Speaker 1: Lots of people use the term codependency, but what is
Speaker 1: it If you've ever felt responsible for the happiness of
Speaker 1: another person or an incessant need to fix people's problems
Speaker 1: so you can be loved. Stay tuned on this episode
Speaker 1: of Navigating Narcissism. I am welcoming gifted author doctor Priscilla Gilman,
Speaker 1: whose beautiful memoir The Critic's Daughter is a roadmap of
Speaker 1: what she calls her codependent journey. Though her childhood appeared
Speaker 1: happy from the outside, Priscilla was tasked with her family's
Speaker 1: emotional burdens from a very young age. At the age
Speaker 1: of nine, she took on the impossible responsibility of her
Speaker 1: dad's well being after he told her he would have
Speaker 1: taken his life if not for her and her sister.
Speaker 1: Priscilla's journey is an important reminder we never know what's
Speaker 1: happening behind closed door of what may look like the
Speaker 1: most loving families, and ultimately, none of us can be
Speaker 1: responsible for another person's happiness or sadness. From Red Table
Speaker 1: Talk Podcasts and iHeartMedia, I'm Doctor Rominy and this is
Speaker 1: Navigating Narcissism. This podcast should not be used as a
Speaker 1: substitute for medical or mental health advice. Individuals are advised
Speaker 1: to seek independent medical advice, counseling, and or therapy from
Speaker 1: a healthcare professional with respect to any medical condition, mental
Speaker 1: health issue, or health inquiry, including matters discussed on this podcast.
Speaker 1: This episode discusses suicidal ideation, which may be triggering to
Speaker 1: some people. The views and opinions expressed are solely those
Speaker 1: of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
Speaker 1: and do not represent the opinions of Red Table Talk productions, iHeartMedia,
Speaker 1: or their employees. Priscilla Gillman, Welcome to Navigating Narcissism. It
Speaker 1: is such a pleasure to have you. I've had the
Speaker 1: exquisite pleasure of reading your book, The Critic's Daughter. What
Speaker 1: I really love about it is there is a subtlety
Speaker 1: and a relatability to it. Because this show, as you know, Priscilla,
Speaker 1: is called Navigating Narcissism, right, But that's a very, very
Speaker 1: vast umbrella. And I think one of the hardest things
Speaker 1: about any kind of story about a family and what
Speaker 1: happens with parents. Yes, yes, it's not black and white,
Speaker 1: and when people find themselves in the gray, they often
Speaker 1: don't know how to see what went wrong. But also,
Speaker 1: most importantly, how all of that shaped them. For anyone
Speaker 1: who doesn't know you and hasn't read the book, can
Speaker 1: can you tell us who your parents are?
Speaker 2: So, my father, Richard Gilman, was a professor at the
Speaker 2: Yale School of Drama for thirty years. He was the
Speaker 2: drama critic for Newsweek in the sixties. He was a
Speaker 2: literary editor of The New Republic in the sixties, the
Speaker 2: theater critic for The Nation in the eighties, the President
Speaker 2: of pen America but didn't even have a BA. So
Speaker 2: a self made, self taught person. And my mother, Lynnezbud,
Speaker 2: who is still alive, is a very prominent literary agent.
Speaker 2: Her clients when I was a child included Tony Morrison,
Speaker 2: Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Michael Crichton, and Rice Now,
Speaker 2: Robert Caro, Jimmy Carter, a whole host of incredible writers
Speaker 2: and people.
Speaker 1: As I read your book, Going to be honest, I
Speaker 1: envied you, you know, because I had a very different
Speaker 1: experience of these kinds of parental relationships and certainly of
Speaker 1: early childhood. But there was an envy. And here you
Speaker 1: were sort of hanging out with, you know, people that
Speaker 1: are my personal heroes Tony Morrison, Joan Didion, the kinds
Speaker 1: of people who are giving you dolls, so you know
Speaker 1: you were playing make believe with your father. I think
Speaker 1: the thing that struck me, though, most about the story
Speaker 1: of your father is how attentive he was. He would
Speaker 1: watch you perform, He was interested in what you did.
Speaker 1: He asked you questions about yourself. He took delight in
Speaker 1: what you were learning about. Most kids never would get
Speaker 1: a parent ever in their lives to be interested in
Speaker 1: sitting down and watching them do a play that doesn't
Speaker 1: happen to them once in their childhood, right, and that
Speaker 1: happened to you almost every day in the same breath.
Speaker 1: There was this remarkable strictness about what you especially small children,
Speaker 1: what you ate, the kinds of media you watched, you
Speaker 1: know everything, the music you listened to. So could you
Speaker 1: paint a picture of the complexity of who your father was,
Speaker 1: especially when you were a young child.
Speaker 2: I love how you started Dr Romeny by talking about
Speaker 2: shades of Gray. And I had one reader say to me,
Speaker 2: You've written a book about human beings and all their
Speaker 2: complexity and all their messiness in a world that wants
Speaker 2: to look at things in terms of black and white,
Speaker 2: and my father was this massive contradictions, which is part
Speaker 2: of what made him so fascinating and so compelling. He
Speaker 2: was exceptionally attentive to me and my younger sister. I
Speaker 2: have a sister who's fourteen months younger. My best friends
Speaker 2: still really invested in our imaginative play, would ask us
Speaker 2: questions about what our dolls or our Paddington's were doing
Speaker 2: that day, would come in and watch. We would have
Speaker 2: auditions for doll and stuffed animal productions of Westside Story
Speaker 2: or Oklahoma, and he would come in and assess them,
Speaker 2: and he would read to us for hours on end,
Speaker 2: and he was just clearly in love with our world.
Speaker 2: He was invested in us as children, but also in
Speaker 2: the realm of childhood per se. He took genuine enjoyment.
Speaker 2: He would sit down and watch Esme Street and Zoom
Speaker 2: and you know, all these shows Doctor Rothin, watch Mister Rogers.
Speaker 2: But you're so right that he was very strict. We
Speaker 2: were not allowed to watch any television except PBS, and
Speaker 2: you did not allow us to listen to any pop music.
Speaker 2: When Greece came out, you probably remember this. All my
Speaker 2: friends at school were going to see Greece, they had
Speaker 2: their grease cast albums. We were not allowed to listen
Speaker 2: to that. My father did support me in reading, like
Speaker 2: the Hardy Boys series and the Nancy Drew series, but
Speaker 2: a lot of other sort of popular mass market stuff
Speaker 2: we would never be allowed to have, like Sweet Valley
Speaker 2: High or Babysitters Club or anything like that.
Speaker 1: What I hear though, was it was a childhood and
Speaker 1: at least in the broad strokes. Yeah, it was safe,
Speaker 1: it was predictable, it was comforting. You were seen, you
Speaker 1: were heard, you were valued. Yes, when did things start
Speaker 1: to change?
Speaker 2: So the fishers that I saw, these slight fishers almost imperceptible.
Speaker 2: I agree with you. My father, I could tell was
Speaker 2: prone to depression from writer's block. He smoked compulsively. I
Speaker 2: could sense when he needed a cigarette. He started to
Speaker 2: get irritable, He had a temper, he would get angry,
Speaker 2: and it was rare, and I always felt that I
Speaker 2: was the one who was best able to coax him
Speaker 2: out of a bad mood dr rominy, and so from
Speaker 2: a very young age, I felt that my role in
Speaker 2: the family. My sister was a little bit more difficult.
Speaker 2: She didn't sleep through the night. She would have temper tantrums,
Speaker 2: and my role always in the family unit was to
Speaker 2: be the good girl, the cheerful girl, the smiling girl,
Speaker 2: the helpful one, the one who steadied everybody else. And
Speaker 2: then I also always sensed that my parents didn't love
Speaker 2: each other the way married couples in movies or books
Speaker 2: that I was reading, or even some of my friend's
Speaker 2: parents loved each other. There was no physical affection between them.
Speaker 2: My father always seemed to crave my mother's good opinion.
Speaker 2: My mother seemed a little distant from my father. She
Speaker 2: was very warm with me and my sister, but not
Speaker 2: with my father. My father was a very funny person,
Speaker 2: but he never made her laugh the way he made
Speaker 2: other people laugh. So I started thinking, something just doesn't
Speaker 2: feel right. But we would ask them again and again
Speaker 2: are you going to get divorced? If they would have
Speaker 2: a fight, or we would hear about a family friend
Speaker 2: getting divorced, and they would always say, we will never
Speaker 2: ever get divorced. And then, as you know, vidd but
Speaker 2: it took a long time. So when I was ten,
Speaker 2: in the fall of nineteen eighty, my mother announced that
Speaker 2: she was ending the marriage. And it was a night
Speaker 2: in October I will never forget. Vividly, sitting in my room,
Speaker 2: I heard my parents talking in the kitchen. I couldn't
Speaker 2: really hear the words, and I'm writing in my journal.
Speaker 2: I have a holly hobby journal, and I have the
Speaker 2: puppy that we've just gotten, and that was another source
Speaker 2: of stress because my mother didn't want a dog. So
Speaker 2: I was thinking, oh, are they fighting about the dog?
Speaker 2: That my mother is not happy that we have this
Speaker 2: puppy now. And then my mother summoned to me and
Speaker 2: my sister into the kitchen and my father had left,
Speaker 2: and she announced to us that my parents were going
Speaker 2: to do what they called a trial separation. My sister
Speaker 2: immediately gets very upset, and I try to stay calm,
Speaker 2: and I'm digging my nails into my tights to keep
Speaker 2: from crying. And I knew that it wasn't a trial separation.
