I Thought Reconnection Would Fix Everything

In this conversation, Lawrence reflects on the emotional reality of parental alienation after reconnection finally begins to happen. Rather than relief alone, he shares the overwhelm, emotional exhaustion, and nervous system activation that can surface when hope, grief, fear, and love collide all at once. Through lived experience and recovery insight, the conversation explores what happens when parents spend years trying to fix, force, or hold everything together.

The discussion touches on emotional regulation, identity, boundaries, recovery, and the difficult process of letting go of control while still remaining deeply connected to your child. Grounded in honesty rather than false resolution, it offers alienated parents a compassionate perspective on healing, resilience, and learning how to stay present through uncertainty. Living fully while navigating parental alienation is not giving up, it’s an act of love, integrity, and emotional courage.

Key Takeaways

•  Why reconnection can feel emotionally overwhelming
• Letting go without giving up on love
• How parental alienation reshapes identity over time
• Emotional exhaustion behind “staying hopeful”
• Why nervous systems struggle with positive moments
• Boundaries, regulation, and recovery after estrangement
• The pressure to fix everything perfectly
• Learning to live beyond parental alienation

Chapters
00:00 - Introduction to Parental Alienation and Healing
03:00 - The Journey of Self-Care and Emotional Intelligence
05:49 - Isolation and Emotional Devastation
08:41 - The Importance of Community and Support
11:50 - Letting Go of Control in Relationships
29:34 - Letting Go: A Path to Connection
31:58 - Awareness and Family Dynamics
35:47 - Boundaries: The Key to Healthy Relationships
39:32 - The Complexity of Boundaries
47:01 - Integrating Pain into Strength
56:40 - The Journey of Recovery and Growth

Support & Community:

Parental Alienation Anonymous (PAA): Join our free 12-step support group with 16 online meetings weekly for parents, grandparents, family members, and previously alienated individuals seeking healing and recovery.

PA-A.org: Parental Alienation Advocates is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to fostering education, advocacy, and support for individuals grappling with the distressing impact of parental alienation, estrangement, erasure, and family disconnection.

All our services are free and sustained by grants and community donations. Your support helps us continue offering these vital resources.
Donate here: https://pa-a.mykajabi.com/donations-for-the-12-step-program

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

Transcript

You Are Not Alone Here

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Do you feel like you're like all alone? Like you're trying to figure out what's going on in your life and is a parental alienation, is a stranger, is it erasure, is it craziness, and you just don't know what to do? Do you feel desperate? Do you feel crazy, tired, overwhelmed, under resourced? Congratulations. I don't say that in a negative way. I say that in a like a really positive way. Congratulations. Because you're actually thinking that way and feeling that way, and you're able to track it. You're in the right place. And today we're going to be giving you some highlights from clips from a bunch of different episodes, but these are all going to be from panels of parents that are estranged, erased, alienated. Some are reconnected with their kids, some aren't. But we're going to cover a plethora of different topics, which is going to be incredibly useful for you if you're struggling and you're new to this. And most importantly, the thread that connects all these different conversations are as a path to healing. You know, and I know you're not here to heal, you're here to get your kids back or your family back or your parents back or whatever it is. But unfortunately, you know, the way through it is to take care of ourselves, is to come back home to ourselves, to start to learn how to take care of ourselves in a more loving, cohesive way, learning how to communicate, learning emotional intelligence, learning about regulation, and so many different things. And I hated that when I first got here. I was counterintuitive. I wanted my kids, you go learn this crap, give me my kids back. But today we're going to actually be listening to real lived experiences of parents that are walking this walk and grandparents and kids and young adults, and it's life-changing. Welcome to Family Disappeared. And this is going to be a powerful episode. We have over 140 episodes that you can listen to that are already recorded and from parent panels, grandparent panels, previously alienated children panels, professionals, lawyers, judges, you know, whatever you want. We have. We are a 501c3 nonprofit. Please donate. Click the button. Take a moment now to do it. Anything you donate right now is going to help the next person that hasn't found these resources yet. We need your help to continue to make everything free and accessible to everyone. And today we're going to be exploring isolation, interpersonal work, boundaries, emotional regulation, reconnection. It's going to be giving you a roadmap for healing. And the neat thing about our communities, we are a nonprofit. We've been around for over five years. We have had free support groups. We've had a bunch of other resources and trainings, and we're able to track with metrics what's really happening, what's really changing in people's lives and what's working and how it's working. And it's really interesting to watch these intersections or intersectionality between all these different parents and grandparents and kids and see what the things are that continue to work in everyone's life. And they're not going to work at the same pace, they're not going to work the same way. Every family is different. But they're all going to be incredibly useful. And they are things that you can dive into and have access to mostly for free. Right? Mostly for free. And I'll just say for me personally, I got here, I wanted my kids back. I didn't know what to do. I was in so much pain. I was dying. And in that dying and kind of like that spiral, I created a lot of harm because I wasn't regulated. I didn't know how to clearly communicate without being emotional. You know what I mean? And there's nothing wrong with crying. There's nothing wrong with sadness. Those are natural human emotions. And if all I'm doing is coming from that place and I can't even moderate myself, how am I going to engage with someone else that's involved within the system somehow in a meaningful and useful way? You know what I mean? It's just not going to happen. And sometimes there is some co-regulation and attunement and stuff happening, but there's so many missed opportunities when I go into some of these high-stakes conversations or courts or attorneys or therapists that I need to be, I need to be prepared. I need to be doing my interpersonal work. And it is about getting our families back, but it's not about getting our families back. It's about having a relationship with ourselves so we can have a relationship with any other human being, including our children. Like opening that window up, like it's about healing everything inside of us so we can start to heal all these things outside of us.

