
Family Disappeared
Have you lost contact with your child? What about your parent, or grandparent, sibling, or any other family member? You might be experiencing estrangement, alienation, or erasure. All of these terms speak to the trauma and dysfunction that so many families face.
A family is a complex living and breathing system. Each member plays a role in the family dynamic. When families carry generational trauma and/or experience new trauma, challenges, or dysfunction, this can result in a break in the family system.
These reaction strategies are habitual and very often interwoven into every aspect of how our family interacts.
Hi! I´m Lawrence Joss and I’ve learned that I need to cultivate a spiritual, emotional, and physical relationship with myself in order to have healthy relationships with others and everything in my life. It is my mission to help you create and nurture that relationship with yourself first and provide you with tools that might help you heal and strengthen family relationships.
This podcast is an opportunity to explore our healing journey together through the complexities of our families.
Welcome to the FAMILY DISAPPEARED podcast.
For more information, visit:
Website: https://parentalalienationanonymous.com/
Email- familydisappeared@gmail.com
Linktree https://linktr.ee/lawrencejoss
Family Disappeared
"Where Did My Mom Go?": A Child's Terrifying Introduction To Parental Alienation - Episode 79
In this episode of the Family Disappeared podcast, host Lawrence Joss interviews Dana Laquidara, an adult alienated child who shares her powerful story of parental alienation. Dana recounts her early experiences of being separated from her mother at a young age, the emotional turmoil it caused, and the long journey of healing and reconnection with her family. The conversation delves into the psychological impact of alienation on identity, the challenges of navigating family dynamics, and the importance of community and support in the healing process.
Key Takeaways
- Dana shares her traumatic experience of being alienated from her mother at four years old.
- The emotional impact of parental alienation can lead to repression of feelings in children.
- Children often feel powerless and afraid to ask questions during alienation.
- Dana's journey highlights the importance of community and resources for healing.
- Reconnecting with a parent after alienation can be a complex emotional process.
- The narrative controlled by the alienating parent can distort children's perceptions.
- Dana's memoir, titled 'You Know Who', reflects her experiences and insights.
- Healing involves acknowledging and processing repressed emotions.
- The journey of healing can take many years and requires self-discovery.
- Dana emphasizes the importance of understanding the child's perspective in alienation situations.
Dana Laquidara - https://danalaquidara.com/
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Email- familydisappeared@gmail.com
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This podcast is made possible by the Family Disappeared Team:
Anna Johnson- Editor/Contributor/Activist/Co-host
Glaze Gonzales- Podcast Manager
Connect with Lawrence Joss:
Website: https://parentalalienationanonymous.com/
Email- familydisappeared@gmail.com
This podcast is made possible by the Family Disappeared Team:
Anna Johnson- Editor/Contributor/Activist/Co-host
Glaze Gonzales- Podcast Manager
Connect with Lawrence Joss:
Website: https://parentalalienationanonymous.com/
Email- familydisappeared@gmail.com
It was a very traumatic time and since I was so young, I think that I experienced it so much through my body, so much through just fear, terror. At one point as an adult I was told by a knowledgeable therapist that I likely left my body from the shock of having my primary caregiver disappear from my life. So what I remember is I woke up one day and my mother wasn't there anymore and I remember being in the car, in the backseat and with my sister, who is a year and a half older than me, and our father saying you'll see your mother on Sundays.
Speaker 2:There was a time in my life when I was overwhelmed and underwater. Those days are the inspiration for this podcast. This is by far the ultimate healing journey for all of us. Healing ourselves emotionally, spiritually and physically is paramount to this journey. From this place of grounding, we can all go out into the world and change all our interactions and relationships. We can engage people from an integrated and resourced place. This is a journey of coming home to ourselves. In today's episode we'll start to explore some of these issues. Let's begin the healing journey today.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Family Disappeared podcast. Hi, my name is Lawrence Joss and welcome to the Family Disappeared podcast. And today we have Dana on the show. And Dana is a previously alienated child and now she's an adult and she has a phenomenal, powerful story to tell and has a lot of insights from the perspective of a very young child, starting at four years old, and what that looked like for her, how it was to navigate her family system and what reconnecting with a mom later on in life looked like and the challenges that came up with that. And she also shares some regrets and some things she wished she would have done differently and and how the situation could have gone differently and incredibly important and poignant conversation. And if you're in the middle of this, whether you're a parent or a child, young adult, there is some really wonderful nuggets to gleam from this. And if you're new to the community, welcome thanks for coming out to listen to the show. All dana's information is going to be in the show notes a link to a memoir, to her newsletter, her website and a great place to go and ask some questions and she's open to engage in the community. And if you have any questions for me, family disappeared at gmail. All that information is in the show notes and also the free 12-step support group that we have, parental Alienation Anonymous. There's a link to that in the show notes and as we're talking and interviewing with Dana today, she talks about the need for community and resources and being more resourced as she went into these places, of reconnecting with her mom. So with that, let's jump into the show.
