What Your Family Called Protection Was Actually Control

What your family called protection was actually control.
And most of us spent years - sometimes decades - believing the two were the same thing.
Dr. Pauline Yeghnazar Peck is an Iranian-Armenian psychologist, coach and speaker who specialises in helping daughters of immigrants break cycles and bridge gaps. She grew up as the sensitive child in a family where emotions were seen as a problem. She resisted therapy when her mother died because she thought it was "a white person thing." She became the psychologist she needed. And in this conversation — she named things she has never said publicly before.
In this episode of INSIGHT, Emma Sargsyan sits down with Dr. Pauline for the most honest conversation this show has ever had about guilt, narcissism, shame, women's bodies, abusive relationships and the cost of breaking cycles inside families that do not want to be broken.

WHAT WE COVER
How the overachieving eldest daughter drive becomes a pathway to burnout — and what is actually fueling it
Why the sensitive child in an immigrant family is taught that her emotions are a problem
What happened when her mother died and she refused therapy — and what finally changed
The difference between narcissistic tendencies and narcissistic personality disorder — and why social media is confusing the two
Why guilt is a byproduct of trauma, and how the Armenian Genocide is still transmitting guilt through generations into women alive today
Whether it is possible to love your child and cause them significant psychological harm simultaneously,  regularly - without knowing it
What growing up in a family where a woman's body is simultaneously her family's honour and something never discussed does to her relationship with her own body and sexuality
Why shame around sex and the body leaves young women unable to protect themselves
The trauma bond - what it actually is versus how social media uses the term
Why leaving an abusive relationship is sometimes the most dangerous moment
The woman who waited until her father died before she could live the life she wanted
What the overachieving woman who has everything and feels hollow is actually running from
The hardest thing she has had to name in her own family — including something she revealed for the first time in this conversation

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Pauline analyses Emma live
04:00 The survival tactic, you cannot be mediocre
08:00 The sensitive child and what shame does to a seven year old
16:00 Her mother's death and the resistance to therapy
22:00 Narcissism - tendencies versus disorder
29:00 Guilt as a byproduct of the Armenian Genocide
36:00 What is normalised is not always healthy
42:00 Can you love and harm simultaneously
49:00 Overprotection versus resilience
55:00 Women's bodies sexuality and shame
65:00 Purity patriarchy and the outfit in the backpack
70:00 The milestones burden
74:00 Trauma bonds and abusive relationships
84:00 Family approval and intercultural couples
89:00 Unprocessed trauma in the body
94:00 The overachieving woman and conditional love
99:00 The hardest thing she named in her own family
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If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788.
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ABOUT DR. PAULINE YEGHNAZAR PECK
Licensed psychologist, coach and speaker based in Los Angeles. Founder of Noor Therapy and Wellness. Creator of Bridging Gaps Breaking Cycles — a coaching and community program for daughters of immigrants. Follow her at @paulinethepsychologist
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Follow Emma: @emmasargsyan
Podcast: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · I Heart Radio · All major platforms
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#Psychology #MentalHealth #Narcissism #Trauma #ArmenianWomen #IranianAmerican #DaughtersOfImmigrants #BreakingCycles #Therapy #WomensMentalHealth #INSIGHT #EmmaInsight #PaulineYeghnazarPeck #IntergenerationalTrauma #GuiltAndShame

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Is it possible to love your child and at the same time cause them significant psychological harm? Not occasionally.

SPEAKER_02 0:19

Love is not enough to not harm. My mom missed and got wrong with me or the negative impacts that she had on me with her being dead. Many of the generations before us, women did not have a choice. My mom never talked to me about menstruation. How are you gonna tell people that this man that everybody loves has been abusing you for 15 years? That leaving a relationship like that is really hard and sometimes actually sadly very dangerous.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Dr. Pali, thank you very much for joining me today. I'm really excited for this conversation.

SPEAKER_02 0:58

Me too.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Let's start with doing a mini-analysis of me. We had a couple of minutes to speak, so I want you just to figure out through the puzzle of who I am.

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Yeah. Just a quick thing that you were telling me about your various moves and going to the next place and hitting a ceiling and wanting more challenge. So clearly I said you're a woman of vision. You are somebody who is eager for continuous challenges, somebody that likes to be on top of her game, which tells me you always like to be learning and growing. Um maybe you get bored easily, and that's worse than not knowing what to do or figuring out a new challenge is being bored and stagnant. And I see a lot of women like that, a lot of eldest daughters, daughters of immigrants who have that. And I like to ask people, what's the source from which you're doing that work? Because if the source of it is a constant need for validation or proving yourself, that's a pathway to burnout. Whereas if the source of it is really loving the learning process, knowing about yourself, feeling like you are discovering new aspects of yourself and you can stay in a situation, but you also like novelty and growing. Like if it comes from a a source that is much more about growth and adventure, then that's limitless. But if it's coming from a place of having to prove yourself by showing how much you can handle what the next challenge is, um, competing with other people, that's when it's gonna lead to a lot of burnout. And many women feel like they hit a point where they're like, I can't operate like this anymore. So I don't know where you lie on that continuum, but that's the little that I got from our conversation.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

That's the eldest daughter problem, I guess, because I'm the eldest one. And back in my time, yeah, this competition was like, you have to be better than everyone, you have to be good, you have to be the I don't know how it is now because I don't teach my daughter to be like that. Like you don't have to be better, you are better at what you are doing. So, where where does that come from? Is it the generational thing? Well, it's a survival tactic, right?

SPEAKER_02 3:17

If your family recognizes that it doesn't, if your family is not part of the majority, they don't have generational wealth, they don't have knowledge of various systems, right? I work with immigrant families, so they're moving to a brand new country. Maybe they're starting over financially and they don't have a safety net, maybe they don't have community resources, they're learning a brand new system, a brand new language. You can't just make it. You have to be better than people that are native to that land. You have to be exceptional because there are more obstacles in your way. So a lot of times parents will tell their children, and especially their daughters, maybe because they recognize the impact gender is also gonna play. I've had daughters tell me, oh yeah, people would, you know, my parents or my elders would say to me, you have to be better than all the men put together. Because if you're gonna get the job that a mediocre man is gonna get, you're gonna be competing with so many women. You have to be better, you have to be exceptional. And so that comes from a survival mechanism. You don't have the privilege of being mediocre, you don't have the privilege of studying art. You have to do a thing that's gonna be a secure path, financially predictable, and you have to be better than others competition-wise because you're competing for resources and you don't have the privileges or the grace to not be as good.

SPEAKER_01 4:42

Let's go back to you. You are also from an immigrant family, Iranian, American, Armenian. Yes. So you came to the United States in early 80s, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 4:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:52

And you describe yourself as being the sensitive child. Tell me more about what does it feel like to be a sensitive child in an immigrant community, and what did you learn from that? Uh pluses and minuses, maybe, like some analysis. What is it, what what does it mean to be the daughter, the sensitive child in an immigrant community?

SPEAKER_02 5:16

Yeah, I think I didn't have the wording for that till way later. I just I perceived a lot. Like my family, so my parents were pastors of a church, and they sponsored a lot of different people coming from various countries seeking religious asylum. So it wasn't odd for our family to have a lot of different guests staying with us, people from different countries as the church was sponsoring them, going through the citizenship process, or a green card. And I would perceive, like, okay, what's going on with this child? Or that there's tension with the marriage, or there's stresses happening. When you were a teenager. When I was earlier than a teenager, I was a child. I was very young, so seven, eight years old. I remember thinking, oh, I, you know, there's hushed hushed voices, this is going on, that's going on. Like the world of people and relationships was always very interesting to me and immediately something that I could see and see clearly. So I had a lot of curiosity around that. I would ask about it. And it was very like, don't ask about that, don't talk about that, what are you doing? Don't make trouble. So I already felt like, okay, the things that I notice, maybe I shouldn't be noticing. So I felt maybe some level of shame around that. It felt like these are the adult things that a child should not get involved in. And then I would feel very deeply. So I would feel very empathic for family situations that were not even my family. Or if something happened with, you know, our family or with me at school, I would, I would cry about it or be upset about it, want to talk about it. And often it was very like, oh, don't be so emotional, don't be, don't be so uh sensitive about this, or you're being dramatic. So there was a lot of there was a lot of dismissal of those emotions. Even if I was really energetic, it was kind of like calm down. Like there was an expectation, especially for women and girls, to be more even keeled, not to have a really loud mouth, not to have a lot of questions, not to have a lot of opinions, not to have deep, deep feelings. So I remember, and again, I don't I I think about it differently now as an adult, but I remember if I was having strong feelings about something, my mom would just say, Okay, go to your room. Like, go and just take some time for yourself.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

What did you feel at that point?

