Family Disappeared

How to "Contain" Your Emotions & Practice Compassionate Communication in Parental Alienation - Episode 113

• Lawrence Joss

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In this episode, Lawrence Joss delves into the complexities of parental alienation, estrangement, and the importance of compassionate communication. He emphasizes the need for a long-term perspective in relationships, the value of community support, and the significance of trusting a child's perspective. Throughout the conversation, he highlights the development of emotional intelligence as a crucial skill for navigating these challenges, encouraging listeners to engage in self-reflection and community involvement.

Key Takeaways

  • Compassionate communication.
  • The long view.
  • Cultivating community.
  • Acknowledging the child's suffering.
  • Developing emotional intelligence.
  • Parental alienation and estrangement create complex emotional landscapes.
  • Acknowledging others' perspectives does not mean agreeing with them.
  • Learning from community experiences shapes personal growth.
  • Being a good parent is possible even without direct contact.
  • Expressing love and vulnerability is part of personal growth.

Chapters

00:00 - Understanding Parental Alienation and Estrangement
02:50 - The Importance of Compassionate Communication
05:43 - The Long View in Relationships
09:01 - Cultivating Community for Support
11:53 - Trusting the Child's Perspective
14:45 - Developing Emotional Intelligence

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:

You know, and I think in parental alienation, estrangement and erasure it's really hard to trust the kid's perspective sometimes because it's so warped and me just saying that is so wrong, because it's their lived reality, it's their perception and projections at the moment and it's super, super, super real. And one day maybe they can tease it apart and see some of the stuff that maybe wasn't great, but there's a lot of good stuff in there too.

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.

Speaker 1:

Hi, my name is Laurence Johnson. Welcome to the Family Disappeared podcast. So we're talking about 10 salient facts that we got out of the survey and salient facts just salient topics to talk about that kept coming up and were repetitive and were part of people's experiences that they shared, and we shared the first five in the last episode and if you haven't listened to the last episode, I highly suggest jumping in there. I think all of the topics we covered were super rich and meaningful and have so many tiers and layers and stuff to think about. If you're someone who likes to think about stuff and dig in and process and look at some nuances in your life, I think you really dig the first part of the show and today we'll get to the other five topics that came out of the survey. And if you're new to the community, welcome.

Speaker 1:

And if you're like huh, what is this guy talking about? I just want to say we have over 100 episodes taped. There's episodes on everything. There's episodes on attorneys, therapists. There's a bunch of panels of parents talking about what their lives look like, how they're improving their lives and changing their lives, even though they're struggling and alienated, estranged or erased from their kids, grandkids or other family members' lives. There's previously alienated young adults and adults talking about what it was like, what their experiences were not having contact with their parents or still maybe not having contact, and what the choices are. And if you are an estranged, alienated or someone that's chosen to leave your family system and you're a young adult and you have different perspectives to share, I think we need to hear your voice here. We need to hear more people talking about that stuff and again from a recovery basis, not like hey, I hate everyone, but like hey, well, yeah, I made this decision and this is what's happening in my life. These are the things that are improving or these are the things that I struggle with. And if you're interested in doing that, please email me at familydisappeared at gmailcom. Give me your name and maybe a minute or two minute video of some topics you'd like to discuss, and if it feels like it's resonant, I'll reach out to you and we can have a conversation and see if it feels good to you and good to me to be interviewed. So I just want to throw that out there. That wasn't meant to come out, but it did so.

Speaker 1:

Again, if you're new to the community, there's a bunch of great stuff in the show notes. We have a free 12-step program, parental Alienation, anonymous. There's something like 18 meetings a week, a wonderful, wonderful, loving community. I suggest trying a bunch of different meetings, as there's different people and different topics at meetings. And yeah, just show up, check it out. It takes a little bit of vulnerability to show up to a random zoom meeting and it saved my life.

Speaker 1:

I just want to say that like it's really changed and transformed my life again today we're going to be talking about I'm just going to read these things out again so you know what's coming up compassionate communication, a long view, instead of just looking like I want my kids back today. Like what's a long view? How does that manifest and play out? You know, cultivating community, which we're discussing a little bit, with some of the offerings we have. Trusting the child's perspective we touched on that a little bit last time. We're talking about acknowledging the child's suffering and then developing emotional intelligence, which is kind of like the ribbon that goes around the whole package.

