BONUS: Unabridged Interview with Carly Ostler

Speaker 1 True Story Media.

Speaker 1 Hello, it's Andrea. A quick spoiler alert if you haven't yet listened to all of season four, but we had a rather big plot twist with the sudden death of Joe's mom while we were making this season.

Speaker 1 Now, losing a parent is always a huge deal, but when your relationship with them was fractured, there are just so many added layers of complexity, which is why I was so glad to talk to Carly Osler, a therapist who specializes in complex PTSD and complex grief.

Speaker 1 As ever on this show, I found that their advice was not only helpful in the context of the season, but helpful to me in understanding a bunch of my own feelings.

Speaker 1 And I think that you'll get a lot out of listening to the full conversation. In the meantime, a reminder that we're now on YouTube.

Speaker 1 So if video is your jam and you want to see my face, you can find us there.

Speaker 1 And if you want even more new episodes while you're waiting on season five, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts and on Patreon.

Speaker 1 If you have a moment, leaving us a nice review or rating also helps a great deal. Now, here is my conversation with Carly Osler.

Speaker 1 Hello, I have exciting news. I am officially taking this show on the road next year.
I'm going to be doing a series of Nobody Should Believe Me live shows next March.

Speaker 1 I will be in Los Angeles on March 7th at the Regent Theater. I'll be in my hometown, Seattle, at the Triple Door on March 18th.
Then I'm headed to New York City for a show at Sony Hall on March 25th.

Speaker 1 And I'll be wrapping up in Chicago on March 26th at The Den. Tickets for all shows are on sale now.
You can find a link in the show notes or on our website.

Speaker 1 We're going to have special guests, meet and greets, and more at these shows. We're going to have a great time.
So go get your tickets now. Hope to see you out there.
Hey, it's Andrea.

Speaker 1 It's come to my attention that some of you have been served programmatic ads for ICE on my show.

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I am the daughter of an immigrant. I stand with immigrants.

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Speaker 1 Well, thanks for being here, Carly. I can see you.
You look great.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 1 And nice to meet you as well. Thank you so much for being here with us.
Really interested to talk to you after reading up on your work. You are the perfect person to talk to, I think, about this.

Speaker 1 So to start off with, can you just tell us who you are and what you do?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm Carly Osler. I'm an LMFT licensed marriage and family therapist, and I specialize in working with trauma, complex PTSD, complex trauma, complex grief, systemic trauma.

Speaker 2 I've been in the field for about 20 years now in all different aspects of the field of psychology and psychiatric hospitals, working in foster care, working in drug treatment.

Speaker 2 And I've really honed in on trauma, complex trauma, systemic trauma, complex grief, and really all the overlaps of all the things that contribute to how we develop as people and how we can work with that and shift it.

Speaker 2 we want to.

Speaker 1 Okay. And so, yeah, as you mentioned, one of the things that you specialize in is complex PTSD.
And can you break that down for us a bit? What is that?

Speaker 2 How I like to talk about complex PTSD

Speaker 2 in terms of trauma. I like to talk about it as like stubbing your toe is blunt force trauma.

Speaker 2 It is really small blunt force trauma, but if you stub your toe in the same spot again and again for a month, your body is going to automatically adjust and evolve to try not to stub your toe again, like trying to avoid that pain.

Speaker 2 And also, if you're stubbing your toe in the same spot every day, again and again and again, you might also develop a larger trauma to your toe.

Speaker 2 It might start gushing blood at some point as it weakens the skin barrier. And so I like to think of complex trauma as a lot of the little traumas, the systemic traumas that interweave into

Speaker 2 more complex expression of pain, of kind of like what gets stuck. Trauma is generally defined as something that's too much, too fast, too soon.

Speaker 2 And when it all kind of builds up and builds up, we develop more complex reactions.

Speaker 1 So I think, you know, the term PTSD, I think in the sort of overall societal complex is probably most associated with veterans, right?

Speaker 1 That's something we think about when we think about post-traumatic stress disorder. And

Speaker 1 how is complex PTSD different than what we might think of as like a soldier coming home from battle and having flashbacks or that kind of thing that I think people come immediately to mind when people think about PTSD?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So PTSD in the DSM is generally defined as having like one single event that is very traumatic, witnessing somebody's death, nearly dying yourself, somehow being involved in like a life-threatening situation that will then develop PTSD.

Speaker 2 Whereas with complex PTSD, it's not necessarily one large single event. It can be a lot of small things that build and build and build and create really very similar symptoms of PTSD,

Speaker 2 although it's a little, it can be nuanced in how it expresses itself.

Speaker 1 Okay, so yeah, I'm thinking of like a friend in college who got in a car accident with his girlfriend and they like, they were okay physically, but they ended up upside down in the car and he really had.

