do you mean? Yeah, it was one of these unexpected things. I didn't, because I grew up speaking English, but I didn't realize how different the English is in the Caribbean. And how often we switch back and forth between a patois and regular English. So having to speak regular English all the time was actually giving me headaches.
[39:08] No, I can imagine. I mean, it would be like if I had to take on some outrageous Scottish accent it for the rest of my life it would be a little confusing
[39:16] Yeah it was wild so you know being um in their home would be kind of like a break from that and you know yeah and how how.
[39:26] Tough was it to switch to i don't know say regular english or something like that to to sort of drop the patois
[39:32] Um it wasn't tough but it was like a conscious effort for um i would say like six months.
[39:41] Right right okay
[39:42] And now people tell me that i don't have much of an accent even.
[39:45] Yeah i get the same thing
[39:47] Yeah um so.
[39:49] This guy i mean he wasn't grooming he wasn't groping a little like he was it sounds like and like straight up trying to rape
[39:56] Yeah he like i was i would stay in their basement um and yeah so i would stay in the basement and all the other the rooms were upstairs and he came down there one night like I was you know in the little futon or whatever and I think I had the tv on and he just came down the stairs he was kind of drunk or something, And he sat next to the bed and started talking to me. And then at one point, he just lunged and grabbed my face and tried to kiss me and tried to get on top of me.
[40:33] Wow. Terrifying.
[40:36] Yeah.
[40:39] Terrifying. Yeah, I mean, I've talked about this. Black girls in the black community have it really tough. Very, very tough. I mean, according to some of the studies that I've read, you know, it's not comprehensive, but it's more than one study. Like half of black girls report being raped by black men before they become adults. And it is a huge, I mean, part of the single mom phenomenon and so on. But it is the preying upon girls. It's obviously not exclusive to the black community, but I think it's a little more concentrated in the black community. And it's just appalling just what goes on sometimes.
[41:17] Yeah, in the Caribbean, there's definitely a rampant problem.
[41:24] Yeah, it's the same in India, too. I mean, there's an old saying, you know, any girl who reaches the age of 16 and still has her hymen must not have any male relatives. And I'm like, oh, God, can we not do this, please? Yeah. It's horrible.
[41:38] Horrible. Not to trade horrible sayings, but one that they had back home is after 12 is lunch.
[41:48] Meaning that oh okay wait wait hang on i'm half there but i'm teetering on the edge oh my innocence what does that mean it
[41:57] Means if you're over 12 years old you're you know fit for consumption yeah.
[42:03] Oh god uh okay all right so yeah horrible and horrifying and so on and i'm so sorry i really i am sorry i mean it it certainly you know it's not like other communities and so on are not subject to this kind of stuff but i think it's a little bit under talked about in the black community as well so for sure okay so keep a
[42:25] Lot of secrets.
[42:26] Yeah yeah okay so 19 plus how do things go for you there uh
[42:33] So after this whole uh the sexual assault situation i, cut ties with that family i just stopped going to their house um i don't know why but because my mom had told me not to tell my dad because I wasn't close to my dad anyway. Sorry, I feel like I need to skip back and sort of insert a fact about my dad, which is that part of the whole not wanting me to date when I was a teenager, is when he realized that I was gonna continue to sort of see this boy.
[43:14] He, I remember one day he took me in the car and he drove me out to like this field or whatever. And he parked the car and he was attempting to like, like ask me what was going on with the boyfriend. Um, like, were we sexually active with each other? And at that point we weren't. Actually, I was a virgin into my twenties. um so i told him that nothing was going on and he i don't remember what he asked me but i gave him like a snarky answer and he punched me in the face oh my god and then drove me home, and then he did not speak to me for like a couple of years, and I mean I still had to say good morning to him because it would be rude if I didn't and then he would sort of like half grunt back and then he would just ignore me.
[44:30] For years? It went on for a couple of years. I mean, I guess there were some breaks, but basically, like, 15 to 17, my dad barely spoke to me. And he was also— Do you remember.
[44:52] The snarky comment? I mean, not that there's ever any justification for something like that, but— What did you say to your poor father? I'm just kidding. Like, but what, what, what, what, I mean, was there. Yeah.
[45:06] I literally don't remember. I don't remember what it was. I do remember that it was snarky memory either.
[45:13] Right.
[45:13] Yeah. Right.
[45:15] Right.
[45:17] Yeah. But I remember like intentionally being sassy because I was, you know, getting sick of his questions. Right. Um, and like, you know, He was not believing me when I told him that I wasn't sleeping with this guy. And I wasn't. And they still don't believe me that I didn't sleep with them.
[45:37] Wow. Okay. So, did your mother not intervene and say, snap out of it, old guy, you've got to talk to your daughter?
[45:51] No, because he was also not talking to her. So, my dad did this thing for a few years. This is what I mentioned, silent treatment, in my email, and this is what I mean. um I don't remember what him and my mom got into an argument about they were always arguing about, everything but the primary grievance my mother was that we didn't have we didn't own our own home we were living in a house that was owned by a relative of my dad's and it was sort of the house that he grew up in and so my grandmother was still there and apparently one of the The conditions of their marriage was that, you know, they would only live with my grandmother for a couple of years and then they would use that time to build their own house and then move out. But that never happened until I was in like my brother and I were adults. So we grew up in the house that my mom, you know, did not want to be living in.
[46:58] Um, so she was always nagging him about that. And my dad would, you know, finance new cars and stuff and then say that he can't afford to get a house. Anyway, they had one of these fights and my dad half moved out. was we had this room that was sort of attached to the house but you couldn't it didn't connect to any other room so you had to go outside and enter a separate door and it was just a bedroom, and so my dad was living in that bedroom i.
[47:34] Mean it's not quite a shed but it doesn't sound like the exact opposite of a shed either
[47:38] It's kind of shed like because we did just use it for storage so there was a bed there was also like three bicycles your.
[47:48] Dad's sleeping in a shed in a storage unit with some bikes yeah patriarchy fail okay I mean it's literally the long house is attached the dog house is attached to the side of the house
[48:02] Yeah he moved out because he was tired of my mom's nagging him and they kind of live that way for a good chunk of time while I was in high school. I'm trying to remember if I started college, if they were still doing that.
[48:22] So he wouldn't talk to you. He wouldn't talk to your mom, really. Yeah. What about your brother?
[48:30] My brother, at this time, because he was allowed to go out and do things, he would go out and do things. and he didn't really seem to have a problem or like him and my dad didn't really seem to have any problems and um you know if i was i always had problems with them obviously so i was always like starting arguments or trying to push back against their rules and you know my brother would sort of play the role of telling me to like you know just calm down so that they'll stop yelling right right.
[49:09] Okay okay and i'm sorry i'm just i'm my brain is just circling the drain of this shed uh now did
[49:25] Your dad have.
[49:26] You know the sort of i don't know i don't mean to overly milk the cliches but you know uh the side piece in town second families like any of that kind of stuff
[49:37] Yeah. So like I said, my mom, when I was really young, would complain to me about my dad, you know, cheating on her with other women. And when I, you know, when I went into forced isolation, I obviously took to the internet. And I found emails, my dad's emails, and it appeared to me that he was seeing other people.
[50:05] You found your dad's emails? You mean you hacked into his account?
[50:08] I didn't hack it.
[50:10] Why do you get them? They're not lying littered around the internet, are they?
[50:13] Well, no. We used the same computer, and he didn't log out. And so when I...
[50:18] Oh, so he just left his email running, and you looked at his emails.
[50:22] Yeah. It was closed, but it was in those days that if you went to the history and you clicked it, and it wasn't logged out, it would just reopen the email.
[50:31] Yeah, yeah. It makes sense. Okay.
[50:32] Yeah, so I saw it that way.
[50:34] And he was emailing girls and women.
[50:37] He was emailing women and there were like, you know, graphic images.
[50:43] What?
[50:45] Yeah, it took forever to load them. It was like a dial-up modem, but there were. Yeah.
[50:51] So I know I still have nightmare flashbacks of trying to get information over the internet. So what do you mean? I mean, I hesitate to broach the topic, but you say graphic images. Was he sending, like, penis pictures or something?
[51:05] No, they were of women.
[51:08] Oh, like of other women sending to him or just women in general?
[51:13] Some of them seemed like women sending to him. Some of them seemed like one of his friends sending images of women to him.
[51:21] Okay. And these are women that he might have dated or had affairs?
[51:26] They seemed local, just based on the pictures, you know.
[51:32] Okay.
[51:33] And then there were just some, like, text exchanges about, like, planning meetups.
[51:39] Did your father have some magic special male source that drew women to him, like flies to honey? I mean, what was, I mean, he's living in a shed with some bicycles. That doesn't seem to be super alpha, if that makes sense.
[51:54] Um yeah but i guess nobody would know that from the outside uh my parents he doesn't.
[52:01] Say that's the shed i live in he's like here's the house over there
[52:03] They're very polished outwards put together like my mom runs a and uh my dad runs a my mom is retired from running and.
[52:17] Oh, so he also, like, he would be kind of a big man in the community, and he would also have the enviable position of being able to offer people jobs, which obviously can be quite status-based. Is that right?
[52:28] Yeah. I mean, when I was growing up, it wasn't so much that, but it was a nice job, and he was, like, awkwardly mobile. But now he is that guy, you know? Like, he's an elder in the church, and he is that guy.
[52:40] Right, right. Pressing the flesh, kissing the babies. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah.
[52:44] All of that. Okay. Giving the sermons.
[52:48] Oh, yes. Giving the sermons. So he'll spend a lot more time talking to strangers than a couple of years talking to his own family. Or at least the women in his own family. All right.
[52:58] Okay.
[53:00] All right. So you cruise into your...
[53:01] He talked to his mom.
[53:02] I'm sorry?
[53:03] He talked to his mom.
[53:04] He talks to his mom?
[53:06] Yeah. She lived with us. So it wasn't all the women. It was just his wife and daughter. But mommy was...
[53:13] Well, technically, actually, I did say his family.
[53:16] Right.
[53:16] Well, I guess this mom's his family, but she'd be part of her family. Okay, anyway. So, okay, so you're cruising away, you're living on campus, doing your undergraduate, is that right?
[53:29] Yeah.
[53:29] Okay. And any dating or guy stuff going on at this time in your life?
[53:35] No. In fact, after the sexual assault, I developed an eating disorder. disorder and um so that and trying to get my degree was eating disorder.
[53:48] Which way though less or more
[53:50] Uh less a lot less i lost a lot of weight i was dangerously underweight um for, like half of my university career was.
