Family Disappeared

From Panic to Healing – Finding Hope Through 12-Step Recovery & Community - Episode 112

• Lawrence Joss

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In this episode of the Family Disappeared podcast, Lawrence Joss discusses the transformative journey from suffering to living, particularly in the context of parental alienation. He emphasizes the importance of community support, creative expression, and emotional intelligence in navigating the complexities of family dynamics. Joss shares personal experiences and insights on how to support children emotionally while accepting the powerlessness that comes with parenting. The conversation highlights the significance of acknowledging suffering and the role of creativity in recovery and personal growth.

Key Takeaways

  • Survival to living
  • Creative expression
  • How do we support the kids emotionally?
  • Is it possible to accept powerlessness?
  • How do I acknowledge my child's suffering and reality?
  • Through change, you will transform your suffering.
  • Community is essential for survival in difficult times.
  • Emotional intelligence is key in family dynamics.
  • Volunteering can shift your perspective and enrich your life.
  • It's important to share experiences and support one another.

Chapters

00:00 - Transforming Suffering Through Change
03:04 - Community and Support in Parental Alienation
05:52 - From Survival to Living: A Personal Journey
08:44 - Creative Expression as a Healing Tool
12:05 - Supporting Children Emotionally
14:57 - Accepting Powerlessness and Acknowledging Suffering

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:
https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=SDLTX8TBSZNXS

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:

I know you're like, hey, let everyone else change, I don't want to change, I'm suffering enough. But I'm here to tell you through the change you will transform your suffering and your struggle and you might not get what you think you want, but you're going to get everything that you need. It's really magical. 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 Lawrence Joss and welcome to the Family Disappeared podcast. We are sitting out here on the balcony on the big island of Hawaii and have a really cool and interesting show for you today. If you haven't listened to the 100th episode and 101st episode, where we talk about the community-wide survey we did, it might be really useful to jump into those episodes and listen to them, and what we were able to extract from the survey and all the metrics we were able to gain was 10 salient facts that I just want to touch base on, one by one, and how they integrate in our lives and apply to Parental Alienation. And I just want to give a shout out to my team, because you might see my face on a lot of these videos and this is a team effort. I just happen to be the person that's talking. Anna is an intricate part to the team, glaze is an intricate part to the team and a team leader, plus a bunch of other folks and these salient points that Anna actually pulled out. So thank you for that work, anna. It's going to be fun to discuss and then see what comes up. If you're new to the community, welcome. We have over a hundred episodes taped. There's playlists on YouTube.

Speaker 1:

If you're looking for lawyers, therapists or different kinds of interviews, or just start wherever it feels good to start at, and this is a different kind of podcast because it's just me yapping away. So if you're looking for panels of parents or panels of grandparents, or professionals or industry leaders talking about stuff, we have all of that stuff. So find what flavor works for you and try it out. And there's a bunch of great resources in the show notes. We have a free 12-step program, parental Alienation Anonymous If you've tried it and you didn't like it, great. If you did like it, great. And also there's a season for different things.

Speaker 1:

And support group that we offer is based on emotional and spiritual growth and really looking at our patterns and how we can grow and how we can be better in every relationship. And it takes energy and work and we don't necessarily always have the capacity for that. So I'd highly recommend in trying it again if you've tried it in the past and if you don't like it, find a group that you do like. Find some support. Community is an intricate part of survival because it's so complex and, in my belief, parental alienation becomes part of the family system. Whether I'm reunited or not reunited with my kids, my parents, family members or whatever it is Like, this is something that's there, it's already been seeded and we're always going to have to deal with it. So having a great support community and continuously working on myself has proved to be intricate. So just to give you a little teaser of what we're going to be chatting about on these next two episodes.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to read this to you Survival to living, creative expression. How do we support the kids emotionally? Is it possible to accept powerlessness? How do I acknowledge my child's suffering and reality? Compassionate communication, and there's a bunch of stuff out there we've done already on NBC. And then also the long view like we want something now. We want some kind of significant change that we can see. But what does the long view look like? Thing now, we want some kind of significant change that we can see. But what does the long view look like? Cultivating community, which we touched on briefly in my little intro here. And then trust in the child's perspective, which is a challenging one. It seems like it makes our perspective and our lived reality not valid sometimes, but we're going to talk about that. And then developing emotional intelligence. So there's a bunch of great stuff that we're going to be discussing and I'm excited to jump into it.

