Family Disappeared

The Wall Between Us: How Alienation Is Built Brick by Brick P1-Episode 92

• Lawrence Joss

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In this conversation, Lauren Joss and Bill Eddy delve into the complexities of parental alienation, exploring how family dynamics, personality disorders, and emotional health impact relationships between parents and children. They discuss the importance of understanding these dynamics to foster healthier relationships and introduce innovative methods for conflict resolution and communication skills that can help families navigate high-conflict situations.

Key Takeaways

  • Children grow up in families that see people as all good or all bad.
  • Parental alienation is a gradual process, built brick by brick.
  • Emotional processes in families are often overlooked.
  • Alienating parents may not be aware of their impact on children.
  • Children absorb their parents' emotions, leading to conflict.
  • The dynamics of family systems can create isolation among siblings.
  • Teaching children flexible thinking and emotional management is crucial.
  • Innovative methods can help parents learn to communicate better.
  • Court systems are beginning to adopt new methods for conflict resolution.
  • Support systems are essential for individuals dealing with parental alienation.

Chapters

00:00 - Understanding Parental Alienation Dynamics

10:07 - The Role of Personality Disorders in Family Systems

19:54 - Building Healthy Relationships Among Children

30:07 - Innovative Solutions for High-Conflict Families


If you wish to connect with Lawrence Joss or any of the PA-A community members who have appeared as guests on the podcast:

Email-      familydisappeared@gmail.com

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/lawrencejoss

(All links mentioned in the podcast are available in Linktree)


Please donate to support PAA programs:

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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

Speaker 1:

So children grow up in that kind of family, seeing people as all good or all bad, and it's not unusual we see in families with alienation that one child may be alienated and the other not, because the parents see one child as all good and the other child as all bad, and so that dynamic of all good and all bad exists in the family already.

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. Welcome to the Family Disappeared podcast. Hi, my name is Laurence Dawson. Welcome to the Family Disappeared podcast.

Speaker 2:

Today we have Mr Bill Eddy on the show, and what a great show. I was not expecting to have such a wonderful conversation and Bill's been around for a lot of years 40, 45 years, working within high conflict and divorce and the social system and just has a lot of wonderful, accessible and useful information and technology and has some wonderful frameworks that are super inexpensive. So I'm super. I keep saying super. That's just weird. Anyway, I'm excited to share this all with you and let you join in on the conversation. If you're new to the community, welcome to the community. We have a lot of great free resources. We have a free 12 step program which is parental alienation anonymous. There's a link in the show notes if you're curious to the community. We have a lot of great free resources. We have a free 12-step program which is Parental Alienation Anonymous. There's a link in the show notes if you're curious about that. We have the Family Hope Project, which is an art advocation platform. So if you want to get to express yourself anonymously and share some stuff with us, we'd love to have that. There's a bunch of other great information in the show notes. We are a 501c3 nonprofit. Everything we do is free and some people are able to support us Some resources. If you're one of those people, we'd love to have your support. Love to have a monthly donation and you'll be able to help us keep this accessible to everyone, no matter what kind of financial resources they have. So please help. If that feels appropriate, appropriate there's a link in the show notes if you'd like to donate, and I'm super excited for you to listen to the show.

Speaker 2:

I learned a bunch of great stuff and, oh yeah, like comment share. Let us know what you think. We've been getting some great emails. We've been getting some great reflections and sometimes it's just an email just saying, hey, wow, that was really great, that really hit home. I appreciate it. We'd like to know that we're rowing in the right direction and if we're rowing in the wrong direction, an email saying, eh, that wasn't so great. Eh, you know, those are useful too, so we can redirect and they're welcome as well, and any other guests or anything else you'd like us to chat about or do differently or add. You know we're always open to the conversation and with that let's jump into the show.

Speaker 2:

So I remember early on in parental alienation I had my high school reunion. So let me see, I was 36, 18. So that'd be my 20 year high school reunion and went to the high school reunion and then went out to dinner with maybe eight or 10 people and I was sitting at the table and I was telling them about my divorce and the challenges with the kids. I had no framework for parental alienation, but I was framing my ex-partner as just a terrible person and she was hurting me. And why is she doing this and all these different things? And the reason I share the story is it wasn't useful.

