AUTHOR CHAT: Deborah J. Cohan's "Welcome to Wherever We Are"

Can you hold two truths at once?
 
I sit down with author and sociologist Deborah J. Cohan to explore her memoir, Welcome to Wherever We Are, a clear-eyed look at psychological abuse, loyalty, and the quiet heroics of caregiving. From the first moments, Deborah names what so many experience but struggle to articulate—gaslighting, threats, verbal assaults, and financial control—and shows how a child’s devotion to her father can coexist with a fierce need for boundaries.

As we trace the book’s path through a pandemic launch, Deborah explains why a sociological lens makes memoir more than confession. She connects the dots between family dynamics, gendered expectations, healthcare systems, and the invisible labor that daughters and partners shoulder. Her years counseling violent men at Emerge, the nation’s oldest batterer intervention program, sharpen her insights: behavior can change, accountability matters, and empathy does not erase harm. That background also deepens her own reckoning with a brilliant, creative, and often wounding father.

Rather than preaching forgiveness, Deborah argues for something braver: ambivalence. Holding two truths—love and injury—without flattening either. We talk about staying present at the end of a complicated life, advocating from a distance, and confronting the limits of what one caregiver can do under debt, time pressure, and grief. Along the way we surface practical takeaways for anyone navigating eldercare, emotional abuse, or family estrangement: document patterns, set sustainable boundaries, recruit support, and learn the language that makes the unseen visible.

We close with the fuel that keeps Deborah moving—art, nature, movement, laughter—and a glimpse at her next project on her mother and creativity. If you’re searching for thoughtful conversation on caregiving, gaslighting, domestic violence education, and healing family patterns, this one offers tools and tenderness in equal measure. If the conversation resonates, tap follow, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs a little more language for their story.

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Link to this episode’s book:
Welcome to Wherever We Are by Deborah J. Cohan

Other links:
The Complete U by Deborah J. Cohan
DeborahJCohan.com

This episode is produced, recorded, and edited by me. 
 Xx, Alex

@babesinbooklandpod

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Transcript

Framing The Memoir’s Core Tension

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to Babes in Brookland, your women's memoir podcast. I'm your host, Alex Franca, and today author Deborah J. Cohan joins us to discuss her memoir, Welcome to Wherever We Are, a memoir of family, caregiving, and redemption. Today's conversation is extremely layered. What do you do when the person who shaped you also wounded you? Deborah's memoir dives into emotional and psychological abuse, loyalty, caregiving guilt, and the radical act of embracing ambivalence. Our conversation is intimate, it's thoughtful, it might make you rethink what forgiveness even means. I'm just so excited to have you on the podcast because honestly, Deborah, your memoir was so compelling to me. I am in awe of what you were capable of to see and to hold on to the duality of who your father was, hold on to the love. I think a lot of us can resonate with your experience. Maybe not necessarily the abuse, though I think unfortunately a lot of people can, but this idea that our parents are people too, with faults, big faults. And ultimately it is up to us to decide how and if we want to keep them in our lives. You chose to be there for your father until the end. And I appreciated your perspective, even as I wonder if I could have, would have done the same.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Lots of complicated topics come up in the book. So it's fun to unpack it with someone who is really thoughtful about it and taking it seriously and just sort of getting it. Oh, yeah.

Publishing In A Pandemic

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Okay, before we really dig in, I want to share this quote because I think it just really encapsulates your memoir to kind of introduce it to people before we get into it. You write, Life forces us to sit with juxtaposition, abuse and love, fear and hope, memory and blank space, joy and grief, connection and disconnection. This book is an attempt to make sense of these family fault lines primarily through the prism of my relationship with my father, an extraordinarily complicated man. Okay, so your memoir came out in 2020. What's the response been like in the past six years? Anything that you're like, oh, wish I wouldn't have said that. You teach it in your class. You are a sociology professor, so your students read it. That must be that must be a wild experience.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

