TRANSCRIPTIE 🔗
WEBVTT
1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.000
Foreign.
2
00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:19.000
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.
3
00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:28.000
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.
4
00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:39.000
Season 1 what you don't see Episode 3 Loved but not always Supported Content Note this episode discusses childhood trauma.
5
00:00:39.000 --> 00:00:45.000
You can have a loving family and still find yourself thinking, I can't tell them this.
6
00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:48.000
That's something I want to talk about today.
7
00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:59.000
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.
8
00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:07.000
It was real. I have a loving family, and I also have memories of needing help and feeling very alone.
9
00:01:07.000 --> 00:01:14.000
I used to think I had to explain that better. Find the right words so nobody thought I was ungrateful.
10
00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:19.000
Make sure I gave everybody credit before I said what hurt.
11
00:01:19.000 --> 00:01:22.000
Even sitting here, I can feel myself doing it.
12
00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:35.000
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.
13
00:01:35.000 --> 00:01:45.000
They may be, you may love them, but somewhere in the explanation, what happened to you starts getting less room.
14
00:01:45.000 --> 00:01:50.000
When I was a teenager, I used to go to Columbia University to see a therapist.
15
00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:55.000
By then I had found my courage. I had spoken about what was happening to me.
16
00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:59.000
My uncle was helping me, and I was going to therapy.
17
00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:05.000
From the outside, you could look at that and say, good, she's getting support.
18
00:02:05.000 --> 00:02:07.000
And I thought I was.
19
00:02:07.000 --> 00:02:12.000
I thought this therapist was part of my support system, someone I could talk to.
20
00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:18.000
One of the things I talked about was not wanting to eat fried chicken all the time.
21
00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:26.000
That detail has stayed with me. Of all the things I could be sitting here remembering, I remember the fried chicken.
22
00:02:26.000 --> 00:02:32.000
My therapist told my uncle what I had said, and she gave him my poetry book.
23
00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:35.000
My poetry book.
24
00:02:35.000 --> 00:02:40.000
Those were my words, and suddenly they were in somebody else's hands.
25
00:02:40.000 --> 00:02:43.000
I'm telling you how
Load full transcript
I remember this.
26
00:02:43.000 --> 00:02:48.000
I can't tell you what the therapist thought she was accomplishing.
27
00:02:48.000 --> 00:02:52.000
What I remember is that people were offended.
28
00:02:52.000 --> 00:03:03.000
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.
29
00:03:03.000 --> 00:03:10.000
I don't think you need to have had the exact experience to recognize something in it.
30
00:03:10.000 --> 00:03:17.000
Maybe you told somebody something privately and the next time you walked in a room other people knew?
31
00:03:17.000 --> 00:03:27.000
Maybe you tried to explain what wasn't working, and the conversation became about how hurtful it was that you'd said anything.
32
00:03:27.000 --> 00:03:31.000
You went looking for somewhere to put your feelings.
33
00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:35.000
Now there are other people's feelings to deal with, too.
34
00:03:35.000 --> 00:03:39.000
That's the part of this memory I keep coming back to.
35
00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:42.000
I thought I had somewhere to speak.
36
00:03:42.000 --> 00:03:46.000
But speaking created another problem for me.
37
00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:53.000
How much can you relax into help when you're worried about what might happen if you say the wrong thing?
38
00:03:53.000 --> 00:03:55.000
I miss my mother.
39
00:03:55.000 --> 00:03:57.000
I wanted her with me.
40
00:03:57.000 --> 00:04:02.000
And after what happened with the therapist, my uncle was upset.
41
00:04:02.000 --> 00:04:04.000
He told me I could go back to her.
42
00:04:04.000 --> 00:04:11.000
Suddenly, in my newfound stability, I was leaving the city and being shipped back to Queens.
43
00:04:11.000 --> 00:04:17.000
What stayed with me was the feeling that the help I had might disappear because someone was upset with me.
44
00:04:17.000 --> 00:04:20.000
I was still a teenager trying to find my footing.
45
00:04:20.000 --> 00:04:27.000
I needed to know that I could say something difficult and still have support. Afterward.
46
00:04:27.000 --> 00:04:38.000
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.
47
00:04:38.000 --> 00:04:41.000
Then there was the experience of telling.
48
00:04:41.000 --> 00:04:46.000
Then there was what happened around the help.
49
00:04:46.000 --> 00:04:54.000
I don't want to tell the story as if nobody did anything for me. My uncle did a lot for me.
50
00:04:54.000 --> 00:04:59.000
Someone who had made it possible for me to see a therapist.
51
00:04:59.000 --> 00:05:01.000
Those things happened.
52
00:05:01.000 --> 00:05:08.000
But I also need to be able to describe what that help felt like when people became upset with me.