Speaker 2:

You know some of the questions that people asked me, based on how I presented what was going on, reflected back that I was really demonizing her and there was a lot of pain and a lot of crazy stuff going on, but I wasn't fully integrated.

Speaker 2:

I hadn't done my work, I didn't know how to communicate, so I actually perpetuated the ideas that she had put out there and I made myself look a little bit loopy. And I say this because educating ourselves, working on ourselves emotionally and interpersonally, changes the dynamics with every single relationship. And if I had been working on myself at that time, I would have had a completely different conversation and I would have been received in a completely different way. And this is with friends, family, judges, therapists, anything like that. And when we get into the conversation with Bill, you're going to hear some really great suggestions, technologies and frameworks that are available, and I just want to share the little story, but let's hear what Bill has to say. So today we have Mr Bill Eddy on the show and super excited. Bill's being around the community for a lot of years and, bill, if you could please just go ahead and introduce yourself to the community so everyone knows a little bit about you before we jump into the conversation.

Speaker 1:

Okay, well, I'm a therapist, a licensed clinical social worker. I'm a family lawyer. For 15 years I was a certified family law specialist in California and San Diego, co-founder of High Conflict Institute now 17 years ago and I'm the director of innovation. I developed a lot of methods to help interpersonal conflicts get resolved and I've written about 20 books on high conflict situations and how to overcome them.

Speaker 2:

That's an extensive resume and like specializing in like parental alienation and high conflict divorce. Is there something specific that brought you to this field?

Speaker 1:

Basically it came from cases that I had. So in the 1980s I was a therapist and actually first heard of parental alienation as doing child and family therapy for actually 12 years to 1992. Then I became a family lawyer and I had cases. People came in and say you know, my son, my daughter don't want to see me. What's going on. And I think I was particularly attracted to this because it's nuanced, it's not obvious on the surface. You know, domestic violence, child abuse, physical child abuse especially, are all pretty clear, cut and obvious. And I had clients, children and adults who had been abused as kids, physically abused et cetera.

Speaker 1:

And this perennial alienation confused people because you can't really see it. It usually goes on behind the scenes but you see a child being resistant to a parent and the instinct is to say, well, that parent must have done something. And yet it's much more complicated. So I really learned a lot and understood about family systems, dynamics and how everybody in a family influences each other, even unconsciously. And I also learned right away in 1980, when I became a therapist, about personality disorders and that people with personality disorders seem to have a different operating system around conflict and that that can be contagious to the children and how children can be impacted by a parent with a personality disorder. And I often saw in parental alienation cases that in fact it was a parent with a personality disorder. They didn't recognize it and often their professionals didn't recognize it. I had family systems and personality disorders in my background when I became a family lawyer and most family lawyers didn't have that background, so they didn't have the same perspective and understanding that I think I had.

Speaker 2:

Wow, that is super cool and just the idea of the family systems and that you're coming in with the knowledge of the family systems because, like you're saying, like I talked to a lot of therapists and they're not even looking at the larger system, they're just looking at this event that's happening and people are just addressing that and it doesn't really go anywhere. And you spoke about the nuances and how it's kind of like contagious of one parent is dysregulated or has trauma. And this question is there's a lot of parents that come in and say, hey, this event happened and that's when parental alienation happened. But in the system this is happening for years and maybe in vitro, before the baby's born. Like, is that your perspective? Is that how it looks in your mind?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So take for example, let's say you have a parent with a cluster B personality disorder. That's narcissistic, borderline, antisocial or histrionic, and the characteristic of that is a lot of all or nothing thinking and a lot of blaming. Everything else is somebody else's fault. And so that personality exists when the child's born. In a sense, as you said before, the child's born, this is a parent, although sometimes its dad is the alienating parent, sometimes its mom is the alienating parent.

Speaker 1:

But from birth the child's exposed to this and this kind of thinking. You know, our neighbor, mr Jones, is just an evil person and don't ever talk to him and try to steer clear of him. And Aunt Mary is just, she's just an awful person, I just hate her. And so the child grows up learning that there's all or nothing about people, there's people to be totally rejected. And Uncle Joe is perfect, he's my best friend and you know.