It really is. It really, really is. There's a lot to say about that, actually. Yeah, it's so weird. When you say six years, it's hard to believe that it's like my little baby is in kindergarten or something. You know that it's really bizarre. And you know, and you can see in this room that I've got the poster of that book, and then my new book that just came out in July, which is not a memoir, but it there's definitely a lot of personal stories in it about prepping for college. So it's interesting. There's a lot of ways in which this book, I mean, it's kind of evergreen, right? People could read it really at any time. The topic is one that sadly, in a way, it continues to resonate with people, and it will continue to just, you know, given demographic shifts and um so many people involved in caregiving and so many people involved in complicated family dynamics. It's not a how-to book, but people still seem to take away some lessons or some some thoughts that help them kind of manage their own situation, which is what I hoped to do. My regret has nothing to do with the writing of it. In fact, there's really nothing in it, it's freeing to be able to say this, that there's nothing where I'm like, oh my God, I wish I had never said that, or oh my gosh, I wish I had never put this out there, or oh, I really wish I had said this. I don't feel that way. My regret is that it's hard to write books. It's hard to get them published and find a good publisher. And then it's hard to, you know, promote our work. Try doing that for your first book in a pandemic. And that was my situation. So this like dream of becoming, you know, an author of a book, which was something I really wanted to do. I had published before, but I really wanted this book. This book is like such a, I mean, it is my truly like a passion project for me. And um, it's really like a heartfelt kind of a project. And it was really rough going, sort of funny. It came out on Valentine's Day in 2020, which was so fitting because I love Valentine's Day. And um, and my dad and I actually always had a connection with Valentine's Day. He was always, he was just always very sweet about stuff he did for Valentine's Day. And it was just, it was so fitting when I found out that was the publication date. Since of course I had no say in that date. You know, I didn't know at the time as I was getting ready to launch this, like, oh, in a month, like I'll have a month to do a book tour and go around talking to people in different states. And it was so exhilarating. It was just spectacular. And the stories I have from being on that book tour are just a few really incredible moments that really stand out. And then it was just really hard to then go to, okay, now I have to figure out how to do this otherwise. I mean, I had my few moments of almost like a kid, like having a temper tantrum. It was like a brief tantrum, too, because it was just like, no, like this is what I want, you know, like and I didn't really realize at the time. And and now, like, here's an example that like still years later, I would be on Zooms talking with people, doing podcasts, doing these things. I mean, it's a wonderful outcome of what was really challenging when it began.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

You you kind of were robbed of this experience that you were looking forward to. You got a taste of it, and then it was like, nope, sorry, just kidding, never mind.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

That was the part that was really, really hard. I was lucky for what I did get, you know, and then that just sort of started some word of mouth. It's just fun to have those conversations about a project that's been in your mind and in your heart for so long, and it's like weighed on you so, so much. Yeah. Coupled with the fact that just that was such a you know, such an intense year for for everyone for so many different reasons, obvious ones and maybe less obvious ones.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

I totally resonate with this idea of like every time you create art, you're putting a piece of your soul out there. And you, I think most of us create art because we want to impact the world in a positive way. Either say, hey, this is what I was experiencing. Are you experiencing it too? Or ask people a question to sit and reflect on. And you just want to make as many connections as possible. It's not even about this ego thing where it's like, I did this amazing thing and everyone needs to recognize me. It's like, here's this part of my heart, and I want to just share it with you and I want to share it with as many people as possible. I think your book will continue to grow in importance and resonate with people because we have an aging population. We have a major disconnect with generations right now where people are really struggling to love one another, even within their same families. And I really think that your book offers not answers, Deborah's way of navigating that encourages us all to ask questions that maybe we reach different conclusions to. Like I said, I don't, I don't know if I could have done what you did, Deborah. You know, just who I am at this point in my life, I don't know. But does your experience make me think? I do keep coming back to your memoir. And I just, I just keep thinking about it. I just keep thinking about it, which is, I think, why you wrote it, you know?

SPEAKER_00 7:37

Yeah, I mean, that's like the greatest love letter to an author, really, is like if the work, if it does continue to raise questions for someone or that you kind of keep coming back to certain pieces or parts or lines or whatever, I feel like that's, you know, the best writing certainly does that for me. I think we write to connect. It seems more crucial than ever now with the state of the world to, you know, to sort of keep doing that.

Why Sociology Deepens Memoir

SPEAKER_01 8:01

Yeah. I think that there's a really specific point of view that you bring as a sociologist. So before we really get further into it, in a nutshell, what is sociology and how you kind of became interested in the field, your education, career, and background?