Speaker 1 a hard time with that for quite a while afterwards and would have memory. So that sounds like kind of a classic like single event PTSD.
And then

Speaker 1 someone who's trying to heal from child abuse,

Speaker 1 that's not one event. That's a whole bunch of events that are sort of a range of different

Speaker 1 sort of intensities, durations,

Speaker 1 like just a whole sort of string of things.

Speaker 2 Yes. And there were some really interesting studies done post-9-11 around

Speaker 2 people who were at ground zero who developed PTSD and who didn't.

Speaker 2 People who had a sense of home safety, a place to be able to process what they'd experienced, did not develop PTSD, whereas people who didn't have that kind of safe home base did develop PTSD.

Speaker 2 And similarly, especially with the example of childhood abuse, right, if you don't, if you can't process the trauma, that's when the complications show up, right? The trauma is not the event.

Speaker 2 Trauma is the body's response to what happened. And being able to process it

Speaker 2 is a part of what alleviates the trauma, moves the trauma out of your body.

Speaker 1 What are some of the things that can happen if you don't process your PTSD, sort of complex or otherwise, I guess?

Speaker 2 Yeah, not processing trauma. I mean, it's going to create more cortisol, more stress.
Your body is going to get stuck kind of reliving that experience, those experiences.

Speaker 2 It might create certain beliefs that kind of then shape your life of like, yeah, if you're in a car accident, then driving is not safe. I can't, I will not be safe in a car.

Speaker 2 And how that can shape your life and your choices and how you respond to other people. Maybe you're really judgmental of other people's cars.

Speaker 2 So it shapes both behaviors, like the trauma can show up as like physical symptoms, the body responding, having sort of stress responses to different triggers.

Speaker 2 Different things can come in and create a response that maybe feels bigger than the moment because it's more about the trauma that's still living in the body and the past event that got triggered and kind of take you out of what's happening in that moment.

Speaker 1 Interesting. Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 was thinking, as you were saying, about sort of like the difference between processing trauma and not processing trauma.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to do my very best not to turn this into a personal therapy session, but I was thinking of, you know, my so my father's British, and my grandfather on that side was a doctor for the Royal Air Force during World War II.

Speaker 1 And he had, I mean, he saw horrors, obviously, in doing that. And the ethos in the UK after the war was: okay, we're never talking about this ever again.

Speaker 1 And like, that was the national ethos about sort of how to do it.

Speaker 2 And like the worst thing you could do, really, the worst thing you could do.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And, you know, my grandmother was also involved in the war effort.

Speaker 1 She worked in Bletchley and, you know, less sort of front lines, but I think even just living there, you know, they were being bombed, like they were very different, like sort of talking to my American grandparents about their experience of the, you know, World War II being over here and then versus being in Europe.

Speaker 1 And yeah, I mean, that just so struck me of like, oh, well, what was, you know, asking my dad what it was like. He's like, well, no one talked about it.

Speaker 1 And my grandfather was a very serious alcoholic and died young. And I think that was probably

Speaker 1 relatively common for folks who were. So I'm assuming that this is tied to all kinds of not so healthy coping mechanisms that can pop up.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. Absolutely.
The trauma is going to be stuck in the body until it's allowed to come up and come out and be processed. And when we don't have

Speaker 2 socially, societally, like the space to be processing that,

Speaker 2 then we even can learn our own sort of ways of tamping it down and trying to push it down. And what, yeah, whether it's self-medicating with alcohol or all kinds of behaviors.

Speaker 2 it can create a lot of problems.

Speaker 1 I think this is something that's starting to be a little bit more of the in the public conversation with, you know, books like The Body Keeps the Score.

Speaker 1 And I know there's a lot more sort of more updated works on that. They're a bit more inclusive than that book.
But,

Speaker 1 you know, this idea, I think, of us holding trauma in the body. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that element.

Speaker 2 Yeah. A really common metaphor that is used is like talking about how

Speaker 2 animals process trauma in the body. So like an antelope running away from a lion will then, after evading this life or death situation, will shake.

Speaker 2 The body is going to shake and process out the extra cortisol and like reconfigure to like, okay, I nearly died, but in this moment, I am here.

Speaker 2 And I have survived, and it's safe enough for me to

Speaker 2 process this trauma, the stress stress hormones, the experience out of the body that animals have a way of naturally processing.

Speaker 2 Humans don't. I mean, yes, there are somatic physical movements that

Speaker 2 some practitioners will use to physically release the trauma from the body. And sometimes that does involve shaking and also talk therapy, EMDR.

Speaker 2 There's all kinds of trauma therapies that help with kind of bringing it up and out.

Speaker 1 One of the challenges for reporting on this podcast, and also one of the things that makes the show what it is, is that I am very close to all of this.

Speaker 1 And so this frequently happens where I, you know, you've said something that, you know, really resonated with me just about sort of complex trauma.