Speaker 1:

So children grow up in that kind of family, seeing people as all good or all bad, and it's not unusual we see in families with alienation that one child may be alienated and the other not, because the parents see one child is all good and the other child is all bad, and so that dynamic of all good and all bad exists in the family already and suddenly now, oops, dad's all bad and you know what to do because you've got like eight years of training at this.

Speaker 1:

So I do think that it really it has more to do with personalities, certainly more than gender, because as a family lawyer I'd say I represented many women who the child was alienated from, as well as many fathers who the child was alienated from, as well as many fathers who the child was alienated from. So I really learned it's not a gender issue, but I think it's a personality issue, and most people don't know about personality disorders or what I like to call high conflict personalities, because that's not a diagnosis. People just don't understand and look beneath the surface at what may be really going on.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for that. And I love that you bring in this like training. That's happening, this methodology that's in the family system that pre-exists, like these major cataclysmic events where the kid goes away or stops talking or starts, you know, being really derogatory to one parent and it is in the languaging is this person's bad? This is happening, that's happening, they did this and the lack of responsibility. And I love that you bring in the part like the the kids being primed well, the other family members being primed all these years. And then it just kicks in because some of us see this thing happen so quickly and we're like, how did this happen? Everything was this, we're a family, we're that, and then it's like just boom, the training's been done. And I think a lot of parents and grandparents don't really get that that. This is not about this tip of the iceberg kind of in the family system where everyone's concentrated on this one event. It's about all this languaging and all this programming that's happened for so many different years.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and actually I would say, and I should mention, I wrote a book called Don't Alienate the Kids and in it I use the theme of bricks, of building a wall or building a foundation, and I see alienation as brick by brick building a wall. It's a thousand little bricks that built this wall, not something that happened last week or something somebody said, and I know. I've been in court. I remember I was representing a mother whose daughter wanted to end her relationship with the father and in court, the judge. The mother had been in and out of court and clearly she was a highly anxious person and the child had absorbed her high anxiety emotions and the only resolution that the 15-year-old saw was all right, I got to take one side I'm going to take mom's side and cut off dad and the judge in court and the father in court and the father's lawyer were really angry at the mother and what happened is that pushed her anxiety up higher, which she couldn't keep from exposing to her daughter, and so the daughter was like I've got to resolve this by doing that.

Speaker 1:

So what we've learned is it isn't just anger and it isn't just one incident, but it may be living with a highly anxious parent as well as some cases it's a highly angry parent. I've had cases where a parent is crying all the time and the child absorbs that sadness and takes a position for one parent against the other, one parent against the other. So a lot of what people don't realize is how much this is an emotional process, like you said over the years, rather than just a switch. And I might add, many alienating parents with alienating behaviors really aren't aware of the ways they impact their child. They may have said some things and interfered with contact, but the emotional underpinnings they're not even really aware of. And that's what I try to teach professionals about Don't argue with people or blame people. Set limits and require new behaviors.

Speaker 2:

That's what we really need yeah and again the idea of this like anxiety and the child's dealing with the anxiety from the other parent and they can't navigate the world with all this intense anxiety coming at them. So they naturally have to pick a side and they've been metabolizing this other parent's anxiety for years. It's not just happening now. They've been in that anxious field for years so their nervous system is really tied into the other parent. So it's really like am I going to die or am I going to live? Decision. And I just want to say that because a lot of folks I talk to don't get it Like this kid's going to live or die emotionally and they're picking one side because they have no choice.

Speaker 2:

I think you touched on that and you mentioned one other thing that I want to touch on before I even get into the questions that I've prepared. You mentioned the idea of a family and like Uncle Bob is just great, he's wonderful. And then you know John, Jill and Jack and everyone else in the family is terrible. And in my own family I saw we had one family member, my grandfather, that my ex really loved and he was a wonderful person on a high pedestal. Everyone else in the family system wasn't. Everyone else in the family system was targeted, and it's really a fascinating dynamic to see, you know, the person with the alienating tendencies, just to pick one person to accept in and then everyone else to kick out and at the same time, that can flip on a dime at any time and everyone can get kicked out. Is that your experience?