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Well, I went to college at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I tell the story that I was enrolled in a philosophy class and I sat, you know, sort of close to the front. It was a big lecture hall, um, big enough, I guess, at that time. And um, I was just nodding off. I was just, I'm not getting this. This is like, you know, my dad was just like, oh, you know, a college degree is incomplete without a philosophy class. So, you know, I had took it with that idea of I guess I should have a philosophy class as a liberal arts, you know, student. I just couldn't deal with it. And the class I really wanted to take, I was very far down on this waiting list for this social problems class in the sociology department. About three weeks into the semester, the phone rings, and it's my advisor who said, you know, really great news. There is a spot in the social problems class if you would like it, you know, and you'd have a lot of catching up to do. And I said, Yes, absolutely, sign me up. I took that class. I'm still in touch with that professor, by the way. I love that. Yeah, that was one of my best stories from the the book tour. He showed up. The coolest part is I got to introduce him to one of my very favorite former students. That is so cool. That was really incredible. So I say this to say that he was he was really formative. I mean, like I was learning a lot in that social problems class that semester that was it just gave me language and tools to make sense of things I had already cared about, race relations or drug abuse or suicide or like any kind of you know, social problem essentially. And it just gave me um a lens for seeing the world in a new way. And it was from that class I I went to my advisor and declared the sociology major in my, it was my second semester of my freshman year. I think what I love about sociology is that it's like, you know, you're looking at very common things. It's all stuff that people have have heard about, like if it's weddings or childbirth or divorce or death or whatever, but we're looking at it in a really uncommon way, in a way that it, you know, it's different than psychology because we're looking more at larger social forces in people's lives. So as well as like the individual's relationship to the larger society. So what I find compelling about sociology is just the look at not just the individual, but the larger structure, the larger structure of the society and the structure of the institutions that we inhabit, like families, for example, religion, the educational systems, you know, mass media, the workplace, the government. You know, all of these different things are always weighing in and on our lives. And sociology really is a way to make sense of the individual's placement and role in in those institutions and sort of the impact that the individual can have on, or groups of individuals can have on those institutions, and also the role that those institutions have on individuals and groups of individuals. You know, what I try to say to my students is that the institutions socialize us in certain ways as human beings, but then we also give back messages, you know, there's like push and pull, and there's ways in which individuals, of course, groups of individuals agitate for social change or personal change or whatever it might be. I find it to be a very compelling perspective and one that really lends itself well to memoir. And just in the same way I'm talking about sociology, like we could talk about memoir, because like with memoir, there is the sense of I'm telling my personal private story with all of its idiosyncrasies and whatever that's really particular to my situation. But if I tell it well, it's going to be relatable and universal to a much larger group. So you didn't need to have grown up in Cleveland as an only child with parents like I did and all of this stuff at the time I did to still find it something that speaks to you.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

I I took a workshop years ago with the writer Rebecca McLanahan. I remember her saying this was so long ago in 2003, but she made a comment of the, you know, there's like the I in memoir, the capital letter I, but then there's like the I E Y E of the larger sort of public. When she said it, it was like light bulbs went off in my head because it was like, that's exactly what I teach my students with sociology, is that for me, memoir and and sociology just go totally hand in hand. And part of the reason I assigned the book is because it does touch on a zillion different sociological issues, and the students seem to do better with story. They can ask and talk to me about hopefully anything they want, so that this is a way for them to go a little deeper. Plus, I really work with a student population that I mean, most I don't think any of them have had the experience really of talking with authors and having that sort of time. I mean, because there are so many other issues in it, right? Yeah. The stuff about grief and there's divorce and later in life marriage and demographic shift stuff and friendship and the family violence, obviously. You know, all so many different pieces in it. There's a lot that it touches on.

Naming Psychological Abuse

SPEAKER_01 13:32

It just reminds me that like the more exposure people have to the ways that other people live their lives, the more connection that you actually and like reflection that you actually see of yourself in them. And it helps us get rid of that otherness that I think it's true.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

I do think that memoir, good memoir can invite compassion. Memoir that lacks the self-reflection. Yes. Is is memoir that doesn't, and there is that. I mean, there's definitely enough of that out there too. I think memoir that is really introspective and that then asks the reader to like go deeper too. I mean, that's like everything I do with my students. I've I've been teaching for 30 years, and I I mean, I feel like the constant refrain I always get from students is you you got me to think about things I never thought of before, or you got me to think about the world differently or my place in the world. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Why I hold the beliefs that I hold, and if those are actually accurate beliefs.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

Oh my gosh, exactly. Because a lot of students will come from backgrounds where they weren't taught to question. In fact, questioning was bad. And so, you know, and here they are in a situation where I'm like pushing that further and further and deeper and deeper. And so it's a little scary and threatening. Sometimes like people will resist it, but then they also will often find it very freeing. You know, it gives them permission to sort of be their own person.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

Right. Yeah. In the memoir, you gave us so much of yourself. You're so vulnerable, so honest with some really, really difficult experiences that you went through. And it's because of that generosity that you invite people in to question these things and reflect on these things and reflect on humanity as a whole. I really appreciated it. And I feel like because of the way that you view the world, would you say that like you see the good in people a lot easier, maybe? Or you understand, you don't write people off, you don't seem jaded. You try your best to understand people instead of judge them. Do you think that's who you've always been? Is that be is that why you were drawn to sociology?