[54:01] This like right after i mean like straight domino stuff off this guy it
[54:06] Was pretty much and i don't even think it was necessarily just off the guy i think it was also off the reaction of my mom oh.
[54:16] The betrayal of your mom you mean
[54:17] Yeah so it's like the assault the betrayal the you know the secrecy and then um like losing that one little like you know safe place that was supposed to be safe that i could go to.
[54:35] Well, and also, I'm obviously no expert in eating disorders, but I would imagine, and correct me, it was your disorder, not mine, so correct me if I go astray, of course, but it also may have something to do with, if I have curves, if I have signs of fertility, then I'm going to get assaulted. So I have to starve myself into looking as unsexual as possible, as uncurvy as possible. It's the only way to stay safe.
[55:03] Yeah there was definitely that element to it and um it's not at all politically correct to say this but in particular it was like i did not want to be attractive to black men because all of my bad experiences had been with black men right.
[55:22] So i mean obviously the the curves i mean that you know there is that kind of cliche that the black men you know like i'm thick like i'm curvy and so on. So if you're going to starve yourself, right, right.
[55:32] Yeah. I had that butt going on.
[55:34] So, right, right, right. Okay. And was that something that like you lost the taste for food? Was it grit your teeth willpower or, or how, how did that manifest for you? Because I mean, I assume you were on a pretty savage regimen of, of calories and, and did you exercise as well, or was it mostly just calorie reduction?
[55:55] Um, it started off with just calorie reduction. and I still remember the numbers but I won't get into that because they tell you not to. Yeah, so it was calorie restriction. Very, very extreme. And then I would also run. I would do a lot of cardio. So I lost it pretty quickly.
[56:18] And how much did you lose? Sorry, if you don't want to talk numbers, obviously that's totally fine. Or if it's not, not wise.
[56:25] Yeah, I'll just say this. I'm 5'9", and at my lowest, I was 120 pounds, I think, which is pretty wiry.
[56:38] That is kind of... And also, a lot of that would be kind of sinewy muscle from the running too, right?
[56:44] Yeah, I was very, very lean. I see pictures of myself, and my bones are prominent, and my arms look impossibly thin. And like, I can't even imagine that I was actually that size walking around and nobody stopped me and said, what in the world is going on?
[57:00] Right, right. I mean, the old joke, you know, she got to run around in the shower to get wet, right?
[57:04] Yeah.
[57:06] And sorry, was it difficult emotionally or had you mostly lost your appetite or how did that occur for you in losing that much weight? Because, you know, a lot of people struggle with weight loss and especially keeping it off. so was it a willpower thing or was it just didn't have much of an appetite or some combo
[57:26] I think it was a combo I'm remembering one other thing too something that happened in between, um sexual assault my mother saying you know what she did and then i went home, uh for summer and i had put on some weight after being uh up here, and like i got a lot of ridicule for that and i mean it was probably you know 15 pounds or something you know the frost 15 well it wasn't you know.
[58:00] On five nine that's not you know
[58:02] It's It's not the end of the world. Yeah. It's not like I was eating fast food and all this kind of stuff. Yeah. And so there was a lot of ridicule for that. My mom and my brother poking again and just in general. So I resolved then to lose a bunch of weight. And once I started with just exercising and restricting calories, But once I got back to Canada, it really accelerated. Yeah, so the number dropped down, and then the regiment of running kind of went up.
[58:43] And also, of course, if your family is mocking you for being heavier, not heavy, but heavier, then it's like you have to lose the weight, because otherwise they have power over you, and they can make you feel bad, right?
[58:53] Yeah, for sure.
[58:54] Right.
[58:56] And then it kind of morphed into bulimia after the first year or so.
[59:05] And is that because you felt like you just weren't able to keep losing? Did you hit your sort of plateau of loss?
[59:10] No, it was because, like, my body needed to eat. And so I would start, like, I would binge. Like, I would uncontrollably binge. And then I would feel disgusted with myself. And then I would purge. and then that becomes its own sort of addictive cycle.
[59:27] Yeah because then you say okay i can indulge my body in its thirst for calories but i don't have to keep it down right yeah okay And did anyone over the course of this time, as you say, sort of notice how much your body was changing? And did anyone say, are you okay?
[59:47] Or maybe you should see a counselor? Or did any of that intervention happen?
[59:56] No, there were comments about it. I remember my mom being like, what are you, anorexic or something kind of thing.
[1:00:06] That's so not helpful, but yeah, okay.
[1:00:07] And another time, she was trying to offer me some kind of food, and I refused it. And she said, I don't want any anorexic daughter. And so that is as much intervention as they ever did. I did find support groups online, and people there encouraged me to get treatment. And so I did start— And were.
[1:00:32] They helpful overall?
[1:00:35] It took a long time. like I did see a counselor through my school and but even after I graduated I continued to like be in eating disorder support programs and eventually I did um kick it.
[1:00:49] Well congratulations I'm obviously very glad for that
[1:00:53] Yeah um this is part of the reason why things is maybe coming to a head because I did relapse last year when my mother visited like after she visited how.
[1:01:08] Long did she visit for
[1:01:13] Just one week right.
[1:01:17] And what happened what happened
[1:01:25] Well, she showed up. I didn't permit her to stay in our home because I thought that would be not a good idea. So I told her to get a place nearby. So she was staying in her own place. But the first afternoon she came over, one of the first comments she made to me, mom of a one-year-old, is that basically I look like I'm still pregnant.
[1:01:50] Oh, haven't lost the baby weight, that kind of stuff, right?
[1:01:54] Yeah, I think her words were, oh, do you have another baby in there?
[1:02:00] Oh, my God. And also knowing that you've had some problems with weight and eating in the past, right?
[1:02:06] Oh, what do you mean? She doesn't know that.
[1:02:08] Well, she made two comments about, don't be anorexic, and I don't want an anorexic daughter, right? Yeah.
[1:02:15] As far as she concerns, I was never anorexic or ever bulimic. or they would claim no knowledge of such things.
[1:02:27] So, I mean, she really knows the holes in your armor, right?
[1:02:33] Yeah. And it's just, again, so casual.
[1:02:38] Right. Okay. And did she share much joy in the birth of your child?
[1:02:45] Uh yeah she's very excited to have a granddaughter, But I've heard you talk about this before, that if you see your abusive parents being super nice to your kid, it creates this cognitive dissonance of like, well, if you knew how to be this way, why were you not this way with me?
[1:03:12] Right.
[1:03:14] And like, how much of this is fake? And when is the other shoe going to drop?
[1:03:18] Well, and how much of it is also just twisting the knife in you, right? See?
[1:03:22] Yeah, it's like, what is this?
[1:03:22] You must have just imagined it all. I'm fine. Yeah. Look how great I am with children.
[1:03:28] Yeah. And I was under that spell for a long time. It was just like, yeah, we're great people. Everybody likes us. You're the only one that has a problem. You must be the problem.
[1:03:40] Right.
[1:03:40] I believed that for so long that I was the problem.
[1:03:44] Sure. Yeah. Yeah, I know. And especially because it's not just, again, it's not just your parents. It's the whole society, right? Your dad's welcome to give lectures in church, and they're pillars of the community. So it's not like you're getting much social condemnation of your parents or issues.
[1:04:03] Yeah, none. It was another thing that my mom was going on about when she was here. She had gone to see her brother, and she was telling me how many compliments she was getting from her brother and his wife about what a nice, lovely person she is. And I was like, this is an interesting sell job. Like, why do you feel the need to relay to me all the compliments that you've been getting from other people?
[1:04:35] Right.
[1:04:36] I guess because she knows it's not been my experience with her.
[1:04:40] Yeah, it's just more gaslighting. I mean, there's certain kinds of personalities, they simply can't open their mouth without wanting to manipulate. They have absolutely no other reason to communicate than to get some obscure point across or mess with your head or gaslight you or something. And did the things you thought to some degree with your dad, to some degree?
[1:05:05] Yeah, to some degree. I don't even remember how that happened. It was just like one day he was just acting like it didn't happen. Like, yeah, that's all done. when I was graduating, from my undergraduate my parents came up and they stayed with that family.
[1:05:33] Oh the rabid guy family
[1:05:35] Yep they stayed there and my dad still didn't know what had happened so this was my mom's plan that my dad not know so that they could continue to stay there Yeah.
[1:05:46] I mean, what's protecting your daughter compared to saving some money in a hotel rooms?
[1:05:51] Exactly. He ended up finding out after what had happened, and he was very mad at my mom and didn't talk to her again for a long time.
[1:06:00] What do you mean he found out? I mean, it would only be your mom who would tell him, wouldn't it?
[1:06:06] I think it started to become an issue because I was not seeing the family, and they were still in touch with them. And so I don't know, because I've always tried to distance myself from my parents, and I tell them as little as possible about my life, so that they don't have ammo.
[1:06:27] Right.
[1:06:30] But I think it was through some circuitous route because the wife also didn't know what happened. So I think my mom told the wife at some point, and then she mentioned it to the mutual friend with my dad.
[1:06:47] Sorry, she being your mom or the wife,
[1:06:50] The wife, the wife would have mentioned it to this other lady who is possibly the one who told my dad or something like that.
[1:06:57] Okay, got it, got it.
[1:06:59] I wasn't really privy to the conversations.
[1:07:02] Right. Now, I mean, of course, yeah, and we don't know what was communicated. Was it my husband sexually assaulted this, you know, young woman from abroad? Or, you know, she misinterpreted a simple hug and got it into her head, the crazy notion that, you know, dot, dot, dot.
[1:07:22] Yeah, whatever it was, it was enough for my dad to, like, be upset about it.
[1:07:26] Right. now upset at the man
[1:07:30] Upset at my mom.
[1:07:31] Oh for not telling him
[1:07:36] And then you know let him go there and stay under the same roof with the guy and.
[1:07:41] Have backyard
[1:07:43] Barbecues with him and stuff oh no see.
[1:07:47] That's kind of funny right and really kind of pathetic in my humble opinion which is you know he's real big on beating up kids but he won't say boo to a guy who assaulted his daughter.
[1:08:03] Yep.
[1:08:04] You know, when it comes to belting kids, man, he's the guy. Because, you know, kids are dependent, small, helpless, weak, can't fight back. But when someone assaults his daughter, oh no, he's only upset with your mom for not telling him he doesn't go and confront this guy.
[1:08:20] Yeah, he just makes a lot of noise about it.
[1:08:23] Yeah. Yeah. So after your mom visited last year, you said you had a relapse, but the eating stuff, right? And how long did that take to overcome?
[1:08:35] Um, I would say just over the course of the winter.