Speaker 1 And I know you mentioned on your website and you mentioned just now, EMDR therapy, which I know for, you know, Joe, who's the subject of our, I'm going to try not to completely derail myself here, but had sort of a bad experience with EMDR.

Speaker 1 I, for me, that was like a very, very useful tool. And that was the thing that kind of helped me process what happened with my sister.

Speaker 1 And I remember when my therapist first told me that I had PTSD from those events, I was like.

Speaker 1 very resistant to that idea because I just sort of thought like, you know, and even now actually I'm sort of having the same thing because as you describe the difference between PTSD and complex PTSD, I'm like, oh, what I had with Megan was complex PTSD because it was a lifetime of events that led up to like one big

Speaker 1 sort of break, but it was like a whole bunch of things, right? So it sounds like it more fits in that category.

Speaker 1 I've sort of attached that to survivors of this abuse, which I don't consider myself, you know, like I'm sort of in a different category.

Speaker 1 So I'm sort of going through a little bit of a just thinking about how some of these like, maybe this is partly, you know, a generational thing where I don't know if this is true for Gen Z, but I think sometimes like having such a serious sounding diagnosis, it can be very easy to be like, that's not what's happening to me.

Speaker 1 Like I'm not a soldier.

Speaker 1 Like I don't want to overblow what's going on with me, but that does actually sound like, and I was, I mean, I was having panic attacks and the whole, whatever, the whole thing.

Speaker 1 And that was what my therapist told me was like, you know, basically you have PTSD. We need to get processed accordingly.

Speaker 1 But I think like, do you find that people sort of are resistant maybe to that idea of PTSD because we really associate it with like 9-11 or a car crash or a war or like these things that we can really

Speaker 1 it's very straightforward to understanding the trauma.

Speaker 2 Yes. Yes.
And

Speaker 2 there's a couple things I think that are a part of this that are part of, yeah, wanting to avoid the diagnosis or that it feels like a very big diagnosis. Complex PTSD is not in the DSM.

Speaker 2 It's not something that you can be like through insurance diagnosed with or reimbursed. It's just not in the DSM.

Speaker 2 And there's a lot of trauma researchers that say that if the DSM was trauma informed, there'd maybe be like four diagnoses. We understand now so much is related to trauma.

Speaker 2 So many things that we want to label as psychological disorders are related to trauma, can be improved with working with the trauma that created whatever diagnoses.

Speaker 2 Part of just trying to deal with diagnoses in general is what are they even good for? Like, if it informs treatment, beautiful, wonderful.

Speaker 2 It helps you get to what you need to live the life you want to be living, amazing. But yeah, there's a lot of different camps of who's going to talk about it one way or another way.

Speaker 2 And a lot of that also comes from ableism and how we treat anybody who has any kind of diagnosis in general.

Speaker 2 This idea that there is a good and a right and a neurotypical and you should be that way or else you will be hospitalized, you will be treated poorly.

Speaker 2 We don't really have a society that's safe to talk about trauma, let alone like

Speaker 2 not being okay in any way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, that's really, that's really true. And I mean, we, I've had a lot of conversations with some of my, and I was just talking to Dr.

Speaker 1 Mark Feldman, who's a really well-known psychiatrist in this field.

Speaker 1 And we were talking about the entry for fectious disorder imposed on another, which is the DSM entry for the behavior of munchausen by proxy.

Speaker 1 And we were talking about it and its utilities and its dangers and how it's used wrongly in court. And I'm like, oh boy, the DSM is a real,

Speaker 1 that's a real journey. And that's made by humans and all of their, you know, and then it's like, oh, there's even some financial incentives for this, that, the other.
I'm just like, what a mess.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 capitalism, maybe.

Speaker 1 But yeah, it's, you know, when I, when I think about attitudes around mental health, I think until, you know,

Speaker 1 really recently, I mean, I do feel like the stigma is loosening up, but even for me growing up and certainly being from.

Speaker 1 that context of, you know, my dad's British and they have an even worse relationship with mental health stuff than we do. Like it's even more sort of stigmatized.

Speaker 1 And you just think like, oh my gosh, you're not going to go on medication unless you're like a crazy person, you know, and it's like, it's very stigmatized. And I think that is not helpful.

Speaker 1 And yeah, so that's very helpful to me personally.

Speaker 1 But I think like I'm very happy to see that such a wider, you know, sort of spectrum of trauma rather than just you had, you were being bombed is being accepted.

Speaker 1 And one of the things that you focus on in your practice is working with marginalized groups. And I think that.
that's something that we're just learning about.

Speaker 1 And so I wonder if you can talk about sort of

Speaker 1 what you see as

Speaker 1 just sort of this effect of if you're, if you're, you know, LGBTQ, if you're a person of color, like just living in a sort of hostile world day to day, basically.