Speaker 1:

Yes, very much. The shift can happen quickly, even though the groundwork for that's been there, that dynamic, for years. But who's in and who's out, and more likely it shifts to new people are out, they're not often new people are in, and so it just it grows and what it does is it isolates the parent and the child who favors that parent. They become more and more isolated because more and more people are outside of their kind of tight relationship. That's part of the dynamic. But, yeah, people can suddenly be out who were in and wonderful for a while. So it's a dynamic that really has a lot to do with the brain and brain development which I've also been getting into lately.

Speaker 2:

This other dynamic that ties into this in and out conception, when there's multiple children say there's three kids and one is the favorite child Like.

Speaker 2:

What I've experienced is there's like this triangulation that happens with the alienating parent is kind of like the hub and all the information comes into the alienating parent, they disseminate it and push it out to the three different kids and the three different kids never really get to know each other because everything's coming through this parental hub and then those kids are pushed out and when they're pushed out they need to come closer to, not die. Can you talk a little bit about that within the family, even with the alienating parent with multiple children, how that same methodology is used to control the kids?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and again, I would suggest it's not all that conscious that this is an automatic process. That's associated often with personality disorders, because a characteristic of personality disorders is a lack of self-awareness and seeing the world with all good and all bad, all superior, all inferior, and so that spills over to the kids. So, like you said, there may be a favorite child and that child's often the one that's alienated because they have this tight bond with that parent that's got alienating behavior. And then the other child may be either seen as negative or just kind of an indifference. And I've had several cases where one child refuses, let's say, to see dad and the other child is like you know, I'm fine, I'll see dad, and they go back and forth. In some ways they're like a diplomat, I love my parents equally and the other child hates one of their parents, and so it's not unusual. The psychological term for that is splitting. Where you split, you have a split like in your brain where you see this person is all good, this person is all bad.

Speaker 1:

And I worked as a therapist before I became a family lawyer with parents who split their kids. I remember I had one woman who had. She said my 12-year-old is just perfect and she had been separated, divorced. This was in the 1980s and actually dad was not in the picture and I don't know how that happened. But she saw one child as perfect and the other child was getting in trouble at school. He was five years old and he was swearing at the teachers a sense of the principal. He's swearing at the principal and he's like the all bad kid and she had an all good kid. There wasn't an active divorce going on. This is just this one person, this one parent and her two kids.

Speaker 1:

But what we see in alienation cases is it's not unusual that, like you said, let's say you have three kids, you have three different responses. But another thing that's really tragic is the kids grow up not able to support each other because everything goes through that hub, through that parent who interprets everything and often pits the kids against each other. You're not like your wonderful brother, you're just, you know you're a loser or you look like your father and that's not good. So you get this parent interpreting to all the kids who they are, what their identity is, but also their relationships with each other.

Speaker 1:

And I remember reading about adult children, not in a divorced family, just a family with a very narcissistic parent, father and two sons. One was pitted against the other, one was the golden child and the other was the loser. The boys are now in their 50s and the one is saying to his therapist it's sad, I can never be close to my brother because my brother sees me as a loser, because he was taught that by our father and it's still lasting 50 years later. So this dynamic, it's not even a divorce dynamic. Again, it's a personality dynamic oh yeah, that's super powerful.

Speaker 2:

And you mentioned that some of these behaviors, or a lot of these behaviors that the alienating parent is showing, is not conscious, and that's been my experience.

Speaker 2:

It's just like they've had this implanted by their parents or some kind of trauma in their life and they're're just on autopilot and this is what they're doing to survive and they're just passing the trauma down the generational chain. And that's kind of like what we're relationship with my kids. I love them, I want them to tell me that they love me, and my focus has shifted to that. I want my kids to have a relationship with each other, and they don't. They have these negative images of each other, these enemy images, and they don't even know each other because everything has always been disseminated through a third party. So for me right now, as a parent for anyone out there that's listening that's what my focus is how do I help other families or other people, maybe set the table even for my family one day with my kids that get to have a relationship? And my relationship with my kids has taken a back seat because it's not really as important as them having a relationship together. So I'm really glad that we walked backwards into that conversation.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for that it makes me want to raise something here, and that is because of the experiences that I had, including this 15 year old girl whose mom I represented. I get into the case at the end, and clearly she had alienating behavior that she was oblivious to. So what I did is I developed a method called New Ways for Families, and how it's designed is to teach each parent four big skills and to teach those skills to their kids flexible thinking, managed emotions, moderate behaviors and to check themselves rather than pointing fingers at everybody else. And this is the kind of thing that helps nurture relationships. And so our approach was we just teach both parents these skills. We don't decide one needs them and one doesn't.

