Welcome to the Stay or Go podcast, where we're changing the dialogue around divorce so that no woman ever stays in her marriage out of fear. Get ready to dispel myths, learn life-changing tools, and build a solid foundation in yourself from which to make your decision. And now your host, me, Britta Joe. Okay, y'all. Uh, let me just say, buckle up. Buckle up. Cause this episode unexpectedly poured, just poured out of me, y'all, today. And I'm obsessed with it already. I love so much what I'm going to be discussing with y'all in this episode. Sometimes when episodes pour out of me, it just, it's like I do a lot of writing. And as I've been reading back over my notes, I've been like, oh my God, this is a total epic download that I think is going to be filled and packed with aha moments for so many of you and things that you're going to be able to relate to. So oof, oof, oof, let's go. So, as you can tell from the title, right, uh, the heart of this is gonna be talking about why you need to be supporting yourself before others. And this is such a like touchstone piece for, I mean, the majority of us as women, okay? And I want to start off by saying I'm gonna explain the title, this whole oxygen mask piece, a little bit later in the episode. But I want to at the beginning just start by diving right in to a couple of client examples that I'm ultimately gonna be paraphrasing. So if you're the clients or the community members that this is your stories and I get them messed up, don't stress. I already said I'm paraphrasing. But this week I had a couple different examples come up. Two of them were on our recent community coaching call. And then I'm gonna share one of my own examples. And it's like the culmination of all of these kind of happening at the same time that this episode was born and came out of. So let's dive into the first one. So I was coaching yesterday in the community, and one of the members was talking about how she's at the point right now in her divorce where they have separated, um, they're living in different places. She actually hasn't filed yet, but they're in different homes, different spaces. At the moment, things seem to be kind of going okay as far as like they can still communicate about finances, but she was kind of struggling with why she was getting stuck around moving forward with the divorce and a little bit getting derailed by her husband's ideas around what they should be doing, and then especially by her mama. Hmm, by the mama. And this is a member in the community that I'd actually already done a 90-minute session with. So I know quite a bit about her backstory and even her mother's backstory, okay, which is gonna tie into this whole example. She explains that her mother had come over and shared with her these thoughts, which were Are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to throw everything away? And this idea of he will look after you. And I knew as soon as she shared it on the coaching call, because I can remember, you know, back to our 90-minute session, what this was about for her mother. Because in that 90-minute session, I know thoroughly that that is not the case that he will look after her. In her marriage specifically, there is a high level of emotional neglect, verbal, and psychological abuse, years and years and years of it. Okay. And even on the call, she ends up sharing, right? Here, her mother said, he will take care of you. And she even kind of pushed back on her mom and being like, look, a couple months ago, I was sick with the flu and he made me sleep on the couch. Like, so what's happening here then? Okay. What's happening is that her mom has unprocessed trauma. Okay. Her mama is in a flashback in this moment where she is showing up and saying, wait, don't do this. Are you sure you want to quote, throw everything away? Now, let me let you in on the backstory, right? This is gonna provide so much clarity. So, in that 90-minute session, she shared with me how when her parents got, so first off, her parents were in a very, very rough marriage. Her dad was very physically abusive. Her mom did eventually leave. And tragically, when she got divorced, her husband, instead of separating things, instead of being fair, he took everything and ended up leaving her and the kids literally homeless. Okay. This is a really, really big trauma. And this trauma in that moment, you can almost see it happening. It creates a wiring in her brain that she should have just stayed, right? That staying with the man is better because otherwise you're gonna end up out on the street. So this pain, this traumatic event, this wiring in her brain, because she has not done what I talk about on the podcast, right? That deeper work of going in and digging through your programming and finding the pieces and being with your trauma, because her own pain is unprocessed. Her brain now is seeing something in the present. Okay, her daughter is wanting to get divorced. And those things are correlated. Okay. Correlation means they appear to be related to each other. So in her brain, she's like, I got divorced, she's getting divorced. That's a correlation. But because the trauma was so severe for her around divorce, she makes this little glitch where she moves into a space of thinking that it will be causational. And causational is where the variable of divorce directly causes this change. Okay. So because divorce for her equaled homelessness, her brain is, even if she doesn't understand it consciously, unconsciously, she is coming at her daughter's divorce from a similar unconscious space of thinking divorce equals homelessness. That's the causational piece. Instead of being able to realize, you know, the correlation, just because something is correlated does not mean it's actually causational. You guys following that? That's so, so big. So because the trauma was so severe, she is now mistakenly believing that divorce is what caused the problem. Rather than the super complex, I mean, this is your prefrontal brain, right? Your prefrontal brain is able to stay in a space of the gray, understanding that there's a whole bunch of different factors that are at play that made her divorce what it was that are not currently at play in her daughters. When we get triggered, though, by our past trauma, we go into that, you know, adrenaline, black and white thinking, we can't really see the nuances. So I want to show you how, like, dive in even deeper into how this is the case. Because, right, her daughter is not her. And that just sounds so like simple, right? But I want to emphasize that in her brain, right now, with the way it is, it is not realizing that there is some part of her brain that is absolutely projecting her experiences onto her daughter. And we can see that too, because her daughter, in her marriage, okay, as I told you guys, she was experiencing very high levels of emotional, verbal, and psychological neglect and abuse by her husband and his family. Okay. But there's this weird trick her mother's brain was also doing because