Speaker 1:

And, just as a reminder, we are a 501c3 nonprofit and maybe you're tired of me saying this, but there's so much more we can be doing. If we have more resources, we can launch all the foundational trainings and everything we're talking about and bring professionals in to really help people and give people a baseline of skills that are going to change the trajectory of what they're going through. Whether you're in a legal system, whether you're dealing with any form of complexities, the more access and exposure we have to these different resources, the better. Yeah, so I highly welcome monthly donations, large donations, small donations. You know, and we're not really good at that part of it we can also use some help with the fundraising and generating that kind of stuff, because we're just a bunch of parents trying to do the best we can and we don't necessarily have all the skill sets to make everything flow as easily as possible. So volunteer, it's a great way to be of service.

Speaker 1:

Share like comment. We want to know what you're thinking. We want to know if you want us to discuss more of some topic, if we missed something, if you've had an insight, if you got an aha moment, you know, let us know. Okay, that's enough out of me. I'm going to get on with the show, so I just want to share this quick story.

Speaker 1:

I'm here on the big island and my neighbor I asked him to make a countertop for me. I saw some of the work that he did and it's out of resin and ohia and ohia is a local indigenous wood over here. That's incredibly hard, you know. You put the wood in and you put all these different colors of resin around it. And I picked out the different colors of resin and kind of laid out what I wanted and then I just I wanted him to do the work and I left the island for a couple months. We negotiated a price and a week before I get back he's like oh, I'm spending a lot more money and material than I thought I was going to. Are you open to paying me more? I'm like I'm open to having the conversation and I would like to do it face to face when I get back. And he said great, and I say that because the old me could have reacted in a lot of different ways and I'm like hey, we had an agreement. No, I'm not open to negotiating or hearing what you did Like this is stuff you should have figured out before you started working, which is a valid point, but it's definitely not a communication strategy that's going to create connection and maybe continuity in our relationship, because he is my neighbor and I just point that out because that's what we're talking about with parental alienation, estrangement and erasure.

Speaker 1:

Like, how do we communicate, how do we show up? How do we react not react, what do we project? And I'm talking about a countertop and you're like, hey, that's a little wonky, but it's not. It's every relationship and it's every conversation in our life. So I get back here and I meet with him and now it's even higher than he said before and we look at the area and we look at the counter and really subpar quality in a lot of places, not a lot of care, and we have this really intense conversation and I agreed to pay him what he asked for and I kind of like cut off myself, like I hit an emotional point where it felt like there was a power differential, because he is one of the 10 residents next door on this property that I'm really connected to and I got scared. So I agreed to pay and I also got stuff that he was talking about was super valid the amount of time he put in.

Speaker 1:

But it wasn't our agreement and the reason that I pick this up is in a lot of communications with my children in the past, I've reached a place where I've cut off emotionally. Just like they split off, I split off too, and if you're a parent and you see your kids going away sometimes you're like what the hell? That's a weird reality. I just want to acknowledge that I do that too, and if you look closely at yourself, pretty sure you'll see that that's part of your strategy, sometimes too, just to survive. So I split off with this guy and I didn't really advocate for myself and I did something that after the fact I must probably regret it a little bit. And I've been here for nearly seven weeks and had one other interaction with some repairs I wanted him to do, and he did a really crappy job, really unconscious job from my perspective, and that could be a projection. That could not be real.

Speaker 1:

I do not know his part and I didn't have to say anything about it. I took it and I worked with it and I worked on myself emotionally. I looked at my part in what I was bringing, why I cut off my fear of abandonment, and then I also looked at some of the other realities and then I reached out and said, hey, I'd love to have a conversation about this. I still have some stuff coming up. I'd like to close the circle, and my intention of closing the circle is not to make him bad and me good. My intention to close the circle is to ask some clarifying questions so I can understand some stuff, because maybe I can't see some things that he's going through or the other mitigating circumstances, and I also want to be able to share what's coming up for me, and I don't need him to agree, I don't need him to validate anything that I have to say, but I would like someone to actually listen to what I have to say, and this is a really important part of recovery, and recovering relationships and keeping the continuity of some relationships alive is actually exactly what I'm describing, and this is coming out of what we spoke about in the last episode, and this episode is this idea of creativity is changing how we communicate with people, how we process what happens, how we contain.