Speaker 1 I mean, what kind of effect does that have on someone's mental health and on their nervous system?

Speaker 2 Generally some complex trauma. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Generally some complex trauma of like you're also constantly being gaslit out of the harm that you're experiencing, which has an effect of I, you know, feeling harmed, but then being told that you're not being harmed or that it shouldn't be hurtful or you should have to deal with it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, microaggressions, hostile environment existing in a world not meant for you, which I think if we looked at that experience collectively, that's maybe more universal than people who

Speaker 2 like if we add up all of the specific marginalizations, like that is a larger actual group than people who are not marginalized.

Speaker 1 Because it's only straight cis white men that the world was built for. And so if we add the rest of us together, then that's a lot of people that actually are not,

Speaker 1 you know, thought of in that system. And I think about that a lot with, obviously, my work crosses over so much with the medical system.

Speaker 1 And that's one of the tricky things, especially because we have such a high rate of female offenders. It's like 96%.

Speaker 1 And so a lot of times in these cases, they'll bring up like, oh, we like medical misogyny and this and that. And doctors don't listen to women.
And I'm like, those things are all true. And,

Speaker 1 you know, so it's like, it's incredibly complex. Like when women were added to clinical trials, these are things that happened like decades ago, slash in my lifetime in some cases.

Speaker 1 And it's just like, oh, yeah, it's just there wasn't that consideration.

Speaker 1 And I think you're right, too, with the gaslighting, but sort of like when someone's trying to talk about racism and then a person just like jumps in immediately and is like, don't make everything about race.

Speaker 1 Not everything is about race. And you're like, no, but this specific thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
I even have thought this with Joe specifically, you know, they're marginalized in sort of a bunch of different ways, right?

Speaker 1 Because they are non-binary and they're an abuse survivor and they're a person of color, which they didn't know growing up and then found out.

Speaker 1 And so, I mean, it's like all of these kind of things piling on.

Speaker 1 And I

Speaker 1 wonder, like. It's just so much to unpack that you sort of almost worry about someone trying.

Speaker 1 It's like, I don't know, like, how you sort of like compartmentalize that on a day-to-day basis or whatever like when you see people with sort of a whole bunch of different things i mean that that must be really really hard and just thinking about the ways that all of these interplay with each other like something that i think about a lot is sort of

Speaker 1 and just exactly hits on what you were saying about how people look at things as like oh you have a disorder not you are a person who's reacting to circumstances that have happened to you.

Speaker 1 And that it can be very stigmatizing to say, you know, like we talk about this a lot with like borderline traits, right?

Speaker 1 That a lot of people have those as a reaction to childhood trauma, and that that's extremely common with childhood trauma.

Speaker 1 You see higher levels of suicide in LGBTQ youth, and you're like, that's not because they're all have some sort of built-in mental health.

Speaker 1 That's because of the way they're being treated by their families and the isolation and all of those things.

Speaker 1 Like, how do you even sort of begin to help people live in what is going to continue to be a hostile world, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Acknowledging the hostility does so much.

Speaker 2 Challenging the constant gaslighting,

Speaker 2 both internally, the ways that that gaslighting has become internal, the internal, internalized racism, internalized homophobia, internalized cisgenderism, transphobia.

Speaker 2 Working with that first of just acknowledging of like, of course you're feeling the way you are feeling. Of course you are having a trauma response in relation to what is happening to you.

Speaker 2 Starting just with the acknowledgement and making room for it and

Speaker 2 letting it be does so much.

Speaker 2 And then, yeah, we have to look with, okay, well, with what exists, what do I want to do with that? What boundaries do I need? What resources do I need?

Speaker 2 What's going to work best for me within what exists?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Like, how many people do I want to try to talk out of their dumb beliefs? Like,

Speaker 1 don't argue with people in the internet comments? Probably.

Speaker 2 I sort of think about like, if it does something for you and not.

Speaker 1 If you enjoy it, go to it. God bless.
But like, yeah.

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Speaker 1 Can you talk about why trauma that is related to our caregivers or parents is so sort of specifically complicated?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. I mean, essentially, in the way I understand it, it boils down to what I understand as Stockholm syndrome.

Speaker 2 We are entirely dependent as babies on the adults that are given authority over us, that are given responsibility of us, our brains develop around

Speaker 2 them and how they interact with us. And so we don't even consciously know anything about that.
We're just acting from the ways we have been programmed. Zero to two is when attachment patterns start.

Speaker 2 So if you have a parent who is using you to get their needs met even just even just like oh i want to cuddle like really harmless, right?

Speaker 2 But it still is going to wire the brain to like, I take care of parents' needs.

Speaker 2 It's complex for so many reasons, but that dependence, that initial dependence and attachment and how our brain is shaped around that is a big part of it. There is love.