Speaker 1:

Everybody can use these skills, but a parent with alienating behavior often has that all or nothing approach, and having them teach their kids your other parent is valuable to you. There's things you can learn from that parent. That's part of the structure of this counseling method. We have it as an online class and as a coaching method also, but by teaching skills, we're looking forward and not dealing with blame, rather than looking back and pointing fingers and saying what people shouldn't have done and we've had, I would say, moderate success with it Severe alienation. It hasn't touched, but we've had some reconciliations come out of that, out of the parents learning these skills and then having parent-child sessions where they teach these skills and hear from the kids and talk about how they're supporting each other. That's built into the workbook. That's part of the method.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for that, and I feel like you kind of stole my thunder, because that was my question was talking about how you developed a new way for family's method, which is great, and this technology that you're teaching people to move away from the blame, because I know, initially when I started with this I wanted a point of finger, I wanted to say everything that was wrong and what my ex did, but ultimately that was useless.

Speaker 2:

All it did was dig a deeper hole for everyone and I helped perpetuate parental alienation. With that mindset and like talking about this idea where we're teaching flexibility to the kids or we're teaching them some useful skills so they can navigate every relationship in their life, not just the family relationship in their life I think is paramount and is a leverage point in the family system that actually can contribute to change, and even on a systemic level. If we continue to have stuff like this be somehow taught in a way that's mandatory, or through every court mediation or through everything, it seems craziness that this kind of technology is not being used because it's so simple.

Speaker 1:

I agree, I would love for this to be just spread super widely. And it's so simple Just teach skills going forward and skip all the blame, shame, finger pointing, and let's just make this better now. And I would say we've had, with our counseling method, online class and coaching method, we've probably about 8,000 parents, we estimate, have gone through learning these skills and for a lot they've made a difference for one parent and for a lot they've made a difference for one parent and for a lot they've made a difference for both parents, making it easier to communicate and cooperate. So, yeah, I think we should teach this to kids in school, a hundred percent Kindergarten.

Speaker 2:

this needs to start. You know what I mean and you know adults need to get relearned and unmind their minds so that this is technology we need on a daily basis to do everything. You have this course and this training, and is it online? Is it self-guided? Do you sign up for a class and then you take it with a trainer? How does that work?

Speaker 1:

so there's three different methods. There's the counseling method, then there's the online class. We have 12 sessions online. Anybody can take it. They can go to our website and sign up for the online class. We've also shortened it to six sessions so people can do 12 sessions or six sessions. It's self-directed. Each session is about 30 to 60 minutes because it's reading, it's watching video clips, it's typing in responses to questions, so it's interactive and that's, like I said, six sessions or 12 sessions. Then you can take that with a coach also. So I train coaches usually to give three coaching sessions alongside of the six or 12 session online class and that way they can practice the skills practice calming themselves with encouraging statements, practice our BIF method of email and text communication, and also practice making proposals and making decisions. So they have someone to practice with, someone to discuss it with, as well as learning it from self-directed watching it online.

Speaker 2:

That sounds a wonderful setup and I love the self-directed, because people's time is all over the place and that's super useful and having a coach and actually get into practices in real time is also paramount. And then within that structure there's a mediation method, within the new ways structure. Can you talk a little bit about what that mediation method is?

Speaker 1:

yeah, so often the mediation would follow going through the new ways for Families structure and learning of skills. The New Ways for Mediation method focuses also on the same skills. So you manage your emotions while you're in the mediation. You learn to make proposals, you learn to ask questions about proposals, so it's really more sequential. So you go through the skills training of new ways for families, then go through a mediation. If the person, the mediator, uses our new ways for mediation method and structure, then it really helps because the parents are already oriented towards making agreements and respectfully listening to each other.