SPEAKER_02 7:36

Oh, shame. Definitely. Yeah, shame. It was like, this is wrong, this is bad, somehow something must be wrong with me. Um, and sometimes they would say things like, Well, your brother and your sister don't make trouble, and you do. So emotions were seen, especially intense emotions, were seen as a problem.

unknown 7:56

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_02 7:56

Right? It's like, don't make a problem. And you're like, I'm just having a feeling, you know, like I don't understand that. So I had to unlearn a lot. And I know now my parents couldn't make space for my emotions because they weren't given space for their emotions. And so I know that now, but as a kid, the experience was very isolating, shaming. You feel like something is wrong with you when emotions are not discussed, you're not given information about them, and it's not normalized for you to have emotions.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

You were not, it was not okay for you to have any any kind of emotion.

SPEAKER_02 8:33

Yeah. Mostly what I call the uncomfortable emotions. Sometimes you'll hear them called negative emotions like anger or sadness, jealousy, disappointment. Um, it was mostly that. Like I remember once, like I said, there were always a lot of other people in our home. And sometimes I just wanted, I'm a very like intimate person. Like sometimes I just wanted an intimate family dinner, just us five, me, my two siblings, and my parents. So I remember one time saying to my mom, like, oh, I wish it was just us, but all these other people are coming, you know. I'm I just want like time with like our family. And she was like, Don't be so ungrateful. Um, yeah, like you should be very happy. We are serving all these people, like, go to your own. So it was like, even just expressing an emotion was turned into like an identity or a character trait. Like, I'm not being grateful rather than seeing that as, oh, maybe I'm just wanting more connection time with my immediate family because there's always other people around. Um, yeah, so I definitely felt like I was the sensitive one that was much more expressive in my feelings. Whereas my brother and my sister, I'm sure they had lots of feelings too, but they were much more internalizers. They they they swallowed them. Because you got the first one to be the punchback of not showing any emotions, your brother and sister were I mean, I think it was most my brother's older than me, so he came first, but just different personality too, right? He's also a boy, so there's a gender piece. I was the first girl, just personality-wise, I'm much more external, extroverted, opinionated, talkative. Um, so I think there were just some personality differences as well. But my sister wasn't called sensitive. She was seen as like, well, she's the baby. It's okay if she's crying about it, but you're older, you have to set a model for her. So I was getting a lot of, you know, a lot of messages from an uh for a number of different reasons around that sensitivity. But now my sensitivity is one of the things that I love most about me. It's what allows me to do the work that I do.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

Would you say that this childhood experience shapes uh what what what profession you were going to choose from? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 10:47

Yeah, absolutely. I've been reflecting on that a lot recently. Like I think we are always on a path to trying to heal ourselves and in trying to understand and heal myself. I, you know, you open your heart and become more empathic to people that are experiencing similar things. I help fellow daughters of immigrants. Of course, that's partly a love letter to a younger version of me. That's how you frame it. I became the therapist that I needed. I became my social media is a love letter to all the things I needed to hear as a child, that I wasn't broken, that I, you know, was carrying a lot, that my sensitivity was a gift, that just because I was misunderstood by my family doesn't mean that there's something wrong. I needed emotional education, I needed support, I needed permission to be who I was unapologetically. So that's really what I do now is give people what I didn't get. And so it's definitely tied into my personal healing becoming part of supporting collective well-being.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Your first encounter with your own mental health was at 24 when your mother passed away after decades of battle with cancer. Yeah. And you and your father at that time were in a very deep state of depression. You didn't seek help, you were resisting any help.

SPEAKER_02 12:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Where did that resistance come from and what did it teach you?

SPEAKER_02 12:10

Yeah, I mean, there's another number of different layers. Well, in my family and culturally at large, we didn't talk about emotions, like we said, and you were shamed for having intense or uncomfortable negative emotions and expressing them. And so just feeling those emotions, I already felt a sense of shame. And shame is isolating, right? You don't want shame to be on display. You want to crawl into a hole and have nobody look at you. So partly the cultural silence around mental health, the lack of permission to express really difficult emotions and to think about how it would impact somebody else. That was part of the shame, the isolation and not seeking it. And then another layer was I grew up in a family that was always serving other people. And part of the messaging that is inherent in that is that you shouldn't have needs. You should just be giving to other people. So all of a sudden, I needed something, and that made me feel ashamed. Right? I should be the one serving other people. I should be a role model to my sister, I should be the strong one. And here I am needing help. Here I am struggling myself. And so I was really, I didn't even know that I had internalized all of these messages, but they were definitely part of my resistance to seek help. And then the last one is that I didn't really have an understanding of therapy. Like nobody in my family had gone to therapy. It was not a profession that I was very acquainted with. I wasn't familiar with going to a stranger and telling them your deepest, darkest issues.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

And hoping they are not going to tell it to me.

SPEAKER_02 13:51

And also, like, I remember thinking, like, what's talking gonna do? My mom's dead. Like, why would I go talk to a stranger? My mom's dead, and I'm sad about it. Like, what? What is that gonna do? So I had all the layers of shame, and also I was like, how is that gonna be helpful for me? Like, I didn't even understand what it means to seek emotional support or have someone hold space for your feeling. I was like, this is so foreign, strange, weird, but I was desperate. And it was a white friend that kept saying, Pauline, I think you should try therapy. I was like, please. It's so weird. That's a white person thing. I don't do that. You know, we don't do that in Armenian families. She's like, you need some support. I'm like, I don't even know what you're saying, but okay, I'll try. And you did. I did. And I was like, oh, okay. Talking to somebody really helped. This is really, and I I talk about this first experience a lot because it was that transformative feeling of wow, this there is something powerful in going to a stranger that doesn't know you and reflecting on your own life and seeing it differently and trying on different perspectives and learning new skills and discovering yourself. So I was like, this is amazing. And remember, I was the kid that always saw everything and was studying those relationships anyway, those dynamics. And now I was like, oh, this is great. I get to talk about all of this stuff. But then I always felt there was something a little bit off in terms of my first therapist was this guy from Boston who was doing his postdoc at UCLIA named Richard. Um, and he was just, you know, somebody that, although he was very caring and very supportive, the cultural pieces I found he couldn't understand. And some of the guidance that he would give me, I was like, That doesn't work. It doesn't work, it's not, it doesn't fit. My family is I don't know. So it it prompted me to want to go back to school and to change my whole career and to go into psychology because I wanted to kind of adapt that to be able to actually work with my family and to understand myself more. So I kind of changed the entire trajectory of my life after that.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

Ah, wow. Um, I want to ask you a question directly, and I think a lot of people do not ask, especially during the interviews. I want to speak a little bit about narcissism because this is what you have been specializing on. And narcissistic personality patterns like controlling behavior, the lack of empathy, a child has to deserve your love by doing certain things, etc., and so on and so forth. Ums guilt as a weapon, maybe like you didn't do this, now I'm sad about that, or something like that. Uh so uh how common are these in Iranian, Armenian families? Uh not as not not as in immigrant families, but how common are it in the culture? Because I have been noticing this kind of things a lot in my surroundings, and I'm sure you have, but yeah, I might be wrong. I just want you to tell me how often do you see these kind of patterns?