her abuse in her marriage was in her mind so much worse because it was, you know, she was being physically beaten and abused. She then thinks that her daughter's abuse isn't as bad and literally has told her daughter, like, he's a good guy. Why would you want to leave? Because in her mind, the trauma around being homeless was so bad that you should be able to put up with as long as he's not hitting you, right? And so many of you are gonna, I do think a lot of you are gonna relate to this. If you have a mother who has experienced abuse that in her mind is more severe than what you are experiencing, they will often downplay or negate your experience. That's her in this moment saying, like, it's not that bad, he's actually a good guy, because she wants you to stay in the home. That's what she sees is the most important part. When in reality, okay, if we come back out of the mother's trauma into the reality for her daughter, the reality, y'all, is her daughter is educated. She works for an amazing company and has a great salary. Okay. This woman, my client in the community, she has assets in her marriage that she and her husband can sell and split. This woman is not going to end up homeless. First off, she's not even homeless now. She's already moved out into her own apartment, right? By all accounts, her daughter has an incredible shot at doing as well as she did in the marriage, if not, and you know, this is my stance, a hell of a lot better. Because women who are not suffering under the effects of emotional and verbal and psychological abuse, I've seen how those women thrive post-divorce. So I have another example for you coming off of this. And I love that one, right? Isn't that just I hope you guys are all soaking up the juiciness of that example of how thoroughly her mother is in the past rather than in the present with the facts of her daughter's actual reality. Okay, second story. Another client this week ended up sharing with me how. So at the moment, she has a really young son, and her son is very attached to her, likes to be around her. She's kind of his favorite. She is who he wants to be with. Okay. And her mom came to visit, and there was this moment where she was leaving for work in the morning, and he was insisting on one more goodbye. And she was fine with giving it to him. She came back, she hugged him, and her mom made some kind of comment about, you know, you really need to nip that in the butt or you need to be more firm with him, right? Or even, I think previously kind of making some comments around how like clingy he is, or he's too close. And when her mom made this comment, she was telling me how it felt awful, like, and that her mom has done this before. And it just really annoys her. Like, why do you feel the need to comment on the way I'm parenting my child or him wanting to be close to me? And so I helped pause her and we started to break it down, right? As we started to dig in, lo and behold, what comes out is she's like, oh my gosh. Actually, because I was like, this is not about you. Your mom reacting in this way. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of trauma that she's being triggered by and she's taking it out on you in this moment. And she was like, actually, when my parents got divorced and I was growing up, my brother was five years older than me. And she said, My mom and him had a really, really rough relationship. And I was like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. There it is. Her mom in this moment is not actually in the present. Okay. She is seeing connection between her daughter and her son. And most likely, okay. Obviously, I'm not in her brain. I can't certify this a hundred percent, but most likely she's triggered by unresolved emotions that she has around her own relationship with her son. And boy, I'm like, I may not be, you know, 100% sure in this instance, but this is absolutely what happens for so many of us with our mothers. When they judge our parenting or they judge our choices, it's not actually about what's best for us as much as it is they are getting triggered by unresolved emotions from their own choices in their past. And what happens in that moment, okay, so let's just, you know, we're just gonna have fun and hypothesize here. That mother is looking, seeing the way her grandson is interacting with her daughter. And she's not realizing that on an unconscious level, she is having that old pain, that wound inside of her that's never been dealt with, triggered. Okay. In that moment, though, because she doesn't have the tools to process and feel through that for herself, she doesn't have the awareness to go, ooh, I'm kind of feeling upset by how he's acting. I'm feeling upset by his neediness and him wanting his mom so much. What is that? And her and right, that's I mean, that's the heart and soul of coaching is being able to develop awareness to stand back from our thoughts and our emotions a little bit and get curious about them. But she doesn't have the tools to do that. Okay. So now she's left with this predicament. I feel icky inside unconsciously. I don't know what that is. And so her conscious brain wants to fix that and make that go away. So what does it do? It tries to force the external world to fit into her world view to make the feeling of her maybe having made a mistake or her feeling bad or wrong about her own mothering go away. Do you guys see it? This is why so many of us end up like lashing out in the external and trying to change stuff that ultimately cannot be resolved out there because it is all about what's happening in here. But when you don't have the tools to go inside, your default is go change the external. The external needs to match. And obviously, in her worldview that got created through her trauma with her son is something along the lines of like, moms need to be firmer, or you need, you need, you know, it's a bad sign if your son is being clingy, whatever, right? But you can see there is a dynamic here where she wants the external to fit her worldview so that she can feel, okay, my worldview matches the external. And worldview, you know, my internal belief system, basically, my beliefs about myself, my beliefs about me as a mother, all the things. I hope at this point some of you are like pausing, maybe even pause the episode and take a second to think about when you have experienced this, perhaps from a mother-in-law, perhaps from your own mother, or from a friend. We all have instances in our lives where people do this, where they are giving you advice or telling you something that feels shitty for you. You're like, yuck, no, why are you saying that? And if you'll pause and look at it, you'll realize it's not actually about you. It's about them wanting an external reality to match their internal belief system so they don't have to feel bad or wrong or like, ooh, something's off. Okay, so now here's the second and like also super juicy other piece that I'm gonna dive into in this episode, which is these couple of examples have shown