Speaker 2 We love the people who've harmed us because we had to.

Speaker 2 And most people don't unpack what they understand love to be, what they understand relating to be. We think there's this one idea, but it's dependent on how you learned it.

Speaker 2 And unpacking that, unlearning that, trying to decide for yourself what does love feel like? What was that that happened? Not everybody does that.

Speaker 2 Not everybody has to do it. Generally, if you have trauma in relation to your parents, you have to.

Speaker 1 I really like the way that you phrase that of sort of like unpacking what love looks like to you, because I think, you know, we have all these different concepts of love and, you know, like familial love, romantic love, friendship love.

Speaker 1 And they are, it's quite complex, right? It's not just one thing. And I think many of us find ourselves in our adult lives replaying patterns unconsciously.

Speaker 1 or not, you know, to the, to the sort of you realize they mirror something. And I mean, for, for me, that's present with other women and sisterly relationships.

Speaker 1 And then you see people sort of mimicking a relationship with a parent. I mean, is that sort of like, we're just so deeply drawn to like whatever, however it is we conceptualized love?

Speaker 2 Yes, absolutely. We are we are drawn to patterns.
We're drawn to replaying those patterns toward familiarity. And trauma has this

Speaker 1 really

Speaker 2 tricky way of simultaneously really wanting to be processed and really wanting to be avoided.

Speaker 2 So yeah, yeah, when we do find ourselves in those same patterns, it's trauma being like, hey, I actually, I really want to process this. I want this to be different.

Speaker 2 I, there's stuff we got to figure out here.

Speaker 2 And also we have this like, oh, but I, I don't like it. I don't want it.
It was too much in the first place.

Speaker 2 And those kind of like push-pull dynamics also have a, have a role in how that trauma gets expressed.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, and I think this stuff is always so fascinating to me to to listen to as a parent too, because I have two really little kids.

Speaker 1 I have my daughter's almost six and my son is just turned two. So we made it through the zero.
And now I'm thinking, I'm like, zero to two. I'm like, did I do anything to permanently mess up my child?

Speaker 2 It's forever. It's the rest of your life.
You'll, yeah.

Speaker 1 We all do. But, um, and I think that's something that my generation of parents is like, there's a lot more awareness of that, right?

Speaker 1 It's like that you, you shouldn't make them give you physical affection or insist that they give it to anyone else, right?

Speaker 1 My daughter will still ask me, she'll be like, you know, if Bubba doesn't, my son doesn't want to give me a hug or she doesn't want to give me a hug at any given moment.

Speaker 1 You know, I'll be like, oh, do you have a hug for mom? And she'll be like, no, is that okay? And I'm like, yeah, of course. You only have to hug me.
And sometimes I'm like, yeah, it's fine. You know,

Speaker 2 totally, totally. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I mean, you can see how obviously parents are just people. And there's probably a lot that happens between sort of really, a really stellar parent and the abusive parent.

Speaker 1 There's probably a huge spectrum between that of like people that were just doing their best, but maybe, maybe weren't always up for the job.

Speaker 1 So with the question of complex grief, you know, losing a parent, obviously, I think, is traumatic for anyone, especially if it happens when they're quite young or feels sort of like out of time.

Speaker 1 And then I think there are these particular complexities when it was an abusive parent or a parent that even just somebody had a really difficult relationship with.

Speaker 1 Can you talk about sort of how that grief looks different than if you lost a loving parent that you had, you know, a really solid relationship with them.

Speaker 1 And obviously you're grieving them and you miss them and it's very sad, but like, how is that different from losing a parent who you had a more complex relationship with?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So there's a couple of things that I think of.
There's the loss of the hope that things could be different. Right.

Speaker 2 When you lose a parent, there's so much that you lose, but there's a loss of, will there ever be a reconciliation? Will things ever be different?

Speaker 2 Will I finally be feeling safe in relation to this person, have the kind of loving relationship that I want? The opportunity for that is gone.

Speaker 2 In a lot of abusive families, abuse is a form of dependence and it creates a dependence, right? The abuser depends on the abuse

Speaker 2 to get their needs met. And so, when you are a tiny, spongy computer and you are developing under

Speaker 2 this dependence,

Speaker 2 you learn also to depend on your abuser. And so sometimes part of that complex grief is dealing with that loss of like who you were depending on.
You were never taught to be okay on your own.

Speaker 2 And so that is a new reality that can. be really disorienting, even if it's like a beautiful reality.
There's just so many layers of loss and complexity and

Speaker 2 newness that can be really overwhelming.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's really interesting that you say kind of interdependence and/or codependence.

Speaker 1 That's an interesting framing because, yeah, I guess we don't think of parents being dependent on their children, but they are a lot of times.