SPEAKER_02 17:17

Well, I don't know that I have research-backed numbers to say that there is more narcissism in one community versus another community. What I do know is that there's also a difference. I want people to know, there's a difference between narcissistic tendencies, and everybody has some narcissistic tendencies. I just want to make that clear, right? And then narcissistic personality disorder, which is an actual disorder that has to meet certain criteria and can only be diagnosed by a mental health professional. And people are just going around being like, my mom's a narcissist and this person's a narcissist. I'm not saying that they're not, but many people are just using lingo that they're picking up from social media and thinking anybody trying to control your behavior, um, anybody caring about what other people think and uh their reputation is a narcissist. And it's not true. Of course, in collectivistic cultures, you care more about what other people think. Of course, guilting or controlling parenting behaviors are actually connected to survival mindset. Again, being afraid that your children, if they don't obey you, might get hurt because there's not safety, right? There's cultural pieces to it, needing to protect girls' honor, for example, right? And having a girl represent even more than a boy represent that family's reputation. So, yes, there are certain parenting pieces that are that are in collectivistic societies, that are passed down through generations, that are part of immigrant survival tactics, that might kind of resemble narcissistic tendencies, but that does not mean everybody is a certifiable diagnosed narcissist. And that gets clouded. When we just take one behavior and we say, this person is a narcissist, then it seems like we can see that behavior everywhere. But the truth is, I mean, I put on lipstick today. I care about what I look like on camera. I'm not a narcissist. That might be a narcissistic vein trait. Yeah. But again, it's not a disorder. It's not, you know, limiting or inhibiting any part of my life. And so I think it's really important that we don't use language just without looking at the specifics of no, this is an actual disorder, and it comes from trauma. It's important to know all personality disorders come from trauma, an exploitation of other people, being disconnected from empathy and not having empathy. This is a distortion of our humanity, and trauma does that. So it's this person's adaptation to what was done to them. Right? I'm not saying it's right, but then we can understand where that comes from. I do work with a lot of people who come in to seek support around difficult relationships with their immigrant parents. And many of the things that you were describing, the control, the arrogance, the lack of empathy. I do hear a lot about those narcissistic tendencies within immigrant families, but also people are coming to me to seek support. So I see more of those negative things anyway. Obviously, I'm not seeing all the people who have families that over time grow and change and you know adjust and don't have those tendencies. So I don't know that I can say it's more prevalent in one community versus another.

SPEAKER_01 20:51

I know personally know some families where the mother would read the messages of their daughter. The father would do some controlling stuff telling her what to wear, where to go, and that is considered to be completely normal. I even know a family where the brother would decide who the sister is going to marry. Yeah. And he would just kick off everyone who is not, in his like opinion, a good fit for her without even asking a question. Uh those people they don't realize that there is something wrong. What when when you hear these stories, when they tell you, and they tell you, is it completely normal? Like, you know, I did this, or my mom is reading my son.

unknown 21:35

What?

SPEAKER_01 21:35

My daughter is 18, never a single time I I write her messages. Never. Yeah. Because we have this relationship. Whenever something is wrong, I know she's going to come to me. I don't have to control and read. But they are telling you as if it's it's it's okay, it's normal. And yeah, they are making me feel the way I am living is wrong. Yeah. How do you um Tell? Not tell. I mean you you don't tell, but how do you make sure these people know that whatever they are doing is not okay? Or you don't.

SPEAKER_02 22:08

Yeah, I mean the truth is that I don't usually work with those people directly because like you said, they don't think they're doing anything wrong. They think that is part of being a good older brother, being a good parent, being protective. Yeah. Right? To the point of controlling somebody. There are cultural differences in how much parents think that their children are an extension of them versus how much autonomy and individual um individuality a child is given. Like I hear that you don't think your daughter is a direct representation or extension of you. She is her own separate person. So you're not going to violate her privacy. Whereas in these enmeshed family patterns, your child is not your is it not a separate person. Your child is your extension of you. So you have to control them like you would control your own behaviors. You're not invading their privacy. You're reading the messages because maybe you think I pay for the cell phone, so I should be able to look and and all of that. So these many of those people are not going to, they're going to get the cultural legitimacy and support, right? There are people where culturally this could be seen as normal because it's become normalized, even though it's an abusive pattern.

SPEAKER_03 23:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:28

Um and they're not going to be willing or wanting to change. The people that I usually work with are the people on the receiving end of these behaviors. How do you set boundaries around that? How do you carve out and fight for some level of your autonomy? How do you let go that they're not going to understand? Like your parenting. They're not going to understand. They might think you are a bad mom. I don't care.

SPEAKER_01 23:50

Exactly. But a lot of people would be guilty, would feel guilty, would be ashamed. It's like, oh, maybe there's something wrong that I'm doing, like, really. But I really do understand that okay, if I do this controlling stuff, it's going to affect her in the long run. And some point she's going to have problems. I'm more than sure I've given her enough trauma. And the fact that I'm realizing that this might be another way, like consciously, I'm not doing that. Those people, they just, they just they just think I'm the I'm the villain in this story.

SPEAKER_02 24:21

Yeah. And the fact that you got to a place where that doesn't shame you and you feel clear that you are doing the right thing, that's the work that I do with people. To recognize your family, especially your family that is engaging in abusive and intrusive behaviors, they're not the ones that are gonna give you validation for the way that you're living your life. You're gonna have to find that. You're gonna have to realize they're giving you what they got. Right? They're giving you what they got. Patterns of control don't just start in one generation, they're passed down.

SPEAKER_01 24:53

Yeah. It's it's a normal.

SPEAKER_02 24:55

It's normalized, yes.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

What happens to these people when they finally realize that whatever they have been doing is not only wrong, but it also somehow hindered the life of their loved one. They thought they were overprotecting, protecting, or caring for.

SPEAKER_02 25:11

Many times they don't realize it. They don't. Right? I've seen families that till the very end, until parents are on their deathbed, feel like the child did something wrong. And that's a heavy burden that the children have to work through. Again, aligning with, I know that I did right in breaking this cycle, in not doing this with my daughter. And I'm not gonna get the validation from the people that are operating under a completely different set of values. They're not the ones that I'm seeking approval from. And they may never realize the impact because they're coming from a very different cultural lens. They don't even understand, like when you said, I don't want my daughter and the attachment we have to be negatively impacted if I am controlling, if I invade her privacy. Many of our parents and grandparents were not thinking about the attachment with their children, wanting their children to come tell them the truth, wanting to give respect and dignity to their child so their child trusts them. These are, these could be foreign concepts because again, maybe they were not treated with any level of autonomy, any level of respect. Maybe they were adultified very quickly. My grandmother was working, she had a second grade education, and then she was working on the family's farm. I mean, she began caretaking for siblings and she was married at 16, 17 years old. This is not a woman who had a childhood, right? She had a very quick entry into adulthood. So those are not going to be people that had the emotional resources or knowledge to even prioritize that connection on an emotional level between parent and child. And that's why I see a lot of times adult children go to their parents and say, Hey, look, you did this. You invaded my privacy, uh, you, you know, did this, that, and the other. You hurt me physically, maybe even. And the parent just says, What do you have to complain about? I put a roof over your head, I gave you food, I paid for your education. What more could you want? That's not because they're really trying to dismiss this. They don't even understand that the emotional connection is necessary for a child. That's education that seems pretty common sense to us parenting in modern times, right? Like, of course, you want your child to trust you, feel connected to you, feel safe with you. Our one generation ago, two generations ago, I tell the story that my mom and Iran, they had a set of cassette tapes that they would pass from mother to mother. Cousins and aunts would pass them. It was a parenting book on cassette tapes. One set passed around. Oh wow. Right now I can get on my phone and have 10 parenting experts at my fingertips telling me how to deal with my child's tantrum, how to support my child's socio-emotional learning. So for us, it seems like, oh my gosh, why did my parents neglect me emotionally? They didn't have that resource, they didn't have that education. They had maybe one set of cassette tapes saying, don't spoil your child too much or they'll grow up entitled. So if you're expecting them to understand the impact of their behaviors on your emotional world, that's that's like you're speaking Italian to somebody who's speaking to you in Farsi.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

It's doesn't make sense. Well, I want to speak a little bit about guilt again.

SPEAKER_00 28:48

Yes, we can be here all day with that one.

SPEAKER_01 28:50

Yeah, with pleasure. And you have a concept you call doing it guilty. Yes. So the guilt, it seems to be everywhere in certain families, in certain individuals. Uh, guilty for having feelings, guilting for guilty for wanting this, guilting for guilty for wanting that, for having needs, for building a life that looks different from the sacrifice that uh the parents have done for them. So um guilty for not being okay when the parent is not. So is it guilt something that generates itself or is it installed into the child? How does that so how would you frame that?