you what it's like when someone outside of you is doing this. But we also absolutely do this to ourselves, my love. Like a hundred percent. We also play this game. And I'm now gonna share a couple of examples. One's gonna be from another one of my clients, the other one's gonna be my personal example that's gonna illustrate this like really beautifully for y'all. So, also on our coaching call yesterday, the second woman that I coached, she was bringing forward this situation where she's having a lot of emotion, conflict, just like with her teenage son. Okay. And part of the reality that we pulled out while we were on the coaching call was that, you know, he's telling her he wants to be treated like an adult. And he does seem to be pulling away some emotionally and spending less time with her, to which she's reacting to that with a lot of internal pressure around needing to be a good mom and needing to show up. And, you know, he needs to stay at the dinner table the whole time while everybody's there. And so there's that aspect. While what we kind of also noticed was that his behavior was really reflecting, and it could be very kind of rude and dismissive, like his father. So they're in the they're in the process right now of their divorce. She's actually someone who I worked with as a one-on-one coaching client. And her partner exhibits a lot, like a lot, some of the highest levels I've seen of covert narcissistic behavior. Okay. And her son, maybe because of his age, maybe because of what he's going through, is kind of taking on and exhibiting a lot of that same behavior. Okay. Which this is just, you know, welcome to the messy realities of first the core issues of being married to narcissists, right? And then what it's like to divorce individuals like this. So, because though he's using some of those behaviors around her, it's really triggering her CPTSD as it would. Okay. That was part of it too. Is I was like, yeah, the stuff he's saying, the way he's behaving, like that's definitely going to trigger trigger you while you're waking up to all of this abuse you've experienced in your marriage and not wanting to be treated that way anymore. So here she is, though, trying to enforce spending time with him and making him be there and connecting with her while he's also a huge source of trigger in her life because of the way he's choosing to behave. And I was helping her see that really this is a lose-lose in that he doesn't want this. He's not, he's telling you clearly what he wants. He wants more independence, he wants to be treated like an adult. And you forcing him not to, or trying to spend, even if you're not forcing him to, even just being around him, is increasing the amount of triggering that you're experiencing. And while we dug into this, this magical thought came out of her, which was, I don't want to ditch out on him. And once that surfaced, she explained that her senior year of high school, when her parents got divorced, her mom was never home, really kind of disappeared. She was the youngest in her family. She'd grown up with like this very, you know, her family all around, all her sisters around. And then here, as the last child, her senior year, parents get divorced. And she felt, I mean, if we really go to the heart of this, abandoned in a lot of ways. So once again, what are we seeing here? Once we found this trauma, this Traumatic event in her past, we can see clearly she's not actually present with what is you know, what is going on with her son right now, but rather she is in the present day fighting ghosts from her past. She is in that moment of saying, I don't want to ditch out on him. He's not saying she's ditching out on him. None of that is coming through, but she is still deep down battling with those ghosts, that pain, that trauma, her unresolved feelings of that happening to herself as a child. Now, the other amazing thing about me getting to coach her yesterday was that I am literally and have been for a while now in a very like super similar experience at the moment with my oldest son. We have been in a lot of conflict, me trying to, you know, put this in air quotes, like mom him correctly, and experiencing a ton of internal conflict, mental anguish, so much flashback, so much dysregulation. So this last month, Quinn actually coached me through a parts work meditation. And what came up to the surface was a very young mother self of me when I was first a mother. And we did a lot of processing and connecting in with her and feeling her overwhelm and her pain and her really frantic desire to be a good mom. Like she wanted to be a good mom so badly. But I got to see and understand these pieces that I hadn't before, like seeing now how under-resourced she was. And I really had the opportunity to feel into that pain with her. And it became clear I could start seeing how she was the one that was grabbing the steering wheel lately when it would, you know, interactions with my son and me. She was the one kind of hijacking things and trying to force things with my oldest so that she could try and keep her idea of being a good mom. Okay. And which when I've through this work this last month, as I've dug deeper into that, I'm like, oh my God, I still have so much internalized patriarchal Mormon religion ideas around what being a mom is. Before I'd done this, I probably would have been like, oh, I don't think I have that much anymore. But no, it's still in there. And such a perfect example, too, of what I was saying with my client whose mother made the comment about her son being clingy. That's literally what my internal part was doing, right? She's wanting the external, she's wanting to have this relationship that looks a specific way with my son so that internally she can decide and say, okay, phew, we're a good mom. Okay. Once I saw this, I was like, shit, I'm not actually doing what's best for my son, but rather unconsciously, like I'm just a lot of what I was doing was needing to prove to her, and you know, by extension to myself that I could do it, that I was a good mom. And y'all, it was muddying the waters like crazy. It was such an up, down, all around, you know, just like this client of mine as well, shitstorm for me of like, how do I do this? How am I gonna show up? A lot. And I'm gonna dive into it a little deeper in the episode. So, with these examples, though, all of these came together today for me. Okay. I've got these examples of mothers kind of doing it to their daughters, and then me and this other client kind of doing it to our son that are floating around in my head. I'm coaching one of my clients today, and she brings up these two concepts that I teach that were really landing for her right now. She said, you know, the two things that are kind of anchoring me the most or that are really, you know, getting me through, because she's also just moved out, separating, were these two phrases I use. The first one was, you have to put your oxygen mask on first. And the second is your marriage is a blueprint for