SPEAKER_00 15:35

I was always the kid who was super curious, you know. You know, in the same way I tried to bring what I call in the book a tender curiosity to looking at these really difficult issues. I also feel like I try to help other people do that for themselves. And I always have, like in the work I did with violent men as a counselor, with students, with friends, even, you know, I've always been someone who people reveal a lot to. So I've held a lot of difficult information. But yeah, as a kid, I was really, I was just really curious. I was always asking a million questions, and I was always kind of interested in how things work, how you know, why people behave the way that they do, you know, I go back to those old diaries and I look at what I said as a seven or eight-year-old, the only two years I really kept a diary in my life. And I really, it's like I looked at that and I was like, oh my gosh. I mean, there's a lot of maturity in those entries too, in a way that's like a little too overly grown up. There's the the sense that I could see things for what they were. But I do think that people who grew up in situations with domestic violence and stuff, there is a little bit of a sixth sense with certain things.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

You have to start paying attention to people's behavior in order to maybe stop something from happening.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

Right, exactly. And at the same time, like uh the book is it's true to kind of a little girl I was too, though, in terms of like I I love my dad. I wanted us all to be happy. I'm not really someone who lets go of a relationship easily or something. I I can appreciate some complexity and just the fact that, like, you know, people are walking contradictions. I mean, you know, we're just all kind of a bundle of contradictions in terms of what we believe or what we do. And sometimes it's really aggravating, but it's just human. It's just the way people are.

SPEAKER_01 17:25

Yeah. You've brought up your father. Tell me about your dad.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

I was really blessed with growing up with two parents, both both of whom are just wildly creative. That's really the quality in both of them that I I really wanted to emulate. With my mother, it was her art. With my father, it was the creative work with advertising that he did. He was a wonderful photographer, and he he was just very creative in terms of his aesthetic as well. They they both just had quite an eye. And I think that's part of the curiosity piece too, and also part of the perceptive piece as well, is that growing up in a home where it was like really important. Like, how do you see things? How do you know things was sort of drilled into me at a really young age, you know, like going to a museum and like what do I see? What am I remembering? It it wasn't so much about like how do you look to others so much as it was like more, how do you see? How do you look at the world? I feel like that was a really good quality to get from both of them, actually. Yeah, I mean, I think with my dad, you know, the way I describe it is he was just so adoring and so brilliant and so difficult and so, you know, and abusive. And I want to make really clear for listeners that, and part of the goal with the book was that I was really trying to help people understand that abuse is not just physical, it's not just sexual abuse. Those are horrific forms of abuse also. What I was really trying to do was to illuminate all the ways in which there are other kinds of abuse that are extremely damaging, like the emotional abuse, verbal abuse, all this, all the psychological kind of warfare and financial control, threats. Threats are huge. That's so abusive. And I mean, right now we are living in a time that all of that seems like it's coming at us in a very global way. And I also feel like people have less understanding of all of the ways that psychological abuse manifests. I mean, we're starting to talk about it more. Like we hear terms like, you know, gaslighting is something that has come into public discourse. And yeah, some of this language, like we're we're sort of we're naming it a little bit more. But my dad really wasn't, you know, he was not physically abusive, although the threats started to feel like they could become so. Yeah. He was not sexually abusive, but I still had too much of my dad. It was almost like he was too involved. And at the same time, he was involved in ways that so many dads in the late 60s, 70s, 80s really weren't that involved. And so some of it was fabulous. Yeah. His attentiveness and all of that. Other times it just was like trying to swallow me whole. All of these forms of abuse are terrible. The thing about it, though, is that sexual abuse and physical abuse still are accompanied by all the forms of abuse that I do talk about. So that's why I feel like helping readers unpack that is so crucial. And that's where I feel like I had like an ethical responsibility actually to help people understand this from the professional lens I have, which is, you know, as a sociologist and as a as someone who's worked in the domestic violence field, as long as I did, those topics are so difficult to reconcile, you know, this loving a person who is also being destructive.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

Right. How do you think that you processed or internalized this abuse as a child or tempted to process it, I guess?

Writing, Reflection, And Boundaries

SPEAKER_00 20:54

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I felt blamed for a lot. I felt my mother was blamed for a lot. I felt that everybody in his line of fire was blamed for a lot. Like criticism is still really hard. I have such an early, early memories of how harsh criticism was and how deeply it stung, you know. You know, it's kind of a miracle that I'm with someone who is just not that way and is is not critical and is like more fully accepting. I I'm able to really talk with with my you know current husband about just the impact of the criticism. And so he he knows and I think he really gets it. And that's huge because that that just erodes out a relationship.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

When you were writing about these moments with your father, how was that revisiting for you?