SPEAKER_02 29:28

Oh maybe both. I think both. Guilt, I always like to put out there, guilt is a byproduct of trauma. Guilt and shame are a byproduct of trauma. When something happens to you and you were the victim of a trauma or a violence that happens, you are going to feel guilty as if some part of it was your fault. This is a part of trauma. So think about Armenians as a people, the Armenian genocide. Huge trauma a hundred something years ago. That is going, that guilt is going to be passed down as a byproduct of trauma. So some part of it is going to be inherited. The thir three to fourteen we inherit into our nervous system when we come into this world. We're not coming in as complete blank slates. We're coming in as a byproduct of many generations that came before us. So there's some guilt that's already part of that. Then there's the additional traumas that you might experience in your life, right? Your parents' life. Immigrants leave everything often in really difficult circumstances. Children see their parents struggling in a new country. There's migration trouble. There's so many other layers to it. And then there's guilting that actively happens as a parenting strategy, right? Can I use the guilt that was done to me to guilt you to try and control your behaviors? Sometimes because this is how love was expressed. If I love you, I try and guilt you and coerce you to do the things that I think are right for you. So it's been infused with love, even though guilting and love are not part and parcel. These need to be broken. So we do get guilted actively by people, and there's some element of it that has been bypassed through the intergenerational transmission of these things. And so there is a lot of guilt to be dealt with, which is why I say do it guilty. You cannot wait for the guilt to never surface in order to live the life you need to live by doing the things that feel right for you, by breaking cycles, which your family may think is a rejection of them, which your family may be completely at odds with. By doing that, you are building the muscle to not let guilt dictate every action. And that softens the guilt over time.

SPEAKER_01 31:47

What are we afraid of not doing things that maybe contradict the family values?

SPEAKER_02 31:53

Yeah, I mean, we are brought up to think that a family, like family bonds are everything. No, I used to have a friend's parents say, you know, you're always with your friends. Friends don't matter. Your family is everything. Right? Blood is thicker than water. You, they're family. You have to always stick with family, and you have to be a good representation of your family. You reflect on them. It's not each individual for themselves. That's a very highly individualistic society. A family that is much more collectivistic, the children and the parents and the grandparents, and that all of them are seen as a unit. The social bonds between them are what's highly prioritized. And so when you are acting outside of what your family expects, that isn't just gonna reflect on you. It may reflect on your family. When the aunties come to the other aunties and say, Have you seen what is wearing and have you seen what she's been doing? Is that's that's because they see them as an extension of the family units. And so going against that, there are sometimes going to be real consequences.

SPEAKER_01 33:01

So not being okay with some of your family members, going against some of your family members should be normalized. Yeah. If you feel so?

SPEAKER_02 33:12

Yes. I mean, it's kind of saying that sometimes what is normal is unhealthy. So sometimes what is normalized is unhealthy. So when you are moving toward health and well-being, you are breaking cycles and saying the trauma stops here. I'm not gonna hit my child, I'm not gonna shame my child, I'm not gonna intrude upon their privacy. You will be seen as abnormal. Yeah, but you're not abnormal. You are abnormal, I mean, you're abnormal in to them because it has not been normalized, but that is a healthy behavior. Like if you grew up in a family where nobody takes care of their physical health, and then you start going to the gym, and you're gonna be seen as the weirdo. Oh, look at her going to the gym. Who do you think you are? What are you doing? You know, you might get a lot of ridicule for betraying the family. Why aren't you eating the cake that grandma made you? What's wrong with you? But what you're doing is trying to take care of your body differently than you learned. So we have to move beyond what is normal in our small bubble. You have to say, okay, they may think this is normal because this is all they have known. But if this is a trauma byproduct, if this is abuse disguised as culture, then I want to be abnormal.

SPEAKER_01 34:29

Yeah, that's what I want to be the weirdo. I had this interesting conversation with one of my friends. Uh, who was saying that whatever I'm doing is not normal, is not okay. And I said, look, there are a certain group of people for whom if I'm not normal, I consider it as an honor. Yes. Because I'm not going to ban, I'm not going to say, Oh, they these guys that they think I'm not normal. Let's let me not do that. I don't care. But the thing is that we don't usually have that level of consciousness to break the pattern, to say, okay, enough, I'm not doing this. So, how do we make sure that immigrant families, non-immigrant families, girls, uh, teenagers in their 20s who are struggling with this kind of issues, how to make sure that they know that it's the the normal is whatever they feel like it is?

SPEAKER_02 35:20

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's it's really encouraging to me to see more education being spread through social media. So many more people know about, oh, these are unhealthy patterns. Oh, this is another way I can communicate. Oh, I shouldn't have an invasion of privacy. Like they're beginning to have the awareness around that, and that's so important. And to have a community. It's why I run a group coaching program because it's so important for people to be in community with other women who are breaking the cycles and struggling as the weirdos of their family. Because when you say to other people, hey, this is going on, and they say, Me too, I was there as well. It's really hard. You're not alone. It encourages, right? If you're by yourself, you're only gonna go so far. You're gonna burn out, and it's gonna be you against an entire collective. But when you have support, slowly you're gonna create your own collective. And I've seen so many families where the daughter who is seen as the weird one, the rebellious one, the shamed one, that one has broken cycles, and over time, there's been healing that is passed on to her family. Her family has actually, we as humans inherently know somewhere what healthy is, even if we've gotten it the wrong way. Right? We know, I think I believe we are truly inherently love at our very core. The reason you do it, you can't change other people. But I've seen it in so many families. And even in my own. I talk about it all the time about my dad. There's so many things that I'm doing differently with my kids. I'm not saying to him, you did this wrong and you did that wrong. He is seeing me parent. And in seeing me parent, there's so many times he said, You're doing this so well. I didn't realize that. I see how you're handling this with your daughter. I see how you did that with your son. I see how much they do this or that. I see how comfortable they feel with. He is seeing how I'm doing it from a much healthier place. I give a lot of respect and dignity to my kids. Even to the point if I say, Do you, you know, I'd like a hug, do you want to give me a hug? They say no. Say, okay.

SPEAKER_03 37:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 37:36

Yeah. Like they have body autonomy. They can say no, even to me. My dad will say, Your daughter didn't hug me, and he'll say it several times.

SPEAKER_01 37:44

And I just kind of let it go because I'm like, they don't even hug me sometimes, dad. You know, first thing I told my daughter, if you're don't feel like it, no matter who it is.

SPEAKER_02 37:52

Yeah, you don't have to kiss, you don't have to hug. You are your again, you are not an extension of me. Do it, Amoto, this is bad, this is shameful. No, that child has their own body, has their own yeses and no's. But my dad has seen how the respect that I am giving them, how they're growing, how they're maturing. So I didn't parent like that for him. I may have been seen as the weird one. My aunts would think it's weird that I have a routine with them, that I let them do certain things or not, that I'm watchful of what they eat, that I don't have them watch TV all day. Like, there are things I'm doing that they're like, this is weird, she's too intense with all of this. But over time, many of them have come around, especially my dad, to be like, we see, I can see the impact of this. So when you find community, when you have the information, the awareness, and then the encouragement to keep going, sometimes then some of the people from that community will begin recognizing the health because you see it in the outcomes, you see it in the attachment, the connection. That person that went to the gym took care of themselves, is eating health. You see it in the energy, the way they move their body, the joy that they have, that they're sleeping better, that they got off their blood pressure medication. Like they will see that. So even if you were weird, over time they might say, So what are you eating? Or what did you do there? Or can I maybe go to the gym with you one time? So it might not be right away, but over time, the fruits of your decisions and your labor will show in your life.

SPEAKER_01 39:20

Yeah, but also you shouldn't be expecting not.

