TALK IT OUT
Welcome to Talk It Out, the thought-provoking podcast that brings engaging discussions, insightful interviews, and interactive segments right to your screen. Our dynamic hosts dive deep into a wide range of topics, exploring the complexities of life, relationships, current events, and much more. With expert guests, lively debates, and a belief in creating an inclusive space, Talk It Out challenges conventional wisdom, encourages critical thinking, and fosters understanding and empathy. Through interactive segments and viewer participation, we ensure that your voice is heard and valued. Join us on this exhilarating journey of discovery, where every episode is a gateway to enlightenment and connection.
TALK IT OUT
S1 E1 Part 1 - The Marathon of Growth with Alyiah and Jason
Embarking on a journey that's as raw as it is enlightening, we, Jason and Alyiah, invite you into the mosaic of our lives on the latest episode of Talk it Out. Picture the dust of southeastern Arizona, the pulse of Atlanta's streets, the camaraderie of the 82nd Airborne Division, and the sting of lower back pain that's all too familiar to some. These are just snippets of my, Jason's, story, interwoven with a passion for sports and the arts that sustain me. Alyiah brings her own colors to the palette, detailing life in a blended family and the insights gleaned from a childhood shadowed by her mother's therapeutic practice, all while nurturing a thriving wellness and beauty spa.
Then, we wade into the deeper waters of personal trauma, examining the turbulent currents that shaped our childhoods and the challenge of caregiving amidst the whirlpool of parental mental health and substance issues. It's about unearthing the roots of those scars, the power of asking "why," and the complex art of forgiveness that doesn't excuse but seeks to understand. We also lace up our metaphorical sneakers, paralleling the mental marathon of therapy with the physical rigor of athletic training—underscoring that the road to mastery, be it in personal growth or a craft, is paved with persistence, patience, and the courage to take that first step. Join us; it's a conversation that promises neither shortcuts nor sugarcoating, just the honest strides of two souls committed to growth, understanding, and connection.
Welcome to Talk it Out. We're your hosts. I'm Jason.
Alyiah:And I'm Aaliyah, let's get into it.
Jason:We'd like to start off by taking a couple minutes just to introduce ourselves. I'm Jason. I'm 29 years old, turning 30 in December. I was born and raised in southeastern Arizona, middle of nowhere town. Most of you wouldn't know the name Arizona, middle of nowhere town. Most of you wouldn't know the name. I did move after my freshman year from Arizona to Atlanta, georgia, and that's where I spent my teenage years going to school.
Jason:My early 20s I spent in the army. I was in the 82nd Airborne Division out there me. I was in the 82nd Airborne Division out there where I jumped out of planes, and unfortunately, jumping out of planes really messed up my body. I've got a pretty bad lower back now because of it, and so that's one of the things that we have to deal with is figuring out ways to alleviate my pain and eventually have surgery to get it all fixed up.
Jason:I'm the oldest of four boys when it comes to my blood relatives. I had two half-brothers on my dad's side, and then I also have an older step sister and a younger step brother. My hobbies I like to watch and play sports pretty much anything sports related and you're going to get me hooked. I also love just having outdoor adventures with the family, with Aaliyah, with our two pups. We have Nola, that's a pit bull mix, and Henry, who is a Boston Terrier. Henry is five turning six this year and Nola is four turning five this year, so we love having them and being able to get outside and connect a little bit more with nature.
Jason:I also enjoy playing video games, and music, for me, is something that I hold very close to my heart.
Jason:I find a lot of peace and a lot of solace listening to music, and it's always been something that I've been able to lean on ever since I was a child and really didn't have other ways to express emotion or to connect with people. I guess Music always provided that for me, with the different lyrics and things that people would use and the way that they would be vulnerable with their listeners. Right now, I'm currently working for Aaliyah as her office manager, and I'll also be the one who is editing the videos for those of you watching on YouTube and also the audio for all of you that are just listening on a podcast service. I am brand new at the editing, so any help or any advice that you see or hear as you are tuning into the podcast would be greatly appreciated. You can find us on Instagram at TalkItOut underscore show if you wish to send us a message or give any advice on anything that you are seeing or hearing on the show please just be nice right.
Jason:Um, our comment section is definitely going to be a place that we don't stand for any type of bullying or hate speech, negative slander towards anybody, not just us in what we're doing on the show, but also towards each other. I think it's just as human beings we should expect each other to be nice and respectful each other to be nice and respectful and I am excited to get to share more about myself as today's episode goes on and as future episodes go on. I think there's a lot of different life experience that all of us have, and Aaliyah and I want to use this platform to share our personal experiences and just be able to get to know you and connect a little bit more.