Speaker 1:

We are a 501c3 nonprofit and we can use your support and it's really important to understand when we ask for support. It's so the next person coming in can have maybe some more resources than you had, and it's not about us, it's about the next person coming in, like if you're already engaged in the community or the community is already starting to get some recovery tools. And the sooner we get to people, the less harm there will be done to the family system and to the children, the grandchildren, parents sometimes, and all our relationships. So donate if you have the resources, if you can help us fundraise, write grants, whatever, shoot us an email familydisappeared at gmailcom and help out the community. You know, service, service, service, service to save my life. Every time I get in pain, I get lost, I get confused a wedding, a birth, something else. If I'm of service, I can get out of myself for a little bit and again counterintuitive and life saving. And that's enough out of me. Let's see what we land up discussing today.

Speaker 1:

I remember there was a long stretch of time where I didn't know if I was gonna make it. You know, I felt like I was standing on one side of this giant cavern and there was no way to get over to the other side and there was no resources on my side and I didn't know what to do and I felt like I was suffocating and I was going to die. The anxiety was overwhelming. I was having panic attacks. I was lost. There was no light.

Speaker 1:

I had to make a decision at some point that I wanted to start getting some help and doing some work and the natural things were seeing a therapist. The natural things were talking to family and friends, getting some self-help books, and for me it was going to a 12-step meeting, because I had some 12-step experience previously in my life and slowly I started building community and slowly I started looking at myself and how I showed up in every relationship and it was hard. I think the first two years I feel like I just cried every single day. There was nothing, that waterworks were just on. I was just overwhelmed and underwater. I couldn't work.

Speaker 1:

There were so many different things going on and if you're in that place, it's hard and you should be grieving and you should be angry and you should be feeling pain and the people are telling you shouldn't be. That's not realistic. This is just the path that I think we all go through in our own ways and some people might not. And what I share and what I talk about, take what you like and leave the rest. There is no right way here. There is just different ways and I'm just sharing ways that have helped me and other people in the community, and other people talk about it and there's a bunch of great professionals and modalities that we'll introduce you to.

Speaker 1:

But it's a conscious decision to choose to be alive and in my own life and there's also a separation where I had my kids, I thought they were my kids a separation. When I had my kids, I thought they were my kids. My ex-wife did birth them and we did bring them into the world together and they are their own people and their own minds and they're growing and developing differently and when they're younger, they definitely need a lot more guidance and letting go of the idea that their mind was really big and it was a really big shift in my recovery and gave me a tremendous amount of relief and didn't mean that I loved them any less. It just meant that I would love them really unconditionally, because the love that I received growing up was conditional. My parents wanted me to be there for them, help regulate their nervous systems, do the thing that good sons do, and I was the prodigal son.

Speaker 1:

I did all those different things and, you know, when I got in enough pain, I started figuring out what boundaries were, I started establishing those and my life started to change. So all the stuff that we got out of the survey is all related to all these different stages of grief, loss, abundance, grace, coping, creativity. I think creativity is really a big one. So that's enough of that little shtick and shtick's a Yiddish word that I grew up around, which is just my little story. So let's jump into the podcast, and I'm knowing that I'm hearing that I'm saying jump a lot, so we will work on that, or maybe just keep saying jump.

Speaker 1:

So the first thing that we came up with on our survey that was super, super interesting was this whole idea of survival, to living. And again, I know, for me there was a lot of years that I was just on survival. I couldn't get through the day without just thinking about my kids, about how to get them back, what my ex was doing, how messed up everything was, and I was just struggling and I was drowning and the ruminating thoughts were overwhelming. You know, for me I couldn't go to work, I couldn't work, I was shutting down parts of my life just to be able to survive. And I've heard this a lot from a lot of different parents, grandparents and even from the child's perspective and I see from my kids' perspective, they had to shut certain parts of the infrastructure down and I think that's what a lot of us experience when the children split and they have to pick a reality, just so they don't die. They're taking part of the systems offline because they can't cope with the input. And as a parent, like I, had to take part of my systems offline because I couldn't cope. And that's different because you've got responsibilities, you've got to make money, you've got to go to work, you've got to take care of yourself physically, but it's super challenging and in that survival mode, like what do you do? Like I don't think we're taught a lot about what to do and a lot about families of origin and then we have to figure it out.