The Loneliness Of Family Erasure

SPEAKER_01 4:27

So I'm just going to jump into this first topic that we're going to hear from some panels about isolation and emotional devastation. Man, parental alienation leaves parents and children and grandparents and other family members feeling profoundly alone. Like I know life is challenging, and sometimes we feel alone and we don't have a partner or we don't have a lot of friends, or we're just going through different things or showing up as different places, whether it's high school or kindergarten or the job world or whatever it is, and there's this loneliness that comes with it, and there's this challenge that comes with it. But the actual profound loneliness and longing and isolation that comes with fighting for survival of your family unit and connection with these people that you love so much is super, super, super deep. It's disproportionate to what's really happening. And when I say that, is the focus is so rigid on this outside factors. If we can just control an X, control this, control that, they do this, they do this, then I'm going to be okay. So the disproportionate amount of energy in the beginning, at least for me, was external. And as soon as it started to focus internal, then things started to shift. And that's the hard one to grasp because we want a pill, we want instant gratification, we want what's right, we want people to support us. And it doesn't necessarily always work like that, unfortunately. And so many of us are having so much success with just taking care of ourselves, just coming home to ourselves, learning new coping mechanisms and systems. We're not using the family of origin stuff anymore for the not anymore, it's super different, super evolved. You know, the old Apple computers that used to be like the size of a large copier to now you have like a tiny MacBook. It's like that. Like we're really refining what we're doing. Like the technology's changed. We need to change too. Here's several different clips of different parents talking about this loneliness and this isolation and what it feels like and what they can do to take care of themselves.

SPEAKER_02 6:24

When I first came to the group, I was seriously depressed. I hadn't spoken to my kids in years. I'd used up a lot of energy navigating the legal system and different arenas where I thought I would find support and wasn't satisfied with the support that I was getting. I did have a job at that point and I had somewhere to live, but I felt like all the life force had been sucked out of me. I felt like I was unlovable. I felt like I'd failed my family, certainly failed my sons. I felt like I was out of options. And the system working within the system had left me really jaded and beaten down. And I was at a point where I thought if I don't find some kind of group or support network, then I was going to sink into a hole that I would have a lot of trouble getting out of.

SPEAKER_05 7:15

I was in a place called hell. Yeah. I was in total, complete hell. I was in the throes of a legal situation in the court system. I was in the midst of a custody battle where there were amazing and horrendous accusations of abuse on my part. I had lost custody of my daughter. I also had lost my job and my home at the time. And I was emotionally and psychologically devastated.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

It's still so new to me, and I am constantly uh trying to make sense of my past and my history and the stories that I believe about myself and my life and the stories I've been told, and they're changing really rapidly. And they're changing in large part because of participation in EAA. Or the first thing I noticed when I really started to feel that I was alienated was that it was a lack, a lack in emptiness. So I realized that I didn't have memories of time with my dad. I have about four or five, and at least one of them is a false memory. I don't have any memories of feeling good around him or happy or cared for or loved. I have a lot of memories of feeling alone, of feeling isolated as a child, even though I was physically in close proximity to one parent and taken away from so physically distant from another. I wasn't emotionally close to that parent. They weren't emotionally close to me, and I don't know that how capable they are of being that way.

Why Community Speeds Recovery

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Wow. So isolation is both a symptom and perpetuator of alienation, right? Like recovery has to start by us starting to have healthy relationships and safe spaces. And whether that's a 12-step support group, which is what changed my life, whether it's a religious or spiritual entity or some other kind of support group, like we need to be in places where we have some kind of framework, a recovery-based framework, where we're all working towards being a better version of ourselves to some degree, and we're getting like this healthy mirroring as we see other people change and as we start to change. Because without this safe and understanding space, like we're just we, I keep using the word we, I just keep perpetuating the same ideas, same behaviors, same harm that I'm complaining about is happening to me. I'm helping perpetuate a lot of that stuff too. And I talk about the inertia of parental alienation. And sometimes, you know, we think we're trying to push the rock up the hill and we're actually pushing it down the hill based on our behavior. So, community is a catalyst for recovery. And I talk about this every time. I talk about parental alienation anonymous, I talk about 12-step meetings. I've been around 12-steps. Oh, it's embarrassing to say, but for 38 years, you know, I'm 56 now. I started when I was 18 years old and I was at college. You know, it wasn't about parental alienation, but I landed up in a 12-step meeting for some reason. And at different periods of my life, it saved my life. And it got me here today to be recording this podcast. The direct path was a 12-step path, even though I've done all this other emotional and spiritual and interpersonal work and community work. The path and the foundation is still the steps for me. And the technology is changing. I'm improving the mainframe, I'm upgrading it. You know what I mean? I'm not just working on what I used to work on. You know, I'm mobile now, right? I'm on the internet. I know that sounds silly, but it's real. Like, you know, it didn't used to exist, but now we have this new technology, and I need to be new technology within myself when I'm uh challenged with something as so ridiculously large as parental alienation, estrangement or ration. Again, don't lock yourself into the word. The word's not important. The importance here is like recovery. Like, what do we need to change in our lives to have a chance for a different life for ourselves? Right? You've got to get your head around this for ourselves first. And as we have this different life for ourselves, then the people's lives around us start to change. And our relationships with the people around us start to change. I'm 20 years into this that I've known about it. I'm 10 years, maybe 10, 12, 13 years into it since I've known about parental alienation. And I've really been really using all these different tools in an integrated way for probably about five years now. And my relationships with my daughters and grandkids are coming back. So it's all possible. Like when we tape these old episodes, like I had no idea I'd ever have a relationship with my kids or my grandkids, but I do. And they're new and they're fragile, and I don't know exactly what that means. I'll have to let you know in five years, but for today, what we're talking about changes lives. So we're gonna hear some parents talk about supportive community, finding a network of people, making friends that are available to you and that are challenged with something similar. So you don't have to explain the language, you don't have to explain your feelings. People don't look at you cross-eyed like you're crazy, and what did you do as a parent? You know? Okay, that's enough out of me. Let's see what someone else has to say for a change.