[1:08:38] Okay. And how tough was it? Were you concerned about a real backslide, or was it not quite that bad?
[1:08:48] Um i was concerned but it was also it was very different this time.
[1:08:59] Um because you know i had already i'd been listening to you and i think i don't know if this sounds crazy or what but i feel like before really starting to get into like the type of philosophy that you do i don't think i even had like an observing ego i think i was just and this is thing this is something that therapists have worked with me on because like i was constantly in fight or flight i wasn't there was no like higher self kind of watching the whole thing and like doing any sort of executive function it was just like survive get through avoid you know defend like it was you know my whole life had been that and so I started, to kind of digesting all your stuff I went to times where I was just like constantly you know listening to call-in shows over and over just trying to trigger like, my underlying feelings to just come out because I didn't even really have access to them.
[1:10:07] Um, so through that process, you know, I, I sort of developed this, um, this observing ego. So this time when I was, I started to see the pattern reemerge and I was doing this stuff. I was kind of like, I could see myself doing it and I was able to kind of like, you know, debug myself in a way.
[1:10:29] That's great.
[1:10:30] Right, right. Yeah, it did feel like that. It felt like troubleshooting, like I'm stuck in a pattern. I got to break out of it.
[1:10:38] Right, right. That's wild. Development of the observing ego. That's amazing. I mean, what a brilliant thing to do. Well done, well done.
[1:10:47] Yeah, it's wild because I studied psychology and philosophy in school, and they don't talk about any of this stuff. It was so less useful. you are.
[1:10:55] Going to draw me into a rant about academic psychology and philosophy but I'm going to resist because I want to focus on you so I'll bookmark that for another time
[1:11:05] Ready so.
[1:11:07] Did you meet your current husband or partner in college or after or what's the status there
[1:11:16] Yeah I met him after before finding your stuff so I was still in my sort of haze of, dissociated nonsense um but like i said i wasn't really dating i didn't date in university and i didn't really date after i had like a good circle of friends and you know go out dancing and stuff like that but i never got into any relationships and i never did hookups or stuff like that um, at one point i had a therapist who suggested that you know maybe you should date um she was He was actually a pretty bad therapist, but I took that advice of hers.
[1:11:56] And how old were you at this point?
[1:11:59] I was 23. 24, maybe? 25?
[1:12:05] It's not the most outlandish advice. I mean, she may have been bad for other things, but it's not the worst.
[1:12:09] She was bad for other things, for sure. She told me that I should date my roommate.
[1:12:13] Oh, gosh. Well, that's my stakes, dating.
[1:12:16] Yeah. And she also told me that bulimia was totally normal, and that that was called date night when she was in school. And I was like, check, please.
[1:12:26] Yeah, yeah. Right. Right. Okay. All right. So you started dating at this point, or you took that advice?
[1:12:37] Yeah, so I got on some dating apps, and I met my husband pretty quickly. I think he was the second guy that I went on a date with.
[1:12:48] Wow, you really are cracking the odds here.
[1:12:51] Well, it was not a smooth ride, because as I said, I was a dissociated mess. So, our relationship was kind of a dissociated mess for the first four years, I would say. Four years?
[1:13:06] Wow.
[1:13:06] Yeah.
[1:13:07] You're all some patient people.
[1:13:09] We are some patient people. Um, yeah.
[1:13:17] So how did you survive four years of dissociation?
[1:13:22] Well, I mean, dissociation had been my normal.
[1:13:24] So. No, but you, yes. I mean, him as a couple, I mean, as a whole.
[1:13:30] Yeah, well, it was not a good situation at all at the beginning stuff. This is a marriage that we kind of had to really rectify after the fact. so when i first oh.
[1:13:44] Like fly the plane bolt the wings on right
[1:13:46] Yeah and you know we've been pretty lucky because we found like good people to give wisdom to us right right uh like you um not a lot of the real world sort unfortunately um yeah so he was actually in a relationship but lied about it, and so we were seeing each other for a long time under false pretenses, and when i found out i'm.
[1:14:21] Sorry i'm just going back to the island is he from a similar cultural background to yours
[1:14:24] No he is a canadian born canadian white boy from yeah okay.
[1:14:32] And and so he You were the side? I don't know. That's a disrespectful term, I suppose.
[1:14:37] I know, but it is what it was.
[1:14:39] You were the other lady, the hidden part of the triangle.
[1:14:44] Exactly.
[1:14:45] Okay.
[1:14:46] And so I found this out after two years because I was ignoring every red flag in the book. They were all there, but I ignored them because it was fun. and like wool steaks, So, when I found out, I went scorched earth. I let the girlfriend know. I sort of, again, with the emails, but I found any other girls that I thought that he was talking to. And I sort of let them all know what was going on. So, that, you know, sort of put an end to that.
[1:15:23] How long was his relationship? You found out after two years. How long was this relationship as a whole?
[1:15:32] With the main girlfriend?
[1:15:33] Yeah. The main? Bane? How many girlfriends did he have?
[1:15:37] Oh, well, I think it was just us two. I just mean Bane as opposed to me at the time.
[1:15:44] I mean, I wasn't sure how much spray and pray white boy summer was going on here, but alright, so it's just the two of you, okay. So, yeah, how long had he been with the girl before you came along?
[1:15:55] Two years.
[1:15:56] Oh, wow.
[1:15:57] Yeah. So, what, you know, we've learned, I've learned in the process of, kind of breaking up and then deciding to get back together after he had broken up with her convoluted sort of mess, um, was that he had been trying to break up with her for a long time. Um, but trying, yeah, apparently she was like a cry bully type of person and he was just really weak and cowardly.
[1:16:30] Okay. Got it.
[1:16:31] Yeah. Um.
[1:16:34] Okay, so you went scorched earth on him and every estrogen-based life form within his 50-mile radius, and then what happened? Like, how did you guys end up getting together?
[1:16:46] Yeah, so I had written him, like, a thing. Wait, how did you find out?
[1:16:52] Sorry, let me ask you that first.
[1:16:53] Oh, I was at his place one night. And he was gone. And I was doing this, this job where sometimes I would use his computer, because it was easier to have two computers sometimes. So I would sometimes use his computer to do stuff for work. work and um he left his email logged in much like my dad parallel there and a notification just popped up while i was doing my thing and.
[1:17:27] Oh like it was you and right right yeah no
[1:17:29] It was actually uh your travel itinerary, and i was like travel itinerary what's this and i opened it up and it was like a vacation plan, and it had the two names on it. And so I was like, huh. You know, he's going on vacation with somebody.
[1:17:56] So if I understand this correctly, he let you use his computer, left his email open, so you'd break up with his girlfriend for him.
[1:18:04] Yeah, he, yeah.
[1:18:07] Okay. I mean, it's a way of getting it done, I suppose.
[1:18:10] Yeah yeah.
[1:18:15] Okay so you break up with him and then what happens
[1:18:19] Um then I don't speak to him for a long time like I sent him this one um sort of email that was like you know I found out everything and this is what I did and uh you know how dare you you terrible person goodbye, and um it was a few You must...
[1:18:39] I'm so sorry. I asked you this question. I completely apologize for interrupting you.
[1:18:43] What were the red flags that you had ignored? You said that you ignored every red flag known to man and beast. What did you, like looking back, what were the hints?
[1:18:52] Okay, so I never really met any of his friends.
[1:18:57] Right.
[1:18:58] Except by happenstance.
[1:19:01] Oh, like, yeah, in the street kind of thing, right?
[1:19:03] Well, one time I was at his place and somebody came over. you know but like he wasn't planned to come over or one time we went to his, place and like his brother was there or like his brother was out in the yard or whatever so he was sort of like forced to introduce me right kind of thing and.
[1:19:28] Okay.
[1:19:29] And just other little things like that. Like sometimes, oh, he just couldn't hang out and he couldn't say why.
[1:19:35] Right. Okay. Okay. Or, you know, you call him and he refers to you by a male name. I'm sure it wasn't that obvious, but all right. Okay. All right. So you don't talk to him for a couple of months and then?
[1:19:49] And then like I had blocked him but I found that he had sent me this email basically, apologizing and ah.
[1:19:59] The manly grovel
[1:20:01] Yeah yeah the manly grovel there was a lot of groveling so I was like I've.
[1:20:07] Not been immune to that over the course of my existence on this planet so I say that with some sympathy
[1:20:13] Yeah and I was just like why don't you tell me that to my face if you're so sorry you know like I don't want an email.
[1:20:19] Right, right.
[1:20:20] I want to see tears.
[1:20:22] I need them glistening like the stars of your regret.
[1:20:27] Yeah, so then he did do the whole bit, you know, on the knees and everything. Oh, wow. And he was like, oh, I know you're so angry at me, and, like, you know, you can punch me if you want. So he let me punch him just once. um and then he was like you know if you would still like if you would be willing to give me another chance like basically i would like to start over and like date you properly right, Because he was like, I really wanted to get out of that other thing, but I was spineless and couldn't do it, or wouldn't do it.
[1:21:09] Right, okay. And what was your draw to him, I guess initially, and also when he apologized?
[1:21:16] First um my draw to him so i guess initially it was you know your basic uh silly non-virtue based stuff like he was cute and he was funny and he was a good conversationalist and one of the big things stuff is that he asked me a lot of questions about myself which not a lot of guys that i had you know gone out with did in my little my little time of dating um yeah i just wasn't used to people like being that interested right.
[1:21:57] Okay no i mean those those are good things i mean good conversationalist good sense of humor those are all positive attributes for sure cute hey i mean that's not the end of the world right
[1:22:05] Right um yeah but i think a big part of it was just like Like he was sort of always like interviewing me and yeah, that was flattering after being, you know, so neglected.
[1:22:19] Right. Um, and it's funny how, when people are curious about ourselves, we actually become interesting to ourselves. Yeah. If people ignore us, it's like, if you've ever tried to talk to someone at a party where they're looking all over the place and everyone except you, you kind of, I feel kind of boring. Just like, but when somebody is like, tell me more, you know, they don't blink. I kind of like, like i am fascinating you know it all starts coming out it's funny that way yeah
[1:22:43] So it was like that, And then after the fact, it was just like, I guess it was a little bit sunk cost, but then I also appreciated that, like, to me was kind of proof that he had a conscience because he clearly felt really bad about what he was doing. And even though it was very misguided, he was kind of trying to avoid hurting people, but in the process, actually doing a lot more damage. but you know I could sort of tell that it wasn't malicious like this wasn't a thing that he was just always been doing and is always going to do. So I thought I would take a chance because at this point I was 28, and my other prospects were not looking so good.
[1:23:35] And had you been back out on the dating apps or anything like that?