SPEAKER_02 39:23

No, you can't expect that it's not happen. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:26

And it's usually when we expect it and we need it and we want it the most that it actually doesn't happen. It's right when you let it go.

unknown 39:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:32

That's when that's when it happens. It's when you let it go. I'm not parenting this way for my dad to show him what he did. I'm not, he is not part of it. I'm doing it not because of anxiety, resentment, or anger. I'm doing it for love. So when you are operating love, love for self, love for your family, my mom, my dad, they did the best they could with what they had, but that's not healthy. That's the way they were shown. Love with control, love with abuse, love with diminishment, love with patriarchy, love with oppression. I don't want that. That's not healthy. I love them, but I don't want to repeat that. I want to love myself without those elements. So it's coming, it's gotta come from a place of love. You're only gonna go so far if it's from a place of anger, resentment, or even judgment. Oh, I know better than them. Um, they're so backwards. Who are you to tell me? I'm gonna, I saw this thing on TikTok, and you know, it it can't it can't come from that place.

SPEAKER_01 40:30

Is it possible to love your child and at the same time cause them significant psychological harm? Not occasionally, yeah, regularly. And how do you come to that realization that okay, this happened? I recognize this, I'm letting that go, and I'm moving forward. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:50

Love is not enough to not harm. And even though you love people, you will also inadvertently harm them because you're imperfect, right, in any relationship, whether it's parenting, romantic relationship, friendships. It's really important to have some level of accountability. You can't just say the past is the past. If you have harmed somebody else, you need to be curious about how that impacted them.

SPEAKER_01 41:21

Do you realize that you have harmed them?

SPEAKER_02 41:23

Some people do. They've got self-awareness, they are able to see clearly after some years. Maybe their life circumstances have changed and a new perspective opens up, and they're like, whoa. Maybe they're on the receiving end of a similar behavior and they see how much it hurt, and they thought, but I did that to this other person. I didn't even realize it. So there are a lot of different factors. Not everybody is gonna be self-reflective, self-aware, and remorseful. Some people have uh, yeah, they have blocks to being able to see themselves clearly. And they have so much shame that they can't look at how they hurt somebody else because that would overwhelm them with shame. So sometimes people deny that they hurt you because they feel so bad about themselves, they can't even see another bad thing that they've done. So their shame is overwhelming and they can't see you. But if that self-awareness opens up for you and you say, Oh my gosh, I did that. I did that. You don't know how it impacted the other person. Let's say you read the text messages of all your children, you've got three kids. It's gonna impact each person very differently. Okay? Trauma is not an event, it's an experience, and everybody experiences it uniquely. So then you might say, Hey, I was thinking about how I read your text messages, and I thought about how that's an invasion of your privacy. I shouldn't have been doing that. Like I should have been trusting you, and you might have felt all sorts of things about what I was doing. I am so sorry I did that. How did that impact you? What was that like for you? You don't get to dictate what the harm is for somebody else. You can name the behavior, take responsibility for it, and ask them how it impacted them and express true, genuine remorse. Then you can move forward. How can I rebuild trust? How can I work to show you that I really respect you and I don't want to intrude upon your privacy or try and control you in any way? How do we move forward? And then working with the person to do that from there on out.

SPEAKER_01 43:36

Does it have the reverse effect? Uh now that you are saying it and I'm reflecting. Sometimes on on my own example, I think I'm being overly considerate. If I do this, maybe because she's my only daughter, maybe because I'm rising her alone, I don't know. If I do this, what impact is it going to have on her? And I try to prevent Something without it even happening. Yeah. Can it like have the reverse not overly traumatizing, but trying overly not to traumatize? And it might also have something, some negative effect. Because sometimes I'm not exposing her to real life challenges. And I'm like, okay, but if I do that and let me not do that. So how does that work?

SPEAKER_02 44:19

Yes, I get that question from parents all the time. Oh god. I don't want to traumatize my kids so much. I don't want to do what my parents did so much that I go the opposite way. And we have to make sure that we differentiate between a child being happy with you and your decisions and a child being prepared for life, having resilience. Resilience is being able to cope in the face of adversity. And life is going to be natural stresses. One thing I tell myself is I am not going to do for my children what they can do for themselves. So if my child is struggling to put on his socks, I'm not going to go over there and put on the socks. I am going to let him struggle. That's not a trauma. That's not him feeling alone and unsupported. I might say to him, I see you trying, keep going. That's really hard. Ah, you're getting frustrated. Try until you Try again. Yeah. Like I can support him, but I'm not going to do it for him and give him the message that he can't do difficult things. And a lot of parents who have had their own traumas, they go too far in the opposite direction of trying to make life very easy for their kids. But the truth is, life is not easy. You are trying to build developmentally appropriate struggles. I'm not going to make him struggle to figure out how to get to school as a five-year-old. I'm going to drive him. But he could handle trying to put on his socks. So you think about how to give them appropriate levels of stress, challenge, responsibility. My kids have to take their plates and put them on the counter when they're done. They're five and three. They are part of doing that. They put their dishes in the dishwasher. There are certain tasks they are responsible for. It's important for them to be responsible. But if I was parentified as a child, I might be so afraid. I don't want them to do anything. I will never say, watch, be watchful for your sister because the sister's not his responsibility. I'm never gonna make him do anything. I'll never make him clean his room. That's also not healthy. I always say the opposite of unhealthy is not always healthy. You have to find a middle ground. Yeah, regular stresses, regular challenges. It's not bad for children to struggle. It's not bad for them to have challenges. It's not bad for them to have and experience very uncomfortable emotions. They just need to know they are supported. They're not alone in those challenges. What happened? What was going on? What did you get frustrated about? What might you do next time? You are supporting them in being able to be resilient and to take a learning lesson from one situation and transfer it to the next. It's not about creating a life of pure ease because your life was difficult. It's about equipping them with the tools and the support and the resources to deal with the challenges that are just a part of life.

SPEAKER_01 47:13

I want to take this to the next level and speak about especially girls and women and the sexuality. Yeah. Because in our community, specifically what happens to a woman's relationship with her own body and her own sexuality when she grows up in a family where the body is simultaneously the appearance, the honor, the reputation of the family. Yes. And something that must be never discussed, never talked, never owned. What does that specific double message or triple message to a woman's sexuality? And what does it look like clinically when someone has grown up inside this kind of situation?

SPEAKER_02 47:52

It's so many layers. It's really so many layers. There's no education about your body, even just on a basic level. Right? Many women tell me my mom never talked to me about menstruation, or I had to figure certain things out completely by myself, or I never felt comfortable asking my mom a question about any part of my body. So they lack education.

SPEAKER_01 48:17

Um up until now.

SPEAKER_02 48:19

Yeah, yeah. And even now, sometimes they don't seek the education because they just they they feel um ashamed or or yeah, ashamed about having questions about their body, as if they shouldn't have questions about their body, or really it should be something to just, I don't know, comes naturally to you. There can also be a lot of um just disconnection from your body if there's been a lot of criticism um or if there's been just a very heavy focus on that. I find that people are very disconnected from their bodies and they kind of objectify their bodies rather than living in their bodies, right? Sometimes people develop lots of. I also see it when people develop all sorts of, my mind is going in so many different directions. So I'm gonna try and frame it here. Women who are continuously trying to be smaller, diet culture, always on a diet, exercising, maybe eating disorders or challenges with eating because they are continuously trying to manage and edit their body. That's what I mean by they're disconnected from it. They're disconnected from what it actually needs, what it's feeling, how to take care of it. They treat their body as something that has to be mastered and managed because that's what's been there. There's many times a lot of shame around sexuality. Yeah, right? Women that don't ever tell you know, parents that they have a boyfriend or that there has been maybe sex before marriage. Like there's a lot of shame and secrecy around that, which in my opinion, one of the main things that happens is it actually exposes a lot of teens and young women to sexual violations because they are not getting the support and the accurate information to advocate for themselves. And so then they get put into very dangerous situations where their boundaries are crossed, they're not getting conversations around consent. My three-year-old the other day, I was saying to her, you know, take a shower, do this, and she said, I don't want to and I don't have to. My body, my choice. And I was like, I loved it. You know, I was like, well, you do have to take a shower, but um I was like, I don't even know where she's gonna be. Yeah, because it is very true, it is your body, but you have to take a shower. Um, but this sense of my body, my choice, many women don't grow up thinking that way at all. And so if you haven't been, again, you've been treated as an extension, you haven't been taught to advocate for yourself, you've been forced to kiss people that a great uncle who's creepy and you don't want to kiss them at five years old, you have disconnected from your body. And I see a lot of these women later suffering from and experiencing sexual violations of some kind because they didn't know how to say no. They didn't know what was healthy or not healthy. Maybe they weren't telling anybody where they were going because of fear of being punished and putting themselves in a dangerous situation that did end up harming them. And so I see it a lot in women kind of looking at how the way they were socialized actually made it so that they were very ill-equipped to deal with the real dangers in a patriarchal society of being a woman with a body and navigating sex and romantic relationships.