Alyiah:Yeah, and be able to share everybody else's stories as well on different platforms like Instagram Community is really important to us. So it's one of the reasons that we are even doing this podcast is just to be able to connect with other people. That we are even doing this podcast is just to be able to connect with other people and, in turn, we want to be able to connect with you. So I guess I'll introduce myself now. I'm Aaliyah. I am 24 years old. I'm going to be 25 in June.
Alyiah:I love astrology, energy work, hanging out in nature with the family. That's definitely one of our like biggest hobbies to do together is to go out and just be in nature and connect with Mother Earth. I guess I come from a blended family. I have two older sisters and two older brothers, and then it is me and I have a different mom than my siblings. My parents divorced when I was four years old and I've been in therapy since I was about five, so I have kind of a deeper understanding of like clinical therapy work. My mom is also a licensed clinical social worker and she got her master's degree when she was newly divorced and I went to class with her a lot actually. So I feel like I should have been an honorary graduate. Where's my diploma? Just kidding.
Alyiah:But I've always loved mental health. I've always loved the clinical side. I've always loved the science side of things because I was surrounded by it, because of my mom, and I definitely owe my love for the background to my mom because she introduced it to me. I don't know what our life would look like without that because, being a single mom, she worked a lot. So I went to trainings. I, even when I got older, I voluntarily went to trainings because I got interested in it.
Alyiah:I've sat through court hearings. I've done the whole shebang. I am an entrepreneur, a wife, a friend. I absolutely love what I do for work. I own a spa dedicated to wellness and beauty and self-love Golden Hour Wellness Co. Our focus is to help people connect to themselves and find a genuine self-love and self-care. I absolutely love connecting with my clients and most of my clients end up becoming my friends and I look forward to our appointments every single month and I hope that they feel the same way. I think that they do. But honestly, with this podcast, we both just really wanted to focus on the power of connection and communication and understanding.
Alyiah:Jason and I both came from completely different backgrounds and belief systems that we have now and similar similarities to though yeah, yeah, we, um, we just learned how to kind of turn our thinking into coming from places of our true selves and love instead of fear and trauma responses, and we really think that we can help others see what the process of healing looks like at home and the power that comes from being vulnerable and being self-aware and having connections with the people around you that are deep and meaningful.
Jason:And even just the power that comes with trying.
Alyiah:Yeah.
Jason:You don't have to be doing those things to feel that happiness or to feel that change, but just making the attempts Right, I think is a huge thing. And I have to think it's a huge thing because that's where I currently lie.
Alyiah:Yeah Well, I'm trying. When you try, you can hopefully evolve to become better at whatever you're doing, but if you never try, then you'll never know. You'll never know if I did this differently, where would my life be Right, because time doesn't stop.
Jason:Yeah, and for me, I'm going to give you a little bit of a long winded explanation for why I personally want to do this show. Um, the show is called talk it out right, and it being all the crap that we never want to talk about all the vulnerable aspects of our lives that feel like they need to be guarded. Those are the types of things that I feel like we're going to be discussing here on this show, here on this show, and so well and even honestly it even fun aspects of relationships, fun aspects of things like that it can be anything right, but it
Jason:includes the hard stuff too, right, and I put more of an emphasis on those things because a lot of the time we I mean when we have good things to share, I think we're pretty excited to share them as people. Those are the things that we always want to talk about. The things that we post on Instagram, the things that we post on Facebook the happy moments of our lives, yeah, but those more intimate moments that we tend to keep close are the things that I kind of want to open up about here. And to get started, I grew up with my mom. Until I was nine years old, my mom struggled pretty heavily with untreated mental health disorders, as well as drug addiction, and during that time, it was just myself and my youngest brother that were really living with her. My middle brother she lost custody of at a pretty early on in my life and, due to her issues with mental health and with her drug addiction, she was a pretty absent mother.
Jason:Throughout my childhood and starting at between six and seven years old, I was basically raising my youngest brother. I was basically raising my youngest brother, waking us up in the morning, making sure that both of us had breakfast, which we didn't have very much money and I was also very young, so that almost always consisted of slapping some peanut butter on some toast and calling it a day, and then I would walk myself to school, where every day I was late to school, not even sure how I got passed through those grades. But then, when I was nine years old, my dad got custody of me from my mom and with my dad he was more present as a parent and he definitely provided me with a far better environment than what I had been living in. But, with that being said, he also struggled heavily with untreated mental health disorders and on top of that he had an alcohol addiction, health disorders and on top of that he had an alcohol addiction. And so, living with both my parents, I developed a pretty skewed view of the world and I felt like I was never safe and I had to just basically live on survival instincts all the time. During that time I feel like I created a lot of negative rules for myself that I started to live my life by, and continue to live my life by well into my adult years.