[1:23:39] Yeah, I did put some more bodies in the count.
[1:23:45] And how did that go?
[1:23:49] Not great. It did not go great.
[1:23:52] Right. Okay. All right. So you and Canuck Boy get back together. And then how long did you guys go out before you got married?
[1:24:07] Right uh so so this gets a bit the timeline here gets dicey so we get back together in that time i had become um a permanent resident of canada so like i got my status but i was in a really like, a bad spot sort of financially because i hadn't been able to officially work like i didn't have permission to work in Canada so I was doing sort of freelance things online to pay the bills, just so I could stay here long enough to get my you know get my papers and once I got my papers you have to sort of leave the country and re-enter to finalize it right so I left the country I went I went back home. I stayed with my parents for a week, I think. And then I came back to Canada. I was staying with friends at that point. And I'm trying to remember now because it's all so hazy. But I remember moving places a lot and just being really unstable. I went back to school so that I could change my careers because the job that I previously had, I held it basically just so I could get my immigration status settled.
[1:25:33] And now I was trying to find something that was more aligned with what I actually studied.
[1:25:40] So I was back in school, and I'm trying to remember. I think I was just having a really hard time, like, juggling everything I was trying to do. And we can call it burnout, I guess. but i just needed to uh stop and take a break because i felt like i just been sprinting for like seven years um to get this goal of um my immigration status settled and so oh yeah.
[1:26:16] No that's that's exhausting and it's uncertain and you're just waiting on the whims of bureaucrats and no no i certainly sympathize with all that
[1:26:23] Yeah and so i was doing this job that was really sold sucking just so I could pay for an apartment and keep going to school. It was winter and I just kind of had enough. It was like having a meltdown about it. So I decided that I would move back to Brazil for a while. My boyfriend at the time and I went sort of long distance.
[1:26:53] That is a trust exercise and a half.
[1:26:55] I know, I know, but I mean, it worked out. He would come visit me, so he met my parents, and then I would come back to Canada for months at a time and do interviews and try to get a career going.
[1:27:10] Did they care that he was white? Did it matter?
[1:27:13] Yeah, they cared.
[1:27:15] Would they rather you be with a brother?
[1:27:18] I guess so, just for comfort's sake, you know?
[1:27:23] Familiarity or whatever.
[1:27:24] Yeah. but you know there were a bunch of comments and and whatever he's of Italian heritage so my dad was asking me if he's in the Mafia, okay because that's as far as his conception of italians goes like one.
[1:27:41] Too many scorsese films i get it yeah
[1:27:42] Okay and i'm like no he's not and he's like are you sure how do you know i'm like oh my gosh i cannot have this conversation what what.
[1:27:51] Cliched questions would you like him to ask you dad right
[1:27:54] So how.
[1:27:57] Many families do you have oh wait obviously that's pretty close
[1:28:00] Right so So.
[1:28:00] All right.
[1:28:01] A little too close to home.
[1:28:03] Yeah.
[1:28:04] Yeah. So we were long distance for a while. And then when I permanently moved back to Canada, we moved in together and got married.
[1:28:11] Okay.
[1:28:12] And that was 2018. No, 2017, I think.
[1:28:17] All right. Good old seven years ago. All right. Okay. So how did the living together in a marriage stuff go?
[1:28:28] Yeah. I mean, it was okay. We had a rocky patch at the beginning, but we've always been able to work our stuff out. I can only remember two times getting into big fights where there was yelling or whatever in the very early days. I think this was even before we got married. um but once we did it was pretty it was pretty smooth sailing except, you know i still had all my problems i was only at the very beginning of my self-knowledge journey and kind of so was he so, there was friction but you know things are a lot better now and he's a great dad and i feel really lucky that you know i have him and that we're doing life together.
[1:29:24] Dare I ask how you get along with his family
[1:29:28] We get along okay my only thing with them is that they're a little on the dumber side.
[1:29:38] Go on.
[1:29:45] Well, I guess one of the impressions that I've had of my husband since we met is that he's sort of a smart person raised stupid. I just don't think that his parents are very intelligent, so they've made some kind of dumb people mistakes. stakes um and his mom's kind of a bit of a facebook lady you know one of those, so nothing like offensive or like malicious just kind of bland and a little dumb.
[1:30:22] Right okay okay and then you lived together for quite some time before you had a kid right
[1:30:29] Yeah, we had a couple of miscarriages when we started trying. And so, yeah, my daughter was born two years ago.
[1:30:41] Well, congratulations, of course.
[1:30:43] Yeah, hopefully we can squeeze one more out.
[1:30:48] And how old are you now? I lost a bit of the math, sorry.
[1:30:52] Yeah, that's okay. She's two years old, two and a half.
[1:30:54] No, you. you oh
[1:30:56] I am 36 37 37 right.
[1:31:01] Okay okay all right so i appreciate the journey and what a what a what a tale it is and um so what's going on with your parents at the moment okay
[1:31:17] So at the moment um Um, so I haven't seen them since last year. My mom came to visit for a week. The result of that was me basically relapsing into an eating disorder, which I had to spend a bunch of time, like, and energy recovering from, obviously. And then, you know, it's just been phone calls since then. You know, they want to see their granddaughter, blah, blah, blah. while. But as she's growing up, my daughter, and, It's like, you know, the body remembers more than my mind does. And so I just feel like things are surfacing, like I'm getting flashbacks. I'm getting like just these sort of body memories are coming to me. Or just I feel like my anger is being triggered by, you know, normal toddler things. And I know it's not coming from me.
[1:32:21] Or your daughter, yeah.
[1:32:22] Yeah, and so it's kind of like, you know, the parental alter egos are kind of, they're in there and they're kind of like trying to advise me about how to do things. And I'm not doing things the way that they did. And I'm feeling that tension all the time. Like it's unavoidable now.
[1:32:42] How did you experience birth and post-birth? Because a lot of that stuff could come out. Yeah.
[1:32:48] Um, so luckily, no, I don't know if it's luckily, but because I know these things about myself, I, as much as possible, try to prepare going into birth. So I had a doula and she really helped step me through some of like what to expect and the emotional things. And, um, you know, I was doing meditations and a lot of exercises. And so I was really trying to prepare myself to be as open-hearted as possible going through that process. And so I had a very peaceful home birth. And afterwards, it was awesome, honestly. I was getting to hold her for the first time and see her little face. It was perfect.
[1:33:43] Did the genes go either one way or the other, or is she sort of down the middle?
[1:33:49] She's very much down the middle.
[1:33:51] Okay, got it.
[1:33:52] Yeah, at first she looked a lot like Dad. I was like, what is this clone?
[1:33:59] How am I genetically supposed to try it all?
[1:34:02] Yeah, but as she's grown, you can see the other half is coming through as well. She's a good mix.
[1:34:09] It just is a tiny nag. You'll look into some of the biracial identity stuff that some of the kids have to be managed through, right?
[1:34:17] Yeah, 100%.
[1:34:20] Okay. And so it was pretty easy afterwards. And when did you start to get the more flashes of temper or stuff that comes from, not from you, obviously, but from your history?
[1:34:31] So I guess it started when she was around five months old and we started having trouble with sleep. and like sometimes she just had a hard time falling asleep she's a baby that's perfectly normal but I would get like enraged like if I couldn't get her to fall asleep like it would just, it just felt like this thought like would just like go up like kind of from my stomach up to through my shoulders, like, out through my mouth. And then I would have this urge to, like, yell and scream.
[1:35:11] And it's very good that your baby's in toddler side psychic, right? Don't read mommy's thoughts. Just look at my facial expressions, right?
[1:35:18] Well, I would have to remove myself from the situation because sometimes it felt like it was going to come out. Sometimes it did come out, but, like, I always would, like, leave the room and, like, if I had to go out onto the balcony and, like, kick something.
[1:35:32] And do you know where that comes from?
[1:35:37] Well, I remember my mom telling me stories about how I was a horrible baby. And I would just cry all night for no reason. And I was so particular. You know, if I woke up in the middle of the night, they had to be right there within two seconds of my bottle. Otherwise, I would be crying and screaming for an hour. So I imagine she was probably raging out when I was crying and not sleeping. Because the story was always, I was so terrible as a baby.
[1:36:19] Right. And obviously, that's bang on. And the other part that I was thinking about was this couple with the rapist husband or the wannabe rapist husband, because your mother processed that as inconvenient to her rather than difficult for you. And if your daughter is not falling asleep, I think that the mom, like almost the narcissistic mom, well, this is inconvenient for me.
[1:36:45] Yeah. Right.
[1:36:46] I need you to get to sleep. And I think that resistance of will probably has the mom in you bubble up in that way.
[1:36:54] Yeah. It's kind of like I get this feeling too like I'm failing at this. And it's your fault that I'm failing.
[1:37:04] Right.
[1:37:05] It's you, baby, you're causing me to fail. And now I'm going to look bad.
[1:37:10] Yeah. And that's the narcissistic thing, right? Yeah. the narcissistic thing is if you make me feel bad you are bad yeah and you must be punished for making me feel bad there's no there's not really any self-ownership that's just you know you can't control yourself you have to control others right so okay wow okay and and how's how's that going uh as a whole so sort of five months to now two years oh
[1:37:34] Um it's it like it's gone um i got a very expensive sleep consultant and we kind of worked through the sleep things. And I, um, you know, started trying to work through my rage things. I've been in and out of, you know, therapy throughout the whole process. Um, yeah, I feel like I would be in again now, but we're a single income family now.
[1:38:02] So going in, in again now. And so what has happened more recently?
[1:38:09] Yeah so it's this thing with my parents like i think, more and more because you know my daughter's getting older and she's very verbal uh she's got so many words and you can't get anything by her she's like she's super observant yep and i can already see that like for one thing, I don't like interacting with my parents at all. And I've been doing that phone call thing for the last few months. You look at the phone when they call, what do you feel? And then decide whether or not you want to answer. And lately the feeling has just been, ugh. I see the name on the phone and I just go, ugh. I don't want to talk to you. And a lot of times I'll just dismiss it. um so sorry dismiss the call dismiss the call or the text or whatever it is right um, and another thought that kind of hit me recently was like my dad will text me sometimes the way that like you know a guy will text you on a dating app like hey what's up kind of thing i'm.
[1:39:25] Sorry how much experience you think i have with guys texting me on dating apps i've been married since the dawn of time
[1:39:31] You talk to these people though i guess that's.
[1:39:34] True it's like when i when i was dating you sent smoke signals and carrier pigeons that's all i got
[1:39:39] Okay ravens yeah.