SPEAKER_01 51:24

And was that's when the controlling and the protection comes in.

SPEAKER_02 51:27

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 51:28

In Armenian culture, and I'm sure in many other cultures as well, uh, and I'm speaking it from inside of that, not as an outsider, a significant amount of a woman's worth is tied to her purity before marriage. That architecture is still operating, it's still there, and again, nobody's speaking about it expli explicitly, but it is in the like when they speak to you, whenever you have a boyfriend or you have a husband. Um, so it is considered to be more of a family property rather than your own choice, your own decision. What does growing up inside these kind of families do to a woman at a later stage of her life? How does it affect her clinically? And is that a way to reverse it?

SPEAKER_02 52:12

Yeah, I mean, we have to recognize that's patriarchy. Yeah, it is a system, and that system then impacts individuals. And when an individual realizes it's not an individual issue, it's a systemic issue that has influenced her. That's one of the main ways to begin unlearning it. If your body was treated as property, you're gonna be disconnected from your body. You're gonna put your worth on your physical appearance, you're gonna put your worth on your purity. I've had women that have been engaged and had sex with that partner, and then the engagement did not end up turning into a marriage and feeling so much shame. Now people might know, or what that looks like. She is carrying the shame from that systemic influence on her. So it's about do I truly feel ashamed about this? Is this outside of my own value system or not? Oh, that's patriarchy controlling me. That's what I should wear, what I should look like. That's not what it was like for my brother. That wasn't like for my male cousin. I'm beginning to question some of those pieces. And sometimes it's the uncomfortable emotions like shame or guilt or family conflict around these things that prompt somebody to begin looking and asking some of these questions. So we take on a lot of the individual responsibility as women, right? For maintaining the appearance or the the whether it's real purity or the appearance of purity. And that's the lying about it, or having, I've had lots of women that are like, I had an outfit that I would have in my backpack that I was really gonna wear, but I'd leave the house and covered up down the street. I'm changing into something sexier, right? To go out, but I'm not gonna dress like that in my family's home. So beginning to look at how, oh, that was a system that then made me feel like what I wear tells somebody whether I'm worthy of dignity, of respect. If I'm wearing sexy clothes, then somehow I'm not intelligent or deserving. I should be inviting violence. Does anybody invite violence regardless of what you're wearing? No. This is patriarchy that then becomes normalized in culture. So when you begin having awareness about it as a systemic issue, I will warn you, it's gonna bring up a lot of anger. Anger is the first because you've to a lot of the taking the responsibility, you start blaming yourself. And then when you realize it wasn't my fault, then that can turn into anger. Anger at being treated this way, just based on your gender, something you didn't control, something that you had no say in. And so a lot of that anger has to be worked through to then get to a place of empowerment. We still live in a patriarchal society. How do we navigate that? How do we reconnect to our own bodies, to our own sexuality, as defined by us, as fulfilling to us? And each woman is gonna have to develop that differently. Some women have kids, some women don't. Some women are sexual and some women choose not to. Like everybody, yes, it's their choice. My body, my choice, right?

SPEAKER_01 55:26

Yeah, you know, you have this saying uh whenever you have a whenever you're alone, everybody is asking you, when are you going to have a boyfriend? Then you have a boyfriend, when are you going to get married? When you're mad, when are you gonna have to get a fri one child? Oh, it's time for the second one. So you have this burden on yourself all the time. Yeah so I want you to tell a teenage girl or a lady in her 20s watching this episode right now to tell her what to do with all that burden, how to carry that burden without giving all yourself, burning out, bending into society. So, what shall they do?

SPEAKER_02 56:04

Yeah, you don't have to follow the milestones that are set up in this linear path. Again, that comes from a survivalist mentality of predictability, a linear checking off of milestones, a woman's worth being in being chosen by a male partner, in being able to have children and having an identity fully based in motherhood. You are growing up. You don't have to carry that burden. You are blessed enough to be living in a time where there are so many options. So many options. You can get to know yourself and see what kind of woman you want to be. If that ends up following, I have women nowadays that sometimes feel guilty if they do follow that trajectory. That that might be your life path. Yeah. Right? And that's okay. It's about having choice. Many of the generations before us, women did not have a choice. I wonder about my grandmother, 16, 17 years old. My grandfather was 11 years older than her. How much choice did she have in that marriage?

SPEAKER_01 57:10

Not much. I think their marriage was even decided before they were born.

SPEAKER_02 57:14

Many women, yes. And then if that was my grandmother, what about her grandmother and the grandmother before that? So your previous generations did not have choice. And so they see this is the track. And when you're doing something different, it might bring up for them the grief, the envy, the sadness of the choices they didn't get. But you don't actually have to carry their burden. I say to you, young girl, take that backpack off. You were given that, but that doesn't mean you have to carry it. You can put that down and you can realize you are blessed enough to live at a time where you can make choices your previous generational women could not. And they may not understand that. They may not be the first ones to be clapping for you and encouraging you, but your peers will. Fellow trailblazers will, fellow other women doing this will, and that's why it is so important that we have, like I said, the community of women that are saying, Yeah, go get your graduate degree and don't even think about marriage right now if that's not important to you. Think about what you want to study, think about how you want to be. Travel the world, learn about yourself. Do you want to have kids? How does that sound for you? Is this the good time? What's going on in your career? To be able to look at the various choices that are available and to not define our worth as women in these very narrow, very, very narrow boxes that come right after one another.

SPEAKER_01 58:41

I want to speak a little bit about relationships, uh, especially with girls that grew up in narcissistic families with similar boys who also grew up in narcissistic families. So that looks like a collision because on the other side you have the patriarchy as you are mentioned. Yes. The guy has grown up in a family where he is the guy, he can do anything that he wants, and then the girl grows up in a family, you are the girl, you need just to calm down, listen to your man, whatever he says, etc. This usually leads to match. Match or collision. Or collision.

SPEAKER_02 59:13

Well, yeah, I mean the collision is it the match-I it's when the one side is different. Exactly. The match is I expect that every I'm entitled, the woman is gonna submit, and I'm expected to submit. This is a this is a match. And that's the that's uh the opposite of breaking the cycle. That's continuing the cycle.

SPEAKER_01 59:32

Because then you get who doesn't cheat, I have to bear that, he doesn't come home, it's okay. Yep, I'm fine. Yeah, what does that do to like a girl living in that world? I mean, I just I want to uh understand what what they feel. Yeah, like okay, your man cheats on you, he doesn't come home, he maybe physically beats you, he abuses you, and and you're fine with that somehow because your parents told you it's okay, or because you're afraid to go to your parents saying, Hey, you know, mom, he's beating me. So what is inside the mind of that girl?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:06

So it's really important to recognize that that's that's trauma and abuse. And when somebody is in a trauma mindset, there there's also something called a trauma bond. And that is is is really um the definition of that is used very incorrectly, or the word is used very incorrectly in popular. You and I both having a bad haircut and then talking about it is not a trauma bond over a bad haircut. Okay, people think it's bonding over trauma. It is not. A trauma bond is when you have a perpetrator and a victim, and there is such instability. They are connected in like a in a romantic partnership. There's such instability. There's high highs, low lows, there's a chipping away of this person's identity. Maybe there's a dependency financially, emotionally, sexually, socially on this person. You are bonded to them. That's a trauma bond is between a victim and a perpetrator. And many times when we look at women who are being abused, we think, why don't they leave? Without recognizing when somebody has slowly been subtly chipping away at your sense of self, your safety, they are both the source of pain and pleasure. Pain and protection.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:25

Pain and approval. Can that person really protect you? Like the the person who abuses you, who physically abuses you, can you can they protect you, huh?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:33