Jason:To live my life by well into my adult years, I also held on to a good bit of anger and resentment toward my parents, because I felt like I had been betrayed by them, and I felt like a lot of the people that were supposed to love me the most. I just wasn't entirely getting all of that love from them. And, with all that being said, I never really had a full picture of why my parents made the decisions they did or what led to them being in those situations throughout their lives. And so, as a kid, that's why it was just a lot of anger, because I didn't see the full picture. I thought it was just because I wasn't good enough, and as I got older, I was able to gain the knowledge of the why behind their actions and their decisions, the whys behind what led you to that point in your life.
Jason:Well, and not only were you able to hear these things, but you asked Right, and that is thanks for bringing that up, because that's, I mean, really the link that was holding me back from being able to work through some of that trauma is because I just never had the thought cross my mind to even ask them.
Jason:You know, what was the reason you were there in those situations. My vision was so clouded by my anger and my resentment of not feeling loved that I wasn't even thinking to ask the question. And the question one word provided me with so much understanding.
Alyiah:Well, and I think the way that it kind of happened we can touch on a little bit right now is our therapist that we have been going to every week for a year and a half.
Alyiah:Yeah, he's been really trying to help us work through our trauma, which is a very important aspect when it comes to healing and mental health and trauma work is working with a professional, through those things and he had just mentioned through those things and he had just mentioned you were kind of telling him how these situations that you were in, you were telling him how it made you feel.
Jason:Yeah, it made me feel like I was second choice to the drugs, second choice to the alcohol right and he said, well, have you ever excuse me?
Alyiah:I got ahead of myself. I was excited. He said, well, have you ever asked them why do you know their side of the story? And he was like jason was like no, I never even thought. I never even thought to ask them why or if there was a reason, because you had already made up this whole story and closed the book, from your perception only.
Jason:Yeah, and maybe someday I'll be able to share with you, um the specific responses that that I was able to get during that time, but it is, um something that I hold very close to me, Um, and also something that I would have to discuss more with my parents before I feel comfortable putting that kind of information out.
Alyiah:Because it is their story.
Jason:Right, yeah, and for me, those whys. It doesn't give my parents any sort of an excuse. It's not a way for me to say yeah, it's not a way for me to say, oh okay, well, you were going through this and it led you to this, this and this, and it doesn't mean that it's okay, it doesn't mean that their decisions were the right, correct decisions, but it gives me understanding. It helps me know that there was more to that book that alia was talking about.
Jason:it wasn't the end of the chapter um well, and I think that understanding that I was able to get, if you're able to ask those questions, those hard questions, to people in your life who you feel disconnected from, who you may feel wronged you. I'm not going to say I guarantee you're going to get the response that you want to get or a positive response, but I do think that there's a pretty good chance you could hear something that changes your life.
Alyiah:That even just adds in a point of understanding where other people are coming from and almost stepping outside of your natural man, we'll say, because, honestly, it is survival instinct to think of yourself and how you're going to live the next day. So it's no wonder that it is human nature to have to overcome the ego and overcome the selfishness, because we all have the capability to become that. We all have the capability to become that. Narcissism is a learned behavior. It's not something you're born with, right, and just looking at it that way helps you find these pockets of compassion for people, which also, in turn, is compassion for yourself. And just looking at things from a different point of view, and maybe the way that you see XYZ is what's the thing that's holding you back? Maybe your perception, maybe your book, the way you've said this is the way that the world works. Maybe it really is the thing holding you back.
Jason:Yeah, and I don't share these things about my parents to put them on blast or anything like that. It's not something that I am sharing with you to get back at them in any way. I am simply sharing this with you because that is my experience, that is my story. I love my parents. I am loyal to the both of them through everything. So that's not my intention here and I hope they don't feel that way either. And for me, sharing this with you my life experience again is why I want to do this show.
Jason:Everything that I've told you up to this point is because these are the things that a lot of us go through. We all have our own traumas. We all have our own negative moments in our life that we have to work through mentally as we get older and as we have a deeper understanding of the things that are important to us and for me more specifically. I know there's a lot of you out there who have gone through something very similar to me and I know from experience and from friendships that I've had through the years, a lot of us that grow up like that don't talk about these things. We don't feel safe to talk about these things.
Alyiah:Because you never learned how to feel safe.
Jason:Yeah, and so I want to show you how I am going about trying to overcome these things, how I'm going about trying to create a better life for myself and for the people that I love around me as well, and for the people that I love around me as well. And I think it's important that not only, hopefully, I'm able to inspire you, but that you are willing to be vulnerable with us, that you're willing to share your stories, your experiences with us, because I think, as much as you might be able to learn from our stories and our experiences, we're going to learn at least that much from your experiences and your stories, if not more.