[1:39:42] Like so they're just like sup or you know there's a a friend of mine's daughter was is in university is like she the way she imitates guys sitting down it's like what you're drinking you know you know that that's all they got like this is not exactly shakespeare here
[1:39:56] Yeah and it just hit me like um if a guy messaged me that way i wouldn't respond but like my dad messaging that me that way and like i'm expected to respond and so i just stopped responding because i'm like i don't nobody else talks to me like this like why are you talking to me like this so.
[1:40:16] He'll say like just what's up or how's it going or
[1:40:19] No not even how's it going not even hi it will be like um So his last text to me was It's the word Picni And it's sort of a derogatory word for a child, From you know Our patua So that's like, That would be the word.
[1:40:40] Is he just putting you down because you haven't texted him back or something?
[1:40:44] It's that kind of thing. I'm expected to be in contact with them for some reason, even though I've established this long pattern of not being in contact with them, but because there's a grandchild.
[1:40:53] Hang on, hang on. What do you mean long pattern of not being in contact with them? Well, I just mean... Hang on, hang on. What's the longest you've not been in contact with them for?
[1:41:04] Like zero contact whatsoever?
[1:41:06] Yeah.
[1:41:13] Okay well i don't know i think it would be months it would be months but um throughout my 20s the contact would be like a few text messages here and there like once a month right um Um, so I kind of count some of that time as like, it's very little contact.
[1:41:38] Yeah, no, I, I think that makes sense. I think that makes sense. And would you say that, um, their, their requirements or the demands or their preferences have gone up considerably since you got married, since you had your daughter, uh, and so on?
[1:41:51] Yeah. So the most recent violation would be, um, at the beginning of the summer.
[1:41:57] Violation? What do you mean?
[1:41:58] Well, I just mean of like.
[1:41:59] I feel we changed the syntax a little bit here from texting and contact to violation.
[1:42:04] Oh, okay. I mean boundaries.
[1:42:06] Oh, boundary violation.
[1:42:08] Yeah, boundary violations. So at the beginning of the summer, I sort of said to them, like, hey, it's summer. It's Canada. Like, we don't get much of it. So we're going to be spending a lot more time outdoors and doing things, which means that we're not going to be as available online anymore. which I think is a reasonable thing to say. And they were never like, okay. They never said like, okay, whatever. They just kind of pretended that I didn't say that. There was no real response to it. And then, so I proceed to not contact them at all for a month. And when they call, I didn't answer.
[1:42:48] So you didn't contact them. So what kind of contact? You said they would call. How often would they call? and how often would they text
[1:42:55] Um sometimes so calls maybe once a week or once every two weeks, um and the calls would be like from half an hour to two hours long and i mean the two hour long ones i'm like it's just me suffering on the phone oh.
[1:43:13] Yeah yeah speakerphone and uh rolling your eyes yeah like
[1:43:16] Yeah or like not even really listening but like going around and doing chores or whatever well you know just carry on or sort of propping the phone up so they can see the baby rolling around or whatever yeah uh so it was stuff like that we were supposed to go visit um in january and i canceled the trip last minute because i started to feel like i was doing something really wrong by introducing my daughter to my dad specifically right and so i wasn't well i would i would reframe that yeah.
[1:43:57] And i obviously i hesitate to tell you what you experienced or didn't experience but i would reframe that as you probably didn't want to introduce your daughter to you with your father
[1:44:08] That too i definitely thought about that i'm like yeah I mean.
[1:44:13] Who are you going to be around him? Not the same as you are, as she knows you. So she'd gain a stranger and lose a mother, in a sense.
[1:44:22] Yes. Yes. Yep, that's 100% correct. And so all these thoughts were swirling around as I was planning this trip.
[1:44:31] Did you have bad dreams before the trip?
[1:44:36] Yeah. I am a person that dreams a lot. um yeah.
[1:44:40] Sometimes those dreams are just like you know none shall pass you know like just don't do it whatever you do don't do it
[1:44:46] Yeah i've been having a lot of them in this uh you know in the days leading up to this call too um and they're just kidding me.
[1:44:53] Or just about them or no about don't talk to staff
[1:44:57] It's definitely not don't talk to staff all right all right um although there are those parts that that would prefer that i didn't yeah.
[1:45:04] Yeah no i get that
[1:45:05] Um no they're They're kind of about my dad. At first, they were kind of veiled, but then the last one, it was just like my dad was just right there. The subtlety was gone.
[1:45:17] Now, how old were you with your earliest memory?
[1:45:22] My earliest, like, just any memory.
[1:45:25] Yeah, yeah, any memory. Good, bad, just do you have any idea how old you were?
[1:45:28] I think about two.
[1:45:31] Right. So your daughter is starting to now collide with your earliest memories.
[1:45:35] Yeah.
[1:45:38] Which is probably one of the things that's bugged this call tonight, right?
[1:45:43] Yeah, it's just, I'm at the point now where, you know, I just, I can't, And I just don't feel like I can continue to expose her to them, but also to expose her to me in their presence and just the way.
[1:45:58] Or even their text or, you know, it's jarring, right? And they call and you've got to wrestle and figure it out and it distracts you from your daughter and so on.
[1:46:06] Yeah, it's disturbing is what it is. It's disturbing.
[1:46:09] What do you mean?
[1:46:11] Well, like it disturbs me mentally and psychologically.
[1:46:14] I understand it doesn't disturb you. What do you mean disturbing how? now well the phone rings and
[1:46:20] Yeah the phone rings and okay now i'm getting like a little anxiety spike because i don't know if well i know that they're gonna complain about the fact that i haven't been in contact even though i told them that i'm gonna be in less contact um the last Last time I answered a call from them was last weekend. And they were sort of immediately like, oh, what's happened to you guys? Are you mad at us? Is something wrong? Because, you know, you haven't been, you know, you've not been answering our calls and blah, blah, blah. Did we do something to you?
[1:47:05] Well, but the answer to that is yes.
[1:47:07] Yeah.
[1:47:08] I mean, because the summer thing is just a lie, right?
[1:47:12] Well, it's not totally a lie, but it is like an excuse. It's kind of a lie. Yeah, it's kind of a lie.
[1:47:18] It's kind of a lie. Come on. I mean, I get what you're doing, and I don't have any big issue with it, but it's not like I can't talk that much in summer. You know, that's like the girl who says, I can't go out with you on Saturday because I'm washing my hair. And it's like, okay, I get that.
[1:47:36] You know, it's good to clean your hair, but it's not about the hair.
[1:47:39] Right?
[1:47:40] Yeah.
[1:47:41] I mean, it's an excuse, right?
[1:47:43] Yeah, it's definitely an excuse. And I think, you know, not I think, like I know I've been kicking this can down the road. Because I know that there's going to be some kind of, or I feel like I'm provoking a confrontation with them, basically.
[1:48:00] Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. Okay, how's their health?
[1:48:06] I'm sorry?
[1:48:08] How is your parents' health? How are they health? How's their health doing?
[1:48:13] They're pretty okay. My mom has diabetes, but it's being managed. She's not on insulin or anything. My dad has high blood pressure. He's had a couple of minor things over the years, but nothing serious. So they're in fairly good health. They're going to live a long time.
[1:48:34] And they're in their 70s?
[1:48:35] They're in their 60s.
[1:48:41] What like sorry to sound like you're deflating at the end there yeah
[1:48:45] It did because i'm like that's right right yeah um yeah they're in their 60s.
[1:48:48] Okay all right so 60s relatively they're not obese or anything so no
[1:48:55] My mom is overweight but she's had that weight like the whole time i've known her so.
[1:48:59] Okay all right so it's not like they're they're gonna need a lot of resources because they're aging out right as yet right no
[1:49:07] But they might like them um but no they.
[1:49:10] Know because you're you're sometimes especially if you're in your sort of middle mid late 30s you are erasing a little bit the clock because if you say if you say i want to go no contact with my parents and then they get sick before that happens that's really tough right yeah
[1:49:27] Because then you gotta a quote-unquote on abandon them when they're in their hour.
[1:49:32] Yeah it's horrible and then they have all this power and and you're like okay well i can't do it now and you know that kind of thing right yeah um i mean it's kind of funny because you are to your parents as your husband was to his ex-girlfriend right i don't want to hurt them but i don't really want to be in the relationship right that's
[1:49:50] The thing because like i don't want to be cruel but i kind of am right now and i.
[1:49:56] Don't no no no no too bad about it hang on hang on hang on you're cruel so tell me what you mean by you're being cruel.
[1:50:02] Um, yeah, I don't know, by like withholding access to their grandchild, I guess could be construed as a cruel thing to do.
[1:50:15] You know, I...
[1:50:17] When they don't know why...
[1:50:19] I'd be very hesitant putting these pejoratives on yourself. Be very hesitant because, you know, you got to live with yourself for the next 50 plus years, right? And as far as what's been going on with you and your family, if we're going to start applying objective standards of cruelty, you're nowhere on the spectrum. First of all, obviously, you're the child, right? So you don't define the relationship and you never have. They're in charge. They ran everything. And as far as cruelty goes, okay, you were beaten 500 to 1,000 times. sometimes provoked by your mother you had a pedophile predator stalking you from the age of six and seven for a long time and lord knows what happens when your memory has blanked out right the beatings went on into your teens your mother has marked your weight while knowing you have sensitivities about this your parents put you under the care custody and control of a family where the husband tried to rape you and then the only complaint was that it was inconvenient when you were found out. So the reason I'm really trying to draw you up short on this cruelty thing is if you want to start bringing the word cruelty into your family, you better start using it objectively and not just tossing it into yourself like it's nothing.
[1:51:48] Because to defend yourself and try and have boundaries with cruel people is not cruel. It's a hell of a job to have to do it's incredibly difficult nobody wants it in fact you almost wouldn't wish on your worst enemy how difficult this is but I gonna have to stand between you and the word cruel I just have to I throw myself in front of it like a poo in The Simpsons right I'm gonna have to throw myself between you and the word cruel because by any objective metric you're trying to manage some violent, abusive, and cruel people as a child while also adjusting to marital and motherly life. So I can't, I can't, you know, I can't, it's almost like calling your daughter cruel. I mean, it's just, it's just so out of bounds regarding what you've had to deal with that. I just, I'd really, I'd have to raise a formal protest about that.
[1:52:48] Okay. Okay.
[1:52:52] And you don't want that label sticking to you at all.
[1:52:55] No, I don't. I don't.
[1:53:01] Now they'll call you cruel right yeah but that's just what selfish people do when they want to bully right they can't hit you anymore so they'll just try and remote control you with with the threads of of verbal harshness if not abuse right i mean is it fair to say i mean they're not still calling you names and you know you're so selfish you're so cruel you're are they still doing any Any of that stuff, what's that mostly in the rear view?