Speaker 1:

And there's a plethora of resources out there. There's our nonprofit Parental Alienation Advocates and Family Disappeared is one of the pillars in there, this podcast and the Parental Alienation Anonymous, which is again the free 12-step support group, which there is a link in the show notes. And there's other places that people are finding a lot of relief. Some people are doing a lot of surface work and volunteering. An incredible place that I've moved from survival to living is volunteering with Big Brothers and Big Sisters, which is a nationwide nonprofit, and they have a really robust screening system where they really want to check your background and make sure you're safe, which I super appreciate it, and I went into that to help a young person that didn't necessarily have a role model in their life, and what I found out is this young person helped me maybe more than I helped them.

Speaker 1:

It wasn't the entitlement that I had in my family, that wasn't the complexity and the years of stuff we had done together that needed to be repaired. We could just show up and deal with some really basic stuff like how do we have a conversation? How do we laugh together? Yeah, so having this young person in my life through big brothers and big sisters has been life-changing. I get to nurture someone and someone gets to nurture me. We get to explore life and also get to see life from a different perspective, from someone that doesn't have all the resources that I have and my kids have and what it looks like to struggle in a different kind of way, and how resilient and beautiful this young person is and his siblings are in my life and they're incredibly beautiful, wonderful people too, and I get to have all these magnificent relationships and be of service, and this has really shifted that survival to living.

Speaker 1:

So I'm curious what are you doing to shift your life from survival to living? Are you building community? Are you volunteering? Are you taking up running, sewing, knitting, painting, water sports? Are you traveling? Like? What are you doing? Can you please comment and share what's helping you transition from that survival, from that fight and flight mode? And I just want to say this like it doesn't happen in this big burst and then all of a sudden, life is full and you're living in such a robust way. It happens incrementally and sometimes I couldn't even see it happening until I had some time. You know, and I heard someone share in meetings once that the years and the reveals what the days cannot, the months reveals what the hours cannot. And that was really true for me. Like I had to keep practicing, keep showing up for my own life, and I moved into this mode and here I am sitting on a porch on the big island in Hawaii, living a completely different life than I ever thought possible, and I love my kids and I miss my kids and I'm continuing to parent. This is an ultimate form of parenting is parenting without access, but I'm living a full, rich and meaningful life. I miss my and I'm the best father I've ever been, and hopefully one day we get to connect from this place. So let us know what's shifting you from survival to living. Are you stuck in that survival mode? Are you stuck in the ruminating thoughts? What do you want to share with the community? What questions do you want to ask about that Family Disappeared at gmailcom? How can we bring up a show just on survival to living? What would that look like? What would you like to hear about? Okay, I'm going to move on to the next topic here Creative expression and the ties in and links together with all these different subheadings I'm going to discuss.

Speaker 1:

You know what is creative expression Like for me. In my life I was a dad. I went to work, earned a living provided for the family and was just kind of in that routine that I'd seen my father be in. But where's the creative expression in that? You know, the creative expression comes up in some really interesting ways with parental alienation, estrangement and erasure. Sometimes the creative expression is working on yourself and being open to seeing that, hey, I contributed to the family system and I can work on myself, emotionally, spiritually, how I communicate, and that is creative. Like I was brought up with a really family orientated way of communicating where we'd call each other out and we'd be loud and noisy and talk about anything we weren't really conscious. And there's creativity on working on myself and starting to expand emotionally and spiritually. That lets me communicate in a different way. Like we think about creativity as painting something, as drawing something, as singing a song, but creativity is also about recovery and finding our way back to living.

Speaker 1:

So what are your creative expressions? What creative things are you doing that you had no idea are actually creative? Like for me, I'm doing a podcast that's super creative and a great outlet. I'm writing a bunch of literature for the community. I'm showing up at meetings. I'm painting where I'm living all kinds of crazy colors. You can see a little bit in the background if you are on video or watching this somewhere like that. I'm working out in the field and planting stuff and growing stuff and picking stuff and learning how to accept what the land has to offer.