your children. And as we talked about it a little bit more, I had this like zing moment where the two came together and I realized, oh my God, you can't change the blueprint, okay, until you put your oxygen mask on first. So in the second half of this episode, let me take you in and let's dive deeper into what I mean by this. So, in this instance with me and my son, and even I would say with this other client and her son, we are following the patriarchal programming of trying to put our oxygen mask on our children first. Okay. Which honestly, at that moment, like as our teenage sons are telling us in no uncertain terms, they don't want the mask. We're trying to put on them, right? The mask is this like over caretaking, insisting on connection and closeness. We are literally forcing that, trying that at the expense of our own mental health. Okay. And we think we're doing that to change the blueprint. In both of our instances, me and that client, we don't want what we had in our childhoods. We want to give our kids something different. We hope that our children will not end up in the marriages that we did. So we're wanting to change the blueprint for them. But the more we forced the oxygen mask on them, the result we were getting is we just were becoming more and more dysregulated, right? We're trying to force a change in the blueprint while not actually having the mask on ourselves first. And I want to explain when I think of the oxygen mask, I am thinking of that as representing that process of identifying and then working with and through your underlying unconscious trauma first. Because when we aren't aware of these hidden thoughts from our past trauma, the blueprint change doesn't work because we are forcing that change in service of a pain from the past that is trying to be fixed in the present by controlling the external. Ooh, you guys stay in with me? Let me say that again slower and a little differently, okay? Because we weren't aware, me and this client, of these hidden thoughts from our past trauma. The blueprint change wasn't working because we're coming at it, forcing it in service of a pain from our past that's trying to be fixed in the present by controlling the external. Whoa! Like, boom, y'all. Let that fucking land. Like, whoa. When I came across this today, I was like, oh my god, am I gonna be able to describe this with words? So I'm hoping it is coming through to y'all on what is happening there. And here's the other thing, right? This is the same thing with both of my clients' mothers. Okay, both of these mothers don't want what happened to them to happen to their daughters because they themselves haven't processed or reconnected and made peace with those parts of their journey. And when you do do that, then you can choose intentionally how you want to show up and support the people you love instead. But because they haven't, they are now showing up with the unconscious trauma of their past dictating and kind of controlling them from behind the scenes. When I said, you know, that inner mother, that young inner mother of mine that keeps grabbing my steering wheel, that's what's happening. So kind of like the image that I was thinking of is it's like, it's like these ghosts that we're fighting in the present, this trauma that keeps popping up as these feelings in their bodies, these mothers, right? They don't know what to do with it. And so they end up trying to get rid of it by unconsciously controlling their daughters. And that's the sneaky, sneaky thing about it is it's unconsciously happening. So if you were to say, dude, I think you're doing this because you know you have this unprocessed trauma around your own divorce. Consciously, they are gonna, most of them are gonna fight you tooth and nail and be like, no, that's not it. I'm sure that's not it. I don't know what you're talking about. Because the the defenses between the conscious brain and the unconscious brain are pretty solid, right? But that's what coaching does. Coaching allows us to start softening those barriers, to start dropping down, to start seeing the patterns and really, you know, the word that's coming up is like dissecting the unconscious. I don't think that's it, but like parsing it out like a puzzle, like figuring out how the pieces play. So these mothers, they end up exerting all of this energy to try and change the blueprint for their daughters. And ultimately, you know, me and my other client when it came to our sons, when really all of us are just fighting these dragons that are from our past, while in the meantime hurting the people in the present in front of us because we can't see them through the flash-backed reactions in our bodies. Whoa. I actually, when I was writing this episode, I was like, I'm getting really strong Don Quixote fighting windmills, thinking they're giants' imagery at this moment. And I was like, this is so beautiful. So for the I want to dive into this like image a little bit. For those of you that don't know the story of Don Quixote, he is this character in the book that sees these windmills in the distance. And he really, like solidly believes they are dangerous giants. And so he ends up charging at them with like full conviction. Okay. And that's what I want you to understand. That's what I'm saying when I say the unconscious of the conscious aren't in their conscious brain, these mothers are full of conviction, really believing they are doing what's best for their children. Those mothers and me and my client, right? We are full of this conviction, trying to defeat these giants only to ultimately get injured. And that's Don Quixote, he gets injured and ultimately realizes they're not giants at all. In our instance, not only do we get injured, but sometimes we injure the people we love as well. And it becomes this really like tragic and symbolic the Don Quixote story, right? It shows how I think like our perceptions, okay, of what we think is happening, especially those that are shaped by unresolved inner narratives and trauma, they can lead us to fight these battles that don't actually exist in reality, right? Because here I am, I'm talking about how the trauma, my trauma, my client's trauma, my client's mother's trauma is causing them and me to react to perceived threats in the present that are actually just windmills, you know, or ghosts from our past. So, in that way, like Don Quixote, we end up going into something, having a noble intention, but ultimately misdirected action. And that's the whole put your oxygen mask on first before you go try to change the blueprint. Because wow, when you are actually breathing oxygen, your brain functions better. You're able to more clearly see the blueprint and work on it. I love this analogy. I'm like, imagine working on a blueprint when you're in a room that has no oxygen, like your brain is being starved of oxygen and you're madly trying to redraft this blueprint. No, stop. Go put on the oxygen mask first, which segues perfectly into this next part, which is so if we know that