Speaker 2: I knew this was false comfort that was being given
Speaker 2: to us, that this was not an experiment, that there
Speaker 2: was something definitive, and my mother looked at peace in
Speaker 2: a way that I had never seen her before.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you a few questions about that
Speaker 1: entire sequence you said. I dug my fingers into my tights.
Speaker 1: To keep from crying. What would have happened if you
Speaker 1: did cry and they saw you cry.
Speaker 2: That's such a great question. I never cried as a kid.
Speaker 2: It was kind of legendary in the family that I
Speaker 2: was the baby who never cried and my sister was
Speaker 2: a baby who cried. And I, you know, I think
Speaker 2: that my father suffered from untreated clinical depression, for sure,
Speaker 2: and I was blessed. I was lucky that I had
Speaker 2: this naturally kind of optimistic, buoyant temperament. But I also
Speaker 2: think that I leaned into that and I was cast
Speaker 2: in the role of the happy one who doesn't cry,
Speaker 2: who makes other people feel better. And I think that
Speaker 2: if I had cried in that moment, it would have
Speaker 2: disconcerted my mom and my sister, and my sister would
Speaker 2: have cried more if I had started to cry. But
Speaker 2: it's just it's so interesting. I don't know. I wouldn't
Speaker 2: have been able to go and comfort my dad, which
Speaker 2: is what I did next.
Speaker 1: Now you've taken to another interesting place. And this is
Speaker 1: something we often see in any family system. Right, children
Speaker 1: do get cast into roles based on their temperaments, right, Yes,
Speaker 1: And that child with the easy temperament the well sleeping,
Speaker 1: not crying, optimistic, constantly cheerful child. They perceive that that
Speaker 1: is a very valued role, like that's a good part
Speaker 1: to have landed in this play called this family, and
Speaker 1: so it's a safe role. To cry would have been
Speaker 1: to violate that role. But even as we're talking here,
Speaker 1: you can see the danger of that role, right, because
Speaker 1: now what's being rewarded is emotional constraint number one, exactly,
Speaker 1: And number two is that your value comes from displacing
Speaker 1: your emotion in favor of a caregiving role and not
Speaker 1: inconveniencing anyone. Right, And no one ever sat you down,
Speaker 1: Priscilla and said, hey, Priscilla, we need you to not
Speaker 1: cry and not inconvenience us. It was a perception, but
Speaker 1: these roles can give a child a sense of place
Speaker 1: and safety and your temperament work. Now, I want to
Speaker 1: go to this next piece here, which is I knew
Speaker 1: that I didn't want my sister to cry. More so,
Speaker 1: you felt responsible for your sister's emotion. I can understand
Speaker 1: that siblings feel that. However, your father a grown man,
Speaker 1: you really were trying to protect him. Can you talk
Speaker 1: about your role as you're the protector of your father's
Speaker 1: emotion and frankly, your father, and when did that role
Speaker 1: kick in for you.
Speaker 2: It's so interesting parallel to my sense of being completely
Speaker 2: seen and safe and accepted and loved from my true
Speaker 2: and best self by my father. I always felt that
Speaker 2: my father's well being, his emotional wellbeing, even his physical wellbeing,
Speaker 2: was precarious. And I always worried about the smoking from
Speaker 2: a very young age. And he would drink, not excessively,
Speaker 2: but he would have to have his drink every day
Speaker 2: at a certain time when his moods started to potentially
Speaker 2: go south. And I talk in the book about becoming
Speaker 2: a football fan to give my father company. I wrote
Speaker 2: a letter to a football player when I was nine
Speaker 2: years old, after we had seen the Giants lose and
Speaker 2: the football player, Harry Carson, had his head in his
Speaker 2: hands and looked like he was sobbing on the sidelines,
Speaker 2: and I wrote a letter and I said, don't be sad.
Speaker 2: You're a wonderful player and a wonderful man. We'll all
Speaker 2: be happy again. And I realize now that I was
Speaker 2: writing this to Harry Carson, but I was also writing
Speaker 2: this to my father, and this was a year before
Speaker 2: the separation. But I was already sensing my father is
Speaker 2: somebody who's prone to sadness, prone to depression.
Speaker 1: And I also want to call you out on something
Speaker 1: else here, Priscilla. It was a word usage you adduced. Okay,
Speaker 1: said doctor Robiney. Moment here when we're calling you out
Speaker 1: the doctor roy Okay. So you know that letter you
Speaker 1: wrote to the football player really hit me hard. And
Speaker 1: in fact, if I remember correctly, he'd even sent you
Speaker 1: a photo of him or something that you hung over
Speaker 1: your bed and he.
Speaker 2: Said, God bless you always old fifty three.
Speaker 1: Yes, but what you wrote to you said you mustn't
Speaker 1: be sad.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: So that's very different, weighing in much more heavily trying
Speaker 1: to kind of run the emotional sort of show. And
Speaker 1: you were very invested in this man's emotional state. You
Speaker 1: didn't even know him, but I do think he was
Speaker 1: a representation of your father, someone who was He played
Speaker 1: for the Giants. The love of the Giants was something
Speaker 1: that was really shared between you and your dad in
Speaker 1: many ways, an interest you took on to facilitate a
Speaker 1: greater closeness with your father. And that's something we will
Speaker 1: see with children who come from environments where they do
Speaker 1: sort of take emotional responsibility for their parents. They start
Speaker 1: to cultivate interests that are in line with what their
Speaker 1: parents like. They'll take up a sport their parent likes,
Speaker 1: they will read books their parent likes. In this case,
Speaker 1: you watched sports the way your father likes, and it
Speaker 1: really created a lifelong sort of point of connection. It
Speaker 1: was a wonderful thing, but once again, you were chasing
Speaker 1: what mattered to him.
Speaker 2: Maybe I was perceiving a big shock, a big sadness
Speaker 2: is about to come, and I'm going to get you
Speaker 2: through this. We're going to solder through this, and I'm
Speaker 2: going to make sure that we get out on the
Speaker 2: other side and we're happy. I didn't focus on how
Speaker 2: these things affected me because I was so plugged into
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, Clary. My sister, she's more vulnerable, she's little.
Speaker 2: I have to protect her. I don't want her to
Speaker 2: upset my parents more by crying, because her crying would
Speaker 2: upset them. And then my mother, you know, she sort
Speaker 2: of ends the scene and says he's going to be
Speaker 2: here for a few more months, and you know, it's
Speaker 2: not happening immediately, and she takes my sister off to bed,
Speaker 2: and I saw my father with his shoulder shaking from
Speaker 2: the back, walking down the hall, and I went after him,
Speaker 2: and I thought, I have to because what's going to
Speaker 2: happen if I don't. And I walk into his office
Speaker 2: and I kept thinking, he's about to be expelled from
Speaker 2: this he's about to be literally expelled from this apartment,
Speaker 2: literally expelled from this office, and he's about to lose
Speaker 2: our family. And he was crying, and he beckoned me
Speaker 2: to him, and I had not seen him cry very
Speaker 2: often at all, and he was crying and he said,
Speaker 2: I don't want this, but I don't want to lose
Speaker 2: our family. And he was crying and crying and crying,
Speaker 2: and I snuffed up my tears. I remember just like
Speaker 2: aggressively trying to keep the tears from coming out and
Speaker 2: snuffing them up because I thought that that would make
Speaker 2: it worse for him.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's an incredibly powerful moment and powerful awareness.
Speaker 1: To think of how young you were. You said you
Speaker 1: were around ten. I believe right ten, fifth grade, fifth grade,
Speaker 1: ten years old. You're getting a piece of news which
Speaker 1: is catastrophic for a child to hear, especially a child
Speaker 1: who actually was really content in her family's space. Yes,
Speaker 1: and you are entirely focused on your father's well being,
Speaker 1: what he's about to lose, watching the heaviness of his
Speaker 1: hunched over back, picked up on all those physical cues.
Speaker 1: How did you manage, Priscilla, the juxtaposition between your father's
Speaker 1: absolute sense of despair and defeat that day you saw
Speaker 1: all that he was going to lose, and what you
Speaker 1: saw as your mom's sense of relief. I don't want
Speaker 1: to quite say happiness, but you definitely saw your mother
Speaker 1: felt like she put a weight down and felt lighter,
Speaker 1: and your father took on the weight of the world.
Speaker 1: How did you, at ten years old, negotiate that difference,
Speaker 1: that tension.
Speaker 2: My mother obviously huge trailblazer in publishing in a major career,
Speaker 2: and was not around as much when I was little
Speaker 2: as my father was, and was not invested in childhood
Speaker 2: and playing with children in the way that my father was.
Speaker 2: But I always felt very protective of my mother. I
Speaker 2: sensed at a young age that she was a woman
Speaker 2: in a man's world. She was going out to work,
Speaker 2: and she was under a lot of pressure. My father
Speaker 2: was very supportive of her in that and always told
Speaker 2: us girls like don't make too much noise. She needs
Speaker 2: to work. He was very ahead of his time in
Speaker 2: being totally comfortable with the woman's power and going out
Speaker 2: in the world and working. And my mother was tired
Speaker 2: a lot, she was stressed a lot. And so I
Speaker 2: felt happy in a weird way that my mom seemed
Speaker 2: relieved and she seemed less tired, and she seemed better
Speaker 2: to me. And I didn't want to make her feel
Speaker 2: guilty about this decision that she had made, because I
Speaker 2: could see that she had needed to make it. I
Speaker 2: just sensed it. There was something about her body language
Speaker 2: that told me this is something that she had been
Speaker 2: wanting to do for a while, and this is something
Speaker 2: she needed to do to save herself in some way.
Speaker 1: So that's a remarkable and I'm like, I'm drawing out
Speaker 1: that remarkable amount of empathy for a ten year old child.