Speaker 1 And I think even, you know, if it's not a full-on sort of abuse situation, just being really dependent on your kids to like be a certain way or live up to something or give you a certain amount of affirmation or be what they expected you to be.

Speaker 1 You know, I think it's impossible not to put stuff on your kids and you sort of have to be constantly aware of like letting them be their own human beings.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It is a very tricky balance.

Speaker 1 I wonder if you, if you find that it's often true that maybe people who lose a parent that they weren't close with and had a complicated relationship with, you know, because it's, I especially think of like, if you're kind of well into adulthood, you know, late, late 20s, 30s, 40s, and you're still losing a parent kind of maybe on the earlier side, but not, you know, not as a child, obviously, or not as a teenager,

Speaker 1 where you're still like in their house and very much in that sort of dynamic with them.

Speaker 1 Do you find that people are sometimes really surprised at how they feel when that parent dies and it's sort of not what they were expecting?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Oh, grief is wild in what it can bring up.
Yeah, absolutely. People who

Speaker 2 didn't anticipate a sense of freedom they've never felt before. People who didn't anticipate, like suddenly they can feel the anger they've been suppressing.
Suddenly they can feel the sadness.

Speaker 2 They can see things differently. So much can happen with loss.

Speaker 1 And I think, you know, one of the things that's sort of ubiquitous about situations of grief is that people struggle with how to support a person who's grieving, right?

Speaker 1 Because it's, it's something that I think maybe this is, especially in our culture, I think we're very sort of have like strong taboos about around death, you know, is like people don't know what to say.

Speaker 1 They want to say the right thing.

Speaker 1 And I think that's hard enough if the person just had a nice relationship with their parent.

Speaker 1 But I think when a person, when you know they had a difficult relationship with their parent, that becomes twice as hard, right?

Speaker 1 Because it feels harder to like, you can't lean on the platitudes of like, well, they lived a good life and you love them so much.

Speaker 1 And, you know, like you can't sort of say any of those things that you might say to comfort the person or even I think that people say to comfort themselves in those situations, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think similarly, like with grief as with trauma, listening is generally more helpful than talking.

Speaker 2 Even just trying to empathize, trying to conceptualize what that person might be feeling and admitting that you might not have it all the way right, but just letting them know, like, wow, I'm, you know, I've been thinking about what that must be like for you.

Speaker 2 And I could imagine some of this, but I don't entirely know, is it something you want to talk about?

Speaker 2 Just an entryway of like feeling understood and that there is space where you might be understood, where where you can kind of explore and process is generally pretty helpful.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So Joe, who we're making this season with, I'm very close with them anyway.

Speaker 1 And so it's been very intense to see them go through this as we're covering the, as we're, as we're doing, you know, documentary project about their life. And so

Speaker 1 having talked to them so much previously about their mom, one of the things I see them struggling with is it's obviously a very intense time for them just overall.

Speaker 1 But one of the things I see them struggling with is that they're worried that

Speaker 1 because they're telling their story

Speaker 1 and Joe,

Speaker 1 you know, does not, Joe's not in denial about what happened to them.

Speaker 1 It takes a lot for survivors of this abuse, specifically, because there's so much deception to get there and to understand even what they've been through. And Joe has a really good handle on that.

Speaker 1 And they've been extremely brave in talking about it. And I think they're very worried and have expressed this concern many times that people will think that they didn't love their mom

Speaker 1 and they did love their mom. And I understand

Speaker 1 where that fear is coming from because I think even for me,

Speaker 1 I have some very real feelings of anger towards Donna, towards that person that did all this to my friend. Like, how could you not?

Speaker 1 You know, I think that's like a pretty natural thing to feel like maybe not, uh, not the saddest that that person's no longer with us, you know?

Speaker 1 And it's on some level, I think I feel relieved for Joe because I think like what I've seen is I've seen other, you know, I've seen a lot of other survivors struggling with these adult relationships with their, their offenders, with their moms.

Speaker 1 And I kind of think because

Speaker 1 there's no chance that these offenders are ever going to take any accountability for their actions, like it's almost like what you were talking about, there's this specter that someday it could all be worked out and that like someday they're going to admit what they did and they're going to, and like realistically, and I understand that you stay in that yearning but like realistically it isn't going to happen and so i almost think like death is the only way out of this dynamic so on that level it's sort of like i'm relieved for them but then i see them suffering so much and i i know that they did love their mom and i saw joe thinking so much about actually a lot of the good things about their mom like in the aftermath of her death, which was surprising to me, I think, in a way.

Speaker 1 But then I wondered, maybe it actually feels safe to feel those feelings now because she isn't a threat to you anymore because Joe had really been struggling so long for so many years to sort of set good boundaries with their mom and it was so difficult.

Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely. I think the loss of the threat opens up a lot of different feelings and thoughts.