Speaker 2:You know, as a parent and someone going through this process and not having the terminology of parental alienation and not really understanding the intricacies of what was happening early on in my journey, in my interactions with my kids, I would just want them to love me, I would just want them to say, hey, I love you, dad, like this is great and that stuff, and really get to the healing. And I had no idea of the complexity of what was happening in their bodies and minds. And they don't have that idea either because developmentally they're they're so young. But the need for them to kind of like shut down and, as Dana brings up in the show later on today, is about repressing their feelings and pushing down all their love and all the you know most probably a lot of the positive memories that they had with me, in order to survive. And then I think as time goes on they have a harder time as Dana shares also for her of accessing those emotions and sometimes I like look at my kids and I'm like can't you just see me, like I'm a good dad, I'm a good person, just love me, just acknowledge it, and I kind of like negate their experience and all that stuff that they've had to navigate and push down and push aside and swim through in order just to survive. How can I think that they could access the joy and the play and everything like immediately?
Speaker 2:There's so much pain and healing and there's so many resources that I've garnished and so many tools that I have and I love that dana talks about like cultivating those tools for ourselves, no matter where we are on the journey or which side of the journey that we're on, and I have so much more um compassion and empathy for anyone going through this that's a young adult, a child or anything like that, and, yeah, even me, I wish, I wish I'd I know more, or or even today, you know, even in in my interactions today, I can see where, uh, there's more space for grace and understanding and taking a breath. When I'm talking to my children and really um taking in what they've gone through and what their journey looked like, pushing part of themselves away and then trying to find their way back to those parts which they might and what they might not and that might not be their journey to reconnect with me either, I'm not really sure. But what a great interview. I'm so grateful that Dana's jumped in to have this conversation. With that and with that, let's get into what Dana has to say.
Speaker 2:Dana, it is so great to have you on the show today. Thank you for coming out to spend a little bit of time with us, and if you could just introduce yourself to the community. Just let them know who you are and how you're connected to parental alienation. That would be wonderful.
Speaker 1:Sure, I'm happy to be here. My name is Dana Laquadera and I am an adult, alienated child. I was alienated from my mother when I was four years old after my parents' volatile divorce, and I, you know, spent the better part of a lifetime really searching for the truth of what really happened, validating my own intuition of what I thought had happened. And then you know, healing from being alienated and eventually speaking out about it and writing about the topic as well.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for that, Dana, and I really again appreciate you being here to talk on the subject, because there's so many people in the community that really can benefit from perspective, from a child what it's going through, and also the young adults and children and older adults that are alienated or have been alienated. It's wonderful to have them represented on the show too. So, with that being said, you said at about four years old, this alienating process started for you, and at that age you remember what kind of sense you had that your mom was disappearing, or what did that look like in the beginning? Like what memories do you have of that?
Speaker 1:You know, it was a very traumatic time and since I was so young, I think that I experienced it so much through my body, so much through just fear, terror. At one point as an adult I was told by a knowledgeable therapist that I likely left my body from the shock of having my primary caregiver disappear from my life. So what I remember is I woke up one day and my mother wasn't there anymore and I remember being in the car in the backseat and with my sister, who was a year and a half older than me, and our father saying you'll see your mother on Sundays. And I just remember this feeling of just powerlessness and afraid to ask questions. I just knew something really bad was happening.
Speaker 1:And then I do remember some of the visits with my mother. So we stayed in the home with our father. We lived above our paternal grandparents, so this was my father's home really more than my mother's. And the visits with my mother required her to borrow a car to come get us and bring us to her now rented apartment where she was really in survival mode. So that's what I remember about that time. It was just scary and I didn't say a lot, didn't ask questions and just sort of went into this numb survival mode.
Speaker 2:Well, what an intense experience for a child to have. And was this like gradual, where it went from seeing your mom maybe half the time where she was living in the house to just seeing her on Sundays? Did it gradually happen, or was it just like one day? This is what the new rules are and that's how it's going to be.