SPEAKER_00 21:43

For me, it was just, I mean, it feels good to have untangled a lot of the knots that were happening. It was like I needed a book like this when I was going through this. So it's almost like I wrote the book that I would have liked to have had. Yeah. That would have helped me be more forgiving to myself. to just give me more permission because it was like I mean uh so many people who are in caregiving situations, even if the relationship is much simpler and cleaner, often feel like they can't do enough. They want to do more or they're like critical of themselves for coming up short in any way. And I certainly felt that way with my dad, but magnified because I was often told I came up short. I was often told I wasn't good enough about something. Yes, it was definitely disturbing to like look at certain artifacts, if it was letters or transcribed voicemails or diaries or any of the things that I went through because I almost did it like a researcher, not even like a researcher as a researcher. But there is the sense of like you know this sort of sense of being thoroughly in it. I guess this is the sociology part too of like being really in it and seeing it as I lived it. And then also you know zooming out and seeing this like larger picture where we're like characters in this in a way because that's what we are in the book. Some of the stuff was just very it was very disappointing, confusing, heart wrenching to like look at some of his medical records, looking at communication he had with his doctors. It was heartbreaking because it was like feeling that he wanted so many different things than what he got in the end. And so like you know my compassion for him was there also that was that was good I think. Yeah it's kind of a mixed bag. I mean I didn't write the book seeking catharsis. I really did write the book with the sense of I have this ethical responsibility because I'm I have this private personal experience that I could write about. But I also have the professional tools to inform it and to help people make sense of this in their own lives.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

There are some memoirs that you read where you're like wow this person is actually still really working through this you had felt what you needed to feel and so when it came time to actually write this thing that you wanted to share with people because of your ethical responsibility because of your specific perspective it wasn't like you got weighed down in the emotional feelings of things. Would you say that that's accurate?

SPEAKER_00 24:09

Yeah I think with some of it that is I mean um or other drafts I wrote did that and I in a sense like it's yeah because I agree I mean well I don't know maybe some people like the memoir that they read where the person seems to be still going through it. I I don't know how you feel about that.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

The big one that comes to mind is Britney Spears's which was like a huge you know like the number one most selling memoir. I think she needed to get her story out there or the story that she could tell at that certain at that point in her life. Obviously looking at Britney Spears today, this the woman still has a lot of trauma that I think she needs to to work through. Did I enjoy reading her book? I was heartbreaking on a completely different level um to me most of the time when when people share a memoir it is because there's something that they're trying to give with it as opposed to receive. And that's the difference I think when someone who's writing something that they still feel like is a very cathartic experience that's their memoir that to me feels like that's someone who's trying to receive love as opposed to say hey here's what I lived through here's how I experienced it here's what I learned here's maybe what we can reflect on together that's that's a gift. And I do think your memoir at the end of the day was a gift. When I read what you experienced, I just wonder was that difficult for you to have to sit through again and again and again as you're rewriting these these okay I think that's the difference.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

That's exactly in a way you just sort of helped me say that and think through that because it's like the writer who's or the writers who do those memoirs that it's like they're deep in the throes of it and you can kind of tell yeah they're I think they ask too much of the reader. I think they um burden the reader they haven't really done their own work yet. Yeah like I think that we benefit from memoirs where you know that the person did their work. Like I I did the hard interior work. I don't want people to read mine and worry about me. I think that's the responsibility of a good memoir is the reader isn't left still worrying about the person. They can trust that the person the writer has done their work their research their reflection their interior work just gone through their shit.

SPEAKER_01 26:27

Yeah and it's not about tying the memoir up in a bow and it being a happy ending because you have to do that with life. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 26:34

Exactly exactly my book does not have really a happy ending but it does have a sense of I'm in a little bit of a different place than I was before. Yeah and life still marches on but like I'm okay.

Staying With A Complicated Parent

SPEAKER_01 26:48

Yeah no that's interesting I've actually never tried to clarify types of memoir or my reaction to memoirs um so this is actually really fun to kind of realize yeah one feels like the writer's trying to receive something and one feels like the writer's trying to give something to the world. Okay so getting back to your relationship with your father why do you think that you were able to continue to choose to have a relationship with him and not only that but feel so much love and compassion for him.

SPEAKER_00 27:17

Yeah I know and people ask this and actually this is where my students a lot of my students are just like I wouldn't have stayed or I wouldn't be talking to my dad or I don't or whatever it is. And um it didn't even occur to me really to to just say bye Sia in the moments it occurred to me it was more in a reflective moment. There was a moment seeing him in a wheelchair in a nursing home and just thinking like I can just totally extricate myself right now. I can just walk through those glass doors and just like be like goodbye Sia like I'm done I'm I'm never coming back here. But I never did do you think any aspect of that was filial piety I just recently learned this term last year which is basically you know this idea that as children we owe something to our parents that's an interesting one perhaps there's a lot of pressure on only children and as an only child with older parents you know I was when I was born my dad was 42 and my mom is 35 which in 1969 was having really older parents.