Speaker 2 And also, like, I hear maybe in some of that really kind of common urge to like protect parents and families and protect kind of the image, protect the relationship, protect something that feels kind of vulnerable and fragile.

Speaker 2 And yeah, maybe needs some protection.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, and it, I think it's been very surreal for Joe to hear and like surreal for me to hear via Joe kind of some of these things that obviously when someone dies, there's a little bit of an immediate rewriting of that person's history.

Speaker 1 And they're like, oh, they were such a light. And they were, and you're like, we are not talking about the same person, right?

Speaker 1 And not that that needs to be the moment where everyone, you know, talks about their worst parts of them.

Speaker 1 And certainly, also, like, I recognize that people are really complicated, and that she did have good parts. And Joe does have good memories with her.

Speaker 1 And I feel the same way about my sister, and it's just extremely complicated.

Speaker 1 And I think I probably completely underestimate how fucked up I would be whenever, you know, anyway, I think Joe's a little caught in some ways between this feeling of of like, oh, people

Speaker 1 really thought my mom was a monster. And so they don't understand why I would miss her.

Speaker 1 And then this other sort of some of the family members that were truly oblivious about what was happening in the family and did not protect Joe growing up and expect and are angry with Joe for talking publicly about it, sort of being like, oh, well, your mom was just struggling and just sort of really sort of like overly sympathizing with their mom.

Speaker 1 And it just, it strikes me as a super complicated thing to be in the middle of it because I see how deeply both things are true. Like Joe is angry at their mom.

Speaker 1 They're, they're re-experiencing all of that programming their mom put in place and sort of aware of it on some level. And then they also really, really miss their mom and are really, really sad.

Speaker 1 And it's just like, seems like you just have to kind of let there be extra room for like all the complex stuff.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Now this will probably get us into like the kind of Protestant idea of good and bad and right and wrong and the movement to like make things clear and eat the, you know, the parts of us that want to make it black and white and

Speaker 2 easy. And humans are so complex and messy.

Speaker 2 And it's laughable to me that we think that we can have one feeling at a time.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

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Speaker 1 You know, it's incredibly complicated with talking about this form of abuse and any form of child abuse, right? It's not black and white, and I don't feel it as black and white.

Speaker 1 And I think people are really complicated. And I, um, I see the humanity in perpetrators of abuse as well and see their pain.

Speaker 1 And I think, like, I've sort of, even after, you know, and I never met Joe's mom, Donna, but she sort of looms large in my, my imagination, as you can imagine.

Speaker 1 I sort of like, we had this other thing happen in our second season. The perpetrator we were reporting on also died in the middle of that season.
And it was very strange.

Speaker 1 And I, I don't, I didn't quite know what to make of it. But

Speaker 1 I think what I really feel is like, I do feel a relief because I think there's, they are so dangerous and they don't take accountability and they usually are not stopped.

Speaker 1 I'm relieved that people around them aren't in danger anymore.

Speaker 1 And I think, you know, something Joe and I have talked about a lot with regards to their mom is like, we wish that someone could have helped them, like that someone could have safely helped them.

Speaker 1 Like Donna should never have been allowed to be around children. She was not a safe adult.
If you're not a safe adult, you shouldn't be around children.

Speaker 1 It doesn't mean we need to throw you off a cliff. It just means we need to protect children.
Like that's very important, obviously. But we wish that someone could have helped her.

Speaker 1 And I feel the same way about my sister. I wish there was someone.
I wish, I wish that for people. And I don't want, it's a very sad life.

Speaker 1 Like we were talking to Joe about the circumstances around their mom's death. She had a sad life, especially towards the end.
Most of these people do.

Speaker 1 It's very common for them to sort of die alone, essentially. And that's horribly sad, regardless of what the person has done in their life.
And I think you can hold space for that.

Speaker 1 And then at the same time, it is so hard to get people to take this abuse seriously and to deal with it in a, in the context of child protection or law enforcement that it's sort of like, I'm always stuck between like, I do see the humanities and the complexities with perpetrators.

Speaker 1 This was someone I loved. I mean, I do, I see that more than most, I think.
And at the same time, I don't want to pull the punch.

Speaker 1 I don't want people to look away from the danger because they're not safe around kids.

Speaker 1 And someone who engages in this never will be safe around kids, especially if they're not acknowledging their actions. It's incredibly complicated.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. And that connects with the trauma of perpetration.
There is trauma that lives in our bodies when we perpetrate and we're not able to process,

Speaker 2 I did something, I caused harm, my

Speaker 2 actions were outside of my values, and there's something in me that is doing this.

Speaker 2 And when that builds up and builds up and builds up, and you know, trauma compounds on trauma, that's when it becomes kind of those hopeless situations where somebody will not take accountability because there has never been any evidence of safety to do so.

Speaker 2 so. And

Speaker 2 this idea that, like, well, those are the bad people and these are the good ones.