this is what's happening, then what is to be done? Okay. And this is where I'm going to talk about like how we move back into the space of putting on the oxygen mask. So, in the instance of me and my client, when it comes to our sons, we need to go do our parts work. Okay. Parts work is that book, internal family, the internal family systems guy, the book that he wrote called No Bad Parts. This is where we take time to process and reconnect with previous versions of ourselves that are hurt or scared or confused, and unknowingly, internally sabotaging our current life with their limited knowledge that they have from the past. And I will just say this is, you know, powerful, hard work. And it seems to be what I am doing the most with my clients lately because damn does it get results. It really changes things when we go spend time with these parts, see them, acknowledge them, feel with them, love them. And then as they release and feel like we have got them again, they reintegrate. It's the most beautiful, like amazing process when it happens. So that's what I directed my community member to go do. It's like this is parts work, baby. And this is what I've been doing myself over the past month. So I know I've mentioned a couple of times in the podcast, kind of going through some stuff. And this is what I've been working through. I mean, this process with my son, I would say the main activation of all of this started in the summer of last year. But me actually being ready to finally go to the unresolved emotional memories, y'all, that's only been in the last month that I've like, oh, this is what needs to happen. And, you know, the heart of this work, I would say this last month occurred when, you know, I did some of it with my mentor. And then that meditation I mentioned earlier with Quinn, where I found and acknowledged that young, young mother inside of me. Um, you know, I speak about her on this episode, like, yeah, of course she's there. But y'all, until I did that meditation and actually like opened and had her come forward, I had no idea the depth of how unready I was to become a mother at, you know, I mean, I was 22. And so in that meditation, I did a lot of actually feeling into and not just understanding mentally, but opening to actually experiencing again with her how excruciatingly, like, really, y'all, psychologically painful it actually was for me to be a stay-at-home mom in a city at the time, right? Where I had no family and a husband who was an investment banker and worked all the time. Like I had no comprehension back then how much emotional and psychological pain I was in at the time. That doesn't mean it wasn't there, though. And that's the whole the book, The Body Keeps the Score. Even if mentally you're not realizing it, it is getting stored in your tissues. The issues are in the tissues. And that's what was down in my unconscious underneath all of this. Coupled with ultimately, you know, I spent 10 years as a stay-at-home mom. And I didn't know at the time, but I do know now that for me, that is like psychological purgatory. Y'all, that is not a mental health fit for me in any way, shape, or form. You know, I know myself better now. I know I have this beautifully unique like neurospiciness. I have the CPTSD element. I have a lot of childhood trauma around being the oldest of eight children in a Mormon family. Basically, I was raising children my whole life. And in realizing all of that, I have been making peace with the reality that I just get really triggered and flashbacked quickly when interacting with my oldest son at the moment, especially with the, you know, I mean, the reality is he his needs, he is such an amazing kid. And his needs for accelerated individuation and independence, like it's just what his personality needs, are something that I don't have the internal resourcing and bandwidth to support. And this was this all kind of came up in the last month as I started to see more clearly that because of this, you know, young inner mother in me, still heavily programmed by Mormonism, right? A part of me was still trying to be the everything to my children, stay-at-home mom, mixed with a heavy dose of what Mormon programming says being a good mom is. And that coupled with trying to be a mom to a very strong-willed 14-year-old while also parenting to other boys. That whole dynamic, I was trying to be that, right? Trying to be the everything to my children's stay-at-home mom. When in reality, like hold up, right? My reality actually looks like being a single mom. I am a single mom co-parenting while healing my trauma. I'm also trying to individuate myself. I am in the process of creating a stable and loving relationship with a romantic partner for the first time in my life, who is now, you know, living with me. I'm living with someone again for the first time since my divorce, running my own business where not only am I just running a business trying to make money and provide for myself, but I'm trying to change the world. I'm I'm trying to influence huge dialogues around divorce and dispel massive patriarchal lies and programming. Like, oof. When I finally sat with all of that, I was like, oh wow, all of this is too much. And to be honest, y'all, the only way I really came to that was that the cracks started showing. They have started showing big time this last year. I was getting in these like massive, dysregulated fights with my oldest. And I was starting to regress back into these survival flashbacked states whenever I would have my kids. And thank goodness, you know, I had Joe here. I don't actually don't think I could have got through it without Joe's support. But also having him there to like help me realize, like, hey, this is not getting better. Like there was so much I'd already done, you know. I mean, I'd gone and met with a therapist. My ex-husband and I had met with a therapist together. We'd come up with a whole new parenting plan and rules that we were going to be in on together, that ultimately, you know, he decided not to do. And so then we had to parent on different wavelengths. Um, I tried to see if my oldest would go to therapy with me, and he really didn't want to. I had done a lot of other things and just none of it was really none of it was working. Okay. And and working in the way that like the fights were getting worse and my dysregulation was getting worse, and my mental health was deteriorating. So, thank goodness in this instance, as my mentor and Quinn ultimately helped me see the reality for my situation is this just isn't necessary. Because here's the crazy part, y'all. While all of this is happening, Happening between me and my oldest in our relationship. On the other side, my teenage son and his dad seemed to be connecting more. Like it was almost like the conflict with me was helping their relationship, making it stronger. His dad was able to like think more outside the box. They were finding ways through the problems that he was experiencing together. So where he and I had reached this