Alyiah:I think, especially me. I'm so. I am so willing to listen to information. And because I'm so willing to listen to information, I feel like I have been able to figure out how to evolve my thinking and not stay stuck in my ways. Stuck in my ways, and I don't think that that necessarily looks the same for everybody and I don't think that it should. Our differences is what makes our society great. But there were some things in my world that I was like that's just how the world is. And there were some things in my world that I was like that's just how the world is. And I am in the thick of learning how to deconstruct that and it's not easy.
Alyiah:But it is really inspiring for me to see you being vulnerable, because I know here's my freaking cancer, cancer baby coming out. Um, I know the way that you were raised. I can't okay, I definitely need tissues over here. Um, I know the way that you were raised to look at the masculine energy and thank you, a woman in modern day.
Alyiah:It is very inspiring and hopeful for me to see somebody who is stepping into their true masculinity, because I know that that's what you want to be in, because I have never felt as supported, respected, protected in our relationship than I do since you've started doing this, and I just really appreciate it, and I think that it's really, really important for everybody to see men being vulnerable with men, women being vulnerable with men, men being vulnerable with women, women being vulnerable with women.
Alyiah:And I think that's where this joke is something that's really special, because we didn't learn how to be in relationships with each other At least a lot of us in relationships with each other, at least a lot of us. Um, there are some people who, I believe, got to grow up in a more progressed home, but a lot of us were trapped in generational trauma and trauma, and to be able to see how these relationships were supposed to be deeper and rooted in trust and love and care in a healed environment instead of a traumatized environment, is important, and it's something that you can learn how to do.
Jason:Yeah, and it's for me. It's also important to note that I I feel like I have made a lot of great strides with my mental health, um, and with being a better husband to you and everything like that, but I also it's important that people know your role in it all as well, because you pushed me and motivated me to get to that place.
Alyiah:Well, I'm already crying.
Jason:And you also, on top of of pushing me and motivating me to get there, you stuck by my side for years when I was not ready or not willing to get to there, to that place, ready or not willing to get to that place. And so for everybody, for everybody that's out there, I think you just need to know that, whether you're the one providing the motivation or you're the one being motivated by somebody, allowing yourself to knock down those walls of self-defense or fear or whatever it might be, and be vulnerable with each other, it goes a long way toward helping each other heal and towards all of us growing as a people.
Alyiah:Right, yeah, well, and because of that, I've been able to see both of us make deeper connections with the people around us, more than just like you and I um, I feel like the people that we see often and that we have connections with often we have good connections with and we're able to do that because we have a good foundation at home and it's important to have that safe place to come back to and you get to make your safe places, hopefully as far as emotional well-being, hopefully as far as emotional well-being, you have the power to do that if you and the people around you make a valiant effort, really, really try. It goes down to the trying. If you never try, then you never try, then you never will. Like, trying is the first step.
Jason:Yeah.
Alyiah:You know what I mean. Like that's why it is important to and it takes time. It's not like you're going to go out and be able to freaking. Maybe you can cry on camera or just jump into a full trauma therapy session and work out all your issues. Like no, it takes practice, so much practice, like we've been in therapy for every week for a year and a half. That's a pretty long time. Granted, we both have some pretty big traumas to work out in life, so it makes sense.
Jason:Yeah, and on top of practicing, for me it's I mean, it's almost like you're just learning to practice. Yeah very beginning stages. It's not like you know what you're doing right Because you're not already? You know a basketball player and going out there and hitting shots. So this is the very beginning of the process. You're going out there. You're not touching the rim.
Alyiah:This is like. This is like peewee ball. This is like you're learning the foundation to be able to be great one day.
Jason:Yeah, yeah, um, but I think making note of that is just important, because for me there were so many times where it just felt like, oh my gosh, I yeah sure I've taken a step forward, but then it feels like I'm taking six steps backwards and it would get so disappointing, so discouraging for me Overwhelming. And I had to learn, over time and with repetition, that failing is okay. Yeah, well, not only that that, but it's going to happen right, like failing is literally part of the process.
Alyiah:You miss a hundred percent of the shots you do not take. It's a reason. There's a reason that, like sports, analogies go deeper and it's because they are using. Athletes understand the power of using your physical body over and over and over practice, practice, practice, practice to be great until it becomes second nature right and mental health is kind of doing that for the muscle your brain, like your brain, is a muscle yeah it can grow.
Alyiah:It can change. It can change it can. There are parts of it that can die, like the brain is amazing yeah.
Jason:With that being said, do you want to get into our first topic?
Alyiah:Yeah, let's do it.