SPEAKER_02 12:41

It feels very nurturing now that I've given myself permission to be part of it and learnt to love myself enough to include myself in it. It was very nurturing and comforting from the beginning. But I put up a lot, if I think about it now, I put up a lot of resistance because I was scared. I felt like I'd been hurt by so many other relationships in my life. I did feel very vulnerable in the group to start with, but everyone was so gentle and understanding. And everyone is at different levels of their own healing processes, but there was such a willingness to just listen and accept. And so I didn't feel like I was being judged and I didn't feel like I was being pushed to share, but I was being encouraged enough and inspired enough by everyone else with their courage. And I could just, I could had a good sense that it was, that was how I was going to heal. So after having spent many years of being quiet, but then also feeling like I was trying to speak up within the system and trying to recreate the contact with my boys, trying to have a less painful divorce and feeling like I wasn't held, I wasn't being listened to. I came into the group thinking, okay, I'm just gonna button it, I'm just gonna listen to everybody else and see what it feels like. And I had really no expectations, but the warmth of the community and the encouragement of others to they helped me to feel comfortable, to feel safe. You know what? I feel really safe in the community, and that's allowed me to heal. And I really can say now, learning how to share and learning that I didn't have to be totally coherent and that there was no right or wrong has helped me define my voice. And I didn't have a voice in my marriage, and I didn't have a voice in my family of origin. So that's a big, a big part of my growth. And I couldn't, I wouldn't have the recovery I have now without the strength of the community.

SPEAKER_01 14:27

And just to clarify, like what kind of contact do you have with folks outside of the meetings? Do you have any kind of contact with folks outside of the meetings? What does that look like?

SPEAKER_02 14:35

I have fairly regular contact. I have a sponsor that I have a really good relationship with, and she supports me, and I also get to support her. I sponsor other people, which is a really amazing experience. Um, and again, growth on both sides. I do outreach calls. Sometimes I have days in a row where there's not much contact, and other times there's lots of contact, but the idea that there's people out there that understand me, and if I needed to, and there have been times when I've really needed to reach out, they'll do their best to connect with me. And I've never had that in my life. And sometimes just the idea of that is enough to carry me through. Maybe it's an instance where I know they'll be working and they won't be able to talk to me. I'm working and I can't talk to them. But the notion that there's listening ears and there's confidence support can has oftentimes carried me through. And that's feels like an amazing gift of recovery.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

Yeah. So the community is there whether you can reach them straight away or not, and they feel supportive and you don't feel alone and isolated. You know there's people that understand the language that you're talking and understand everything that's happening within the dynamic of parental alienation, correct?

SPEAKER_02 15:42

That's right. And I often think about different members of the group. If I can't contact them or whatever the circumstances are, what would this person do in this scenario? What are the comments that I associate with these people? What's the advice they would often give me? And that can also be enough to carry me through too. I find a lot of strength in that as well.

SPEAKER_03 15:59

I'm going to say then the reaction that I had to the very first meeting was extremely healing because I'd been doing this on my own for 25 years. I'd have it all of these years to beat myself and wonder what was wrong with me, criticism is myself, think the mum must just hate me. I must be a terrible person, that my own children don't want a relationship with me. So when I went to my first meeting, there was a conversation about the a big part of this was numbered, and was also number children's month. And then it really resonated with me. And I literally felt a lightness of this heavy, heavy burden lifting off my shoulders for the first time in a couple decades. And it was profound. It was definitely a spiritual experience, and I'll never forget that feeling. And I knew right then I would be coming back.

SPEAKER_00 17:02

It was through the first few weeks of being in PAA and listening to parents. At first, I could understand and empathize with them as a parent whose children were unlawfully withheld for more than two years and for periods of time before that. But over time, when I started to really engage in the group, not so much as a parent, but as a child, and to listen to people describe how they feel, what the experience is like, that I really started to feel emotionally what my dad may have experienced. And interestingly, some memories started to come back. The first one was I suddenly remembered his smell, and that was like intense. It was a good feeling. I could like remember something about him. And I don't think I could have done it if I'd been put in a room with him. I don't think I could have been done that with a counselor saying, look at him, you have to think about him differently. First I was able to think about myself by saying, Would that be appropriate for my daughters? No, I wouldn't allow that. Okay, so it's not appropriate for me either. That was kind of the first step, and then the second step was when I see these other parents who are diverse, who are men, who are women, who have done different things, who are flawed, who've made mistakes, and I've made mistakes as a parent. So that's never from me a criticism. It's an acceptance that no parent is perfect. But yeah, parental alienation is not about who's best or perfection. So it wasn't until I really started to deeply empathize with parents that I started to feel these emotional connections to my dad, and some memories started to come back that were positive, and that included a feeling of of longing for connection and of missing him. I never had the chance to mourn him or the divorce. And so it was through listening to and talking to parents in the group that I was able to make that bridge.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

Again, it's so important about community. It's a place to have healthy mirroring and also to have corrective experiences, right? Not everyone in a program or a religious group or support group is healthy. You know, most of us aren't. And then there's a lot of people that are working a really solid program and you get to have this really healthy mirroring. And some days you don't. But the neat thing about like a 12-step framework is it's actually a step where you get to clean up stuff when you don't have a great day. You actually have a framework for languaging and a way to make a repair with someone, which no one really teaches us how to do in our family systems. We say, I'm sorry, I won't do that again. But we don't even know why we're doing that, how that's happening, and then it just repeats itself. And then the kids do the same thing that we're doing, and then we're mad at them for doing what we're doing, but we've actually helped install the software. That's must probably the most devastating thing that I see is some of the behaviors, especially when they were younger, they got back reflected back to me, which were part of my behaviors. As they're getting older now, I'm starting to see them find out that life is hard, like making a living is hard, raising a family is hard. Being a parent like is hard. You know, working 40-50 hours a week is hard, and they're starting to develop and change differently, you know. So there's more input into this closed system because now they have partners or jobs or other things that they're doing. So community, community, community.