like impasse and all of this spiraling and the traumatic fights, which were a huge deal. Y'all, let me be clear that these fights were triggering one of my deepest core wounds. A wound of feeling like, you know, my only option when we would get into these impasses was I either needed to abandon myself and what I felt like was right to make him happy and win his, you know, kindness and cooperation and his love in the family, or I would need to stand my ground. And what I would deal with was the fallout of teenage conditional love, right? Which is, I think there are lots of other adults out there that can handle that, that are more resourced or, you know, just don't have CPTSD. But for me, that fallout was a total shit show for my CPTSD. And it really would send me back to these horrific flashbacks of the conditional love with my mom and feeling so trapped, except that that is like 10 times scarier when you are the adult and supposed to be the person in charge and you're supposed to be playing a parent role. Like, fuck, y'all. So, in the thick of this all, right though, my ex and him are finding middle ground and they're finding these solutions that honestly, just nervous system-wise, did not have access to. So through the parts work and going into these past painful experiences, and I will just say, you know, I still have a lot of excavation to do. I loved my mentor, really helped me see like, you know, the grief isn't going to be a one-time thing. Like it's something that's going to come up and you're going to just keep expanding around it. So, with doing that work, coupled with a lot of support from people who love me and have seen the destructiveness of this cycle that me and my oldest have been in since this last summer, I was able to ask his dad to have him come live with him full-time, where he can ultimately have the support he needs, and I can too. And y'all, it was really hard for me. It was really hard for me to admit that I can't do it all. And it still is, as you guys can hear. This is, you know, this is still really, really fresh. And you can kind of hear it in my. I mean, you guys know me, right? You can hear most of what I love on the podcast and who I am. I love believing I can do it all. I love thinking that I can, you know, I can run a business, I can have a relationship, I can heal my trauma, I can individuate, and I can manage a teenager. It's coming at me in his anger and need for independence right now. And the reality, what the facts were showing was that I can't. This was just too much. And I really had to sit with that young, you know, early 20s mother, that part of me that just wanted so badly to be a good mom, but ultimately always felt overwhelmed and so afraid she was doing it wrong. And I really had to sit with her and let her grieve because for her, you know, in Mormon standards, letting him go live at his dad's is a failure on my part because you're only a good mom if you have your kids super close and that's the whole, you know, stay-at-home mom taking care of everything. But through processing and doing that work of reclaiming and realizing that, you know, this was a feeling really rooted more in the past than it was in the actual facts of my life, my son's life right now. Um, I got to kind of reclaim what I define a good mom as. And I realized actually deep down, I think a good mom is someone who facilitates my children getting what they need most to trust themselves and succeed. And I want that, even if that means it's not gonna be with me. Because ultimately, as I explored all this, I realized like the very last thing I want for him is to feel like he can't trust himself because I know best. And there's like the moment because that's what my mom did to me. She sacrificed my relationship with myself to her being able to stay firm in believing that she knew what was best for me and that she hadn't made any mistakes in her parenting. And for me, this has been about this really deep process of coming into more honesty with myself about you, and you guys know this. The last year's really been a lot of that, accepting that I have CPTSD, accepting that that is not going away. This is not something that's gonna be healed and then done. It is something I live with daily and being more honest about what I can actually realistically do, and also being honest about the environment I need to function well, and then letting that just be enough. I don't have to be the savior for everyone I love anymore. And really realizing like it was time for me to put my own oxygen mask on. And when I started doing that, like, hello, you know, put my oxygen mask on and let the other adults, like my ex-husband and his parents who don't have the same traumas that I have, don't, you know, I don't know if they have CPTSD or not, but if they do, it's not as severe as mine or the neurospiciness that I have, and in many ways are way more resourced and have a lot more oxygen through the various privileges they just have. Okay, there's a lot of privileges over there that they have that are just more than me letting them be there for him. I physically can't. It's admitting I physically can't be the savior anymore, and that's okay. And actually, in fact, paradoxically, it's way more healthy. Cause in Mormonism, and I see it now, Mormonism is what taught me that I needed to be the savior for everyone. My childhood trauma is what taught me that I needed to overfunction and be everything for everyone at the expense of myself. And it is okay if it is okay. Not only is it okay, it is healthy to admit I cannot do that. So not only do I want to talk about it from my perspective, right? That's giving you like, what do you do when you find that you're the one doing this? But I also want to finish out this episode by explaining what's to be done in the instance with my clients whose mothers are the ones that are actually doing this to them. So, first thing I want to make clear is that we cannot force other people to do their own deep unconscious work and trauma processing. Any of you in marriages with spouses that you may be seeing these same things with, right? Know that you cannot force somebody to do this. And it's just, of course not. You guys have heard, I've told you, this is deep, hard work. People have to come to this on their own, they have to choose it for themselves. So, ergo, if they're not going to do it, then the answer becomes boundaries. And let me just say that with some people, boundaries will work, and with others, they won't. With my mother and my ex-husband, the boundaries, the the level of the boundaries I needed really didn't work for them. And that is why ultimately I got divorced. And before my mother died, I had greatly reduced my contact with her. Okay. But back to my clients, once I clarified with them what was happening, okay, which was just huge for them, even from the very beginning, just the awareness that, oh, these thoughts being shared by my mother actually aren't about me. It looks like they're part of their trauma. And the