Speaker 1: Most adults could not engage in the balance circumspection and
Speaker 1: would maybe even not balance. You were making allowances for
Speaker 1: everyone's different position, your mother's relief, your father's despair, your
Speaker 1: sister's anguish. The only emotion that wasn't being accounted for
Speaker 1: was yours. But you were simultaneously able to literally make
Speaker 1: that adjustment. Don't want mom to feel guilty because I
Speaker 1: can see that she's okay, want dad to feel okay.
Speaker 1: In adults, we would view that as quite a skill, right,
Speaker 1: and in fact that's actually a shrink skill. But the
Speaker 1: difference between a shrink and what you were doing is
Speaker 1: a shrinks an adult who went to school for many
Speaker 1: years and is objective. They're not in that family. Most
Speaker 1: ten year olds would be enraged, upset, devastated and run
Speaker 1: to their room and cry and would not give a
Speaker 1: damn about the mental state of either of their parents.
Speaker 1: And what you did was literally the opposite. You became
Speaker 1: so invested in your father's emotional world and well being,
Speaker 1: especially at the point that the trial separation and subse
Speaker 1: divorce happened. Was he equally plugged into your emotional world
Speaker 1: and equally aware of your emotional world and responsive to it.
Speaker 2: I don't think he was in those couple of months
Speaker 2: after this night where my mother breaks the devastating news
Speaker 2: my father has moved out. I don't know where he's living.
Speaker 2: We're not told he doesn't have an upsteady apartment where
Speaker 2: we can come over for sleepovers. We're only seeing him
Speaker 2: for these like rushed lunches and dinners on the Upper
Speaker 2: West Side. And then my mother goes to California on
Speaker 2: business and my father is allowed to come back and
Speaker 2: stay in the apartment for a few days. And he
Speaker 2: got upset with my sister one night when she was
Speaker 2: crying and we were playing a game. She spilled some
Speaker 2: apple juice on the monopoly board and started to cry,
Speaker 2: and he got mad and he yelled, and then I
Speaker 2: went to find him and he was apologizing, essentially for
Speaker 2: getting angry, and which he always did. And that's the
Speaker 2: thing about my dad. He had a temper, but he
Speaker 2: knew he had a temper. He didn't justify it. He
Speaker 2: felt very guilty about it. And he said to me,
Speaker 2: you know that I love you girls more than anything
Speaker 2: in the world. And I said, of course, Daddy, of course,
Speaker 2: And he said, sometimes I think I'd kill myself if
Speaker 2: it wasn't for you girls. And that was like a
Speaker 2: moment where it just was imprinted on me that my
Speaker 2: father's survival is my responsibility and I'm going to do
Speaker 2: everything it takes to make sure that he stays alive.
Speaker 1: My conversation will continue after this break.
Speaker 2: And you know, when we would have these lunches and
Speaker 2: dinners with him. He would get irritable. Sometimes he would
Speaker 2: rush us through our meals. He was struggling financially, so
Speaker 2: he would make us split a dish at a restaurant,
Speaker 2: and my sister would say, but I'm hungry, that's not
Speaker 2: enough food, and I would kick her to try to
Speaker 2: get her to be quiet. And once I would see
Speaker 2: him in McDonald's taking the packets of salt and sugar
Speaker 2: and ketchup and putting them in his bag, and I thought,
Speaker 2: this is really alarming, Like he doesn't have enough money
Speaker 2: to buy these things on his own. He's taking them
Speaker 2: from the restaurant. And he never asked us how are
Speaker 2: you handling the split or anything like that. Neither of
Speaker 2: my parents ever said how do you feel about this?
Speaker 2: And we were not to talk about our feelings about
Speaker 2: my dad not being there, so it just didn't come up.
Speaker 2: And my parents didn't. You know, this was nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty one, Cramer versus Kramer generation. You know, there
Speaker 2: just wasn't any discourse about how to talk about divorce.
Speaker 2: Very few of my friends at school had parents who
Speaker 2: had split up. I felt ashamed, so I just didn't
Speaker 2: talk about it.
Speaker 1: It was a different time. But you're a mom, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm a mom. Yeah, And when do you think about
Speaker 1: the fact that your parents split up, father goes elsewhere,
Speaker 1: everything has changed and nobody is checking in on you
Speaker 1: and your sister. How do you feel about that now?
Speaker 2: It is completely shocking to me. Like when I looked
Speaker 2: back at this, my kids are now, they're so old.
Speaker 2: I am divorced from their father. I did my divorce
Speaker 2: completely differently. We nested for a few years, we have
Speaker 2: joint custody. We're good friends. You know. My parents had
Speaker 2: the most bitter, most vicious divorce that was extended over
Speaker 2: many years as they fought over money and they could
Speaker 2: hardly bear to be in the same room with each other.
Speaker 2: I did it completely differently. But one thing, when I
Speaker 2: looked back my agent, she said to me, I really
Speaker 2: want you to realize how little you were, Yes, and thinking, wow,
Speaker 2: I was so little.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I want to build a nine nine years old.
Speaker 1: I was around nine ten years old that your father,
Speaker 1: in the midst of his despair, said to you, if
Speaker 1: it wasn't for you and your sister, I would kill myself.
Speaker 1: You're a mother, you know what nine looks like from
Speaker 1: a parental perspective, I know you love your dad, I
Speaker 1: really do, and I get it after hearing the childhood
Speaker 1: you have I get it. But when you look at
Speaker 1: that now, that utterance one line, if it weren't for
Speaker 1: you and your sister, I would kill myself. You're nine.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about that now? And more importantly,
Speaker 1: how did that shape you from that point forward?
Speaker 2: You know, I still look at it with empathy in
Speaker 2: the sense that it was a moment where he was
Speaker 2: just completely broken.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I heard that he had been momentarily inserted back into
Speaker 2: the home while my mother was away, and he was
Speaker 2: in that space, the same room that she had made
Speaker 2: the announcement two months earlier. I think he felt so
Speaker 2: overwhelmed with shame and guilt about having gotten angry at Claire.
Speaker 2: He probably felt, this is my one chance to be
Speaker 2: with him, and I screwed it up because I got upset.
Speaker 2: And I get that, and I think he felt under
Speaker 2: an enormous amount of pressure, and in that moment he
Speaker 2: broke and he said something that he should not have
Speaker 2: said to me, but he was lost. I just looked
Speaker 2: at his face and there was just anguish scoring his face,
Speaker 2: and he just blurted it out. And in general he
Speaker 2: was pretty disciplined around the split, Like he never spoke
Speaker 2: negatively about my mother ever, he never said a single
Speaker 2: negative word about her to me. But you know, in
Speaker 2: terms of how it shaped me, he shaped me to
Speaker 2: have this kind of pattern, especially in romantic relationships, to
Speaker 2: completely subordinate my own needs and my own feelings, even
Speaker 2: in service of somebody who needed boostering, bolstering support. It
Speaker 2: made me actually positively attracted to people who were struggling,
Speaker 2: who were depressed, who struggled with substance abews, some of
Speaker 2: them in their past, because it felt familiar to me.
Speaker 2: And you know, I write about this moment where I'm
Speaker 2: dating somebody and we were having a conversation where it
Speaker 2: became a parent that there were some real incompatibilities between us,
Speaker 2: and I said, well, maybe you know, this just isn't
Speaker 2: going to work, maybe we're not right for each other.
Speaker 2: And this man tried to kill himself in front of me.
Speaker 2: He tried to jump out a window. He also grabbed
Speaker 2: a knife and waved it in the air and said,
Speaker 2: why don't you just take this and stab me with it,
Speaker 2: because that's what you've just done and it felt like
Speaker 2: completely surreal, but at the same time there was a
Speaker 2: weird element of familiarity in it. Yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: it was like I'm important to people. I you know,
Speaker 2: they need.
Speaker 1: Me, they need you, right, and you have a function.
Speaker 1: I mean I think listen, you have people sometimes say
Speaker 1: there's chemistry, I have chemistry with someone. Chemistry really is
Speaker 1: that sense of ancient familiarity, and if it's unprocessed, right,
Speaker 1: so if nobody fully processes hey, this was the pattern
Speaker 1: with your dad, there is this risk. The challenge for
Speaker 1: you is even as you climbed into adulthood, you retained
Speaker 1: a very collaborative, loving, supportive relationship with your father, right exactly.
Speaker 2: Yep, that's precisely right.
Speaker 1: And so you were in a very very sort of
Speaker 1: unique situation. You know. Philosophically, I will say is as
Speaker 1: a parent, I think I got about sixty five percent
Speaker 1: of it right and thirty five percent wrong. Your parents
Speaker 1: really didn't do it right. They did a lot right,
Speaker 1: especially your father. Well, the piece that they didn't get
Speaker 1: right was unloading inappropriate emotional stuff on you and your
Speaker 1: sister and placing you in a role like not catching themselves.
Speaker 1: Your father should have never said that, however, Priscilla, and
Speaker 1: this is where I'm saying it's gray. I have tremendous
Speaker 1: resonance with what you said about I had an empathy.
Speaker 1: This was a man, an adult man, in tremendous despair.