Letting Go Without Giving Up

SPEAKER_01 20:46

This next one sucks. You know, letting go of control. Like there's no way I'm letting go of control. You know what I mean? Of some things. Some things it's okay. Like, I gotta let control if I'm waiting to get some food, and there's two other people that order before me. Like, I can't make them cook my food first, right? You know, if I'm in traffic, like I can try control stuff and move from lane to lane, but ultimately I'm gonna get there within a similar period of time. And maybe sometimes I've have someone helping me in the car that's on some kind of app or ways or some map, and they see where the accident is, and we can get off the freeway and get on somewhere else. And that's what we're talking about here, is we're talking about using resources. But the idea of really giving up control is paramount and trying to control our children's experiences, responses is futile a lot of the times. We need to understand what mechanisms are in play and and and why they're acting out. They're not just acting out because they want to say, Hey, I hate you, dad. They're hurting, they're scared. They want a normal, safe place to coexist. And it might have nothing to do with interaction that's happening, they might just be in a secondary trauma response. Months for months or years. Or maybe they might have split or cut off from themselves. And we talk about that in other episodes if you don't really understand what that means. But they're just trying to survive. So we gotta let go of control. And here we're gonna again hear from some of the panels on what letting go of control might look like.

SPEAKER_05 22:17

In the spirit of PAA and being a 12-step, I really have needed and continue to need the first step, right? In recovery, you know, this is the statement that means the most to me, right? We admitted we were powerless over alienation, right? And that includes people, the alienating parent, the child, all family relationships. And you know, in Al-Anon, they talk about the three C's, right? And the three C's are we didn't cause it, right? We can't control it, and we can't cure it. And the three C's, of course, are usually to describe the disease of alcoholism. But it's profound how easy it is to translate alcoholic to alienator and alcoholism to alienation. But in essence, what the first step has done for me, it has released me from the following dynamic. I feel like my daughter's mom and I have been chronically unskillful in our co-parenting relationship. And one element of that, and I think it's a fair statement to say that we we are both trying to more or less trap each other. So let's take her out of the equation and let's talk about me. I have uh sort of a sick need in me to trap her somehow in some sort of metaphor of a chair that she's tied to, right? And I basically want to hold up a mirror to her and say, look, and I don't want her to look away from this mirror until she sees in her reflection what I see. And this dynamic has caused me so much suffering. I cannot control what she thinks, what she sees, what she says, what she might be doing and believing she's acting in the best interest of our daughter. I have no control. My sanity and my health and my well-being and my chance at recovering a full and vibrant relationship with life rest on my ability to be contained within myself, to change what I can, which is usually me, and to have a relationship with life that is a relationship of acceptance with how things are, with how things were in the second half of 2021, and with how things you know play out. You know, the favorite quote, Lao Tzu, I think, said, stand in the center of the circle and let all things take their course. So alienation is a family disease. It has power, it has momentum, it's alive and well, and and even though it's not apparent in my life completely, it's there. And I have to continually reflect on the first step and powerlessness specifically over other people.

SPEAKER_03 25:39

I was in so much pain and discomfort, and of course, my children were the ones that I was mainly around during this time since their dad had left. And I did. I when we were together, I tried to get information from them. I told them things that weren't appropriate to tell them. But then even once they began living with their dad, I made the mistake of thinking that I would be whole as long as they loved me. So my self-concept was based on whether or not they reached out to me, whether or not they took my call, whether or not they were there when I went to pick them up. And when they weren't there or they wouldn't take my call, immediately my self-esteem just took a dive. Obviously, they don't love me. And so I gave them a lot of power that frankly wasn't good for any of us. And so I know for a fact that I did the very thing that you're talking about, and unfortunately, more than once. And, you know, even years later, when the alienation had been going on eight years, 10 years, I was still so raw and emotional that I would hear a song on the radio, and then I would call and leave them a message about, oh, I just heard this song, and all I want you to be is a man of your word, because those were the words in the song, you know? And I was just looking for any kind of relief, and I couldn't find it no matter what I did. So a lot of my tools back then, and I use that term loosely, were not very functional. They were extremely dysfunctional. But again, I was using the best tools I had at the time.

SPEAKER_04 27:28

I absolutely thought I wasn't doing anything harmful. I thought at the time the tools I was using to kind of hook my kids and get their attention and feed me what I needed to regulate my body to make me feel like, okay, I have control again. They love me. Okay, I got this. It was very hard on them. I'm mature of it. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was sending text again, sending text, the emojis, just trying to get some attention, some reflection back that I was lovable, that I was still going to be a part of their life, that they they needed me and loved me. And I put everything into getting something back that validated that I am lovable. And then it would, I remember it would just reduce all that anxiety and fear of not having a hold on my kids. It would reduce it, but I would have to keep doing those things just to keep it. It's probably like a drug addict, it was feeding something for me, something I was used to. And it wasn't until I got into the program and started learning how detrimental that tool probably was for my kids, I was able to start backing away and using a better way of getting my needs met. You know, talking to people in the program who understood where I was coming from, taking care of myself mentally, and just realizing that it wasn't my kids' jobs to fill up those spaces that were so broken inside of me. And I did it.