Speaker 1:My memory of it is. It was one day we were told this is when you'll see your mother on Sundays. So it went from she's gone, she's exiled to you will see her on Sundays. And then that went on for several months, but it ended by the time my father remarried, which was within a year of the separation.
Speaker 2:So once your dad remarried and then your mom just didn't have any access whatsoever and kind of like completely disappeared from the picture.
Speaker 1:I do recall in this scene is actually in my memoir. I recall my mother showing up to our home for my birthday I believe it was my fifth birthday and I had a stepbrother by then who we were calling mom and I recall my mother coming in and my father pacing and he was very agitated that she was there and I knew this. My stepmother started crying, went downstairs to be with my paternal grandmother and I recall, as my mother was, she gave me the birthday gift and I was again. I said nothing. It felt scary because I knew she wasn't, you know, according to my father, supposed to be there. She wasn't welcome. I, by that point, associated her with my father's anger and I saw him speak to my sister and then, before my mother left, my sister said to our mother we don't need you here anymore. We have a new mommy, which of course we all know were not her words or her true feelings, but that is how quickly she was weaponized, really.
Speaker 2:Wow, that is a that is a powerful memory, seeing your dad talk to your sister for a couple seconds and then that come out of her mouth at about seven years of age and, as you're saying, weaponized and being a surrogate for your dad's feelings and emotions. And and it's also interesting how you associate the anger that your dad was feeling with your mother and that just got you to shut down even more is what I heard. Is that correct?
Speaker 1:Yes, and I think that's a very common thing for alienated children. The thoughts of their alienated parent bring up feelings of anxiety, fear. In the case of, like my sister, it was anger. For me it was anxiety. It gives us this dark, scary feeling and I can't overemphasize how terrifying it can feel, even though logically it makes no sense. This was a parent we always loved and who loved us, but now we're terrified in their presence or at the mention of their name. And it is just. That is the programming. You know, that is the programming. The parent who wants that targeted parent out of our lives. You know, whether consciously or not, they instill this fear in the, in the child.
Speaker 2:So just thinking back a little bit, like this idea of this anxiety that came up for you and the fear that came up for your sister, anytime your mom's name would come up or she'd be mentioned or there'd be some thing in the house reference in her, I'm presuming each time that came up your dad would got really big, really angry, and your anxiety escalated. And then the association happened with your mother any single time she was around. That is associated with what had been slowly, slowly programmed into you in the house.
Speaker 1:Yes, I recall that feeling coming up when discussing our mother with my sister. I don't actually have more than one childhood memory of her name coming up with my father. We learned pretty quickly don't ask for her, don't talk about her. And so my sister and I would whisper about her in our bedroom at night. Every now and then. We'd be sharing memories and I titled my memoir you Know who because we would call her you Know who. We were too afraid to mention her name because we would call her you-know-who. We were too afraid to mention her name, to call her mom or even her first name, and so she became you-know-who and we would share our memories.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow. And just to reference what Dana's talking about, which is her book you Know who? An Alienated Daughter's Memoir. That'll be in the show notes. There'll be a link there. There'll be link to to dana and her newsletter, which is free, and some other offerings that she has. So the different stuff we're discussing will definitely be in the show notes for you all to reference. And, uh, when you actually explain the title, dana, in that way that you knew who was, like how you and your sister communicated around your um mom, like I viscerally feel that in my body, I feel like some heat in my chest and like a contraction and my gosh, what a crazy way to have to live just to be able to have any kind of memory of your mother.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, it really highlights the severity of this course of control. You know, this type of psychological abuse, and I feel so sad for my mother that we could not even speak her name, and then also, of course, for us as children. You know it's just so unnatural and so obviously coerced.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, no that is. That is definitely the heartbreak. And and you mentioned this idea of kind of like cutting off from part of yourself or splitting off from yourself in order to survive Can you talk about that a little bit, of how that felt when you were really young and maybe in your teenage years, just a sense of kind of like losing yourself? Did you have a loss of identity or identity confusion?
Speaker 1:Yes, I think you know, to lose your parent, your loving parent, as a child is so traumatic that and then, if you don't have any support for grieving them such as, I imagine you know, if a parent has died, which would be very traumatic as well there typically would be a grieving process and support for that process. But in the cases of alienation, we as the children are just having to repress, alienation, our love for that parent, because it's way too painful to feel the love and feel the grief and have nowhere to put it, no one to go to to express it. And so, you know, I think that's why often, perhaps especially with a young child, but I think a child of any age will repress that love, and so then we don't have the access to the feelings of love for that parent. So that, so then we don't have the access to the feelings of love for that parent, so that enables, you know, enabled my sister to tell her go away, we don't want you. Because in that moment she probably was feeling that anger and that you know I'm okay without you because she had repressed her love for our mother.