Speaker 1:

So containment is a really big word. Like a lot of times, we have an emotional trigger and we just want to argue with someone, we want to fight with someone, we want to tell them what they did wrong and we want to even get rid of some trauma that's going on with us with something bad that happened with one of our kids and containment is actually taking a moment to hold it a little bit closer. Work on it, meditate, journal, talk to a therapist, someone close to us but not just take it out into the world, because a lot of time that creates harm and that's a form of creativity, that's a form of acknowledging other people's feelings, that's a form of choosing life. So I just want to touch base on those things connecting to the last show, which will connect to this other part of the next show that we're jumping into right now. I do have a curiosity after my itch. There's a lot of parts of this journey that are super interesting but aren't necessarily on topic about just talking about parental alienation and I'm thinking about sharing some of those in a little bit different structure and if you're interested in that comment, like, send me an email. It feels a little bit vulnerable to jump into more of my personal life and stuff that's going on. Like, talking about this stuff doesn't necessarily feel vulnerable to me because I've done so much work around it, but starting to share what my life looks like and some of my other ideas does, and I don't know why that came up, but it did and whatever.

Speaker 1:

Here we go, compassionate communication. So the example that I just gave you about this gentleman that did these countertops with, I consider the compassionate communication is me not jumping down his throat, is me not saying, no, I'm not going to even think about negotiating or giving you more money. The compassionate communication is me realizing that I made a mistake and being kind to myself instead of beating myself up and saying what a schmuck, what a knucklehead, why would you do that? The compassionate communication is saying, well, I'm human too. I got scared, I felt like I was going to get kicked out or alienated from the community, and that really kicks up a lot of PTSD. So it makes sense that I behave that way. But the compassionate communication is with me and with others, and sometimes it's verbal and sometimes it's silent. Sometimes the compassionate communication is not having to say anything at all and with our kids, sometimes it's not having to say anything at all. Sometimes it's just reflecting back what they're saying. And I think a couple of episodes ago I did a couple of episodes on nonviolent communication and just different texts and emails people had received and letting you know a little bit about nonviolent communication, which is an empathy based form of communication which is compassion.

Speaker 1:

I don't have to make it about me. I don't have to bring my dysregulation into the conversation. I can support my child in a different way and go bring my feelings and hurt and dysregulation somewhere else, and sometimes it's appropriate to bring it up with the kids. I'm not advocating that you eat everything and never say anything and never, ever, get to express yourself. I'm advocating to learn how to do it in a useful way. I'm advocating for not creating more harm. I'm advocating for taking a breath and taking some space between responding. There's no reason to have to respond really quickly. The only reason I respond really quickly is because I'm feeling anxious and scared and I want to get it out. And if I get it out, I think that anxiety and fear will go away. So that is compassionate communication. And then this next one's a good one. It's the long view. It's the long game. You're like how in the world can I have a long view and all I want is my child back? How?

Speaker 2:

in the world.

Speaker 1:

Can I have a long view and my son, daughter or you know gender non-confirming child that I have is getting married? How can I have a long view then? It's happening now, tomorrow, you know, screw you and your long view. That makes no sense. I think that limits A the creativity. It limits the opportunity to connect, it limits the opportunity to do some living amends and living repairs.

Speaker 1:

If I think about it, there's so many times that all I had was a short, immediate view and I just wanted to go to graduation, I just wanted to go to prom, I just wanted to get these needs met and I reacted from that place and it didn't give the relationship an opportunity to breathe or my child an opportunity to breathe. So if I can actually take a long view and step back a little bit and I can look at my intentions, this is really great. This comes out of the big book of alcoholics anonymous, the original text, and it says something to the degree that I was judging myself on my intentions and everyone else was judging me by my actions, and this speaks to the long view. Like my intentions are to be a good father, a good communicator, tell the truth, be honest, and if I just stop there, I'm doing myself and everyone else a disservice. I need to follow it out to the impact zone. What is the impact about me doing this right now, in this moment? Is there an impact? Is a positive, is a negative? Are there other mitigating circumstances that I might not know? I'm mitigating circumstances that I might not know. So by stepping back a little bit and opening up the view, even to an hour instead of a minute, or a day instead of an hour, or a week instead of a day, like this thing I'm working out has been seven weeks and that's a long view, and I've cultivated enough comfort in myself that I can put it down and live my life Right.

Speaker 1:

Like that's the first thing that we started discussing in the first part of the episode is the survival and flight to living. Like if I'm able to have a long view, I can put something down and I can enjoy and live my life and love the jungle and paint a wall and say hello to a friend, like how kind and wonderful would that be for you to do that for yourself or for someone else? So the long view how can you be creative in a long view? What does the long view look like in your life today? How's it showing up? Let us know? You know like just my experience and just the team's experience is not enough. We need to hear what everyone else is doing, because there's so much creativity, opportunity, cultural differences in all the different people that are part of the community, and we need to hear what everyone's doing so cultivating community. I can't do this alone. It nearly killed me doing this alone.