I mean, they protect you in some ways from they're legitimizing you as a woman. They protect you by paying for the bills, having the facade of a happy married couple, um, giving you that legitimacy of financial freedom, maybe access to then becoming a mother. So protection might not come in emotionally protecting your heart, but it might come in you have a husband and they're providing isn't that an illusion? Yeah. It I mean, it's not it some part of it is not an illusion in the sense that they are providing certain practical things for your life. It might not be an emotionally protective or emotionally healthy relationship, but you're not getting nothing from the relationship. And this person has shifted and um thwarted your mentality. They have made you feel worthless about yourself. So many women in that situation have been told and treated so poorly and have absorbed that they don't have any other options. No one is gonna love them. They have nothing to contribute, they are worthless. They should be so happy that he even comes home when he does, that they have these practical things. Many of them are financially dependent. So let's say they say, okay, I'm gonna leave with what money? Many times the the man has, and I've seen this happen sadly, too many times, where the men have won a lot more custody of the children. And so there's been a loss of access to their own kids. So there are real consequences. So I think it's easy from the outside to say, how could this person have no worth as if it's her problem? She is being abused. That's the byproduct of abuse, is that sense of hopelessness, helplessness. Many times in those controlling situations, they are being isolated from their family and friends. And many times they have a very public, charming, wonderful appearance to everybody else, and nobody knows what they're doing back home to their wife. They are they are very two-faced in that way. And so, how are you gonna tell people that this man that everybody loves has been abusing you for 15 years? Nobody will believe you. Nobody will believe you, and they'll say, 15 years, you're the idiot, you've been staying here, why are you still with him? And not recognize this person has ground her sense of worth, has ground down her options. How is she gonna go? Like, what are the social ramifications of that gonna be? How is she even going to sustain herself financially? There are so many pieces, and she is still connected and attached to him. It becomes almost like an addiction. Your body craves that connection. You are attached to this person on a neurobiological level. That leaving a relationship like that is really hard and sometimes actually sadly very dangerous. If there's physical abuse, when you prepare to leave or do leave, those are the times where sadly women are either attacked, the level of violence is raised because now you leaving is gonna break the facade that he's worked so well. So he will fight for that. And so there are real um physical and and scary consequences to even leaving.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:48

How do they seek help in these situations?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:50

I mean, many women will slowly squirrel away money and build a long-term plan for how to leave. They've got to do safety planning. Um, I I've seen women go through great measures to leave abusive relationships and not always be successful, sadly. It's I I don't work a lot with domestic violence, but the friends of mine who have worked within this arena, and anytime there's physical violence, there's oftentimes financial abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse alongside it. It's really, really, really hard. So it's easy to victim blame and just be like, have more self-respect and leave. It's exactly. I don't think we know enough. And the justice system, sadly, even when a lot of these things are brought up in court, like you know, the biggest example recently was P. Diddy and Cassie and seeing, nope, she she she engaged in all of those things voluntarily, right? Not looking at the power differential.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:48

That's also the patriarchy.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:49

They age absolutely. And so even when a woman comes out and says these things that are painful private details about her life that are going. To get the one attacked. She's the one that's gonna be attacked. She's gonna be the one that's blamed. And so there's there's a high cost. And Cassie didn't do that right afterwards in terms of mentality-wise, you are helping women recover from narcissistic abuse is a long-term process because it is so subtle that it just slowly, slowly chips away at you. It's it's really that emotional manipulation does not happen overnight and it really changes your sense of self. It changes what you think. There's so much gaslighting that you don't even know what is reality and what is not reality. And then if they've isolated you from everybody else, because they don't want you talking about their behaviors to someone else that could say, that's not healthy, or oh, that's so bad, I can't believe he did this. So if they're cutting you off and you're only getting their perspective, there's so much power, you're dependent on them. I mean, it's a recipe for not even knowing this is unhealthy. And there's no way to break this pattern. No, you can break it by the awareness piece, it's huge. I've shown women, I've I've worked with some in my training, some um cases of domestic violence and just showing somebody the cycle of violence. It's the honeymoon period. Then it's slowly gonna start getting conflictual again, then there's gonna be the violence and the conflict, then there's gonna be the making up period, then there's gonna be the honeymoon again, this is the cycle of violence. And I remember maybe a 16, 17-year-old girl looking down at that and just, you know, tears coming down and saying, This is what happens, and this is what my parents' marriage was like, for example. So if that's been all you've known, it's gonna feel I say, what is familial is familiar. So if that pattern, like you talked about her growing up in this household, being controlled, being guilted, um, being shamed, being treated like an object, that is familiar for her. And whatever is gonna feel familiar is gonna feel safe to our nervous system. The nervous system says, Oh, I know this. And so a lot of women will say, Well, he loves me. He really loves me because the love they have known is that love. And you slowly begin to see, wait a second, this isn't love. This is control. This is and slowly the person has to be ready and willing. And it it takes time and it takes practical support and safety planning. Do they have financial resources? Do they have supportive family? Do they have a place they could go? Are there kids involved? Do they have their own career? Have how far have they been isolated? Like there's a lot of factors that go into successfully having somebody leave. And then a lot of the healing happens afterwards because once that trauma bond has diminished a little bit, it's like you start seeing the reality of what it was. It's like you were in a trance, you know, like under a spell. And when that spell is broken, you're like, wow, whoa, I used to think he was more powerful. He was this. Whoa, I used to beg for him to be nice to me, or I used to beg for him to not ch Wow. So a lot of the healing actually comes when they're outside of the relationship because those realizations slowly begin happening because they're no longer actively in the abuse delusion.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:27

Wow. Um, you work with intercultural couples and in the societies that we are in, sometimes and very often, whenever you have someone in your life, it has to be approved by your family. And a lot of marriages I know didn't take place because the parents didn't approve, uh, because of the girl having, I don't know, different culture, religion, uh, I don't know, different relationships before the guy. And this is something that happens every day that we see that a family is not just happening because mom didn't want that or dad didn't want family was against. Um, how would you deal with this kind of situations? What do you advise and how do you help the couples to get um not to get the approval but just to be okay with the disapproval of the loved ones of their relationship?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:19

Yeah. Both members of the couple have to be invested in that, in recognizing that sometimes it's gonna be a difficult obstacle and really supporting each other and getting support from other places in order to help their relationship thrive. Because a relationship does get impacted by those other elements, family approval or disapproval, um, external voices and opinions. And so really making sure that the attachment between that couple is strong and that they have support for navigating the real obstacles that are gonna come in the way. I once went to a wedding that was a renewal of vows 10 years after the couple had gotten married, because 10 years later, three kids later, the family finally approved. Their first marriage was just the two of them at the courthouse. And there were years of estrangement from both sides of the family because they did not approve of the marriage. And so some families will recognize we can't, we can't get in the way of this. They're in love and they will submit. They might not be happy, joyful, dancing next to you at the wedding, but they might be okay. And others will will get in the way and will will cut off whatever, will control that outcome. And so sometimes it's not completely dependent on the couple. I mean, short of running away and getting married, which some couples do. Um, it's it's recognizing what the real consequences are and what the real obstacles are going to be, and supporting that couple and navigating it and standing firm with the values that they have, standing firm with the ways that they can lovingly set boundaries that say, This is really my decision. And what's at stake is you won't be invited into the life that we're creating. And sometimes there's estrangement for a period of time, and then it changes when kids come into the picture because grandparents want to have access to and have a relationship with their grandkids. So it's a long game and it can go a whole number of different different ways. There's no easy solution to just gaining the approval. There's no magic thing that you can say that all of a sudden is gonna make your family say, Okay, you get to do it. But that doesn't mean it's the wrong decision for you.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:43

I wonder what what goes on inside the mind of the parent that decides not to go to the wedding of their kid just because they disapprove the bride or the groom. Yeah. What what are they thinking? I mean, you're a parent. What has to happen for you to do that?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:05