Speaker 1: He loved his daughters more than anything, and he was
Speaker 1: letting that despair show. He shouldn't have. We know that
Speaker 1: in terms of chapter he shouldn't have, but he's a
Speaker 1: human being, and lives get changed over spilled glasses of
Speaker 1: apple juice, because that's the stuff that pushes us over
Speaker 1: the edge. Now, I want to go back to something
Speaker 1: because this affected me a lot. Being in the McDonald's
Speaker 1: restaurant and your father sort of hoarding the salts and
Speaker 1: the peppers and the ketchups. I found that to be
Speaker 1: an incredibly poignant, unsettling, painful scene of a daughter seeing
Speaker 1: her titan of a father, so respected, so valued, reduced
Speaker 1: to having to hoard these kinds of condiments. That there's
Speaker 1: such a complex set of emotions that I was trying
Speaker 1: to climb in there. I know you said, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: I know he's really struggling financially, but can you connect
Speaker 1: back to other feelings you had at that moment, because
Speaker 1: that was a lot to see.
Speaker 2: That was a lot, And you know, and I remember also,
Speaker 2: even as I'm seeing it, and I'm feeling this pang
Speaker 2: of wow, he's even worse off than I thought, and
Speaker 2: this is alarming. I'm thinking to myself, I can't let
Speaker 2: him see that I noticed, because I don't want him
Speaker 2: to know that I see him in all of his
Speaker 2: struggle and shame. Remember the only time that we got
Speaker 2: together as a family of four after my parents put up,
Speaker 2: and we go to this musical on Broadway for my
Speaker 2: sister's birthday and she's turning ten, and I noticed that
Speaker 2: my father is crying during a love song in the show.
Speaker 2: And even as I'm feeling tears coming into my eyes
Speaker 2: because I'm like, it makes me very sad to see
Speaker 2: my father so sad, I'm thinking, I cannot let my
Speaker 2: father know that I saw this. And I'm rustling my
Speaker 2: program to make a noise to cover the noise of
Speaker 2: my father's crying so that my mother doesn't notice it.
Speaker 2: And you know, I like that you use the word titan.
Speaker 2: He was a titan. He was a cultural titan. He
Speaker 2: was in the literary and theatrical world, of my childhood.
Speaker 2: He was revered by everybody, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: this titan, this majestic figure who was sort of on
Speaker 2: the mountaintop with his critical pronouncements, was reduced to tipping
Speaker 2: over the bin and putting the salt in there, or
Speaker 2: being reduced to helpless tears during a song in a musical.
Speaker 2: And even as I noticed it, and I felt these
Speaker 2: were signs of how far he had fallen. And he
Speaker 2: was on the pedestal for me, and also in the
Speaker 2: culture and in the restaurant that night before we went
Speaker 2: to the theater, my mom and my sister and I
Speaker 2: were already there and he arrived and he's rushing to
Speaker 2: the table and he's late, and he misses the chair
Speaker 2: and he falls on the floor in the restaurant, and
Speaker 2: it was just this feeling of oh, no, oh, no, oh, no, oh,
Speaker 2: my gosh, get up, you know, as quickly as you can.
Speaker 2: And my mom looking at him, and I could see
Speaker 2: with just a kind of contempt, and I'm just like, Okay, everybody,
Speaker 2: how many Shirley Temples are me? And you're allowed to
Speaker 2: get you know, what are we going to order? Oh,
Speaker 2: let's talk about the show and sort of trying to
Speaker 2: assuage these feelings of anxiety that everybody around me has,
Speaker 2: including the waiter, my sister. I'm sort of managing everybody's
Speaker 2: feelings and quickly pivoting from my own feeling of unease too.
Speaker 2: I'm going to go into that role of fixing, solving,
Speaker 2: rescuing all of that stuff.
Speaker 1: How did you manage your mom's contempt because it was undisguised.
Speaker 1: That is a very difficult emotion for a child to decode.
Speaker 2: It really was. And it was funny because the contrast
Speaker 2: between how adored and revered my father was by everybody
Speaker 2: in our orbit and my mother's lack of reverence for him,
Speaker 2: it was very disconcerting and I didn't know how to
Speaker 2: handle it, and I couldn't figure it out. I didn't
Speaker 2: understand and why my mother didn't love and respect and
Speaker 2: adore my father the way everybody else seemed to. But
Speaker 2: you know, we haven't gotten to this yet. But after
Speaker 2: my parents let up, my father said so in appropriate things,
Speaker 2: my mother said some inappropriate things, and she so I
Speaker 2: found a letter that my father had written to his
Speaker 2: first wife brother's mother, in which he asked her to
Speaker 2: essentially dominate him sexually. And this was when I was
Speaker 2: ten years old, and today we would say my father
Speaker 2: had BDSM tendencies. We didn't really know how to talk
Speaker 2: about it then, especially for a man who wanted to
Speaker 2: be dominated. I think there was a lot of shame
Speaker 2: and guilt around it. And I was so confused by
Speaker 2: this letter that I went to my mom and I said, Mommy,
Speaker 2: I found this letter and I described it to her,
Speaker 2: and then the floodgates opened and she started telling me,
Speaker 2: I've been hiding this kind of stuff from you girls
Speaker 2: for years. He has these pornography magazines that he was
Speaker 2: hiding in the cushions of the sofa that you were
Speaker 2: playing on, and I was always afraid you were going
Speaker 2: to find them. And then my mom said to me,
Speaker 2: you know, your father had a lot of affairs during
Speaker 2: her marriage, and some of them were with his graduate students.
Speaker 2: And I give her a lot of credit in the
Speaker 2: sense that she didn't rant and rave and demonize him
Speaker 2: in saying this. She said she was very explicit about it.
Speaker 2: She said, he's not a womanizer, he's not a don Juan.
Speaker 2: I couldn't give him what he wanted, and so he
Speaker 2: went elsewhere, and so I'm trying to decode what this means,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, okay, you mean you didn't want to
Speaker 2: get on top of him and whip him or do
Speaker 2: whatever it was that he wanted. So I kind of
Speaker 2: got it. It was the same thing where I had
Speaker 2: empathy for her and I was like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 2: But I still didn't understand why she had married my
Speaker 2: father if they were so sexually incompatible.
Speaker 1: PRIs Solla, how old were you when you found that
Speaker 1: letter and then talked to your mother and then she
Speaker 1: let you know that he had had multiple affairs and
Speaker 1: all this other stuff. How old were you at that time?
Speaker 2: Ten years old?
Speaker 1: Okay, all right? Do you think that wasn't a propriate chair,
Speaker 1: Absolutely no, it really wasn't. And it's interesting you're even
Speaker 1: soft pedaling it now. Well, she wasn't saying he was
Speaker 1: a womaniser. In no universe we occupy would ever have
Speaker 1: been okay for a child to have been handed that
Speaker 1: emotional burden to carry. It was interesting to me that
Speaker 1: she did unburden herself. The only word I could use
Speaker 1: at that point was I was frustrated when I read that, Like,
Speaker 1: why are you doing this to this child? She cannot
Speaker 1: hear this right, And so it's so fascinating because for
Speaker 1: how much you were seen as a child, let me
Speaker 1: watch you do your plays with your stuffed animals and
Speaker 1: watch you perform, and all that you weren't seen, You
Speaker 1: were simultaneously seen and not seen, which in a way
Speaker 1: is almost more confusing, because the vast majority of kids
Speaker 1: who aren't seen are simply not seen. Not only is
Speaker 1: nobody plugged into their feelings, they're also not watching them
Speaker 1: do the plays and this, and that they're just not seen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it was so confusing. It was so confusing,
Speaker 2: And I felt so much love and affirmation from both
Speaker 2: of my parents and so much recognition of who I
Speaker 2: truly was. But at the same time, when I discovered
Speaker 2: this idea later in life of the parentified child and
Speaker 2: the child who sort of turned into it was interesting.
Speaker 2: I like the word that you use, that she was
Speaker 2: unburdening herself, that she had been carrying this for years,
Speaker 2: and that it must have been really hard for her
Speaker 2: to watch me and Claire romping around with my father,
Speaker 2: cavorting around and playing these games, and she knows right
Speaker 2: under the cushions of that sofa, there's a pornography magazine
Speaker 2: that we might find, or we think of my father
Speaker 2: as this kind of innocent, magical being that really he
Speaker 2: has this kind of double life. When he goes up
Speaker 2: to Yale, he's with the students, and I think that
Speaker 2: was frustrating to write.
Speaker 1: There's a pivotal moment when your mother reads to you
Speaker 1: a passage from the Alice Miller book Drama of the
Speaker 1: Gifted Child, and she has an epipot. Can you read
Speaker 1: that passage to us?
Speaker 2: This was one of the few things that I couldn't
Speaker 2: pin down exactly when it happened, but it was in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty one or nineteen eighty two, soon after its publication,
Speaker 2: my mother read Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child.
Speaker 2: She devoured the book, discussed it endlessly with her friends,
Speaker 2: and scribbled notes in the margins. One evening, she urgently
Speaker 2: called me into her bedroom and told me she needed
Speaker 2: to share it with me. It explains so much about
Speaker 2: your father, she said, and about his relationship with you
Speaker 2: and Claire. It will help you understand why his love
Speaker 2: for you isn't real. I was stunned, but I stayed
Speaker 2: calm and attentive, not betraying at all. How that last
Speaker 2: sentence had lacerated me. She showed me a passage, And
Speaker 2: this is from the Alice Miller book. The grandiose person
Speaker 2: is never really free, first because he is excessively dependent
Speaker 2: on admiration from others, and second because his self respect
Speaker 2: is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.
Speaker 2: And then my mom says, this is your father. It's
Speaker 2: why I felt so drained with him. I could never
Speaker 2: give him enough praise, and Claire refused to cater to him,
Speaker 2: so he rejected her, I thought to myself, But he
Speaker 2: didn't reject Claire. She tried his patience, he yelled at
Speaker 2: her on occasion. He definitely favored me, but did he
Speaker 2: reject her. Never.
Speaker 1: When she said that to you, what did you take
Speaker 1: away from that?