Speaker 1:

It nearly killed me just relying on my family and friends that I had before everything started to disintegrate. Yeah, it wasn't enough. They didn't have this lived experience. They weren't directly dealing with parental alienation, estrangement, erasure, whatever you want to call it. It doesn't really matter what the word is. I need a community.

Speaker 1:

The thing that drove me to community was drinking. I had a really bad blackout experience and I landed in community because the pain was so bad and I was having other minor blackout stuff and food issues and stuff like that and I was trying to medicate myself different ways. You know, it could be food, it could be alcohol, drugs, sex purchasing stuff, whatever it is. But I found like I was doing that and I hit a bottom and I landed up at a Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and I started to form community and from that place I started to form all different kinds of community as I worked on myself more and more. I had a meditation community, I had a nonviolent communication community, I had my Buddhist community and just friends and things started to shift. But without the community I couldn't shift. The community brought technology to me and creativity and love and all forms of different things that weren't part of my lived experience, and I needed the community in order to transcend some of these things and start to learn new ways to look at the world and community might even be a religious community. For some people it might be a grief community. You know what? Whatever, who cares, community people love. And again, if you are part of a community that's in a secondary or trauma response and everyone's just dumping out all their stuff at one time, I don't know how useful that's going to be in the long run. Maybe initially like that's useful. But find people that are in recovery, that are working on themselves, find people that have qualities within your community that you find attractive, and spend time with those people and you might have a vast community with 50 people in it. But there might be three or four or five people like well, what are they doing? What's going on over there? Ask, it saved my life. I've met so many wonderful people.

Speaker 1:

In anything that I'm sharing with you right now I wish I could tell you it was original, but it's all stuff I've learned in community and I've adapted it to what fits me and how I navigate the world and what I believe in. But it's all being community-based learning. That's transformational. And if you're struggling and you're isolated or you're just relying on your family or you're just relying on your kids coming back or the little emotional hits you get from them. It's not going to work, at least it hasn't worked for me. Maybe it will work for you, but the kids need to see something different. The grandkids need to see something different. Even the parents need to see something different from the kids. And then we all learn together. You know we all learn together in community, and community is family too.

Speaker 1:

Here's an interesting, multi-nuanced one Trusting the child's perspective. Like how do you do that? You know and I know, with what we're struggling with it's a little bit more complex, but I think every single family is struggling with the same stuff in different ways, like as kids become young adults and they pick different religions, they pick different partners, they pick different countries and different places to live in. They pick different ways they want to express themselves. They learn who they are. Some pick different ways they want to express themselves. They learn who they are. Some folks stretch in all different kinds of directions. Can we trust their perspective and their journey and the road that they're choosing to bounce along?

Speaker 1:

You know, and I think in parental alienation, estrangement and erasure, it's really hard to trust the kid's perspective, sometimes because it's so warped and me just saying that is so wrong, because it's their lived reality, it's their perception and projections at the moment and it's super, super, super real. And one day maybe they can tease it apart and see some of the stuff that maybe wasn't great, but there's a lot of good stuff in there too. It's not just saying that they're having a different perspective and a different life and every single thing they're doing is wrong. There's certain things that are super challenging for us and i'm'm sure it's super challenging for them. But validating their perspective is important and this doesn't mean your kid's an alcoholic or a drug addict or whatever they're doing You're like, hey, go get high. This means like validating their perspective. Oh, you're really struggling. It looks like it's really hard what you're going through right now. I'm not talking about the drugs, the alcohol, whatever else has gone on. I'm just validating their perspective.

Speaker 1:

When I invalidate their perspective, there's no place for us to connect. And it doesn't say I'm agreeing with their perspective. I'm just acknowledging that it is a perspective and it is something that they're living. So I hope, if you take anything away from what I'm saying, you take that one thing. Is that me acknowledging someone else's perspective is not agreeing with them, but it is acknowledging that it's a reality and it is something that they're living and it is super real for them. It doesn't matter if I agree or disagree.

Speaker 1:

You know, can you put yourself aside? Can you put your projections, ego, manifestations, ideas, need to say something aside? Can you acknowledge their perspective? What a great practice. And I know for me. Sometimes I can, and I know for me, sometimes I step in it and I'm practicing and I'm getting better at it. I'm enjoying myself. I don't make a lot of messes and by knowledge and other people's perspectives, I don't have a lot of stuff I need to go back and clean up. I'm not fighting all these different people and all these different institutions and all these different things. I'm just like, oh yeah, yeah, I can see that can be true for you, institutions and all these different things. I'm just like, oh yeah, yeah, I can see that can be true for you, and I move on. Just an idea, just a thought, and then just wrapping everything up.