Yeah. I mean, again, I don't think of my children as an extension of me. They're their own people. So when they make a decision I like or I dislike, I recognize it's because, just like my friends or any other person in my family, they're gonna do what they're gonna do. Some things that you like, some things that you don't like. And so you and them, you're separate and they get to make their own choices, including who their life partner is. You might have feelings about it, but thinking you are in charge of controlling their decisions, that's a whole nother level of feeling like they are an extension of you, or feeling like they're an object, you know, or feeling like that's the role of the parent, that that's your justified role to make these major decisions in your kid's life. And I've seen people, you know, talk about their parents doing it with their career choice. Yeah. Oh, I really wanted to be an artist, but my dad said no, I have to be a lawyer, and now I'm a lawyer. And I hate my job, I haven't. I hate my job. Yeah, and it's not until I think people sometimes I see women in their 40s, 50s that are just beginning to say, now I'm okay not having the approval anymore. And it takes, I remember a client years ago at this point, but waiting until her dad died. Oh my god. Until she could live the life that she wanted.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:27

So I can imagine how much hate I'm going to get out of this episode. Like, what are you teaching the people? Mm-hmm. Um, in your clinical work, um, what does an unprocessed family trauma look in women? Especially in immigrant families, but in general as well, because sometimes we're resisting, yeah, get happen getting hit. Yes, going to therapy. So what if I have trauma that I just leave it there? What happens to me?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:56

A lot of times I see it in physical sicknesses. So I don't get to see them if they're not coming to therapy, but it's chronic fatigue, it's um all sorts of gastro GI stuff, um, inflammation, fibromyalgia, PCOS, lots of question marks. I've been to 10 million different doctors and I don't know what's wrong with me, but I get rashes, I can't sleep, I do this, I that, I can't process food, I can't a lot of it becomes somaticized. You consciously, emotionally, and mentally can be disconnected from the traumas, but they are still present within you. And they're still gonna have somatic physical impacts. So a lot of times it it presents in physical and somatic forms, which in immigrant communities are a lot easier to address. If you say to your you know mom, I'm going to see a cardiologist because I feel like I have an irregular heartbeat. Nobody's like, that's for crazy people, right? Like they're gonna say, go see the doctor. But if you say, I'm gonna go see a psychologist because what's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? Yeah. So a lot of times it actually presents physically, it also presents an assert of unfulfillment. Like I have everything I want, but something is unfulfilling. It's empty, it's hollow. I got the house, I got the husband, I got the kids, and I feel like so what? And there's this questioning of like what's going on here? And many times they begin to then slowly reflect. And then things only come up when you're ready.

unknown 1:16:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:38

Okay, things will only come up when you are ready. Because if you are in a state of denial, you will continue on as you are. So many times those traumas either present physically, trying to get your attention, your body is saying, Pay attention to me. Pay attention to me. There's something going on here. And I get a lot of referrals from doctors. They went there first, they dealt with the PCOS, but there's something deep down, and that doctor says, She actually has a history of sexual trauma she never talked to me about. She needs psychological support. And so then they're but it often starts with some, I call it a crisis. And the crisis becomes an opportunity because your body is always moving toward healing. And so if there's something unresolved, it's gonna want to get your attention in some way, shape, or form to say, pay attention to me and deal with this thing that is still within you.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:29

I want uh in the beginning of the episode, we briefly spoke about analyzing me, but I want to go back to that analysis and not in the face of me, but I'm more than sure that you have seen so many successful immigrant women in their 30s overachieving, working hard, doing stuff that a lot of men would not even do. In your experience, what is what are they trying to do? What's going on in their life? What are they trying to prove? Where are they running and when when are they going to stop? They're proving their worth.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:06

Their worth has been coupled with achievement and validation for their accomplishments. So what is fueling it is actually a deep sense of inadequacy. Like I am trying to gain adequacy. I am trying to gain validation and approval by this external accomplishment. Because if I built the million-dollar business, then I must be good. And when I don't build it, I then am not enough. So there's often an inadequacy that is built there. And if you look, you'll see love has been conditional. Right? That's the that's the daughter who got a lot of praise and love and affection for the straight A's. But if she got a B, cold shoulder from her dad for a week, a lecture from her mom about what is she doing and she needs to focus, maybe she was grounded. And so really early on, it was you are not enough if you are not performing, and you're not performing very, very highly. And so this is the woman who seeks to get the validation in her achievements that she is enough, that she's lovable, she's looking for love. That's a pathway to love. Some women are gonna do it based on physical appearance, some are gonna do it based on their accomplishments. We're all gonna do it in some way because we're searching for love. We all need to be loved and to love. It is a human need. And so oftentimes I find what is fueling that is a sense of inadequacy and a desire to earn love.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:32

Wow. Okay, my last question. I guess we call people, but I think we're um you are the psychologist that helps people name the things in their families that nobody wants to, yeah. And uh nobody named. You have built a career and a community around a big community around that work, and you are Iranian, Armenian, American, which means your own family is inside the same cultural system that you are trying to combat at some point. I want to know uh personally, not in the clinical terms, what is the hardest thing you have had to name in your own family and what did it cost you personally?

SPEAKER_02 1:20:13

Yeah. I think one really hard thing is talking about the things my mom missed and got wrong with me, or the negative impacts that she had on me with her being dead. It's really hard to talk about somebody that you don't get to repair with in real time. It's really different with my dad. Because if you follow me on Instagram, you see I have a great relationship with my dad. And I can tell him, like I told him today, I was like, I'm going to a podcast. He's like, okay, what are you gonna say about me? Like, you know, we joke about it. There's this joking piece. He's like, I need a support group of immigrant parents whose kids are always talking to them about the things they didn't do right growing up. And so, like, we we we have a joking, open communication around some of these things.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:07

It wasn't always like that.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:08

No, it absolutely was not like that. It took a lot of time. This is 20 years in the making. So I I want to put that out there for someone that thinks that their relationship is just gonna get like that overnight. But with him, I get to actually, if I needed to talk to him about something serious, I could. I could do that in a private realm in a way that I can't with my mom. So I think one thing that is hard to talk about is the things that she messed up on or the things that were missed, and to do that with compassion, I think is I can't then sit with her and talk to her and discuss that. And so I do have just a I have to navigate that in a different way than I do with my dad. And in general, just talking about my life very openly. Like today at breakfast with my dad and my sister, we were talking about how some of my family members found out that I'm getting a separation from my husband from social media, and what a big deal that was that they found out from social media. So, me sharing transparently is so important to me. If I want to support others and naming the things their family didn't talk about, then I'm gonna talk about what I'm going through, including a divorce. Like I'm gonna put that out there so that we can break the stigma around it. But that also means that I sometimes do get judgment from my own family. I do get real consequences for how they think about me. I was saying to my sister, sometimes I right now I feel like some of my aunties are mad at me, but it's okay because I like I don't care as much since they're like I used to care a lot more. But there's real consequences. There, some of them are mad at me right now, you know, they think I've made a wrong decision or I'm not being a good mom or whatever it might be. So I am, you're right, I am helping women break these cycles, but I'm I'm living inside that. And I'm feeling the real impact, which I think just makes it that much better for me to be able to support women doing that because I am I'm experiencing it alongside them. I'm I'm not telling you anything that I don't have to experience myself. I recognize, and that's why sometimes women are like, How are you in my head? How do you know these things? I'm like, I am living it too. Of course, everybody's experience is unique, but I'm experiencing it. And so there is a cost to being authentic. There is a cost to saying the things that are usually kept silent and not talked about. I talked about, I talk about trauma, I talk about sex, I talk about abuse, I talk about divorce, I talk about money, I talk about our bodies. These are things you're not supposed to- I talk about our parents and the things they missed. These are the things you're not supposed to talk about. I talk about mental health. And so I do get the pushback, but what I also get is an authentic connection to my mission, to my value, to my purpose. There are people in my family like my dad. I know my dad supports me. I don't get that judgment from my dad, right? He might not love everything I talk about. My sister sometimes doesn't always love everything I talk about, but the general I know generally we're gonna be okay and they're gonna love me. That's not to say my extended family always feels the same way. So for me, being authentic is valued more than having the judgment of them. And every single person has to make some of those decisions personally. And I wasn't doing that at 25 years old, but I'm doing that now at 40 something. So sometimes it takes time, building up of courage, and everything will work out, and everything will work out. Thank you very much. Absolutely, thank you so much for having me.