Speaker 1:

Creativity is everywhere and the creative expressions that we're talking about in recovery are communication, being friendly, having compassion, like. What ways are you being creative. And again I want to hear about that Like, what ways are you being creative? How are they changing your life? Tell us some stuff that's not obvious, that's not like, hey, I painted a picture but like, I learned how to communicate. Today I asked someone how they were doing that's creative. There has to be space and capacity to stretch into some of these different places and we really found within the survey that this idea of creative expression just manifested in so many incredibly beautiful ways. So again, if you're struggling and you're stuck in that place where you're not really living, start to look at the places you are being creative and you can be creative in relationship to you growing and stretching and changing as an individual. And I know you're like, hey, let everyone else change, I don't want to change, I'm suffering enough. But I'm here to tell you, through the change, you will transform your suffering and your struggle and you might not get what you think you want, but you're going to get everything that you need. It's really magical and that maybe is too much for now, but that would be a great episode too. But I'm going to move on to the next thing here.

Speaker 1:

Another thing that came up a lot was supporting our kids emotionally. And I think this is really complex because my idea of supporting my kids emotionally before I got to recovery, before I really started my emotional and spiritual expansion and journey, before all the pain came in and forced me and actually cleared away some of the old debris with inside of me, I couldn't really tackle this in a useful way. You know, I thought supporting my kids emotionally was telling them what to do, punishing them when they did something wrong, role modeling how I got my needs met. And a lot of times I got my needs met by getting something from my kids like them saying hey, I love you. They're doing different acts that felt like they validated who I was as a father and validated who I was as a person, and that's not a useful way for me to get my needs met emotionally from my children. I need to be a separate person working on myself and connecting with my kids emotionally, but there needs to be a separation.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes we would come together and share emotional stuff that we both get emotional needs from. It's called nurturing, but there's no secret contract where you have to do this or you have to do that, and I think in my family of origin that existed. So learning about emotional support. So when we talk about supporting our kids emotionally, how do I support my kids through this devastating thing they're going through with not having contact with me? How do I support them emotionally through that and not expect anything emotionally back from them? And I'm not saying it's always going to be like that, but there are going to be phases where how do we show up in that way and support these kids? Because I know there's a lot of times that I've had an opportunity for some kind of connection and I wanted to get something myself. And if I could have just shown up a little bit more grounded with a little bit of my own support from resources outside of my kids, from community, from mentors, from support groups, whatever it is, it would have been different.

Speaker 1:

So supporting my kids emotionally, it looks like validating their experience, it looks like acknowledging their request. I don't want to talk to you. How do I acknowledge that and not blow up the relationship? You know, how do I not make my kids make a decision not to talk to me? You know, I know I was in a situation one time and I kind of told my daughter it sounds like you don't want me to be there and I gave her the opportunity to exclude me. And it was manipulation on my part because I was just feeling hurt and not included and instead of saying, hey, I feel hurt and not included, but I'm really excited to participate, I said, hey, it sounds like you don't want me there. And she's like, yeah, I don't want you there. Like I set myself up so I wasn't really taking care of my child emotionally, I was taking care of myself. So supporting our kids emotionally, really listening to what they're saying, you know, through the NVC lens, figuring out what they're feeling and what they're needing, and really showing up emotionally, not projecting our needs, our fears, our wants onto what they're requesting. I think that's super, super, super, super huge and a great thing that came out of the survey. This is a good one.

Speaker 1:

Accepting powerlessness Like how do I, as a parent, accept powerlessness over my kids? They're my kids. I raised them, I didn't birth them, but me and another person mixed our love together and they popped out. You know, like, how do I accept my powerlessness over them? And I struggled against this for years. I remember coming into Al-Anon just shredded and ripped apart. I'd been around 12 step for maybe 12, 14, 15 years at this time and I couldn't cope anymore. The fear, the anxiety, the ruminating thoughts, all that stuff was coming back after some years of relief. And it was because I wanted to control my kids, like I thought I had some kind of power over the trajectory of where they were going or what was happening in their life. And that is not true for me. You know what I mean. They have their own higher power and I'm not it, and I can still be a great father and a mentor and I can still be there for them. But surrendering that they have their own life and their own path has been incredibly important.