SPEAKER_01 29:19

So letting go is not giving up. And letting go doesn't mean that you don't care. It means that you're you're working on yourself, you're building resources, you're building capacity, and you're stabilizing. And in doing those things, it actually makes reconnection possible. So letting go is actually a mechanism that's used uh to create a warmer and friendly environment that will support connection. Right. And letting go doesn't mean you know, leaving your kids on the side of the street or leaving your parents somewhere. You know, letting go is letting go of that control, that mechanism, and usually it's a derivative of anxiety. Like if I can just control what someone else is doing or how they're doing it, how they're saying that I'm gonna be okay, that I'm not gonna die. And most of us don't know that's happening. Like when we're trying to control something, it's because we're feeling overwhelmed. We're not resources, we're not regulated. Letting go is actually, you know, giving us an opportunity to take a breath. It's not quitting, it's not giving up. But it's letting go of controlling, you know, people, places, and things. And that doesn't mean that we don't do our research, we don't educate ourselves, we don't show up, we don't have boundaries, we don't learn how to communicate. We do all of those things. You know what I mean? Letting go is not standing still. Right? Letting go is not standing still. You know, and all the stuff that we're talking about is really, you know, different systems within families. So really understanding family system patterns and behaviors and where they come from. And you know what I mean? Was I raised that way and now am I doing that? You know, maybe my ex has some trauma in their family and and they have these different behaviors that they're perpetuating. So uh unhealed patterns in my raising, my trauma will shape family dynamics with my kids and my grandkids, uh, right? Like if I'm not actually working on myself, which I choose to do through the 12 steps, I just choose to use uh communication strategies like nonviolent communication, I choose to do a lot of interpersonal work. If I'm not working on those things, if I'm not aware of how I communicate, what my triggers are, if I'm not aware when I'm making a mess, I can't say I don't really stand a chance, but I'm definitely pushing that chance further out of reach. And all the stuff that we're talking about is just giving us an opportunity to have a relationship with ourselves, to have a life, to invite all these other people into our world, including our loved ones. But it has to start with us. And it's gonna look different than you think it's gonna look. It's gonna be so much richer than you ever could have imagined if you do the work. And if at least for me, when I stayed stuck in the story, it was painful. I just spun out and circles and circles and anxiety and fear and panic attacks and my gosh, some substance abuse and and some other stuff and food, sugar, sugar me out, man. I still use that today, so let's just say that's something that I still use as a coping mechanism. So awareness is

Awareness That Breaks Old Cycles

SPEAKER_01 32:26

key. Awareness is key. And it's not linear. Sometimes we're aware, sometimes we're not. Sometimes we're super present, sometimes we're not. And and if we're taking kind of like an inventory of our day, where from a 12-step perspective, that would be like a 10-step, and we're looking at how we behave during the day, we're building capacity for awareness, we're building an understanding of what awareness could even look like for ourselves. And we have some parents here talking about what that looks like. And we also have you know previously alienated kids and young adults and adults talking about what awareness looks like in their life. And I haven't mentioned that we're giving you different perspectives even from young adults and adults that were previously alienated. As this is not just parents and grandparents, we're trying to mix in a bunch of different stuff in the show.

SPEAKER_04 33:11

My home with my family at the time, it was a very tumultuous time. And I think for years, my husband and I parented and communicated from a different experience in our own families. I brought to the table childhood baggage as well as my ex-husband did. And my kids were left to function in that with us going through our dysfunction. They were just taken along for the ride. I had my own pain that was coming up, just triggered in my own marriage. And yeah, it wasn't my children's fault. And they got taken down a road. They watched the devastation of their family fall apart. The clarity definitely has come even over the past months of being in PAA. You get to have a really good look at where your place in this, where my place is, and why I'm in the situation I'm in today. And yes, the fact that my kids who are young adults, they're functioning in their pain from a place where they're just that small child who was walking through that at the time.

SPEAKER_00 34:23

I married somebody who just felt like they fit. So love for me was being useful, taking on tasks that were difficult for them, smoothing out family relationships. There were a lot of sort of non-traditional gender lines. So I did more of the caring work, more of the caring for work, the talking to the kids, the soothing them. I took on a lot of that work and took it off of her plate. So I very much uh married and started a family that mirrored my family of origin.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

So awareness, awareness, awareness, practice, building capacity. You know, this is helping us stop repeating old dynamics. We're choosing healthier ways to relate to everyone. Right? And again, getting hyper focused on just healthier ways to relate just to our family members is not a solution. Right? Like that's a band-aid. We want to figure out how to show up in the world in a different kind of way, and it will affect our loved ones tremendously and profoundly. But it needs to be embodied, and you need to be able to look at me from any angle and see the same person whether I'm at work, I'm trying to reconnect with my kids or grandkids, or I'm having a conversation with you on this podcast. And it's not always perfect, it's messy. I'm messy. I'm a little bit less messy than I was yesterday, and hopefully well, that's not true. I'm a little bit less messy than I used to be, and hopefully I will continue to trend that way. But I'm never gonna get unmessy. I'm not, that's not gonna work for me.