SPEAKER_01 28:16

Yeah I don't know um you don't feel it was a sense of duty it was it was you wanting to still have that relationship and when and when the cards fell you wanted to take care of him.

SPEAKER_00 28:28

Yeah but there is more responsibility on only child because there's this sense of who else was going to do this. Yeah and my parents had divorced my mom she wanted the divorce and they announced this to me right before my 30th birthday. So they were 72 and 64 when they divorced which is really much later in life. And then my mother remarried you know in her 70s late 70s. This is to say that like I mean there's lots of lives in a life right true and everyone has a different threshold too.

SPEAKER_01 29:00

You come from such a different place of understanding I think because of your curiosity and your educational background. When it comes to people who are in abusive relationships and you've worked in the domestic violence space, talk to me a little bit about this. I've read other articles and writings where people try their best to explain why someone stays in an abusive relationship, right? It's like that person's not just a monster or they weren't a monster for a long time and they actually showed you a lot of love and there's that hope and that that desperation that if you are just good enough that that monster will stay away, right? All these things. I feel like we have to talk about it because it's a space that you existed in and also because of the way that you were able to stay in this relationship with your father. I just think people would be really curious about this.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

Yeah it's a great question because it does bring up the fact that if this were a partner, I would have left.

SPEAKER_01 29:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 29:53

Yeah. And maybe that also answers a little bit more of your last question that I mean with a parent I did feel more I don't know more beholden, more loyal and more you know still trying to work it out, still trying in the end to like have the relationship with him I wanted so badly. Yeah. And to sort of repair stuff.

SPEAKER_01 30:14

No, but with a partner oh no I would have I would like to think I would have found a way to to get out absolutely the good moments with your parents are so good and you just want to hold on to that and believe that that's who they still are even if they're not showing that to you anymore. And I just I really understood that part like you didn't just show us all the difficult things that your father said or did to you you showed us all the beautiful ways that he made you feel special and loved and valued and it showed the nuance of who he was and it did help us understand why it was so important for you to take care of him.

SPEAKER_00 30:49

Right, exactly and I just I can't imagine him just being alone through that. Like I feel badly enough that I didn't make it right before he died. You know it's like he I found out he died when I was at the airport checking in for my flight to go see him. And um like I still feel torn up about that. In a sense I wish I had done even more than I did but I had so many more limitations on me at that time. And I I see that now.

SPEAKER_01 31:18

What is the work that you do in the domestic violence space? Are you working with the survivors of domestic assault? Are you working with the assaulters themselves?

Inside Batterer Intervention Work

SPEAKER_00 31:27

So when I um moved to Boston in 1994 I got connected to the oldest battering intervention program that's in the country called Emerge. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had in my life I was working as a counselor with violent men and I was co-facilitating the group with usually a man and it was a group of guys like maybe about could be 10, 15 clients that we would see. It was absolutely formative because I was doing this in my you know 20s and 30s and just thinking so much about relationships, intimacy, marriage, you know, caregiving all these kinds of issues it was really um it was like quite a living laboratory for thinking about this stuff. And then helping these men to really examine their own relationship histories, their own life choices, their own circumstances. It's hard I mean these this stuff doesn't it's not like it changes overnight but I think in many cases we were able to at least help them reduce or eliminate certain behaviors and question other behaviors. And many of them had been bullied you know themselves. So this kind of stuff really lingers. I learned so much in working in that program and then through them I you know also did these partner contacts and worked with women talking with them about patterns of abuse causes consequences of of violence. The thing is like you you've sort of said it I mean I'm just gonna say this in a different way but it's like anyone who's been in these kinds of situations, it's like you want, you know, you believe that the person that you love loves you back. Yeah. And we want the relationship to continue but we want the crazy making behavior to stop. We want the abuse to stop. Sometimes those are not compatible goals. Sometimes it's like that doesn't always happen. It didn't totally happen for me. I mean there were towards the end though, I mean he kind of softened too but you know it's it's hard to to really want this relationship to care about this relationship so much, but wanting the behavior to stop and then and if it doesn't it's like well you know I don't I mean I definitely don't think even though I wrote this memoir the way I did I in no way think that people should stay in abusive relationships.

SPEAKER_01 33:43

Yeah. I mean this was just you s sharing your story and your perspective in this very specific nuanced situation. And you just you offer up a lot of things to reflect on in no way was your memoir a and that's why all of us need to just love our parents no matter how abusive they are and take care of them. It's like hey life is difficult relationships are difficult. My father was a difficult person and I chose to continue this relationship and then caregiving towards the end of his life is a difficult situation too. Do you feel like in working with these men it maybe even subconsciously helped you understand your father a little bit more and therefore helped you get have grace and compassion for him?

