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This is high function revealed. People see what I get done. What I want to talk about is how I got this way, what I learned growing up, what it takes to keep going, and what I'm starting to notice about the things I do over and over again.
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Some of those patterns have served me well, some I'm still working through, and I'm curious whether you see them in your life, too.
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Season 1 what you don't see Episode 3 Loved but not always Supported Content Note this episode discusses childhood trauma.
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You can have a loving family and still find yourself thinking, I can't tell them this.
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That's something I want to talk about today.
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Because when I say I've felt unsupported, I can immediately remember people who supported me when I had my daughter and while I was raising her, I felt that support.
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It was real. I have a loving family, and I also have memories of needing help and feeling very alone.
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I used to think I had to explain that better. Find the right words so nobody thought I was ungrateful.
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Make sure I gave everybody credit before I said what hurt.
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Even sitting here, I can feel myself doing it.
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Maybe you know that feeling. You're trying to tell somebody about something painful and halfway through you're explaining why the person who hurt you is actually a good person.
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They may be, you may love them, but somewhere in the explanation, what happened to you starts getting less room.
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When I was a teenager, I used to go to Columbia University to see a therapist.
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By then I had found my courage. I had spoken about what was happening to me.
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My uncle was helping me, and I was going to therapy.
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From the outside, you could look at that and say, good, she's getting support.
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And I thought I was.
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I thought this therapist was part of my support system, someone I could talk to.
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One of the things I talked about was not wanting to eat fried chicken all the time.
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That detail has stayed with me. Of all the things I could be sitting here remembering, I remember the fried chicken.
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My therapist told my uncle what I had said, and she gave him my poetry book.
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My poetry book.
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Those were my words, and suddenly they were in somebody else's hands.
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I'm telling you how
Load full transcript
I remember this.
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I can't tell you what the therapist thought she was accomplishing.
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What I remember is that people were offended.
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Somehow what I had said and written had become an offense against the people helping me, and I was still the teenager who needed help.
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I don't think you need to have had the exact experience to recognize something in it.
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Maybe you told somebody something privately and the next time you walked in a room other people knew?
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Maybe you tried to explain what wasn't working, and the conversation became about how hurtful it was that you'd said anything.
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You went looking for somewhere to put your feelings.
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Now there are other people's feelings to deal with, too.
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That's the part of this memory I keep coming back to.
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I thought I had somewhere to speak.
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But speaking created another problem for me.
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How much can you relax into help when you're worried about what might happen if you say the wrong thing?
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I miss my mother.
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I wanted her with me.
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And after what happened with the therapist, my uncle was upset.
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He told me I could go back to her.
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Suddenly, in my newfound stability, I was leaving the city and being shipped back to Queens.
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What stayed with me was the feeling that the help I had might disappear because someone was upset with me.
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I was still a teenager trying to find my footing.
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I needed to know that I could say something difficult and still have support. Afterward.
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When I talked about trauma building on top of trauma, this is the part of what I mean. In my own life, there was what happened to me.
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Then there was the experience of telling.
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Then there was what happened around the help.
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I don't want to tell the story as if nobody did anything for me. My uncle did a lot for me.
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Someone who had made it possible for me to see a therapist.
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Those things happened.
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But I also need to be able to describe what that help felt like when people became upset with me.
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Because being offered support and feeling secure in that support were not always the same experience for me.
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Could I be unhappy about something?
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Could I write something someone didn't like?
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Could I need help and still have feelings about how I was being helped?
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I don't remember knowing how to ask those questions then.
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I can ask them now.
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My father leaving belongs in this conversation, too.
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I loved my father.
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I have good memories of him.
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And he left.
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That absence was part of what I had to live with.
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Sometimes when I talk about feeling unsupported, I think people hear a judgment about how much I was loved.
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But I'm also talking about who was there, what I could count on, whether something was still going to be there when I needed it again.
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You can miss someone who loves you.
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You can need from someone who has already given you something.
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I'm learning to let those sentences stand without immediately arguing with them.
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And then there are memories that look much smaller.
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A report card full of A's with one B.
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And the question is, why didn't you get that a one B On the whole report card, I think about what I wanted in that moment.
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Someone to notice how well I had done, to be pleased with me before we got to the one thing I could have done better.
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If you've had that experience, you may remember the one thing that got discussed more clearly than everything you accomplished.
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And I wonder what happens when you start anticipating that. Question yourself before anybody sees the report card. You've already found the bee.
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Before somebody notices your work, you've already worked out what they might criticize.
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I can recognize that kind of attention in myself. The ability to spot what needs fixing.
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It's useful. People pay me to notice what isn't working.
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But I want to understand what happens when I turn that attention on myself and never let anything be enough.
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We'll spend more time with that in the next episode. For today, I'm thinking about how much difference it might have made to here.
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Look at everything. You did well.
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And now I want to come back to my daughter.
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Because if I leave you with only those memories. I haven't told you the truth about support in my life. When I had my daughter
and through raising her, I felt very supported. I know what it is to remember help with gratitude, to feel the love in the family. Those experiences belong to me just as much as the painful ones do.
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That's why this can be so complicated to talk about.
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I'm not describing a family where love was absent.
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I'm describing a life where I could feel held in some ways and left on my own in others.
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At different times, around different needs, the support I received later mattered. It doesn't mean the earlier experiences stopped mattering.
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And being hurt early doesn't make the support that came later less real.
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I don't want to lose either part of my life just to make the story easier to tell.
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This is where I think about the person I've become.
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In the last episode, I talked about being quick to handle things, making a plan, finding a way forward.
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When I put that beside these memories, I wonder whether part of the relief in doing something myself is that I don't have to work out how much of my experience I'm allowed to bring with me.
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I can just get it done.
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I don't have to explain why I'm upset, worry about offending somebody, or find the right way to ask.
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But I still have the feeling I still have the need.
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Being able to manage doesn't make either one disappear.
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And I don't want to assume every offer of help now will become the kind of experience I had then. I. I've had enough real support to know that isn't the whole story.
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I want to get better at noticing the difference. When does help give me room to be honest?
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When do I start editing myself because I'm afraid of what honesty might cost?
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Maybe there's someone you love who comes to mind while you're listening. Someone who did a lot for you. Someone used to wish had understood something.
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You don't have to decide today what to say to them. I appreciated what you did and I still need it.
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What comes after that?
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Maybe you needed someone to keep something private, to notice your effort to stay interested after you said something uncomfortable.
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Maybe you needed to know that someone could be upset with you and still be there for you.
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For me, support has become a question about what happens after I'm honest.
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Can I still belong here?
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Can you be upset with me and still care about what happens to me?
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I want relationships where there's room for that.
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And I want to give myself room to tell the whole story. The people I love, the help I remember, and the things I still needed.
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Thanks for spending this time with me. If you recognize something from your own life today, I'd love for you to tell me that story. I'll talk to you next time.