Boundaries As Self Respect

SPEAKER_01 35:59

This is like a four-letter word that's not a four-letter word, but it's just like we're gonna talk about boundaries and self-compassion, and these are vital. Love without boundaries is self-abandonment. Recovery is learning to say no and to respect that we have limitations. And uh, there's a really cool thing that they say in Alan on they say no is a full sentence. Like I know that I want to explain my no to people all the time. At least I did. You know what I mean? It was important that I explained it to them, otherwise they were gonna abandon me, they were gonna hate me, they were gonna leave me, they were gonna think whatever they were gonna think. But sometimes no is just an appropriate answer. You know what I mean? Maybe I've already expressed something and you've expressed something, and then you ask me a question or come in at a different angle, I just say no. That's a boundary. And I want to say, for me, the way that I was taught about boundaries in my family of origin is like I build these boundaries. Like I really thought like I was building like a boundary, like I was setting a boundary, like it was really, really, really rigid. And a dear friend of mine that's a therapist, she's like, You don't set boundaries, you have boundaries. And I'm like, Potato, potato, you know, tomato, tomato, whatever. You don't set, you have. And she's like, Yeah, she's like boundaries are malleable, they're negotiable. Like I'm gonna have a boundary and you might have a different boundary, we might negotiate what that boundary looks like and choose to pick something different that suits both of us, or maybe we don't, but we are open to the conversation with that. And this doesn't mean like in an unhealthy, scary situation, that we're gonna negotiate what our boundary is. It's like no is my boundary, that's it. I'm super clear here. Like, there's some places where that's what it looks like. But within the complexity of relationships with people and family systems, when I set these boundaries that felt like walls to my kids, they learned to do the same thing. So they had set boundaries with me, and there was no way around the boundary because it wasn't a boundary, it was a wall. And I'm still I'm still dealing with that today, you know, 20 some odd years, 30 some odd years into this. There's a impact on how we have boundaries. Super important to learn about, super important to read about, and nuanced. I love talking about boundaries. I can do it the whole day, but I'm gonna let some other people share some of their stuff over here from some past episodes.

SPEAKER_03 38:23

In my family of origin, we had some boundaries. Like there are certain things you don't do, you do not talk back to your parents, you do not do this, you don't drink, you don't smoke, blah, right? But then with the behavioral things in the family, there was a big lack of boundaries. You know, mom is sharing things about my dad with me that were not appropriate to share with a teenage daughter, right? So all of those things from my family of origin, of course, I bring into my marriage. And everything that's happening in my marriage and with my children, and especially during that very volatile divorce controversy, I'm sharing everything with my parents, and then it's being shared with someone else. And there were no boundaries about what's appropriate to share with people and what's not. And over my years of recovery in various 12-step programs, boundaries have been a big, big part of my recovery. And one of the terms I heard early on was it's so important to set boundaries. However, we don't want them to be hatchet boundaries. Like if we haven't been setting boundaries, and all of a sudden we come in and when we set a boundary, it lops their head off. You know, it's a very hard and firm and okay. And the person is reeling when we do that. So what I've learned in my recovery is that I start out with some gentle boundaries, you know, rather than you can't talk to me like that. It's more like, you know what, it really hurts my feelings when you talk to me that way. And I just need to let you know that. And then if they still don't hear me, maybe I take it up a notch, and then maybe up another notch, and if it's going to get out of control, maybe I stop the conversation altogether. Um, so boundaries have been extremely useful for me in a lot of different arenas. Like if someone's calling me, I don't have to pick up that phone. If I'm not in a good place to have that conversation or whatever reason that I need to set a boundary, I'm not going to have this conversation right now. I can revisit it later. Or as was said earlier by Georgette, I can say to someone, you know what, let me take a minute to check my schedule and I'll get right back to you. And this has only come over years and years and years of not having boundaries. And as Georgette alluded to earlier, letting you do whatever with me, like you need me to do this, do that, even though I'm overloaded, I'm more than happy to do that for you. And PAA has completely changed my life in terms of really shoring up my boundaries and my self-care.

SPEAKER_04 41:10

Boundaries is a huge skill that I probably have just learned over the past year. So I'm like a baby. I'm still learning how to have boundaries. I'm learning how to feel comfortable with boundaries. So for me, and I never had boundaries. I'm pretty sure that I was the yes, ma'am. You needed something, I'm gonna do it. Everything's fine. I got it. It didn't matter if I was falling apart inside. I didn't know how to honor myself and say, I need a minute, let me think about it. I'm not sure. I'll get back to you, I'll let you know. I didn't have strong boundaries with my children as to how it was appropriate for me to be treated. This might sound funny, but for me, after being in the program for probably five months and I started experimenting with what having a boundary for myself looked like, it really put off my children. I noticed other people weren't real comfortable with me having boundaries of setting a limit on what I was able to accommodate, especially for myself healing and going through a lot of emotional healing. I had to make decisions whether I could be involved in certain conversations at particular times. And that really was new for me and very uncomfortable. Boundaries, it makes me feel inside of myself. I'm still nervous trying to have them because it's so foreign to me. But learning how necessary and freeing that I think of it as having a voice for myself. I'm honoring what works for me. So that's where I'm at with boundaries. I'm still in the infant stage of learning.

SPEAKER_02 43:14

I really needed the program and I wanted it, but I was frightened to begin with. But now the focus is entirely on me, and I've realized that unless I have a good relationship with myself, a good connection with myself, unless I learn to love myself, I can't connect to anyone, whether it be my kids, my grandparents, the people that I work with, the neighbor across the road. Um, and I was never able to identify that until this point, because I lived vicariously through other people. I was so codependent in my relationships that I never had my face up to the mirror to that extent. And so that's what recovery means to me. It's how I interact with people, it's how I respond to situations, how I try not to react in certain situations. Um, and then really discovering where I am. End and where the other person begins.