thoughts they're sharing are derailing me and kind of poisoning me against myself and what I'm trying to do in my life with my children and my dreams. Once they realize that, the next piece to come from a like solid grounded state and clearly be able to say, you know, your advice, your words are not helping. And if you continue to share them with me, I'm not gonna be able to invite you over. Or if you continue to text these to me, I'm not gonna reply. You know, or with the client who's getting divorced right now, like explaining to her mother, what I need right now while I'm going through this process is absolute support. So during this process of getting divorced, I'm not going to be talking with you, responding, or listening to any of your opinions about this anymore. And as I know, many of you probably are, if you are freaking out about this, if you are thinking, oh my God, this is too harsh, I can't do this. Boy, do I have the rallying cry for you. So, in as so many of you know, one of my all-time favorite books, Untamed by Glenn and Doyle, there is this chapter called Islands. Highly recommend if you have the book and it's nearby, you can pull it out and you can read along with me. But she explains so fucking powerfully what this is, what is happening here. And I know this is gonna make this episode run long, and I don't fucking care because y'all need to hear it straight out of Glennon's voice. How and why, even though you're freaked out about having this conversation with, you know, with potentially your mom, it is exactly what needs to happen. So I'm not gonna read the entire chapter, but I am gonna read a lot of it because yeah, it's absolute fire and I want it here. So here we go. Ah, I'm so excited. I love story time. So she says, one night, Abby, who knows I understand life best through metaphors, said this. Glennon, I want us to think of our love as an island. On our island is you, me, the kids, and real love. The kind of love novels are written about and people spend lifetimes trying to find. The holy grail, the most precious thing, the thing. We have it. It's still young and new, so we're going to protect it. Imagine that we've surrounded our island with a moat filled with alligators. We will not lower the drawbridge to let anyone's fear onto our island. On our island is only us and love. Leave anything else on the other side of the moat. Over there it can't hurt us. We're here happy on our island. Let them scream, fear or hate, whatever, we can't hear it. Too much music, only love in, babe. Oof, so that's Abby's quote. She goes on. Every time an internet troll, journalist, or fundamentalist minister shared self righteous judgment, I'd smile and imagine his tomato red face screaming on the other side of the moat, while Abby, the kids, and I kept dancing on our island. None of it could touch us. But things got more complicated when my best friend, my champion, my mother, showed up on the other side of the moat, carrying fear in both her hands, asking us to lower the drawbridge. My mother lives in Virginia and we live in Florida, but we talk every single day. We are intricately intertwined in each other's lives. Recently we were talking before bed and she asked about my plans for the following morning. I mentioned that I had a haircut scheduled and I was thinking about getting bangs. We said goodnight. The next morning my phone rang at six o'clock. I'm sorry to call so early, sweetheart, but I've been up all night worrying. It's the bangs, honey. You don't do well with bangs. You cut them and then you regret them, and it becomes a whole thing. Your life is stressful enough already. I am just worried that bangs are the wrong decision for your family, sweetheart. If my decision to get bangs had kept my mother up all night, you can imagine her reaction to my decision to divorce my husband and marry a woman. I could hear her fear in every question and in the long silences between her questions. But what about the kids? What will their classmates say? The world can be cruel. She was shaken, and that started to shake me. That day she told me not to get bangs? I didn't. My mother loves me very, very well, so I've tr always trusted her to know what was right for me. It's not the cruel criticism from folks who hate us that scares us away from our knowing. It's the quiet concern of those who love us. My mom's fear started to pull me away from my knowing. I lost my peace. I became defensive and angry. I spent weeks on the phone with her, explaining myself, trying to convince her that I knew what I was doing and that it would all be okay. One night I was talking to my sister working myself up, replaying to her my most recent conversation with my mom. My sister interrupted me and said, Glennon, why are you so defensive? Defensiveness is for people who are afraid that what they have can be taken from them. You are a grown ass woman. You can have what you want. No one can take this from you. Not even mom. This is yours, Glennon. Abby, it is yours. We hung up and I thought, My mother loves me and she disagrees with me about what is best for me. I am going to have to decide who I trust more, my mother or myself. For the first time in my life, I decided to trust myself, even though that meant moving in direct opposition to my parents. I decided to please myself instead of my parents. I decided to become responsible for my own life, my own joy, my own family. And I decided to do it with love. That is when I became an adult. That night I told Abby, I'm not going to spend one more second explaining myself or justifying our relationship. Explaining is fear preparing its case, and we are not on trial. No one can take what we have. I can't convince my parents that we're okay by talking incessantly about how okay we are. I think the only way to convince anybody you are okay is to just go about being okay and let them witness it. I don't want to leave our island to be an evangelist for us anymore. It's too tiring. And every time I go and try to convince other people that we're fine, I'm not here with you being fine. So I'm adding a sign to our island. This one isn't facing outward at the world, it's pointing inward toward us as a reminder. It says only love out. No fear in, no fear out, only love in, only love out. The next day I stood underneath a tree at my son's cross country meet, trying to find relief from the hundred degree heat. I was on the phone with my mother and she was asking to come visit her grandchildren. Her tone was controlled, anxious, shaky. She was still worrying and calling that love. She just couldn't trust my knowing yet. But for the first time, I did. I trusted my knowing. Here is the part of the story in which a mother and a daughter become two mothers. I say, Mom, no, you can't come. You are still afraid, and you can't bring that to us because our children, they're not afraid. We raise them to understand that love and truth in any form are to be honored and celebrated. They haven't learned the fear you carry, and I won't have it