Speaker 2:

That sounds incredible. I've spoken to a lot of people, but I really like your structure because it's really simple. We're practicing life skills that are relevant to every relationship. We're not just hyper-focusing on these relationships, even though that's at the forefront of why we're doing this. And then you have the next step, where you actually go through mediation, where you're continuing this process. It sounds wonderful and simple, and this is kind of deviating from where I want to go with my question. But have you rolled this out to courts, or is there a place to advocate to actually get this in some kind of trial basis, or is it already set up in some court systems?

Speaker 1:

It's spotty, but it has been set up in some court systems. So I should say the court system that's been using this the most has been Orange County Family Court in California, north of San Diego County. They've been, I believe, since 2015. Oh my goodness, I was going to say eight years. That's 10 years. They've been ordering the online class and I might mention we worked out an arrangement with them. So the class is $79 for 12 sessions. It's hard for anyone to say I can't afford that, but if they say we're low income, it's $19. So we made that arrangement with the Orange County court system. Then we taught them about coaching and I believe they're now starting to order coaching as well as the class. And I might add, it's always ordered for both parents and it's the exact same skills, so nobody has to be identified as the bad guy. There's no pointing fingers to get this going. Both parents can learn these skills and they never have to be together. So if there's concerns like domestic violence or a parent that just hates the other parent, they don't have to be around each other. It's the parents learn it and then they teach the kids individually.

Speaker 1:

We've had, I'd say, probably a dozen court systems have used this. I'd say probably a dozen court systems have used this. More commonly, individual judges hear about it and order it. We have a lot of information on our website at highconflictinstitutecom about this, but we're trying to expand it and spread it even wider and I must say a lot of where it's being used is in Canada. Maybe a third of the cases where it's being used are in Canada and two thirds in the US, and we have taught people some people about it in Australia. So there's some of it going on there.

Speaker 1:

But it's very easy. All it takes is a judge say you know, I'm ordering both of you to take this course, and if you have a reasonable parent and a high conflict parent, high conflict parents often won't do it unless they're court ordered. And then they do it and then they actually learn something and appreciate learning something. One thing you said a little earlier is how you can use these over your lifetime, and that's we call them the four big skills for life and teaching your child. These skills will help them facing situations that we can't even imagine we won't be around for. But flexible thinking, managed emotions, moderate behavior and checking yourself are the four big skills for life that really help you navigate the world and get along with people.

Speaker 2:

That's all incredible. And that you're making it affordable and accessible to people, no matter what their socioeconomic status is, is incredible. And it's super simple, it's accessible, it's online, it's self-directed, there's like not a lot of limitations unless you don't have resources and don't have a computer, but there's the library, there's definitely some options. Wow, wow, wow. I like bill, I like me some bill man. That is super cool. What a neat interview and what great resources and technology. And, again, all the stuff will be in the show notes and I love the accessibility and I love that this is getting out there and I also hear like it's challenging to have it spread really wide. Yes, and again, I appreciate bill's communication style, the information that he has, the accessibility, the years of experience and this is a super important couple podcasts to really resource yourself in a different kind of way, like I'm not in the court system right now. I'm beyond that and I'm not in a lot of that high conflict stuff, and everything that Bill's talking about will help me refine what I'm doing and how I respond and how I show up, and it's great. So thanks for coming out to play today.

Speaker 2:

Again, a bunch of stuff in the show notes free 12 step program. There's a link in the show notes. It's a great place to start working on your interpersonal and emotional ecosystem and starting to take accountability for how we show up in the world, and it has saved my life and changed my life. So I suggest trying that as a support group or finding a support group that resonates with you and get some help, because this is not something we can do alone. We need other people to support us along the way, other people to read some of our communication before it goes out. It's good to have fellow travelers and just to remind you, we're a 501c3 non-profit. Everything we do is free and we can use your support. If you have access to resources and if you want to volunteer in some other kind of way, just let us know.

Speaker 2:

You can always email me at familydisappeared at gmailcom and love to hear your comments, thoughts, ideas and yeah, and in case no one's told you yet today, I love you. I love you and those are some of the most important words I heard early on in my recovery, and I heard a lot of that in 12-step rooms and it was just nice to be loved and not necessarily know the people, and it might seem trite and silly, but it was just like like oh right, in this moment, in this particular second, someone cares about me. You know it was as simple as that, or it is as simple as that for me. So have a beautiful day, hope to see you around the neighborhood and come back for part two.

Speaker 2:

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.