Speaker 2: That my mother really didn't get it. That's what I
Speaker 2: took away from at that. My mother was slotting me
Speaker 2: and Claire into these roles where I was my father's favorite.
Speaker 2: Claire was rejected. To use the terms that you started
Speaker 2: our conversation with, she was looking at it in black
Speaker 2: and white. She wasn't looking at the shades of gray.
Speaker 2: She wasn't seeing that my father affirmed and validated Claire
Speaker 2: and meant just not as much as he did me,
Speaker 2: And that's not good and you don't want to do
Speaker 2: that with kids. But it wasn't a rejection. But even
Speaker 2: as I was sort of like, you're so wrong, you
Speaker 2: don't get this, I'm thinking to myself, I understand why
Speaker 2: she's doing this. It's sort of a similar thing to
Speaker 2: what I was describing with my father when he was
Speaker 2: so anguished about the I love what you said so
Speaker 2: much about spilled apple juice changes lives. So Alice Miller
Speaker 2: is the drug gifted child changed a lot of lives
Speaker 2: in the early eighties. And you know, and I was
Speaker 2: thinking to myself, my mom is trying to make sense
Speaker 2: of her relationship with my father. She's grasping, She's why
Speaker 2: did I feel so drained? I don't get it. Oh,
Speaker 2: he needed me to affirm him constantly. And I think
Speaker 2: also she was trying to lessen her guilt about breaking
Speaker 2: up the family.
Speaker 1: Well, here's the thing that passage you read from Alice Miller,
Speaker 1: which Alice Miller in many ways is taking on narcissism
Speaker 1: in that book. If any of you haven't read The
Speaker 1: Drama of the gifted child. Who are listening to this,
Speaker 1: it's a classic. The grandiose person is never really free,
Speaker 1: excessively dependent on admiration from others. His self respect is
Speaker 1: dependent on qualities and achievements and functions that can suddenly fail.
Speaker 1: That's a description of a narcissist exactly. That's as good
Speaker 1: a definition as I've read. But your mother was actually
Speaker 1: accusing your father of being narcissistic. And then she goes
Speaker 1: on citing from the same book that your father loved
Speaker 1: you and your sister for your false selves, which, like
Speaker 1: you said, was a total misread because from your subjective experience,
Speaker 1: you do not believe you were loved for your false self.
Speaker 1: You believe that you were truly seen and heard, and
Speaker 1: that it's very possible that he was leaning on your
Speaker 1: mother for different needs to different kinds of validation gratification.
Speaker 1: That's what we would expect a parent to a parent
Speaker 1: would relate differently than a parent to a child. And
Speaker 1: I think something people grapple with, how can somebody be
Speaker 1: a great parent but not such a great spouse. I'm like,
Speaker 1: because they're entirely different roles. I mean, I've seen and
Speaker 1: I've seen it go the other way, where people are
Speaker 1: actually fantastic spouses and they are absolutely abysmal parents.
Speaker 2: Yes, I've seen that too, I've seen.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying. They are different roles, and
Speaker 1: some people are great people are their job and their
Speaker 1: terrible parents and their great spouses. You said, one thing
Speaker 1: she shared with you is that your father had affairs,
Speaker 1: and in an interesting way, I wasn't even hearing that
Speaker 1: your mom was hurt by them. It was as though
Speaker 1: it was almost as though she was almost detached from
Speaker 1: the intimate part of their relationship, but almost that this
Speaker 1: is an impropriety, this is not what you do. And
Speaker 1: we see all of that now, exactly, but exactly, and
Speaker 1: I've said this over and over again, infidelity does not
Speaker 1: a narcissist make. It's a different question. And in your parents' case,
Speaker 1: it wasn't even as though it was sort of a
Speaker 1: sexual competition thing. It was more of a speaking to
Speaker 1: his character thing and bringing him down in those eyes.
Speaker 2: I was just loving what you were saying about the
Speaker 2: affairs and how she wasn't personally injured by them at all.
Speaker 1: No, No, and that I found fascinating because it was
Speaker 1: a different relationship with it and like I said, I
Speaker 1: think one of the reflexive things that people will often
Speaker 1: say is my spouse, partner, husband, wife, whomever had an affair,
Speaker 1: they're narcissistic. And that's when I usually say, slow down,
Speaker 1: I need more. I understand they did something that hurts you,
Speaker 1: that betrayed trust, that you've used questionable, that showed bad judgment.
Speaker 1: I can agree with all of that. However, I'm not
Speaker 1: jumping to that next place until we fully understand the
Speaker 1: depth and the holistic look on this person's personality. But
Speaker 1: I don't disagree with you. And I think one thing
Speaker 1: we're struggling with at this sort of time and history
Speaker 1: is everybody's using the word to describe anyone they have
Speaker 1: a problem with. And I think you're right. It also
Speaker 1: helps people feel more steadfast in their decision to distance
Speaker 1: from someone, to separate from some And she's like, ah,
Speaker 1: he was just a narcissistic, grandiose, admiration seeking guy. Didn't
Speaker 1: I make the right decision? And maybe she could do
Speaker 1: that with her friends. My point is that people go
Speaker 1: through their processes. Sure, but she was doing it with
Speaker 1: her kids, and that's what a lot of sallenges. Now
Speaker 1: you had said that you'd found a diary entry that
Speaker 1: you found from middle school that you wrote. Could you
Speaker 1: read what you wrote? Because I think that that was
Speaker 1: something that was so telling that you not only experienced this,
Speaker 1: but actually took the time to write it down.
Speaker 2: I know, and I found this in twenty seventeen. I
Speaker 2: found it in a bin that was in my mother's basement.
Speaker 2: So it's a page from my diary, and it's titled
Speaker 2: things not to do when I'm with Daddy. Number one,
Speaker 2: don't cry. Number two, don't complain, number three, don't be difficult.
Speaker 2: Number four, don't tell him anything but good news. Number five,
Speaker 2: I don't mention mommy. Number six, don't expect him to
Speaker 2: be the daddy of old.
Speaker 1: So when you found that, how did it feel reading
Speaker 1: that back as an adult?
Speaker 2: I started crying as I started reading it, and it
Speaker 2: almost felt this might sound strange, but I felt like
Speaker 2: I was reading instructions that I was giving my middle
Speaker 2: school self about how to cope and contend with my father.
Speaker 2: But I was also reading instructions that I've lived by,
Speaker 2: maybe subconsciously or implicitly, for much of my life. Don't complain,
Speaker 2: don't cry, boost people's moods, be the positive one, lower
Speaker 2: your expectations, all of those things. And it was a
Speaker 2: moment where I just thought, Wow, all of this stuff
Speaker 2: that I've been working on in therapy and meditation, it's
Speaker 2: all right here in this list. It's like a diagnosis.
Speaker 1: Why do you think you wrote it down?
Speaker 2: I think probably it was an attempt to codify and
Speaker 2: give some structure to these feelings that I was having,
Speaker 2: and it made it feel more like an assignment. I
Speaker 2: almost now. It didn't occur to me until you asked
Speaker 2: that question. It almost occurs to me now that it
Speaker 2: was a way of giving myself an assignment and making
Speaker 2: sure that I got an A on the assignment that
Speaker 2: I did as well as I could possibly do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as an assignment, and it's also a form of control,
Speaker 1: right to be in a circumstance at this you feel
Speaker 1: deeply out of control, and so taking some of that
Speaker 1: because this, to me, it reflects tremendous emotional labor that
Speaker 1: you had to bring to every single relationship you were in.
Speaker 1: You were all the legs of the table. You know,
Speaker 1: without you, this thing couldn't stand. So but it brings
Speaker 1: it a certain level of control that comes when we
Speaker 1: write it down it's right there. It's like a policies
Speaker 1: and procedures manual. Yes, you know, for how to conduct
Speaker 1: yourself in that relationship. But it's also quite heartbreaking. If
Speaker 1: all someone did was see this one list, it would
Speaker 1: be very easy to go to a place of, oh
Speaker 1: my gosh, this father must be a monster, and this
Speaker 1: poor young girl is having to be so careful. What
Speaker 1: is so revelatory about your story is your father was
Speaker 1: anything but. He was anything but he was an incredibly attentive, doting,
Speaker 1: loving father and an incredibly flawed in some ways adult
Speaker 1: man who was struggling with some real mental health crises
Speaker 1: and had been in a marriage that simply didn't work right.
Speaker 1: None of those are mortal sins. People make mistakes, they
Speaker 1: marry the wrong people, and they have kids with them,
Speaker 1: and they love their kids, and they have affairs and
Speaker 1: they do all that. That's the messiness of being a
Speaker 1: grown up, right, But no one had to take away
Speaker 1: that he was as honestly as devoted and doting a
Speaker 1: father as I think I've ever read about. And if
Speaker 1: your dad's worst moments were yelling over a glass of
Speaker 1: apple juice on a monopoly board and then rapidly apologizing.