SPEAKER_00 34:26

Absolutely I mean yeah not only did working with these guys help me think about my own relationships, but it definitely helped me think about the complexity with my dad. Absolutely the contradictory stuff too I mean where my dad you know he was like worried about my safety in working at this place. And then there's like the evening I'm on the phone with him he was just really getting very agitated about the fact that you know I was at this place so late. Like I, you know, I would stay till like 10, 11 o'clock at night. And there was just that moment where I said to him like Dad, these guys have done stuff and said stuff that's really not different than what you did. Do you understand that? That was like the closest I really got to like pushing that with him and holding the mirror up yeah yeah and it was disturbing to him he didn't have that much of a reaction to it because in a certain way I was just saying what what was true, what what is or what was yeah it helped me to understand like why I could hold on to this constant tension between love and abuse and you know the forgiveness and blame and all of that. The thing about this the society that we live in is that we don't have an easy time and social media hasn't made it easier at all. People don't have a lot of understanding of nuance and of ambiguity and of ambivalence and of like contradiction and dealing with two competing things that are difficult at the same time. It's like, you know, there's always just this like people have to sort of think in this really absolutist kind of way what I realized in all of my experiences professionally and then personally with my dad and then in writing the book is that the invitation was embrace the ambivalence, embrace the complexity like hold on to both of those things. The challenging space in life is to hold on to both of those things maybe not too tight, not too loose, but to like it's not that I forgive my dad because I don't really even totally forgive my dad. But there's also like the sense of he tried his best with his own limitations and his own unmet needs and desires and there's complexity with my mother.

SPEAKER_01 36:36

You also bring up kind of realizing how he was raised and how that shined a light oh we're conditioned to respond certain ways. It's up to us to understand our behavior and our patterns and to do the work to change them. But first we have to understand that and I don't think everybody does.

SPEAKER_00 36:53

Add to this the fact that I mean this is the part I really appreciated about him was like this was a guy who was very far ahead of his time in certain ways. He didn't have an issue with the idea of like a woman becoming president. So it's like in a certain way he was kind of very progressive. I don't give him a pass. I think that's pretty clear I don't really give him a pass, but I give a little bit of a sense of yeah dad I get it you tried your best but please also know all the ways in which this deeply affected me and and sort of marked and changed my life.

SPEAKER_01 37:26

Yeah yeah and your memoir offers that to the people in your situation too like I see you this is really complicated. This is really difficult I see you every day navigating that line you write this you say this story is far more complicated than whether abusers know they abused, regret what they've done and can change. It's more of a legacy of how we learn love and ultimately what we do with it. And I thought that that was just beautiful and I feel like it really kind of sums up everything that we've been talking about today. And I do appreciate that you said like I don't fully forgive my father and I you know I always hate that phrase where they're like forgiveness is for you and it's like well I don't know about that like do we have to forgive to move on no thank you thank you for shaking your head absolutely and that's the other thing that I don't like about the word probably is that there's the idea of it's for you.

SPEAKER_00 38:20

Well no but it seems to just give the other person this like yeah I'm okay with this or I forgive yeah like no and and also I I don't like the religious connotation to it personally although I'm not so sure that redemption is any better for that. But but there's something about forgiveness and like sin and stuff. It just doesn't ring true for me. And it's like um and maybe also because my father when he did something really atrocious he was very quick to apologize to and wanted to sort of like you know erase it and like start over and kind of demanded of me come around quickly, which I talk about in the book and I learned to do to a fault.

Embracing Ambivalence Over Forgiveness

SPEAKER_01 39:01

That's why I don't like the word forgiveness because it's sort of it's burdening me with that again kind of the way you just were talking about you can understand why someone is the way that they are but still not accept that or still not be fully okay with that. And if someone doesn't ask for forgiveness, why do you have to do anything about it?

SPEAKER_00 39:21

Oh my gosh. So I was friends with a woman she and her husband would speak at my classes they lost their daughter to a domestic homicide and students would always ask like do you now forgive him Shirley the mother would always say he never asked for forgiveness really he did not he did not appropriately ever apologize like what's what's to forgive him for like have I moved on with my life have I done other things with my life yes and I just found it very affirming to hear her say this because it wasn't said in a way that was being vengeful. Like in fact you know she didn't want him to have the death penalty it's just interesting kind of like what people expect other people to feel about this stuff or the pressure that people put on themselves for that.

SPEAKER_01 40:11

And of course the forgiveness question comes up all the time you know yeah yeah I imagine okay so before I let you go do you have anything that you would like to say about the caregiving space?