SPEAKER_01 44:03

Yeah. So you're you're you're just establishing your own boundaries and figuring out, like you're saying, where you start, the other person ends, and and not jumping into someone else's space. And can you share maybe a recovery moment that's not related directly to the kids? Any other instance work, other family members, is any one quick little tidbit you can share of what recovery looks like and how it's manifested in your life?

SPEAKER_02 44:24

Well, I can certainly feel it in my friendships. I know, especially as I've been walking the recovery path and I really see the benefit of it, and I feel like it's making me come to life. I have certain people in my life that I don't know that I want to uh necessarily encourage them to join a recovery program, but I can feel myself a little bit getting up on a soapbox and trying to interfere where I where I haven't been asked to help out. And so I've learned again, it's the piece where I end and where they begin. I've learned to be able to observe it without thinking that I need to necessarily rescue them or that it's my job to do that. That for me, that's part of an old identity that I had, and I'm trying, and but I can really see the different I can stop myself in the process of overdoing it, of getting out of my lane. Um, and I never used to be able to do that before.

SPEAKER_01 45:15

Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries, they are a framework for living a beautiful life, and they're useful and they're needed, and they're also complex and negotiable. And I've shared the story before. I was on a Zen retreat and a wonderful, wonderful teacher, his name was uh Alan Sanaki. He is uh he passed, I think, three or four years ago, and he was uh I think he was the abbot at the San Francisco Zen Center. You know, when he passed, but that's not where I met him. I met him somewhere else when I was doing a two-year chaplaincy program. And you get like ten minutes during the meditation sometimes to go in with some of your teachers. I think it's called like a Dyson. Dyson, I might be pronouncing that wrong. So I go into the session with Alan and I sit down and I'm telling him that I'm I'm having all these innocuous conversations with people and it's driving me nuts. Like I want to talk about real stuff, and he's like, Don't have the conversations. And I'm like, huh? He's like, Don't have the conversations. I'm like, you're telling me that I don't have to have a conversation. And he's like, Yeah, it's like if I'm in a conversation and someone's just talking at me, I don't need to put myself there. So my practice is when that happens, is I even if it's mid-sentence and someone else is talking, I'm like, hey, sorry, gotta go. Enjoy the day. And sometimes I just leave. And sometimes I stay because it's old behavior. But I'm just saying boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. What a loving, healthy, self-compassionate way to have sustainable relationships.

Turning Trauma Into Strength

SPEAKER_01 46:46

This is a rough one, integrating pain into strength. So healing is about transforming pain, trauma, processing it, metabolizing it, you know, and then we're transforming it into resilience, capacity, new skills, new insights, patience, whatever we're transforming it into, but it takes time and it takes work because a lot of the stuff that we're challenged with today comes from a really, really, really young age, and unless we go back and look at that and go, Oh wow, I can see why I did that. I remember my parents doing that to me, and now I'm doing it, or whatever it is, it might not be that simple, but it takes time. And we gotta metabolize the past. We've spoken about this before. So the amygdala, the reptilian part of your brain has no sense of time. Right? So you can have a traumatic experience on a hike when you're twenty and there's a mountain lion all of a sudden, and now you start to hike and you get kind of nervous and you think there's gonna be a mountain lion. Right? Like that's unresolved trauma that hasn't been metabolized, you haven't worked through that. Same as my child says, I hate you, or some event happened. Like if I actually haven't worked through the event, I haven't metabolized it, my amygdala doesn't know that it's still happening. So sometimes there's some kind of stimuli, a trigger that happens in a conversational situation, and I think I'm back there with a mountain lion, but I'm not. I'm just reacting if I was, or I'm just reacting as if my kid just told me I hated me. Super, super, super important part acknowledging, processing, transforming, and here's some folks sharing some of their stories with that.

SPEAKER_00 48:25

I haven't tried to get rid of it, even though I was a child and I was asked to make decisions almost under duress, which isn't fair. I still rejected the bond with my dad. And even as a child, when I think back now, it felt wrong. It it really felt wrong to be complicit in it, to be part of it. And then as I got older, around 18, I did reject him. But I rejected him because I'd been given detailed information about uh court and child support and how he was looking to reduce child support, and I called him with all this information that I should have had no knowledge of. But I think fundamentally, even as a child, by pulling away from and then rejecting the natural relationship with a parent, it leaves scars. And I don't think fully absolving myself of those is the best way to heal. I think I need to integrate that into myself in a way that brings strength as well. And I'm not sure quite how to do that yet, but I'm working on it.

SPEAKER_05 49:38

Well, I should say, you know, in order to create a collective understanding, alienation doesn't seem to exist too deeply in my daughter. Many parents come to meetings, and alienation has taken such form and such structure that the child rejects the alienated parent. So that never totally happened. But recovery in relationship with my daughter, I can tell you what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean this. Let me tell you how crazy your mother is. Oh my God, look at you know what she said in these court motions. And I know your mother manipulated you into saying things, and I want you to tell me the truth. That's what it doesn't look like. That would make things so much worse. So recovery to me today means accepting what happened, accepting that I chose someone, you know, maybe not entirely consciously, with whom I would play out to a certain extent the dynamics that were formed in my family of origin, as well as my daughter's mother's family of origin. So recovery to me means how can I be healthy and contained in relation to my daughter? How can I accept what happened and where she's at, and how can I proceed skillfully from here?

SPEAKER_04 51:11

The blessing for me, even today, is the people in PAA, like Renee, people that have who are paving the way for me, who are walking before me and sharing some of the things that they've been through as far as this goes. I can look forward to if and when my children who have stepped away for a time, I can accept that and allow them to do what they need to do in their life. And that's huge for me to just have a regulated feeling about allowing them to live their life that I don't have to control it. That's a relationship. I'm allowing them to do what needs doing without me, sticking my fingers in there and messing it up and letting them find answers to some of the things they're trying to go through.