Speaker 1: You know, again, the vast majority of kids who get
Speaker 1: yelled at by a parent never ever will hear an apology,
Speaker 1: not then, and not even as adults. So again, this
Speaker 1: list in isolation is something very different than this list
Speaker 1: in context, because this list, to me is sort of
Speaker 1: the working model of a child who was headed towards codependency.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay, So the family system you were born
Speaker 1: into really almost set you up for that. You came
Speaker 1: into the world with a temperament, and your temperament was
Speaker 1: agreeable and a brilliant and cheerful and optimistic, and then
Speaker 1: you were assigned these two parents who not only created
Speaker 1: you but shaped you. And you had a loving, attentive, playful,
Speaker 1: doting father. You had a successful, driven, equally titan s
Speaker 1: as your father, you know, in the sense that she
Speaker 1: was also a titan as you got closer to ten
Speaker 1: years of age and you saw some of the early rumblings,
Speaker 1: I need to make sure everyone's happy. And then when
Speaker 1: your father really hit that point of despair, it became
Speaker 1: a bit of your full time job. That's what you
Speaker 1: had to do. That's where that comes from. So you
Speaker 1: definitely now have that sort of codependency architecture, elevating the
Speaker 1: emotional needs and emotional worlds of other people around you
Speaker 1: above your own, and making psychological sacrifices to ensure the
Speaker 1: well being and care of those around you ahead of
Speaker 1: your own, holding back on your own needs, holding back
Speaker 1: on expressing your own emotion. That's codependency right as it's
Speaker 1: typically defined. So how did that affect you as you
Speaker 1: now take this sort of codependency architecture that's been built
Speaker 1: in you. How did that show up as you moved
Speaker 1: through adolescents and adulthood.
Speaker 2: I think it showed up mostly in my romantic relationships,
Speaker 2: but it did a little bit in the sense that
Speaker 2: the career choices that I made. I'd wanted to be
Speaker 2: an actress. I'd wanted to be a singer. My parents
Speaker 2: didn't want me to do that, and I was obedient,
Speaker 2: and I gave it up when I got to Yale
Speaker 2: as an undergraduate, and I went straight into the PhD
Speaker 2: program in English literature, even though I had a lot
Speaker 2: of doubts about academia and I wasn't sure if I
Speaker 2: wanted to be a professor. So it did shape me
Speaker 2: in that sense that I made my decisions about what
Speaker 2: my career was going to be based on what would
Speaker 2: make my parents happy, and in particular, what would unite them,
Speaker 2: because I would hear them talking about, Oh, she won
Speaker 2: this prize, and oh she's doing so well, and isn't
Speaker 2: that great, and they would be pleasant with each other
Speaker 2: around that. So I absolutely directed my life trajectory in
Speaker 2: a way that would make each of them happy as
Speaker 2: individuals and unite them in a certain kind of happiness.
Speaker 2: Terms of romantic relationships, my marriage to my boy's father,
Speaker 2: he's a classic example of somebody who is an exceptional
Speaker 2: father was not the best romantic partner for me. I've
Speaker 2: always been especially drawn to men who are vulnerable in
Speaker 2: some way, and men who either struggle with depression or
Speaker 2: they've had a kind of history of substance abuse in
Speaker 2: the past. And I was drawn to men who had
Speaker 2: suffered and who had struggled, And I think there were
Speaker 2: a lot of good aspects to being drawn to people
Speaker 2: like that. I was drawn to people who were emotionally
Speaker 2: complicated and were able to go deep with me, and
Speaker 2: I wanted that. But my ex husband, my boy's father,
Speaker 2: when I met him, his father had died six months
Speaker 2: earlier of MS at fifty four, his mother had staged
Speaker 2: four breast cancer. He was taking care of his mother.
Speaker 2: He was very, very introverted. We met in the LPHD program,
Speaker 2: and I'm more drawn to him because I feel this
Speaker 2: feels familiar. I can be the light giver in this
Speaker 2: relationship and this poor, valuable, worthy human being who has
Speaker 2: suffered so much. I'm going to bring joy and light
Speaker 2: into his life. And all of his relatives would say
Speaker 2: versions of oh, the lights back in his eyes, and
Speaker 2: you've brought you know, little Rico back to us, you know,
Speaker 2: and it felt incredible, and you know, we didn't work out.
Speaker 2: My older son is autistic, and we dealt with that
Speaker 2: crisis in very different ways, and he was very emotionally
Speaker 2: closed off and not really able to be there for
Speaker 2: me in the way that I was for him. So
Speaker 2: it's a version of this issue right where I'm tending
Speaker 2: to him and I'm not getting enough in return. And
Speaker 2: then after my father died, I was even more drawn
Speaker 2: to people who were going through crises, struggling, suffering. If
Speaker 2: a man would text me a song like here Comes
Speaker 2: My Girl by Tom Petty or Mellow My Mind by
Speaker 2: Neil Young, which is all about how the woman is
Speaker 2: able to mellow the men and you know, make him happy.
Speaker 2: That would be catnip, you know. I was, oh, my gosh,
Speaker 2: this feels familiar, this feels like love. I had a
Speaker 2: therapist one say to me, do you think that you're
Speaker 2: trying to save these men because you couldn't save your father? Okay,
Speaker 2: because my father died of lung cancer. He died of addiction.
Speaker 2: I mean, he was addicted. He died of his addiction.
Speaker 1: How did you respond to the therapist connecting the dots
Speaker 1: in that way?
Speaker 2: At first, I was just incredulous. I was like, I
Speaker 2: don't see that at all. And I remember she said
Speaker 2: something like I was describing one of these rogues to
Speaker 2: her in a therapy session and I was saying, I
Speaker 2: don't know if I should stay with him, and she said,
Speaker 2: you don't need to be with him in order to
Speaker 2: hold on to your father. And that was another insight
Speaker 2: in the same session. And I did date one very
Speaker 2: flagrant narcissist during this time period, and I did suffer.
Speaker 2: And that's how I first discovered you. And when I
Speaker 2: was researching codependency in nursissy on the internet, that was
Speaker 2: really dangerous because you know, I think if you're a giver,
Speaker 2: if you put your own need in second, if you
Speaker 2: are somebody who's used to being in that role of
Speaker 2: boosting and bolstering and booing someone, narcissists are drawn to that.
Speaker 2: You know what. I've got on a lot of dates
Speaker 2: with narcissess, but I've learned to recognize the science.
Speaker 1: And one thing I've said is that you know, it's
Speaker 1: not even so much the drawn as the stuck right, Like,
Speaker 1: you know something, the fly might be flying around and
Speaker 1: minding its own business and then gets caught in the web.
Speaker 1: It's just stuck in the web. That's the problem. I
Speaker 1: don't think that the fly is like, hey, Spider's web's
Speaker 1: very similar to what happens here is that people who
Speaker 1: are codependent and who are willing to push down their
Speaker 1: emotional needs to fully prop up someone else, other people
Speaker 1: become projects.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: The ego gratification for the codependent person comes from maintaining
Speaker 1: that relationship and fully serving those needs, which will also
Speaker 1: allows the codependent person to feel in control at some
Speaker 1: level too. Yes, the narcissistic person sticks around for two reasons.
Speaker 1: One is that they're still getting a steady source of
Speaker 1: supply and secondly, even when they become disinterested in the
Speaker 1: person but still want them around because you want some supply,
Speaker 1: So like why you keep extra toilet paper in the
Speaker 1: cabinet because you need some. You what you need, what
Speaker 1: you need when you need it. Right, is that they
Speaker 1: know that the codependent person's not going to leave right
Speaker 1: and believe it or not, a narcissistic people have more
Speaker 1: abandonment crises than you would think. I think we often
Speaker 1: think of them as they're the ones abandoning everyone else,
Speaker 1: not at all. People who are narcissistic have a lot
Speaker 1: of what we call rejection sensitivity, and that can elevate
Speaker 1: to this level of abandonment and fear of abandonment. It's
Speaker 1: different than sort of the fragile fear of abandonment we
Speaker 1: can see elsewhere. It's more of a I need to
Speaker 1: stay in control and if somebody else gets up and leaves, well,
Speaker 1: then that means I'm not in control, and that fractures
Speaker 1: that ego that a narcissistic person has. So it's a
Speaker 1: little tricky because I think that the codependency framework isn't
Speaker 1: a perfect map on to what happens in narcissistic relationships.
Speaker 1: But I think it definitely is very consistent with about
Speaker 1: half of it, which is the only way a relationship
Speaker 1: with a narcissistic person works is if you completely surrender
Speaker 1: your needs to that relationship, that you put them first,
Speaker 1: that you make attending to their emotions first, You in
Speaker 1: essence sacrifice yourself and that's how the relationship sort of sustains.
Speaker 1: We will be right back with this conversation. Where your
Speaker 1: story was so illuminating is that I see the origin
Speaker 1: of your codependency. You were commendeared, intentionally or not, by
Speaker 1: two parents into serving an emotional function that you were
Speaker 1: not yet equipped to serve. Here's what's really interesting about you, Priscilla.
Speaker 1: I don't think you ever believed that love was contingent
Speaker 1: on you serving their emotional needs. I don't I truly
Speaker 1: believe you felt loved right, But for you it was more.
Speaker 1: I am responsible for this really important system and the
Speaker 1: people within this system to function. That's my responsibility. But
Speaker 1: what your story reminds me is that we often write
Speaker 1: a far more shattered and damaged narrative around codependency, which
Speaker 1: your story actually isn't.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, I could not agree with you morea and
Speaker 2: it was something that perplexed me and confused me as
Speaker 2: I was reading the literature, because I was like, but
Speaker 2: I did feel seen, I did feel affirmed, they did
Speaker 2: feel loved. That doesn't negate the fact that they were
Speaker 2: putting a burden, an emotional burden on me. Friend once
Speaker 2: said to me, you know, in a way, they were
Speaker 2: kind of turning you into their emotional support.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what they were doing. That's exactly what they
Speaker 1: were doing, an emotional support animal. You were being handed
Speaker 1: the emotional luggage cart and saying push. Your parents weren't
Speaker 1: sadistically rubbing their hands together and saying how can we
Speaker 1: mess up these kids? Or you know, none of that.