[1:53:26] It's mostly in the rear view, but I have no doubt that it will come out if I ever step out of what they would consider to be balance.
[1:53:36] Right, okay.
[1:53:38] Because that's what's always gone down over the years, especially in those times when I've moved back home. You know, I would try to bring up grievances and it would always turn into we're yelling and, you know.
[1:53:53] They just escalate.
[1:53:55] Being shouted down, basically.
[1:53:57] Right. What does your husband think of this? The question is going no contact. Is that right?
[1:54:04] Yeah. I mean, after the last time I spoke to them, I actually hung up the phone on my dad because he was going on. He was starting to lecture me about how he demands to speak to my daughter at least once a week, and I have to call them. I'm sorry.
[1:54:21] Oh, my gosh. This guy. I'm so sorry. I hate to interrupt.
[1:54:25] Yeah, I hung up the phone stuff. I just hung up.
[1:54:27] Yeah, no, it makes perfect sense to me. me i mean you know from the outside just how completely deranged it is for your father who didn't talk to you while in the same house for years demanding that he'd be given free access to his grandchild yeah like that's so beyond deranged yeah like he literally lived under the same roof with you and didn't talk to you was it 17 to 19 right did i have that right um
[1:54:57] Probably Probably 15 to 17.
[1:55:00] Okay. And that's really formative of your stuff, right? That's really formative of your stuff. You needed his advice. You needed his counsel, particularly with boys and dating and stuff like that. So he cut you off. For years, when you absolutely needed him the most. And then he's like, how dare you withhold my daughter, my granddaughter from me? I mean, that's so entitled. And so there's such a staggering, like intergalactic lack of self-awareness there.
[1:55:33] Yeah. There's another one too that is intergalactic in nature. You know, my mom came to visit last year. My dad has refused to come to visit. it um he said that um she must be brought to him.
[1:55:49] She must be brought to him yeah to me is he a mayan priest or something what does that mean is he afraid of being abducted into the mafia like why wouldn't he visit because
[1:56:02] He's the patriarch and so the grandchild must.
[1:56:08] Be presented to him and lord of the shed i don't know lord of the shed demands i can't
[1:56:14] Pretend to understand his logic.
[1:56:17] Right okay so what was the when was the last time you had a positive enjoyable happy interaction with your parents
[1:56:36] Um, so I can occasionally have those with my mom. But again, it involves quite a lot of me, like just not being there. So is it happy, truly happy and enjoyable? Not really. But I was really into politics. And I started like an organization back home. And I sort of ran it remotely with a partner. Sorry, back home? um yeah in the country that my parents live in okay.
[1:57:06] Got it okay
[1:57:07] Um and my mom has always been like really into politics so me and her can talk about that type of stuff pretty like you know whatever okay.
[1:57:19] I mean that's productive doesn't sound like a lot of fun but it sounds productive
[1:57:25] Yeah. And yeah, yeah, that type of stuff. And you know, they will like, supply resources to me if I need it. But I think a part of that is also keeping up with parents. Like money? Like money or like if I'm, you know, like when I was back there, they would help me get jobs for the summer.
[1:57:49] Are they still giving you money?
[1:57:52] No, no, not in any way. Okay, good, good. They haven't for a very long time.
[1:57:56] Okay, and when was the last time...
[1:57:57] They did give me land.
[1:57:58] I'm sorry, go ahead.
[1:57:59] They did gift me with some land, but it's land in my home country, my old country, so it's not very useful to me. Right. And I think that was kind of, I don't know, kind of a bribe. Like, here, we're giving you this land now, so please... Don't be mad at us.
[1:58:23] Right. And when was the last time you had interactions with your parents where you have felt that your guard is down and you're just relaxed and not cautious?
[1:58:33] Never, never, never.
[1:58:37] What does your husband think of your plan or possibility of going no contact?
[1:58:47] Well, he says he'll support me if that's what I decide to do.
[1:58:51] Okay. Let's pretend we draft a spine onto him, right? No, seriously. I mean, so was he aware that your mother coming triggered your anorexia?
[1:59:04] No. No.
[1:59:07] Are you keeping a couple of secrets there?
[1:59:10] I am keeping that one because I'm so ashamed of it. I just wanted to fix it and then just carry on. But I did tell him recently about the comments that she made. And how it was making me feel, but I didn't go into the details.
[1:59:33] Does he know your history of eating? eating he
[1:59:36] Knows my history.
[1:59:37] Okay and so for a couple of months you were struggling with this and kept it from your husband i
[1:59:43] Did do that.
[1:59:45] Why he said in a vaguely nagging tone why young lady did you keep this from your loving husband you've actually made a human being with um
[1:59:56] Because i was ashamed and because.
[1:59:59] Sorry what were you ashamed of
[2:00:02] That i was like engaging in those behaviors again.
[2:00:08] But the shame is like it's supposed to isolate you right yeah it's called secret eating sometimes right i mean it's supposed to isolate you and make you feel like a freak and a weirdo because you're praying to the porcelain god right so the opposite of of feeling isolated is to reach out and talk to your husband and say i'm struggling with a bit bit of an old beast here.
[2:00:33] Yeah.
[2:00:36] I mean, you don't need me to tell you that, right?
[2:00:38] I know.
[2:00:39] So the shame is what? That you are broken, that you are weak, that you are, like, what is the shame?
[2:00:50] Yeah, those for sure. And, like, I don't ever want him to see me like that because it's so, like, Like, it's so dark and, like, it's such a, it's, like, a self-abusive thing to do. I just, I didn't want to see you like that.
[2:01:17] Hang on. So, you forgave him for cheating with you for two years and lying to you for two years, right? Yeah. Now, you think that he can't not even forgive you, but sympathize with this direct effect of child abuse and sexual assault. You are robbing of him the chance to comfort you. Not also, of course, you're also robbing yourself of the chance to be comforted.
[2:01:53] Yeah.
[2:01:54] It's not weird. It's a perfectly natural response to some sexual predation, as you said, from the black men because of the booty thing or whatever, right? It's a perfectly rational response. you know if if you kept getting robbed every time you left the house dressed nicely you dress badly right yeah i mean you you have to camouflage when there are predators around that's not it's not shameful it's not weird it's not bizarre it's a perfectly understandable response to a a series of predation it's not dark it's not i mean you you are not it's not self-harm as far as i understand it it's self-protection yeah
[2:02:44] But it's not actually protecting me.
[2:02:47] Well we evolved to not have the kind of differences that you and i and so many other people in the the world have so if your big butt was attracting the black men to sexually assault you it was it would protect you now you say ah yes but now i'm in canada and i'm married to a white guy and it's like okay but that's not what we're evolved for we're not evolved for jumping from the island to canada and from this to that to the other the race like we're not so what what was evolved was if I'm doing things that are getting me assaulted, then I'll stop doing those things, right? So you say, well, it's not protecting me. It's like, but the reason why it came back was because the circumstances, which is your mother, came back. Because it was your mother's job to street-proof you, primarily, your father's too, but your mother's job to street-proof you and protect you. so when she came back you felt in danger again because it triggered all of the associative things with being groomed and and and sexually assaulted by black men right
[2:04:16] Yeah it triggered that and it triggered a whole lot of other stuff and i mean it also just directly It cut straight to the eating thing because she was pretty much body shaming me as soon as she walked in the door.
[2:04:28] Well, and the irony of her body shaming you when she's been overweight her whole life and has diabetes, right?
[2:04:39] Yeah.
[2:04:40] I mean, that's like me mocking a bald guy. Except bald ain't a choice, right? It's just something that happens.
[2:04:50] Exactly.
[2:04:51] So, the darkness, it's a rational response to danger. You know, they say that rings attract sharks, like if you're swimming, right? You don't wear a diamond ring, it's going to flash and attract a shark. So, you know, if I'm spending a lot of time in waters where there are sharks around, I don't wear my ring. I mean, that would be a rational response, right?
[2:05:19] Yeah.
[2:05:19] Oh, no, I'm betraying my marriage. I guess you could make it kind of dark or something like that, but it's just a rational response to a grave danger. I mean, anorexia, in certain circumstances, can save your life. I mean, two things. One, you're not sexually attractive to men if they're looking for that thick stuff. And number two, if you starve yourself enough, I mean, did you starve yourself to the point where you stopped your period?
[2:05:53] Yeah, I didn't have a period for a long time.
[2:05:55] Right. So then, not only are you less sexually attractive, but also, if you are raped, you won't get pregnant.
[2:06:08] Wow.
[2:06:09] So you understand, it's not dark or weird or terrible. It's a life-saving situation. You see the polar bears, they eat like crazy before they hibernate, and they come out starving, right? Right. Yeah. Well, that's because there's no food for them over the winter. And that's just that's how they adapt. They come out and they're rail thin. Right. And then they got to go eat, I don't know, 50 seals or something. I'm not a biologist. But but so it's it's not it's not weird or dark. It's it's survival. Right.
[2:06:43] Yeah, and I mean, it was survival. Those years, I was in survival mode.
[2:06:49] Well, and your father detached from you completely. Yeah. Which further fuels this sense of danger and lack of protection. Because deep down, you know that the creep who was working across, in the building across your house, who was grooming you for those months, that he did this because your father was not there to protect you. And so when your father withdraws from you, after he punched you for whatever the sass some comment you made out of exasperation right so he punches you and then he doesn't talk to you for years that further puts you in danger because by not being close to you he's sending out signals albeit unconsciously to other predators and pedophiles to pursue and possibly assault or rape you
[2:07:35] Yeah and there were definitely others around.
[2:07:39] Oh yeah oh yeah so i mean in the modern world Well, there's kind of an epidemic. It really is, right? One in three girls, one in five boys, right?
[2:07:47] In our school, there was kind of an epidemic in my high school.
[2:07:52] Oh, of people, of men who would prey on the girls?
[2:07:55] Of teachers, yeah.
[2:07:56] Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, the starving, I know it wasn't exactly at the same time, but starving yourself to be unattractive. And also, you know, rape is a brutal and horrible strategy of reproduction. And if you're that thin, one of the reasons why the rapists would not find you that attractive is because they can't impregnate you. So it is a perfectly rational strategy in a situation, because it's one thing to be sexually assaulted, right? Absolutely appalling to begin with. It's another thing to be sexually assaulted and raped and then get pregnant.
[2:08:36] Yeah.