Speaker 1:As a teenager, I wasn't thinking about my mother, I had a void I was trying to fill and I thought, well, I'll you know, I would seek fulfilling that void through romantic relationships, through dating. And it was so unconscious because it's not as if I thought, well, what I really need is my mother. So instead I was just seeking, seeking, seeking, thinking I will be happy, I will fill this void if I am loved by someone else, a boy, a young man that will help fulfill me, fill this void. And I did not stop and think maybe I need to reach out to my mother. So I didn't. I didn't actually see her again after the alienation until I was 15. And that was just a single visit with my sister.
Speaker 2:Thank you for that, and you said a couple of really interesting things that I just want to touch on a little bit this idea of repressing your feelings and not having an outlet or being able to talk about anything, and by repressing the feelings and not really having access to have any kind of feelings, because the whole body of feeling spectrum is completely shut down, like their kids hate them, don't like them, don't have the capacity to feel anything. But when you actually describe from your perspective and your lived experience that you had to keep pushing this down in order to survive and then you couldn't access anything, so it was more like a more of like a numb, neutral state than any kind of emotional state, correct?
Speaker 1:Correct, that's accurate.
Speaker 2:Wow, that is super powerful visual just to see that repression and that pushing down and just the amount of energy and strength and life force that it takes just to push that stuff down. And God, how tiring this.
Speaker 1:I did things to, you know to heal, like yoga and, you know, being back in my body and allowing the feelings. And you know, in addition to some therapy and learning about this type of abuse and all that, I felt it was very important to ground myself and really just be in my body again completely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that sounds like some incredible healing work, and I'm going to ask you a couple more questions about the younger stuff and then we'll get into the healing stuff, because people need to know what the journey is like and how to kind of like recover themselves. You had mentioned a couple of other things that I just want to ask some clarifying questions on, and one was this idea that you're in your paternal grandparents' house living upstairs and you have a stepmom. With paternal grandparents and the stepmom, what role of any did they play in this process of alienation? How did they keep the system going?
Speaker 1:Well, nobody questioned my father and you know part of it I'm sure we have to keep in mind this was back in 1970. And he had grown up in a very patriarchal home and his father was abusive His or at least his mother and sisters, maybe unknowingly, I'm not sure that they knew what was really happening, because he only gave you know, he controlled the narrative and gave them the information he wanted them to have in an attempt to escape the marriage had had an affair. So that helped him to say oh look, she doesn't want her children, she would rather run off with this. You know another man and she's destroying our home life. That narrative leaving out the part that she was abused throughout the marriage, and so people, his family members, sort of did what he asked of them and didn't question it.
Speaker 1:And these were people you know. My paternal grandmother loved my sister and me. So you know, part of it was the culture she lived in and part of it was she believed what my father was telling her. So I don't hold her. I don't have any resentment toward her. Hold her, I don't have any resentment toward her. But he was able to have things turn out the way he wanted, in part because nobody stopped him right and just want to touch on this one point of this idea of the, the alienator control.
Speaker 2:In the narrative which I see so often. They are kind of like the center point and everyone comes through them, so any information that comes to them gets disseminated through their lenses and then passed on to different people within the family system. And it sounds like that's how your dad kept control over everything, because he was the central person that was giving out information.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, exactly, and it's like a virus, a virus that spreads. And um and my sister and me, as children, we had no access to other information. We lost access to our maternal family. You know letters and cards that came to us we didn't even receive so, and you know it was the time before cell phones, so, but even if there were cell phones, we were too young to have them, so we had no access whatsoever to anyone outside of my father's life.
Speaker 2:Sure, no, that makes a lot of sense. It seems like a common thread on how people continue to control the environment and the environments don't get really seen for what they are. And you had also mentioned that this idea of seeking, like seeking something external of you to kind of fill that void internally. And you mentioned you know, like boys and dating and looking for something because you couldn't really find yourself. So I heard you mention like boys were the other ways that you were looking for this thing that you couldn't find besides boys. Were there other things going on in your life that weren't necessarily the healthiest decisions but the best decisions you could make at that time?
Speaker 1:Boys were really my drug of choice. I think part of our coping mechanisms can be partly genetic. You know, I think that's how my mother was coping with an abusive marriage. She wasn't drinking, she wasn't taking drugs. She looked outside the marriage thinking, oh maybe this other man can help me escape. And so perhaps I had some of those genes.