Speaker 1: And again, your mom's story is significant to me that
Speaker 1: in the seventies and when her career came up, it
Speaker 1: was much more unheard of for a woman to have
Speaker 1: a career at her level. There were no templates, there
Speaker 1: were no peers for her, and there were probably people
Speaker 1: sort of still giving her the side eye, and again
Speaker 1: they still do in twenty twenty three. It's very easy
Speaker 1: to view your mother through a very villainized lens, But
Speaker 1: when we bring in that context of the impossibility of
Speaker 1: what she was trying to pull off. You really had
Speaker 1: to create some jagged edges around you as a woman
Speaker 1: to be able to survive in that world. And I
Speaker 1: think that that may very well have bled into marriage
Speaker 1: and family. And clearly your parents' marriage was not what
Speaker 1: either of them thought that they had signed up for.
Speaker 1: Mercifully yielded to wonderful daughters, so you know, got them
Speaker 1: something very important. I think there was different agendas. Your
Speaker 1: father really wanted family and hearth and home and the
Speaker 1: soft place to land. Your mother's head was someplace else,
Speaker 1: and that happens.
Speaker 2: One of the kind of beautiful healing moments for me
Speaker 2: as I go through my experience with my mother is
Speaker 2: that I find out later on my mother tells me
Speaker 2: that she was never in love with my father, and
Speaker 2: that she told him that before they got married, and
Speaker 2: she had had her heart shattered by her first great love,
Speaker 2: the writer Donald Bartheamey, who was her client. And my
Speaker 2: mother said to me, and he was depressive too. She
Speaker 2: was obviously attracted to people like that. That Don barthelmy
Speaker 2: revered my father intellectually, and that she was holding on
Speaker 2: to him in a way through being with my father.
Speaker 2: And she picked my father because my father has a
Speaker 2: son from his first marriage. She met my father for
Speaker 2: the first time with his son and instantly thought, this
Speaker 2: is an incredible father. This is a good person to
Speaker 2: have children with, and we can have a great family together.
Speaker 2: Our values, our ideals about art and literature and the
Speaker 2: world are aligned. I respect his mind. I think he's
Speaker 2: brilliant and it worked until it didn't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think you know, in some ways, your
Speaker 1: mom made an interesting choice in choosing a good father
Speaker 1: to be a partner. Where she misplayed the hand was
Speaker 1: knowing she had chosen a good father, being aware he
Speaker 1: was a good father that when the marriage fell apart,
Speaker 1: it's a shame she didn't navigate that part better. Yeah, Ultimately,
Speaker 1: I think it does come to a good place, but
Speaker 1: it would have saved a lot of heartache. So you
Speaker 1: identify as codependent, You totally own up to it, Priscilla,
Speaker 1: how are you coping with this being codependent today? Do
Speaker 1: you still feel responsible for other people's happiness?
Speaker 2: Much much less? I would say I'm a recovering codependent.
Speaker 2: I'm a recovering perfectionist. You know so many of the
Speaker 2: ways that my life has unfolded writing two memoirs where
Speaker 2: I tell the truth about hard and difficult things, and
Speaker 2: I share my struggle and I share my sadness. That
Speaker 2: in and of itself is moving beyond codependency in the
Speaker 2: sense that if you're writing a memoir, you're writing about
Speaker 2: real people, you're writing about people in your family, You're
Speaker 2: taking a risk that you're going to upset people. And
Speaker 2: also as a doctor, going from academia where you have
Speaker 2: to write quote unquote objectively and you never put the
Speaker 2: eye into it, to writing in a more vulnerable way
Speaker 2: on the page and sharing my own story, that in
Speaker 2: and of itself is I think healing from codependency. Right,
Speaker 2: I'm not getting the A anymore. I'm not in academia
Speaker 2: and jumping through the hoops and getting the gold stars
Speaker 2: and getting the tenure truck because I taught at Yale
Speaker 2: on the tenure track and I taught at Faster for
Speaker 2: four years. And I love teaching and I still teach,
Speaker 2: but I didn't want to be in that system anymore.
Speaker 2: And I catch myself. I think meditation helps me a lot.
Speaker 2: I think being a meditation teacher, I'm a loving kindness
Speaker 2: meditation teacher as well as a mindfulness meditation teacher. So
Speaker 2: reminding myself to be kind. And you know, my sister
Speaker 2: still helps me. Like I'll say, oh, Mom was in
Speaker 2: a bad mood or something, and she'll say, you don't
Speaker 2: have to worry about it. She'll be Okay. I still do.
Speaker 2: One of the therapists that I worked with on codependency
Speaker 2: emphasize the strengths that codependence bring. Right, that you're very empathic,
Speaker 2: that you're very tuned into people use the word preternatural.
Speaker 2: When I'm teaching. I'm able to sense what people need,
Speaker 2: how they need to be taught, maybe differently or dressed differently.
Speaker 1: I love that. What do you think, though, as you've
Speaker 1: gone through your process of healing from codependency, other than
Speaker 1: writing two memoirs, one does work best for you? And
Speaker 1: as you said, I'm in recovery, I'm a recovered codependent.
Speaker 1: What was that recovery process? You know, if somebody is
Speaker 1: listening to this saying I'm codependent, what works? What works?
Speaker 2: Books? I'm looking at them. I have my microphone stacked
Speaker 2: on Melody Beaties books. I watched endless videos from people
Speaker 2: that I really trusted, and that's how I found you meditation, mindfulness.
Speaker 2: I went to some Code of meetings. I did when
Speaker 2: I was first in recovery right.
Speaker 1: And so for people listening, CODA is Code Dependence Anonymous,
Speaker 1: which is a twelve step program focused on people recovering
Speaker 1: from codependency.
Speaker 2: And I think that for me because it was particularly
Speaker 2: manifesting in a negative way in the realm of my
Speaker 2: dating life, I started dating very mindfully. Stan Tapken is
Speaker 2: a guy who I really like, who has good stuff
Speaker 2: on attachment and really taking my time and going slow.
Speaker 2: It used to be something like I got engaged to
Speaker 2: my kid's father after four months and I was the
Speaker 2: kind of urson like get into something. It was like, oh,
Speaker 2: it was amazing and living with that chemistry and I
Speaker 2: love what you s in the beginning about chemistry with
Speaker 2: the narcissists that I described, I had the most intense
Speaker 2: chemistry I've ever had on any date. On the first date,
Speaker 2: it was like crazy chemistry. I've learned to be skeptical
Speaker 2: of that. I've learned to ask the right questions when
Speaker 2: I'm dating to not get sucked in by what now
Speaker 2: I know to call love bombing. Thanks to you, you know,
Speaker 2: it's not just warm and affection, it's love bombing. To
Speaker 2: make myself stronger, so that I can't be manipulated.
Speaker 1: How did becoming a mom affect your healing process?
Speaker 2: You know, both of my children have special needs. So
Speaker 2: my older son was given the autism diagnosis when he
Speaker 2: was twelve, but had all sorts of speech motor issues.
Speaker 2: Would get the autism diagnosis at three now, but it
Speaker 2: was two thousand and two and we didn't know as much.
Speaker 2: My younger son was for family dyslexic and dysgraphic. They
Speaker 2: both struggle with OCD, and I think the caretaking stuff
Speaker 2: and the advocacy stuff and the empathy stuff was fantastic
Speaker 2: for these kids, right, I knew how to do it,
Speaker 2: but I think it also gave me a lot more
Speaker 2: empathy for little Priscilla because seeing their vulnerability and seeing
Speaker 2: them at nine, them at ten, them at eleven, and thinking,
Speaker 2: I cannot imagine ever seeing anything remotely close to what
Speaker 2: my parents said to me to my children, right, It's
Speaker 2: just unfathomable to me. So that was healing too.
Speaker 1: I love that, And I really love how you talked
Speaker 1: about codependency interestingly has its gifts. I think that is
Speaker 1: such a beautiful, beautiful framing of that, and I think
Speaker 1: it's cultural. I think that we pathologize emotion, we pathologize need,
Speaker 1: But codependency when a person can get themselves out of
Speaker 1: the vortex of exhausting themselves in the name of other people,
Speaker 1: what you uncover under that is a tremendous empathy, a
Speaker 1: self awareness and well yeah I know self awareness, but
Speaker 1: more than that, an awareness of others compassion. It's really
Speaker 1: about channeling those gifts, if you will, of codependency, because
Speaker 1: I think what happens is it gets co opted into
Speaker 1: something that's actually harmful in the hands of a person
Speaker 1: in the wrong relationship. You know. I do want to
Speaker 1: say that people listening to this are often tuning in
Speaker 1: to hear about more of the narcissistic abuse stuff, but
Speaker 1: many of those folks are saying, well, I also want
Speaker 1: to hear the codependency piece. So you know, Priscilla, today,
Speaker 1: you gave us an opportunity to have that important conversation.
Speaker 1: You know, there are some differences in that. I think
Speaker 1: with narcissistic abuse, there's a lot of overlap. I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people who experience narcissistic abuse, especially when
Speaker 1: it's legacy narcissistic abuse, meaning that it originated in childhood.
Speaker 1: There we see a lot of the codependency stuff because
Speaker 1: it's survivalist, right. It was a safety need to be
Speaker 1: able to cater to the emotions and the needs of
Speaker 1: others and to surrender one's own needs so they can
Speaker 1: make sure that they maintain safety and get their attachment
Speaker 1: needs met. However, there's a lot of people out there,
Speaker 1: many people listening, who they encountered their first major narcissistic
Speaker 1: relationship in adulthood, and so in those cases, it's actually
Speaker 1: not codependency, and it becomes narcissistic abuse and the fallout
Speaker 1: of narcissistic abuse, which is absolutely chaotic confusion, whereas codependency
Speaker 1: it's almost built into the emotional DNA. And so for
Speaker 1: folks listening to this, there are differences. There's also a
Speaker 1: lot of overlap, and it's also quite conceivable people have
Speaker 1: the separate phenomenon of narcissistic abuse made worse because they
Speaker 1: already have a codependence style. And that sounds like that's
Speaker 1: what happened to you.