Speaker 1:

And when we talk about powerlessness, we don't talk about helplessness and hopelessness. I'm not helpless if I'm powerless. I'm just saying that I can't control other people, places and things, but I can show up for myself, I can be an agency and self-fulfilling and I can learn and change and adapt to all kinds of situations. A and I can learn and change and adapt to all kinds of situations. A lot of people get turned off by 12-step because the first step says we admitted we were powerless over the alienator and our lives are unmanageable and people are like I don't want to admit that I'm powerless. And yeah, hell yeah, I'm powerless. It's not my job to control, fix or change anyone. I can show up, be a role model, be in relationship, ask for what I want, listen when they are asking for what they want, reflect back what's going on, and that's just admitting powerlessness. And it's a form of creativity. You know, I couldn't be powerless or admit that before, but now I can. What a gift to be powerless. I know it sounds silly and counterintuitive, but it's a form of creativity, it's a form of letting go, it's a beautiful thing.

Speaker 1:

So, accepting powerlessness, no matter if you're in 12 step or you know a nature lover, a camper, a hiker, a painter, it doesn't matter. This is a super, super, super important thing and something that came out of the survey over and over and over and over again, acknowledging the child's suffering. That's a tough one and it ties back into creativity, it ties back into living, it ties back into supporting the kids emotionally. Like my kids struggled and are struggling, and sometimes, when they were struggling, I wanted to change what was going on. I wanted to change the script to my script, to my reality, to the movie that I was watching that invalidated their experience and it created more distance between us.

Speaker 1:

So, acknowledging that they're suffering and struggling and it's not trying to blame anyone and do anything else and it's in the context of a relational field Like me just saying, oh my god, it looks like you're struggling and your life is shit and your life is just chaos, and all that kind of stuff that's not acknowledging their suffering. Acknowledging their suffering is when I happen to have some contact or I decide to send a letter or decide to say whatever and say, hey, just checking on you, I'm guessing that stuff is potentially kind of bumpy out there. You know what I mean, I don't know if you're experiencing that, but I'm experiencing that there, you know. I mean, I don't know if you're experiencing that, but I'm experiencing that. If you are experiencing. I just want to acknowledge that this is a really challenging situation for everyone and I love you, or whatever it is.

Speaker 1:

And contextually, acknowledging their suffering might be a silent thing too. It might be a living amends, it might be hey, my daughter didn't invite me to her wedding. But I'm talking to a friend and I'm saying, hey, my daughter didn't invite me to her wedding. But instead of saying X, y and Z about her. It's like it's going to be really really hard for her not to have her dad there.

Speaker 1:

And this work of acknowledging that we do sometimes not without children and not without grandchildren, not without parents, is starting to heal the world and starting to heal some form of relationship. So it doesn't have to be us directly one-on-one with our loved one. It's bringing it into the world and it's bringing it into the conversation, and hopefully someone gets to have that conversation with our loved one, our child, our grandchild, our parent, and they start to shift and then there's space created for us. So this is another form of creativity. And acknowledging our child's suffering doesn't have to be directly with the child. It can be in any kind of relationship in any place. It could be through service it child. It can be in any kind of relationship in any place. It could be through service, it could be through painting, it could be through just going through a really really rough dark spot. And also, acknowledging Jesus has got to be hard for everyone. I can't imagine having to make these decisions. I couldn't make these decisions. Oh, my Lord, that this sounds really, really hard. I just want to hold my child in that light.

Speaker 1:

So those are the first five, and that's a lot of stuff to talk about. Each one of those can be a separate episode, and probably will be, but I'd love to hear your comments. Please share what resonated with you. If you want to add anything to this that we can share with the community familydisappeared at gmailcom, we'd love you to get involved. Please comment and share. These are meaningful conversations for people that aren't in parental alienation, estrangement or erasure and for people that are, these are things that are going to change and shape our lives. We love having you here today. Great resources in the show notes We'll list these five different topics that we're covering and hopefully get to them in actual episodes or maybe with some professionals out there. We'll see what manifests next. And if you're new to the community, again welcome.

Speaker 1:

The next five will be on the next show and thank you for coming out and playing today and I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Love to hear if you did. If you didn't, I'd love to hear that too. Maybe it's not useful with me just talking, and what's really fun for me sometimes is I get a random text or random email from someone I happen to meet and they go wow, I really appreciate what you're doing. I really appreciate what the team's doing. It's really making a difference in my life and that gives us energy and capacity to keep going, because sometimes this is tiring, also for us. Even though it just pops up on a video and it looks like it's pretty easy and seamless, that's just really not how the process works. So thank you for coming out to play. If no one's told you yet today, I love you. I hope you have a beautiful day Like share, donate, help us bring this message to more people around the world and in a more useful way.

Speaker 1:

And yeah, see you soon. 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.