[2:08:37] And again, it's not like we evolved with abortions and things like that, right? So you would just, that would be your kid, no man would marry you, and that would be your life. So it absolutely makes perfect sense to behave in that way. But just, so just saying it's, you know, weird and dark and self-destructive, and it's like, I don't quite follow that because it seems to me the best survival strategy in that kind of situation. And I think you should, I mean, again, while recognizing the dysfunction, of course, I recognize the dysfunction, but it's not dysfunction under our evolutionary circumstances.
[2:09:28] Yeah, I've never heard that perspective on eating disorders. Like, you know, and I've been through eating disorder specific treatment programs. And, you know, they do talk about the link with sexual assault. but there's never been this like biological connection that you know if you are the victim of a rape then if you are yeah um what do they call it in manoric then you can't produce offspring and that could actually reduce your you know your attractiveness to a predator yeah yeah, it's just only one step beyond what they say right.
[2:10:06] Yeah but i mean i mean and i think that's That's why the body shuts down in situations of starvation. I assume it has something to do with this predation thing, because, you know, as you know, I mean, lots of women, countless women throughout our evolution were not exactly wooed, right? I mean, so it is, yeah. So I, you know, I, you know, I obviously I hesitate to give any particular advice. It's far from my area of expertise. But when I just sort of think about the evolutionary side of things, I don't find it dark or weird. I think it's a really tragic necessity that you have to do in order to, you know, I mean, to take a sort of silly example, like in times of famine, people might have to eat their pets. We say, oh, my God, that's so dark. And it's like, but it's famine. I mean, what are you going to do? Die? If you die, your pets die anyway.
[2:11:05] Yeah, you got to eat.
[2:11:07] So, see, the darkness is in the circumstances, not in your response. That's really what I want to get across. The darkness is being hunted in your home. That's the darkness. The darkness is the molesters and the rapists and the fucking assholes who prey upon women and children. They're trying to get you to internalize that darkness.
[2:11:33] Yeah.
[2:11:34] It's their darkness, not yours.
[2:11:36] Like they put it in you.
[2:11:36] Yeah, they put it in you. Say, my God, here I am, and I'm binging and purging. And it's like, no, I'm trying to not get raped and impregnated. And this is all that I have because I have no male protectors. So the darkness is in your mother and your father failing to protect you. The darkness is in the hideously evil people who pursue prey, assault, molest, and rape children and women. It's their darkness, not yours. Yours was just a response. If somebody poisons you and you spend three days throwing up, you're angry at who? The guy who poisoned you, not the fact that you're throwing up. you throwing up so that you don't die from the poison and you starved yourself so you wouldn't die from rape yeah
[2:12:35] I had to figure out a way to protect myself because nobody was doing it.
[2:12:39] Absolutely and
[2:12:41] That's been yeah i've been doing that for too long.
[2:12:44] Right so um and so So with that understanding, I think it's important to try and break that cycle. And if you are experiencing that, to talk to your husband and say, listen, I have some effects of having been preyed on. I mean, if there's some soldier who doesn't like fireworks, right, because they remind him of war.
[2:13:11] Yeah.
[2:13:12] The darkness is in the war. It's not in the person who was drafted and had to go to war. And, of course, you went to war, or you were hunted at the age of six. Well, you were hunted, in a sense, by your father with his belts, and then at the age of six or seven with this pedophile who went some mysterious distance. We don't know exactly what, but that's where the darkness is. It's not in your response.
[2:13:38] Okay. Well, that gives me a whole lot of relief.
[2:13:43] Good, good, good. good okay so with regards to your parents the choice is relatively simple which is of course not to say that it's easy right so the choice is what's best for your daughter yeah is it best for your daughter for you to be managing this hornet's nest of history absolutely not well you know i hate to say it's that simple and i'm not again i'm not saying it's It's easy to do, but... If you can't be as good a mother around your daughter, if your parents are around you, I mean, you owe everything to your daughter, right?
[2:14:27] Yeah.
[2:14:27] You didn't choose your parents in your life. And you probably wouldn't have. I certainly wouldn't have chosen them, right? So you didn't choose to have your parents in your life. You didn't choose their personalities. You didn't make their choices for them. And their choices aren't going to change now that they're in their 60s. so you are the most responsible to your daughter because you chose to have her in your life and you didn't choose your parents and if anything interferes with the free flow of connection and emotion and love and intimacy with your daughter that is expendable yeah everything it's it's absolutely expendable and it sounds like you've been trying to manage them for a while um you've you've had some i mean it sounds like you've had some fairly direct conversations with them about the past and it sounds like they're just escalating gaslight right yeah
[2:15:21] Which is why i haven't attempted for you know it's been a few years since i've attempted any kind of real conversation with them.
[2:15:29] Right and and that would i mean that would almost be a form of self-harm because i think so so yeah that's
[2:15:34] Where i am i'm like do i even try to do this again or do i just Just say to them, listen, I'm kind of done with you. I'm sorry, but we're breaking up.
[2:15:45] Well, I don't know. I mean, the mechanics of how you do it is actually, I mean, there's lots of variety. There's lots of variety.
[2:15:51] The interesting thing, though, Stef, sorry to interrupt.
[2:15:54] No, no, go ahead.
[2:15:55] Since I hung up on my dad a week and a half ago, maybe, I was expecting that there would be follow-up, there would be messages, there would be whatever there's been nothing and that's been surprising to me um so i don't know i'm still in this kind of limbo because now i want to put i want to have some kind of finality to this i don't necessarily want um this slow fade kind of waiting wondering for another shoe to drop Pops.
[2:16:34] Uh, so you want to have a conversation saying, uh, I'm going no contact.
[2:16:39] Yeah. I started to write a letter. I don't know if I would actually send a letter or I don't know, read it to them or something. I don't, I'm not sure, but I was trying to like, like, how do I say this to them? I was trying to figure that out. And in trying to.
[2:16:59] Do you want, do you want to tell them what you're doing or do you feel the need to explain why i
[2:17:04] Feel the need to explain why.
[2:17:06] Okay so so that means that you don't hang on that means you don't in my opinion obviously just my opinion then you don't have closure right right because if you need them to explain you need to justify it to them that you need to make a good case but if you've made a good enough case for yourself you know what what does it what does Does it matter what they believe?
[2:17:30] Yeah, this is the thing. Because I know, I can feel in my body that I'm done, I don't want the contact. But then I have all this chatter about it.
[2:17:49] And there's nothing wrong with writing all of this stuff down and absolutely talking it over with your husband, talking it over with the therapist. But get to certain to yourself. yourself but yeah if you could explain to them why you would making your decision and they were the kind of people who would listen you wouldn't be going no context yeah
[2:18:09] That's so true.
[2:18:09] So the only that the when you go no context in my experience it's when i have nothing left to say like i'm beating my head against the wall here nothing's going to change nothing has changed There's no prospect of anything changing, and there's nothing left to say. Now, if there's nothing left to say, then it's just a matter of trying to figure out the mechanics of detachment. But if you have a strong urge to explain and get them to agree and understand and see your point of view and so on, then I think you're missing the wall, the wall that you're facing.
[2:18:49] It's not even that I want them to, you know, in a sense, I want them to just know my point of view or know my thoughts, but I'm, I'm not trying to convince them. I'm not like, I don't.
[2:19:01] Why do you want them to know your thoughts?
[2:19:04] That is a good question.
[2:19:07] Or to put it in another way, why would you think they could know your thoughts when after 37 years, they haven't yet.
[2:19:16] Yeah. This is a contradiction that is sort of like, Giving me the stuck feeling.
[2:19:22] Okay, let me ask you this. How good are you at knowing your daughter's thoughts?
[2:19:28] Pretty good.
[2:19:30] I think you're probably...
[2:19:31] I mean, she also says everything out loud, so...
[2:19:33] No, no, but I mean, but she says everything out loud because you listen.
[2:19:37] Yeah.
[2:19:38] Right? This is the back to she's interesting because you're interested.
[2:19:43] Yeah, she's awesome.
[2:19:44] So, I mean, and listen, by the by, I just wanted to point out how beautiful that is. and how magnificent a job you have done. And like, holy crap, like a medal the size of the rings of Saturn. If I could pin one on you, I would. I just think that's incredible. I don't want to, you know, as in the hurly-burly of the conversation as a whole, I just don't want to miss that. Like what an amazing job and a magnificent and beautiful job you've done becoming the mother that you are. And wow, fantastic. Thank you so much.
[2:20:16] That means a lot coming from you. It means so much. So thank you.
[2:20:19] You know your daughter's thoughts very well, right? If your daughter's sad, do you have any doubt about that?
[2:20:28] No. It's very easy to tell when she's sad.
[2:20:32] Do you doubt knowing that she's sad? Do you have no idea what she's feeling?
[2:20:35] No, I never have no idea.
[2:20:40] Yes. So, sorry about that. that but um oh yeah so i was just asking uh you don't have any doubt about how your daughter is feeling like if she's sad you don't sit there and say i wonder what alien feeling she's experiencing right yeah
[2:20:56] No it's pretty clear what she's feeling when she's feeling it and like you know what to do about it.
[2:21:03] Right so uh so so as the parent parent, you know what your daughter is feeling, and your parents don't know what you're feeling. Do you sort of see this sort of massive gulf here, right?
[2:21:20] Yes, yes. This is what I've been feeling, the massive gulf.
[2:21:25] Right. You're connected with your daughter. She enjoys your company. She talks to you. You talk to her. You know her moods. You know her feelings. and your parents who don't seem to know any of this
[2:21:42] Yeah. I'm just a strange, incomprehensible creature.
[2:21:47] Right. Something to be, you know, manipulated and, I don't know, controlled and exploited and, you know, just an object, right? Just an object, a thing, in a sense.
[2:21:58] Yeah. You know, they've literally said to me in the past, I don't know why you're so upset about this, or I don't know, just like everything that I say or feel is a complete and total mystery, and they can't imagine where I'm getting any of this from. Mom, why are you mad at us? Why don't you want to talk to us?
[2:22:16] Right, right.
[2:22:17] And it's like, if I have to explain that to you, not only would it take the rest of my life.
[2:22:24] But I don't think I could talk. Yeah, but you wouldn't understand anyway.
[2:22:25] Yeah, you wouldn't get it. How could you possibly get it?
[2:22:29] Right. So if you look at that massive gulf, like that absolutely staggering distance between the fact that you can't not know what your daughter is feeling. Like, okay, how good is your daughter at hiding her feelings from you?
[2:22:46] She's terrible at it.