Speaker 2: That is absolutely what happened to me.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, I also have to say that I
Speaker 1: was getting frustrated with your mom and your memoir because
Speaker 1: she really had left you feeling as though dad's love
Speaker 1: for you with some sort of narcissistic projection or some
Speaker 1: loving of your false self. But she did come around,
Speaker 1: and if you could just sort of maybe that would
Speaker 1: be a good place to end what she shared.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in the process of writing the book, I actually
Speaker 2: got up the courage and this, I guess is part
Speaker 2: of my healing process from codependency and sharing my feelings
Speaker 2: with her. And I confronted her, and I used that
Speaker 2: word deliberately and advisedly. I confronted her and I said,
Speaker 2: why did you reduce his love for me to narcissistic
Speaker 2: projection in some way? And she immediately said, I was
Speaker 2: completely wrong. I didn't understand what narcissism was. I had
Speaker 2: felt exhausted taking care of him, and I didn't want
Speaker 2: you to make the same mistake. And then I sent
Speaker 2: her an email and I said, why did you marry
Speaker 2: my father? I need to have him writing. And she
Speaker 2: sent me this email where she affirmed, I'm not going
Speaker 2: to quote it exactly correctly, but she said, you know,
Speaker 2: I admired his brilliant mind, and he was an excellent father. Basically,
Speaker 2: he was a kind and ethical man. And I remember
Speaker 2: reading these words and I just started sobbing, and I
Speaker 2: put my head down on this desk, and I was like,
Speaker 2: these are the words that I was waiting to hear
Speaker 2: for forty years. And it also confirmed for me that
Speaker 2: I had been correct about my mom in the sense
Speaker 2: that I knew that she was trying to protect me
Speaker 2: with everything she was telling me. It was misguided, it
Speaker 2: was wrong. You shouldn't ever tell those things to a
Speaker 2: ten year old, but I still did feel that she
Speaker 2: did it out of love and protectiveness for me, however
Speaker 2: misguided it might have been.
Speaker 1: I'll be cynical and honest for a minute. Some listeners
Speaker 1: might even say, well, is she rationalizing it? And that's
Speaker 1: not actually how I see it. There's a difference between
Speaker 1: rationalizing and making meaning and sense out of what happened
Speaker 1: to you, And I'm hearing the meaning making and the
Speaker 1: sense making, which is really important. I wish she had
Speaker 1: told you this earlier. I think it would have set
Speaker 1: you free in a very different way. But I think
Speaker 1: for you to really hear that she knew that he
Speaker 1: loved you and that he was a decent man, an
Speaker 1: ethical man, was just it was a closing of a
Speaker 1: circle for you. You knew that all along but that
Speaker 1: you needed to understand some of that from her too.
Speaker 1: That one of the greatest that can happen in our life,
Speaker 1: and I don't think it can ever happen too late,
Speaker 1: is a moment where we feel like our experience is
Speaker 1: really seen and perceived. So you've got some.
Speaker 2: Yes, I really did. And even as I'm like depicting
Speaker 2: my father in this book, you know he valued mystery
Speaker 2: and I can't solve my father. I hope this is
Speaker 2: useful to people who are listening. Right, You're never going
Speaker 2: to get to a definitive mastery of your past or
Speaker 2: your experience or these characters. The best you can do
Speaker 2: is just sort of see them with all of their contradictions,
Speaker 2: many contradictions, see the good, see the darker stuff, and
Speaker 2: make sense of it. And always know that any human
Speaker 2: being is going to exceed a label or a category
Speaker 2: or a diagnosis.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting my final point. People are complicated and
Speaker 1: if we communicate them right, someone's always going to have
Speaker 1: a bone to pick, which means you did a great job.
Speaker 1: So again, I can't tell you what a pleasure it was.
Speaker 1: Priscilla is so grateful to you for this stunning book
Speaker 1: and for your time, and just glad you're out in
Speaker 1: the world. It just makes me happy to know those
Speaker 1: people out there.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, I can't tell you how glad I
Speaker 2: am the care of world. You've been such a blessing
Speaker 2: to me and it's such an incredible honor.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: And this conversation I had high expectations, I have to say,
Speaker 2: but like the succeeded them, right, that's like, oh my god,
Speaker 2: you helped me.
Speaker 1: So take good care. All my best to you, my dear,
Speaker 1: You're the best.
Speaker 2: Weank you too, so much. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Here are my takeaways from my conversation with Priscilla. In
Speaker 1: my first takeaway, In many ways, Priscilla's story is a
Speaker 1: primer on parenting, what to do and what not to do.
Speaker 1: Her father, despite his flaws as a man, was my
Speaker 1: Priscilla's recollection, a patient, empathic, engaged, and loving father celebrating
Speaker 1: his daughter's talents, interests, and intellects. However, none of that
Speaker 1: is enough to supersede a difficult marriage with her mother,
Speaker 1: and while her parents did get some things right, her
Speaker 1: story is a reminder that it is never appropriate to
Speaker 1: burden a child with a parent's emotions, needs and despair.
Speaker 1: Parenting is an active will, boundaries, and discipline, with parents
Speaker 1: needing to find appropriate outlets for their emotions. Children are
Speaker 1: far more perceptive than adults at emotional nuance because they
Speaker 1: need to be perceptive to survive. Sadly, that can mean
Speaker 1: a child can take on those unfairly shared emotional burdens
Speaker 1: and devote their emotional bandwidth to appeasing and soothing their parents.
Speaker 1: That's not how it's supposed to work. For our next takeaway,
Speaker 1: what is codependency? Part of the problem is that there
Speaker 1: really is not an agreed upon definition. The American Psychological
Speaker 1: Association's Dictionary of Psychology defines it as the state of
Speaker 1: being mutually reliant, for example, a relationship between two individuals
Speaker 1: who are emotionally dependent on one another. It is definitely
Speaker 1: morphed from there into something less mutual, and generally refers
Speaker 1: to one person putting another person's emotional needs ahead of
Speaker 1: their own and taking responsibility for the emotions of another person,
Speaker 1: often to their own detriment. This term gets messy when
Speaker 1: we talk about similar dynamics, such as those we see
Speaker 1: in people going through narcissistic abuse, because in narcissistically abusive relationships,
Speaker 1: people often take the blame for what is happening in
Speaker 1: the relationship and slowly sacrifice their identities needs an emotional
Speaker 1: expression to avoid the wrath and anger of the narcissistic person.
Speaker 1: While people may be codependent in narcissistic relationships, the two
Speaker 1: are not synonymous. In Priscilla's case, she acknowledges being codependent
Speaker 1: within a system where she felt loved and did not
Speaker 1: feel that she gave up her identity or sense of self,
Speaker 1: Nor did she feel that she was conditionally loved and
Speaker 1: that the emotional heavy lifting she did was to protect
Speaker 1: her parents. In the case of a child with a
Speaker 1: narcissistic parent, they have to construct a narrative in which
Speaker 1: they are loved and then blame themselves for the parents
Speaker 1: chronic anger and rage. The child believes they cannot be themselves,
Speaker 1: but rather only be what the parent needs. There is
Speaker 1: a lot of overlap between what happens in a narcissistic
Speaker 1: relationship and codependency, and ultimately the way we manage these
Speaker 1: relationships in therapy is similar, but the survival function of
Speaker 1: taking on those emotional burdens in a narcissistic family system
Speaker 1: are different than we see in some codependent families. For
Speaker 1: this next takeaway, codependency assumes that the codependent person is
Speaker 1: also experiencing a maladaptive condition themselves. The term codependency has
Speaker 1: its roots in the nineteen forties alcoholism literature, which is
Speaker 1: why I do not think it can always be applied
Speaker 1: to people experiencing narcissistic abuse. Many people in narcissistic relationships
Speaker 1: did not understand what they were dealing with do not
Speaker 1: want to endure it, but for a variety of reasons
Speaker 1: may be stuck, including culture, religion, financial necessity, genuine fear
Speaker 1: of post separation abuse or fallout, or familial rejection, and
Speaker 1: caregiving responsibilities. They are not deriving some secondary benefit and
Speaker 1: instead our face with an impossible choice. Codependency does remain
Speaker 1: a controversial term in the psychological literature, and while it
Speaker 1: was a framework that resonated for Priscilla, does not necessarily
Speaker 1: provide a framework for everyone in an emotionally imbalanced relationship.
Speaker 1: In this next takeaway, Priscilla calls herself a recovering codependent
Speaker 1: and shared a list of things that have helped her,
Speaker 1: including books, videos, meditation, and mindfulness practices. Twelve step groups
Speaker 1: such as Codependence Anonymous, and slowing way down in new relationships.
Speaker 1: Many of these tools can be quite useful for survivors
Speaker 1: of narcissistically abusive relationships as well. And for our last takeaway,
Speaker 1: a piece of Priscilla's story that sticks with me was
Speaker 1: when she said, we can never have mastery of the past,
Speaker 1: and that may be one of the heaviest burdens and
Speaker 1: greatest challenges for folks who have experienced complex childhoods, which
Speaker 1: is most of us. It's like chasing a mirage, and
Speaker 1: the attempt to fully make sense of the experience of
Speaker 1: emotionally confusing childhood, whether or not you had a narcissistic parent,
Speaker 1: can pull us out of our present and the opportunity
Speaker 1: to be fully in the present moment as ourselves and
Speaker 1: walk forward into healing