53
00:05:08.000 --> 00:05:15.000
Because being offered support and feeling secure in that support were not always the same experience for me.
54
00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:18.000
Could I be unhappy about something?
55
00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:21.000
Could I write something someone didn't like?
56
00:05:21.000 --> 00:05:26.000
Could I need help and still have feelings about how I was being helped?
57
00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:30.000
I don't remember knowing how to ask those questions then.
58
00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:33.000
I can ask them now.
59
00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:37.000
My father leaving belongs in this conversation, too.
60
00:05:37.000 --> 00:05:39.000
I loved my father.
61
00:05:39.000 --> 00:05:42.000
I have good memories of him.
62
00:05:42.000 --> 00:05:43.000
And he left.
63
00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:47.000
That absence was part of what I had to live with.
64
00:05:47.000 --> 00:05:54.000
Sometimes when I talk about feeling unsupported, I think people hear a judgment about how much I was loved.
65
00:05:54.000 --> 00:06:04.000
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.
66
00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:07.000
You can miss someone who loves you.
67
00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:12.000
You can need from someone who has already given you something.
68
00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:18.000
I'm learning to let those sentences stand without immediately arguing with them.
69
00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:22.000
And then there are memories that look much smaller.
70
00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:26.000
A report card full of A's with one B.
71
00:06:26.000 --> 00:06:39.000
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.
72
00:06:39.000 --> 00:06:45.000
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.
73
00:06:45.000 --> 00:06:52.000
If you've had that experience, you may remember the one thing that got discussed more clearly than everything you accomplished.
74
00:06:52.000 --> 00:07:03.000
And I wonder what happens when you start anticipating that. Question yourself before anybody sees the report card. You've already found the bee.
75
00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:10.000
Before somebody notices your work, you've already worked out what they might criticize.
76
00:07:10.000 --> 00:07:16.000
I can recognize that kind of attention in myself. The ability to spot what needs fixing.
77
00:07:16.000 --> 00:07:20.000
It's useful. People pay me to notice what isn't working.
78
00:07:20.000 --> 00:07:27.000
But I want to understand what happens when I turn that attention on myself and never let anything be enough.
79
00:07:27.000 --> 00:07:35.000
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.
80
00:07:35.000 --> 00:07:38.000
Look at everything. You did well.
81
00:07:38.000 --> 00:07:41.000
And now I want to come back to my daughter.
82
00:07:41.000 --> 00:08:00.000
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.
83
00:08:00.000 --> 00:08:03.000
That's why this can be so complicated to talk about.
84
00:08:03.000 --> 00:08:07.000
I'm not describing a family where love was absent.
85
00:08:07.000 --> 00:08:13.000
I'm describing a life where I could feel held in some ways and left on my own in others.
86
00:08:13.000 --> 00:08:25.000
At different times, around different needs, the support I received later mattered. It doesn't mean the earlier experiences stopped mattering.
87
00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:30.000
And being hurt early doesn't make the support that came later less real.
88
00:08:30.000 --> 00:08:36.000
I don't want to lose either part of my life just to make the story easier to tell.
89
00:08:36.000 --> 00:08:40.000
This is where I think about the person I've become.
90
00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:47.000
In the last episode, I talked about being quick to handle things, making a plan, finding a way forward.
91
00:08:47.000 --> 00:08:59.000
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.
92
00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:01.000
I can just get it done.
93
00:09:01.000 --> 00:09:08.000
I don't have to explain why I'm upset, worry about offending somebody, or find the right way to ask.
94
00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:12.000
But I still have the feeling I still have the need.
95
00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:16.000
Being able to manage doesn't make either one disappear.
96
00:09:16.000 --> 00:09:27.000
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.
97
00:09:27.000 --> 00:09:33.000
I want to get better at noticing the difference. When does help give me room to be honest?
98
00:09:33.000 --> 00:09:41.000
When do I start editing myself because I'm afraid of what honesty might cost?
99
00:09:41.000 --> 00:09:50.000
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.
100
00:09:50.000 --> 00:09:58.000
You don't have to decide today what to say to them. I appreciated what you did and I still need it.
101
00:09:58.000 --> 00:10:00.000
What comes after that?
102
00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:10.000
Maybe you needed someone to keep something private, to notice your effort to stay interested after you said something uncomfortable.
103
00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:16.000
Maybe you needed to know that someone could be upset with you and still be there for you.
104
00:10:16.000 --> 00:10:22.000
For me, support has become a question about what happens after I'm honest.
105
00:10:22.000 --> 00:10:25.000
Can I still belong here?
106
00:10:25.000 --> 00:10:31.000
Can you be upset with me and still care about what happens to me?
107
00:10:31.000 --> 00:10:35.000
I want relationships where there's room for that.
108
00:10:35.000 --> 00:10:47.000
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.
109
00:10:47.000 --> 00:11:06.000
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.