[2:22:47] Yeah, and good. She should be. She shouldn't even try, right? Because that's what's called being connected, right? My daughter used to have, when she was very little, she'd have a sad corner. So if she was sad about something, she would just go to that corner, and that was the signal that she was sad. And that's great. I mean, I always knew she was sad anyway, but it was, I guess, good to have a sort of physical confirmation of the proximity of the sad corner. Yeah. So you can't not feel what your daughter feels, and your parents have no clue what you feel. Like, it's different wiring. It's different wiring.
[2:23:26] Yeah, it's like they're a completely different type of animal. It is.
[2:23:30] It's just a completely different kind of mind because you are wired into your daughter and connected with your daughter and you know what your daughter's feeling and you will do anything to keep her safe. and you will do any you know you the lines of communication are always open and you know what she feels and your parents either don't know or you know act as if that's the case in which case there's no practical difference right i mean if i do know japanese but i spend my whole life pretending i don't there's no functional difference right right so so that's That's the gulf. You're trying to say, well, if I can get my parents to understand this about me, then they will either change or they will accept my decisions. And so if you want to, my general advice has been, if you feel like you really want to explain something to your parents, it's probably worth having a conversation. And if you say, okay, well, the reason I don't want to have any contact with my parents is because they have shown absolutely zero capacity or desire or willingness to listen to anything that I say. I'm just an object of convenience to them or inconvenience, in which case they get mad.
[2:24:57] Yeah.
[2:24:58] So that's why I guess my question is, you know, and it's good to get clarity on these things. Right. So writing it all down and and you can, you know, get your husband to pretend to be someone in your family or you can pretend to be your parents and your husband can pretend to be you and, you know, just play out the various scenarios. OK, if I say this, what's going to happen? You could write dialogue back and forth and say, OK, well, if I say this, what's going going to happen and and see if there's any scenario by which or through which you can credibly connect with your parents and get them to understand something fundamental about you that's to do with you not them yeah
[2:25:39] I think the writing it out will be a useful exercise size, but the actual talking to them, I have no, I have no hope there, you know?
[2:25:53] Yeah. Now, if you have closure. then you might not need, I hate to say sort of drama, because you've got your closure, you don't need your drama, right? But it's like if you have your closure, because you say, well, I don't want to stretch it out, this, that, that, the other, right? Well, I think you want the least difficult and problematic and escalating kind of exit strategy, right?
[2:26:21] Yes, because I don't want to be all preoccupied with this. It's, you know, I want them necessarily.
[2:26:28] You know, pounding on your door at one in the morning because their flight landed.
[2:26:32] Yeah. Oh, my gosh.
[2:26:34] So if if, you know, you hung up on your dad and if like basically is it the case that neither of your parents have contacted you?
[2:26:43] No, but my brother has.
[2:26:46] Oh, and what's his? Oh, dear. I feel he's like, you got to fix this with mom and dad. What's his approach? Is he getting back?
[2:26:53] Okay, he still lives at home with them. He still lives with them. So whatever is going on, he knows it's going on. But he hasn't said anything to me about that situation. But a week to the day after I hung up on them, he messaged me out of the blue with some little anecdote about a friend of mine. And because I kind of know my family's culture, I have a suspicion that he was asked to contact me to see how quickly I would respond.
[2:27:23] Hmm. Right. So machinery is in motion and manipulations are occurring at a cosmic level. Okay.
[2:27:29] Yeah. And I think they're kind of racking up the score. And then at some point, they're going to try to, you know, reach out and do what they do.
[2:27:39] Well, yeah. I mean, so, I mean, there's a couple of different strategies. And by strategies, I don't mean manipulations, right? I mean, because they're all based on honesty. So do you feel that your father has something to apologize to you for? Is that why you hung up on him?
[2:27:56] Well, I mean, he has a lifetime of things to apologize to me for.
[2:28:00] Was there something more specific in that conversation?
[2:28:06] I don't know. I just didn't like his tone and the fact that he was demanding things. Right. In that moment, I was just like, who are you?
[2:28:14] Yes. So what you can do, I mean, and I don't want to put words in your mouth. So if this is something that would be honest, then if he contacts you and you can say, you know, you kind of owe me an apology for being so demanding last time.
[2:28:29] Right? Yeah.
[2:28:31] Now, what's he going to do?
[2:28:35] I was going to say an apology for what?
[2:28:38] Well, you were kind of demanding and insistent and I didn't appreciate it.
[2:28:43] Demanding and insistent? we haven't spoken to our granddaughter in over a month. You think that kind of thing is right?
[2:28:52] See, now you're just being too bad to get insistent again. I don't appreciate this tone and I don't appreciate the way you're talking to me.
[2:29:01] Who do you think you're talking to?
[2:29:04] Oh, yeah, you're my father. I understand. I mean, I'm actually aware of whom I'm talking to. I didn't think that you were some cunning AI or an imposter.
[2:29:10] Well, you need to treat me with respect.
[2:29:13] Why?
[2:29:15] Because I'm your father.
[2:29:17] So? Does that mean that you don't have any moral standards?
[2:29:21] What do you mean by moral standards? You're always with some kind of big word philosophy.
[2:29:28] What do you mean by that? Hang on, Dad. Are you treating me with respect now?
[2:29:33] I don't have to treat you with respect. You're a child. You're my child.
[2:29:36] So I don't want to be in a relationship where I'm not treated with respect. Just like you, Dad. So if you don't treat me with respect, I don't want to talk to you. So that's your choice.
[2:29:51] Okay, if that's how you feel, okay, go ahead.
[2:29:56] I'm not sure what you're saying.
[2:30:00] You say you don't want to be in a relationship. Relationship.
[2:30:05] Well, you just told me that you don't have to treat me with respect.
[2:30:10] You have to respect me.
[2:30:12] You have to respect me. No, Dad, just a moment. I'm still talking. So we're stuck because I say, look, I'm telling you, I don't want to be in a relationship where I'm not treated with respect. And you say,
[2:30:24] I don't have to treat you with respect. Listen, listen, you always talk in some kind of confusion.
[2:30:26] Sorry, Dad. You always talk in some kind of confusion.
[2:30:28] Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad.
[2:30:32] You keep talking while I'm talking. That's very disrespectful.
[2:30:36] Because you're talking stupidness.
[2:30:38] No. See, now you're being even more disrespectful. I don't want to be in a relationship with someone who calls me stupid.
[2:30:44] Okay, well then hang up your phone.
[2:30:45] Okay, bye. And then hang up the phone. And then when he would call back and attempt to bully or manipulate more, I'd just say, no, I'm not enjoying this. I don't like being talked to in this way. You're not treating me with respect. expect and uh and see he'll he'll end up going no contact with you yeah i mean i've i've mentioned this before on on these conversations you sure have right i mean i i didn't go no contact with my family they just decided to stop talking to me because i was just honest yeah
[2:31:21] Too much trouble with all the honesty.
[2:31:23] Well yeah i mean if if somebody i mean your father openly says in this convo, right? I mean, in our little roleplay, he says, I'm not going to treat you with respect. It's like, okay, well, what's in that for me then? I don't want that.
[2:31:34] Yeah. Yeah. But see, everybody around him is supposed to cater to him.
[2:31:43] Okay, that's fine. Then everyone else can. But I don't have to.
[2:31:47] Yeah.
[2:31:48] I don't want to.
[2:31:50] Definitely don't want to.
[2:31:52] Well, and if he's like, well, you know, I have to see my granddaughter daughter be like dad you didn't talk to me for over two years as a teenager yeah
[2:32:00] What's so special about this kid.
[2:32:01] Yeah i mean you know i i you know when you were still supposed to be my father i was only 15 years old you're still supposed to be my father you didn't talk to me for two years and like now you're saying that it's really important to keep the lines of communication open come on you're gonna be kidding me
[2:32:24] Yeah it is.
[2:32:28] And then if he's and if he you know it's like well then you owe me an apology for those two years as well that was very difficult for me very unpleasant but it was sassy to be in a cycle okay I don't have to talk to you right that's the rule and then he'll just put that I'm your father and stuff I mean, you know, listen, Darth Vader, you're still bound by some moral rules, aren't you?
[2:32:54] Oh, dear. Yeah. So, yeah, you're right.
[2:33:05] A confrontation with people who are genuinely so self-absorbed that they will never listen to you is usually just an exercise in a futility and be almost like self-harm.
[2:33:19] Yeah. One of the recurring dreams I've had throughout my life is like I'm having some kind of argument with someone. And then my voice just sort of disappears. ears and so i'm trying to scream and yell but like no voice is coming out right and it's you know very scary and frustrating and like i've had this recurring dream my whole life until like it stopped now right i think right and that.
[2:33:49] That's the dream is saying look you if you're in a conversation with people who don't listen you lose your voice
[2:33:54] Yeah and i think it was specifically about my parents too.
[2:33:58] Sure, sure.
[2:33:59] I was always trying to get myself across to them.
[2:34:02] And all of that, right?
[2:34:04] Yeah, very much so. I remember them saying, talking about people who had moved away and maybe lost contact with their family. We don't know what their business is, so why they're not in contact with their family, but they would talk about it like they were the worst people in the world.
[2:34:22] But that's the minute. Coming back to visit. They're just warning you. They're just warning you that you better not do that or they'll talk about you that way too.
[2:34:28] And it's like, can you believe they were on the island and they didn't even go visit their mother?
[2:34:33] Right. Well, maybe the mother should have behaved a little better.
[2:34:37] Yeah.
[2:34:41] So, yeah, I mean, I really sympathize. I mean, I enormously sympathize with what's gone on for you in your childhood and your youth and even up to now. It's not a fun choice that anybody wants. But my gosh, again, I mean, what a lucky girl your daughter is.
[2:35:01] Thank you, Stef.
[2:35:02] Thank you. I mean, this is how we win the world back from the bad guys, right? One parenting action at a time.
[2:35:10] Yeah. And so thank you for putting it out there, because if I didn't find you, I don't know that I would even be a mom.
[2:35:18] Well, I'm very pleased for that. I'm very pleased for that, because it's a great experience, as you know, right?
[2:35:23] Yeah, it's amazing. It's the best thing in the world.
[2:35:27] All right. I'm afraid I'm pulling old guy 25 minutes to one in the morning, fading energy thing. Same here.
[2:35:36] Yeah.
[2:35:36] And you've got to get up probably earlier than I do. So first of all, I'm really glad that you reached out. I thought it was a great conversation. I admire your journey enormously, and I reiterate my sympathy for what happened. And I hope that you will keep me posted about how things are going. You can just message in the Skype window.
[2:35:56] Okay, I will do that. And thank you so much for your time and all your work and for being my internet dad, kind of.
[2:36:05] Well, I appreciate that. Thank you so much and have a great night.
[2:36:08] Okay, you too, Stef. Bye. Bye.
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