SPEAKER_00 40:22

I wish that there was something for caregivers like some sort of um money something I was doing the caregiving through graduate school. And so part of the reason I was so constrained with being able to help my father was that I was dealing with student loans. I was teaching in two universities one in Massachusetts one in Connecticut while also counseling violent men on the side I mean three jobs and trying to hold down my own relationship and setting up a home and doing all these things and just feeling I was so financially burdened and the kinds of things I wanted to do for my dad I couldn't I really couldn't do. Yeah. And I was long distance too you know being in Boston he was in Cleveland the amount of times I needed to travel there and the the cost of it was like a work trip. I mean really I guess it just like I wish that we lived in a society that better understood caregiving and that had better friendly policies in place to help people so that they could do better. I mean so much of caregiving is just offloaded to families who don't really know what to do and how to do it. So I mean I was grateful to have the care for him in places that he had it but it was it was hard to feel so you know financially constrained and then feeling like I kept coming up short as a result.

SPEAKER_01 41:41

Yeah and and just to clarify like you said he wasn't living with you but it's not like the buck stopped there. It wasn't like oh yeah dad's in a home and everything's okay like no you had to be on top of things you had to check things recheck things right help him live the type of life that you wanted him to have there's a lot to it.

SPEAKER_00 42:00

We don't we don't really see caregivers like we don't acknowledge them so much. Well it's just part of invisible labor done by women you know like that's the other thing is how much this falls on daughters or daughter-in-laws or you know um wives or so the gendered part of this is also a huge piece and totally relates to that kind of invisibility and stuff as well.

SPEAKER_01 42:26

Yeah yeah and I think that your memoir helps shine the light on that as well. Before I let you go there is a question that I ask all my authors how do you stay hopeful? That's a great question.

SPEAKER_00 42:37

How do I stay hopeful? I would say being with people I love laughing as much as possible being in nature is huge walking exercising and being creative actually you know writing keeps me hopeful you know the world is burning so make art is kind of my the theme to create as many moments of joy as we can especially when there's so many forces out there trying to extinguish that yeah connection stories seeing people hearing people's stories that's the antidote to what's going on right now. Absolutely yeah and to just um and to really be creative.

SPEAKER_01 43:16

Yeah to give yourself permission to explore what it is to be humans.

SPEAKER_00 43:21

Exactly uh Deborah thank you so much for such a lovely conversation thank you I really enjoyed chatting with you yeah kudos to you for doing this because seriously with the absence of I mean really a huge absence with book reviews in newspapers and magazines and things like that I just find it extremely meaningful that there are people like you doing this. And especially like you've sort of specialized in a certain with a certain genre and a certain audience and I like oh my gosh thank you you're so sweet. Just to put some food for thought out there, I will say that the next memoir I'm working on is related to my mother And art.

SPEAKER_01 44:00

Okay. Yes. And we didn't even get to talk get to your mother today. And that was that was its own complicated thing.

SPEAKER_00 44:07

It's a very complicated part of my story, but it's also really interesting. And the the quality of how prolific she was with her art, I think, is what makes me persist with feeling like that is the antidote. That is what what one does to stay hopeful and alive and fully engaged in the world.

SPEAKER_01 44:24

I love that. Well, then we will definitely have you back on You Keep Me Posted on that journey. And we'll have you uh then, if not before. Thank you, Deborah.

The Invisible Labor Of Caregiving

SPEAKER_00 44:33

That'd be wonderful. You know, if and maybe you'll provide the information anyway that if listeners are interested and want to find out more about me, to go to Deborah Jcohan.com. A lot of readers of Welcome to Whover We Are would probably also connect with the Complete You book that I've just written because of the caregiving component with that, and also the sandwich generation of people who are caring for kids and growing kids and parents. Yep. It's it's fun to, even though it's hard stuff, it's fun to sort of just talk about the stuff with people and and especially people like you who are just carefully and thoughtfully reading and just genuinely having questions.

SPEAKER_01 45:11

Thank you, thank you. And we will link ways to buy both of those books on our show notes.

SPEAKER_00 45:17

Alex, thank you so much. Take care.

SPEAKER_01 45:19

Thank you, Deborah, for such a great conversation. And thank you for listening. If you liked our conversation today, please rate and review the show and share it with a friend. It would mean so much to me. And if you'd like to further support us, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Patreon for bonus content, and we're even on Substack. All of these are linked in the show notes. Next week, my friend McKinsey joins me to discuss Demi Moore's 2019 memoir, Inside Out. It's her candid, best-selling reflection on her traumatic childhood, rapid rise to fame, and intense personal struggles. Her memoir details her battles with addiction, tumultuous marriages, including Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher, and her journey towards self acceptance. Until then, take care of the