Speaker 1:And in my teen years I wasn't that interested in drinking or drugs, and also my father ran a tight ship, so I was afraid to do things that would get me in trouble. He was very authoritarian, and so that was just how I tried to fill the void. I you know this I had loved to give but also wanted to receive love, and I did not feel unconditionally loved in my home whatsoever. I didn't feel seen or known or like my feelings truly mattered, and so I was just seeking that love and, I guess, validation or sense of worth. And of course, looking back now I know that was not a good way to find it, but that's what a teenager will do who's seeking to fill a void 100%, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And again, like your drug of choice, as you said, was boys and a lot of kids. In this situation, there's drugs, there's alcohol, there's food, there's all kinds of different things that come up and, yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. And then you said, at 15, you reunited or saw your mom just one time. How did that happen and what was that like?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you know, ironically it was my sister who had the idea to go look up our maternal family, and so we started with looking up our grandmother. That was a little less scary than looking up our mother and our aunts. We had young aunts who they were several years younger than our mother and we were very close to them as well. So we started by, we secretly met up with our grandmother and aunts and my sister used that opportunity sort of to interrogate them why didn't she come find us and why did she have that affair? And she very much still saw our mother as the villain and our father as the hero of the story. And I just knew, deep down there's another storyline and this really isn't accurate. And you know, I loved our mother. I was never afraid of her. It was my father who I was very intimidated by, but I was silent, you know I, I was just silent and let my sister ask her questions until it was time to leave. And of course our grandmother was, you know, so happy to see us. And afterwards I just thought how sad though that that was the reunion, but I was following along with my sister's lead. And then shortly afterwards we found our mother. You know she knew from hearing from our grandmother that we'd be reaching out to her and we went and visited her and she actually was living in our maternal grandparents' old home. So it was a house we had been in many, many times as little kids.
Speaker 1:And again I let my sister ask the questions. Our mother was so gentle in her answers and the way she handled my sister that my sister sort of calmed down a bit in her anger, I guess you could say. But once again I was just letting my sister take the lead. I sat there mute. It almost felt unreal, almost felt dreamlike that I was in this room with my mother, that I really still could not access feelings of love or grief, and I just sort of tucked that memory away. But I knew, living in my father's home, that I wouldn't dare reach out to her again while I was living at home. So you know, looking back I think, oh, I wish I had sent her letters after that and kept the communication going. And she was very careful to not put us in a hard position so she wasn't sending us letters and certainly wouldn't call our home phone to talk with us. Then, you know, she I think she was still afraid of my father and also just afraid of making things more difficult for us.
Speaker 2:Wow Again, what an intense experience to have at such a young age, at around 15. And you mentioned a couple things about your grandmother and and your mom, and you said your your grandmother was incredibly happy and excited to see you, and you said your mom was incredibly gentle, so it sounded like the the landing, even though wasn't optimum, was open and and led with their heart, like their heart showed up there right yes, yes, she said she had always hoped that we would come find her and that she loved us.
Speaker 1:And you know she cried. She had two little sons at the time. So we had two little brothers that we didn't know and she was very careful about what she said about our father. I think that was probably wise of her, especially given my sister's feelings about our father and wanting to protect him and thinking he did the right thing. She didn't want to, I guess, ignite or I don't know. She wanted to keep it diffused, I think, with my sister. She never really said any bad things about our father. She just really tried to convey that it wasn't because she didn't love us that she wasn't in our lives.
Speaker 2:And this was 15 years old. When you saw your mom like this, at what age do you remember actually thinking wow, she was really gentle, she was really loving. Like when were you actually able to process and feel those emotions that you experienced at 15 years old?
Speaker 1:I think I started thinking about it again when I was about 18. I started wanting to find more information and look deeper into the story, and it's like I knew all along that my mother didn't simply choose to abandon us. That made no sense to me. My father's narrative made really very little sense to me because I just knew she did love us. But it took me until age 26 before I reached out to her again. I was pregnant with my daughter and I reached out and really gave her a chance to tell me her full story. I wanted to hear again. I was pregnant with my daughter and I reached out and really gave her a chance to tell me her full story. I wanted to hear it.
Speaker 2:Okay, just reflecting back on this for anyone that's listening to the show like 15 years old you had this conversation.