taught to them through your voice and your eyes. Your fear that the world will reject our family is causing you to create the very rejection you fear exists. Our children are not carrying the fear that you are carrying, but if you bring it here, they will help you carry it because they trust you. I do not want that unnecessary burden to be passed to them. Is this the easiest path for me, for Abby, for Craig, for your grandchildren? Of course not, but it's the truest one. We are making a true and beautiful family and home, and I hope with all of my heart that one day soon you will be able to come enjoy it. But we cannot be the ones to teach you that you can love and accept us. I have to tell you this hard thing, which is that your fear is not my or Abby's or the children's problem. My duty as their mother is to make sure it never becomes their problem. We don't have a problem, mama. I want you to come to us as soon as you don't either. This is our last conversation about your fear for us. I love you so much. Go figure it out, mama. When you are ready to come to our island with nothing but wild acceptance and joy and celebration for our true, beautiful family, we'll lower the drawbridge for you, but not one second sooner. My mother grew quiet for a very long time. Then she said, I hear what you've said. I am going to think about all of this. I love you. We hung up the phone, I stepped out of the shade, and walked back to my family. I'm going to jump forward now to this line she comes to, this paragraph she comes to at the end of this chapter. If you want to read the rest of it, go get the book. She says, A woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter. When she finally understands that she is creating something different from what her parents created, when she begins to build her island not to their specifications but to hers. When she finally understands that it is not her duty to convince everyone on her island to accept and respect her and her children. So going back to what I said previously, if you're freaking out, when I say you get to set boundaries, you get to protect your peace, there's Glenn and Doyle laying it out for y'all in the most powerful way. And I mean, honestly, y'all, if you haven't read that book yet and you're struggling with that, that right there, that like this is my life. I get to trust myself, I get to follow my knowings, go get the book. It'll totally light you on fire. Okay. So I hope from this episode I have in really, I feel like gorgeous, just gorgeous examples shown on both ends of this coin, right? When we have others doing it to us or when we are doing It to those we love, the importance of putting your oxygen mask on first and prioritizing your work, resourcing yourself, taking responsibility for you before you go out trying to change everybody else's blueprints and end up doing that more from our triggered, unprocessed trauma responses, than really showing up in the reality of what is present and right in front of us now. Oof. This episode today, y'all. I had no idea, I really didn't, that I was gonna end up sharing about this piece with my son so soon. I knew it was gonna come out eventually, but you know, it's just been very raw and recent, but it feels really good to trust the timing of the universe. I do really deeply love through this podcast being able to show up in the messy and the real and the raw because I never want, you know, I think out in the world, in our attempts to, you know, have authority or to seem like we can be trusted or that we know something, we pretend to have all the answers. And I want so beautifully to show that I'm a real human and my life isn't perfect. And that's actually a really good thing. And it is an ever-changing and always evolving tapestry. And I just want to acknowledge what a gift that is to get to share all of that with you, to get to on this podcast be a full human. All right. With all of that said, I am sending you all so much fucking love. I really hope some part of this related to something you're going through, or maybe set off new realizations for those of you that were like, oh, there it is. That's what's happening. Please know that I am absolutely here to go deep with you, um, just like this. I mean, what I'm kind of describing, the coaching that I'm doing with my clients, that's a lot of what I do. I mean, that's the heart and soul of what I do in my one-on-one coaching in my deep dive container. Um, but it's also a piece of what I do in the 90-minute sessions to really parse out and see these patterns and bring a lot of clarity. So if you are like, oh, oh my God, I want more of this or I want it individuated to me, sign up for one. I can't wait to see you. Also, I can't really say enough. I just want to keep like y'all, the community is so fucking special, everybody. It is this magic, like set apart space filled with women. You know, the way I show up on the podcast is the way these women are showing up in the community along with me. And I just want to say again that if you have been feeling called to it, like now is the time to join, especially because this next month, I am actually gonna be doing the workshop. The um, the stuff we're gonna be talking about and the theme, I'm just really stoked about this workshop because I'm gonna be teaching one of my favorite and most powerful coaching tools. And then already for the month after, which will be May, I've got my next guest set up, and she is fucking amazing. We were discussing yesterday what we're gonna talk about on the podcast episode with her, and I was just like getting so excited for y'all to hear her perspective. She's uh a voice activation coach and you know, helping you really find your voice again, which I know so many of you, that's what's been stripped away from us, and that's what we're learning, right? Learning that we have a right to speak up for ourselves, to protect our islands in the ways we need to. Also, as I said before, Alex is now the one doing those interviews to get into the community, which is so beautiful because now we're previously we kind of had a more automated experience. You get to drop in live with her. Um, I get to watch all of those. And I just think that's really special. There's, you know, it's it's amazing to get to hear me on the podcast, but I've seen this over and over when I meet women on 90 Minutes or then when they're in the community. There is nothing like actually connecting in real time with me and even with Alex. The questions she's gonna be asking you, the interview she's leading you through has been curated by me. Um, and I think it's just a gorgeous, like your first kind of experience foray into what it's gonna be like in the community. So, yay. That's all I got for you guys today. That's all I got for you guys today. Right. Just just this little, you know, over an hour long episode into really deep stuff about your unconscious. I love, I love it. I love that you guys go on these journeys with me. And I will see you on our next one. Till then.