SPEAKER_01 52:00

So metabolizing, integration, processing, work, journaling, meditating, support groups, learning how to communicate. Even dancing, you know, taking comedy workshops are great. Acting workshops are great. You really got to get to do a lot of interpersonal stuff and look at yourselves and see how other people are acting and do it. There's so many ways to work with this stuff. You know, I mean so many wonderful ways to work with stuff and with the technology we have today, even more. So integration, embodiment, presence, you know, this is all beautiful stuff. I'm going to hear a little bit more about integration from some of the folks on uh some of the past panels right now.

SPEAKER_03 52:42

Today I talk to another adult, and usually it's another adult that can relate to my situation. I talk to a lot of people about not having a relationship with my kids over the years, and I think every parent that's in this situation has seen that look from people that don't understand. And it's that look of, huh, how come you don't have a relationship with either of your kids? And you can just see the wheels turning, like obviously you did something, you know, obviously you were wrong, or you're a drug addict, or you're, you know, something you did made this situation the mess that it is. And while I did have a small part, I've done nothing even close to um causing me to not have a relationship with my kid.

SPEAKER_04 53:34

On the other hand, the beauty of my other relationships in my life is because of being in the program, I'm starting to test the wonders with my parents, just with some of the things with nonviolent communication. How can I test the wonders of trying to step into a different dialogue with my mom and dad? And it's foreign to them. I'm a different person, and I'm gently trying to plug those things into I'm having a strange relationship with my mom and dad, but I'm trying to use my new tools to kind of bring them into my world. So that's been an up and down test, but there's richness even in that for me. I'm sort of trying to heal some things with my parents for myself, as well as I have the opportunity having a college-aged daughter who has contact with me. She has been over the last 14, 15 months of my walk with parental alienation and the support group. She has been able to witness some of the things I've been doing. And I didn't realize it even until yesterday when I had conversation with her. We had a FaceTime visit, and it's emotional for me because she said, Mom, I see what you're doing. And she's like, Mom, you're different. She actually said it out loud, and we were able to talk a little bit. She doesn't know exactly what I do, but she is seeing change and growth in me. And how cool is it after going through all this alienation to have your child say, I've never felt closer to you than I have in the last year.

SPEAKER_00 55:28

It was like a shift from imagining that the universe is surrounds the earth and the sun and the planets and everything revolves around the earth to realizing that we're actually orbiting the sun. It's a revolution. And certain facts have to get thrown out. New facts can be explained, but it's an entirely different perspective, and that's what it really feels like.

SPEAKER_01 55:52

Wow, that's good stuff. And that's a great place to take some

Step By Step And Stay Connected

SPEAKER_01 55:56

perspective. These stories show that recovery isn't instant. You know what I mean? It's not it's not like instant hot water when you hook it up to your sink, you push a button, you have hot water, you don't have to boil it, you know what I mean? Like it's a step-by-step process, rebuilding trust, self-worth, you know, emotional consistency, self-regulation, attunement to yourself, just really being present with yourself, you know, and it's like anything else that we do, you know what I mean? If you happen to be an engineer now, you just didn't go to your on-demand water and push it in your engineer. Took a lot of work to get there. This is the same thing. And I don't care what it is, I don't care if I'm laying tile, if I'm an engineer, or I'm trying to be a dad. Like it all takes a lot of work, and I gotta pay a lot of attention and I gotta continuously work on myself and update my skills, and I want to phone it in a lot of days because that's what I saw my parents do. I didn't see a lot of developmental work, and they did great. They did a little bit better than their parents, and hopefully I do a little bit better than my parents, and and so on down the line. I think I think that's the dream for all of us. So step by step. Well, I hope you enjoyed that. I am super curious to hear what you have to say as we're drawing stuff from a bunch of panels. Did you like this? You need to communicate here, like I can't hear you. You know what I mean? And I don't say that in a sarcastic way, but I do say it that I'm talking into a vortex. And I think hearing all these different people's voices and experiences paramount and important. And we want to know that it resonates to present it in this way, in a more consolidated kind of way. So email us at family disappeared at gmail.com. Let us know that you love this, like, share, let other people know about this. There's some wonderful, wonderful information here, whether it's parental alienation, it's estrangement, it's family dynamics, it's blended families. It doesn't matter. All this stuff is incredibly useful. So thanks for coming out and playing in the sandbox with us today. If you're new to the community, welcome. Great resources in the show notes. We are a 501c3 nonprofit. Donate write the second, take a moment, become a monthly donor, help support the people that haven't found these free resources. Let us keep bringing this to you for free. Let us expand. You know, I say that a lot, but we're uh quite a few resources away from being able to bring in some people that can really help us expand and bring these trainings directly to you in a free, cohesive way. But you know, we do need support from the folks out there that have the resources and make a large donation if you have the resources. You know, it's tax deductible, and we're gonna help people. At least for me, it's not about the I, it's about the we. And once I surrendered to that, like my relationship started changing, and and I'm actually getting my relationships back with one of my kids right now. I'm actually gonna be flying out to go see her for the second time and see my grandkids for the second time. Come on. It doesn't get better than that, and it relates to every single thing that we just discussed. Free 12-step program, bunch of great resources in the show notes. Loved having you on the show and along this journey with us. We want to hear from you what's good, what's working. And in case no one's told you yet today, I love you, and the only reason I can say I love you today is because I've done this work. Done. That sounds like I'm done. No, I am doing this work. I learned to say I love you through the 12 steps and through the other interpersonal work that I've done. So I love you. I hope you have a beautiful day. I hope to see you around the neighborhood sometime, somewhere, someplace, and that's what we got for today.