Speaker 1:

We're talking about emotional intelligence. Everything we've discussed today is developing emotional intelligence how I communicate, the different ways to be creative, acknowledging other people's perspectives, learning how to communicate the long view. It's emotional intelligence, and it's like going to school. You don't just go to kindergarten and you're reading. You know an autobiography with 500 pages in it. You go and you practice. You practice painting, you practice listening to the teacher, you practice this, you practice that and you start to cultivate different skills.

Speaker 1:

And emotional intelligence is the same thing, and there's a lot of people offering some great modalities and different ways to practice emotional intelligence, and we practice it in community, and there's a lot of free communities out there that they're practicing emotional intelligence together, and people are screwing up in community all the time too, and people are great stuff too. And one of the best things I ever heard when I got to the 12-step community is an old time and said you know, we learn what to do in community. And then he said something that I was surprised by, and he also says we learn what not to do in community. And that's the point about being in community, being up close with people, like we get to see all these things and we get to decipher what fits and doesn't fit. For us, emotional intelligence is paramount if you're in the court system, if you have a therapist, if you navigating any of that kind of professional like? You have an emotional intelligence time to pause. Look at the long view. Being creative, you're going to get so much more out of those interactions. You're going to change and expand, expand and grow and you can do a lot of this work independently. You can do a lot of this work in community. And then you get to the professionals because they're expensive and you get them for 50 minutes. So you've got to find places to practice emotional intelligence and research and look at it. Figure out what it means for you. I'm expressing what it means for me.

Speaker 1:

Okay, those are the 10 salient items that we came up from the survey. I think those are all independent shows and great topics. I wanna hear what you think about all of them. Any of them Like, share, don't like, don't share. If you don't like some of the stuff we're talking about, love to hear about it too. And I got an email from someone that didn't appreciate one of the guests we had on and was super triggered by them. Everything that they were sharing and their experience was super triggering and super valid and I could see how upset they were and stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

And at the same time, we take what we like and we leave the rest. If there's someone that doesn't feel good, then we don't listen. If we're in a community where it doesn't feel supportive, we leave, and I think that's been very real for me. I've joined some communities and at a point I got a tremendous amount out of them and emotionally and spiritually stuff shifted and I stretched in a different direction and I haven't gone back to some of those same communities and that's the part of emotional intelligence and growing up and that's why I'm a great father. That's why I'm a great father and I don't have contact, you know, with my oldest daughter at all and very little with my middle daughter and a lot with my youngest. But I'm a great father. I love how I parent. I'm loving how I'm learning to parent without access and it's charged and it's hard and it's upsetting. I want to be part of their lives. I want to share my life with them and I want them to share their life with me, and yet I'm sitting in the jungle, I'm smiling, I'm happy, I'm being playful with you. I'm choosing life, I'm choosing communication, I'm choosing emotional intelligence.

Speaker 1:

I've hoped you enjoyed these couple of episodes. I've enjoyed taping them. I really like to hear what comes out of my mouth, because I read it on a piece of paper and then when I'm actually talking about it, I get to hear what I'm thinking too, and I think that's super useful. Tape yourself, listen to yourself. As I said in the beginning of the show, if you're someone that you think might be really useful to be interviewed and you have an interesting story or perspective you're a young adult adult that was previously alienated, or an alienated parent, a professional, anything like that email me a minute or two minute video about what you'd like to discuss. I can hear your voice, you know how you present and also that it serves the community. I don't need to talk about the trauma and how hard things are and what happened, how terrible this one thing was Like I want to talk about, like what I'm doing to transform that and what other people are, and that's the direction of this podcast. There's plenty of other opportunities and other people that are sharing from a different perspective, and we're not doing that. So thank you for coming out to play. It's been wonderful chatting with you today.

Speaker 1:

A lot of resources in the show notes the free 12-step program. We have the Family Hope Project, which I'm not even going to get into, but that's super cool and creative-based and free 12-step meeting. Donate, help us bring more resources, more services. We're understaffed, under-resourced. We're going to continue to bring everything for free. Nothing's going to go away, and it would be nice to expand our offerings and bring some people on that can help support the amount of work that needs to get done and the amount of people that need to get reached, because right now, we're barely reaching anyone, even though we're reaching a lot. Thank you, and in case no one's told you yet today I love you. I love you and I learned to say that as part of my growth, and I love it when people say that to me too. Send me an email or text, say I love you, lawrence, just letting you know, and I hope you have a beautiful day and I hope to see you around the neighborhood.

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.