Speaker 1:It took you until about 18 to start like feeling some of the stuff and getting curious, and then another eight years until you're 26 to actually make the call and this seems like an incredibly long period of time, but developmentally it's where you had to go through in order to get to this 26 year old and be pregnant and be ready to actually start accessing your feelings and being curious and present right yes, I think that's accurate and I wonder if, perhaps when I was 18 or when I went off to college, if my mother had communicated with me, then sent letters, you know, it would have felt a all the things young college students are caught up in classes and friends and I was dating my now husband at the time and so I wasn't thinking of her very much during back burner again, unfortunately for those four years.
Speaker 1:But if she had reached out to me, if I received a letter or something frequently or consistently, I think that may have helped me to act sooner. I can't say for sure, but I guess part of me wishes that she had, because I again, I wasn't the completely brainwashed child, I was more like the hostage child that you know. I knew my father's narrative wasn't accurate, but I was too afraid or disconnected from those feelings to act on them. But perhaps some contact from, perhaps some reaching out on my mother's part may have pushed me along a little bit, a little bit quicker.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I hear. I hear that curiosity and maybe a longing for that to have happened and you would have liked to experience that and uh, and also that you were really busy with just growing up and figuring out your life and getting to class and just again trying to live and developmentally. That makes no sense. There's not a lot of time in those years for kids to figure out their life, go to college, buy a book, have a boyfriend and heal this major, major, major wound. So my curiosity is until 26, until you get to this point where you reach out to your mom what kind of other interpersonal or healing work or embodiment stuff what was in that period of time that maybe also helped you prepare to be able to reach out to your parents?
Speaker 1:I was very interested in psychology. I studied education, but I took several psychology classes in college. I looked for books on personal development. I remember reading a book called Willpower is Not Enough in some other books at that time, and I would do some self-reflecting. I was just, I guess, interested in the world of healing and becoming our better selves, and so I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful that I had that interest and even though it took me a lot longer than I wish it had to really accelerate the healing, I feel like I was maybe had the temperament in the interest to go down that path.
Speaker 2:And did yoga or any kind of embodiment practice start at that same time, or did that happen later on?
Speaker 1:That started when I was about maybe late 20s, so a little bit after I first reached out to my mother to have a real conversation with her. And you know I've been doing it ever since yoga and meditation, and so again I'm grateful for, for those interests I think they've, they've been very helpful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just your curiosity and wanting to understand how the world works, and then the ability to get back into your body and start to ground and find yourself sounds incredibly loving, kind, healing and created space for this next chapter of your life. So you're 26, you're pregnant. What's that moment that you decide, hey, it's time to reach out to mom. What happened, did it just? You wake up one morning Like, what did that look like? Wow, that was a powerful, powerful first half of the show. Dana just touched on some points that I don't really think of as an alienated parent and I'm so appreciative of her and I mentioned this in the introduction and this was from Dana's interview that this idea of repressing, repressing the feelings and pushing them down and then losing access to the feelings or the emotions, or to associate with a, with a parent that the, that the kids have loved so much. I thought that was probably the most poignant moment from the first part of the episode. And just a reminder come back next week for the second part of the show. And all Dana's information is in the show notes. Check out her memoir, you know. Know, get in touch with her. You know, jump on her website, you know, jump into those resources. This is, this is a really wonderful opportunity to connect with someone that has a lived experience and is continuing to live their life to the richest and the fullest extent. And, uh, with that being said, love to hear from you. Please, like, share, let people know about the show.
Speaker 2:We're also a 501c3 nonprofit and we need you to help support us, and everything we do is free. All our resources are free. Our 12-step program that is available to parents, grandparents and children and young adults is specific meetings for previous children, young adults and adults where they can get support. Where there are no parents or grandparents in the meeting. It's just for you. So if you're looking for community, if you're craving that, that's there too, and then there's mixed meetings as well, and it's all free. And, uh, we'd love you to contribute, to help, uh, help us continue to bring this to the, to the whole community.
Speaker 2:And uh, yeah, I feel some tingling in my body, some heat in my chest, and I share this because this is an intense conversation. There's a lot going on, and then the mind starts to spin and think about how we can do stuff in different kinds of ways. So that's a lie for me too, in case no one's told you yet today. I love you. I love that we get to have these conversations in community. I love that Dana is now part of our community and uh, yeah, what a rich conversation and we will see you around the neighborhood soon, I hope. Take care. Thanks for taking the time to join me on this episode of family disappeared podcast. Do you know someone who can benefit from what we're discussing on today's episode? If so, please share this podcast with them and anyone else in your community that might be interested in changing their lives. Together we'll continue the exploring, growing and healing journey. I will see you on our next episode. Until then, happy days to all.