Speaker 2 And it just perpetuates it, making it difficult to process the harm that all of us cause because we are humans and we're capable of harm and we just do cause harm.

Speaker 1 That's something that I think haunts everybody that's been, you know, especially if you have a family member where you remember a version of them that was not this person, right?

Speaker 1 And that was not doing these things and that you never would have imagined would be capable of doing those things.

Speaker 1 And you sort of think, like, where was the last stop on the station where something could have been done?

Speaker 1 And obviously, that's an unanswerable question as of now.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I mean, I think obviously with child abuse, the best thing we can do is look towards prevention, not just, you know, obviously accountability is also important,

Speaker 1 but prevention is ideal. And I think it's so complicated to look at.

Speaker 1 And I wonder, just like, given that you do deal with a lot of abuse victims and survivors, and it sort of sounds like you think a lot about people who perpetrate abuse.

Speaker 1 And like something I think that Joe and I have both respectively wondered about the people in our lives that perpetrated this abuse, if they're capable of love or if they're capable of empathy.

Speaker 1 And I think to your point, like love is a pretty complicated and subjective term, but I just sort of think this is the nth degree of human behavior, right?

Speaker 1 Of when you think about like a thing that most people would never, ever, ever, ever do. It's like they do anything before they'd harm their child.

Speaker 1 And so to think of someone harming their child in such a purposeful, systematic, well-thought-out way over a very long period of time, it's hard to imagine that person is really feeling empathy in any meaningful way.

Speaker 1 What's your kind of read on that?

Speaker 2 What comes up for me is thinking about like, yes, the idea that parents consciously

Speaker 2 do not want to harm their children. That is valid.
And

Speaker 2 unconsciously, parents do harm their children, even in just tiny, tiny ways that are noxious and won't cause trauma later.

Speaker 2 But we do unconsciously cause harm and we have ways internally of not looking at it. Every human has blind spots.
Every human develops a way of not looking at what is too much inside ourselves.

Speaker 2 Actually taking all of us in and our entire experience in is way too much all at once, most of the time. So we prioritize with what's most conscious.

Speaker 2 And yes, that can build up in extreme cases to like,

Speaker 2 I can look at this tiny delusion of how I exist and how I believe myself to exist and everything else I am just unconsciously putting so much effort into hiding and pushing away and dissociating and ignoring.

Speaker 1 They're kind of hiding from themselves, in a sense.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Cause I think one of the things that is so baffling about being around someone like this, and I mean, people do throw around the term gaslighting.

Speaker 1 This is like real gas. Like, truly, you feel like when you're talking to that person, you feel like you've lost your grip on reality because they are so convincing.

Speaker 1 And one of the questions I had for the longest time before I had any experts to talk to about it was like, does my sister believe what she's saying?

Speaker 1 And I think like, from what we know about it, she doesn't.

Speaker 1 And sort of she does, right? In the moment, like she understands what she's doing. She understands like it's a conscious behavior.
She's not delusional.

Speaker 1 She's not like divorced from reality in that way.

Speaker 1 But also, I think there were moments where Maybe they really do believe or they are in such deep denial or like when their, you know, adult child is trying to confront them on their behavior.

Speaker 1 they're like, no, no, like there's that rewriting of history, you know, which, as you said, like, it's a very extreme example, but it's something that kind of everyone does.

Speaker 2 So, when we enter a stress response, we lose the ability to choose what we do. Everybody wants to say, like, if I'm in an airplane and it catches on fire, I'm going to run to the exit.

Speaker 2 I'm going to choose the flea stress response. But what generally ends up happening is a lot of people go into freeze.
We don't get to choose our stress responses.

Speaker 2 And when there is an internal threat, when there's an internal threat of like, this is too dangerous. I have learned my body, my internal system has learned.
I cannot be confronted with this.

Speaker 2 I cannot be honest about this. This is a threat.
We go into a stress response and we don't have the conscious choice anymore.

Speaker 1 That's really interesting. I think one of the things that's so hard for people to conceptualize

Speaker 1 this particular form of abuse when we can sort of wrap our heads around certainly like more straightforward physical abuse that's a moment of anger, right?

Speaker 1 I think like most parents, whether you'd like to admit it to yourself or not, like even if we would never do it and we have better coping mechanisms and we would walk out of the room and we would do whatever, you know, we understand the feeling.

Speaker 1 Like we understand parenting is incredibly stressful. Little kids just put your like cortisol through the roof sometimes.
I mean, they really do. It's like they're like they, they're balls of need.

Speaker 1 It's usually like when you have young kids, it's like not enough sleep. It's just like everything about it is stressful.

Speaker 1 So we understand how people that don't have good coping mechanisms can get pushed over the edge, especially if you have some situation where like there's substance abuse or whatever.

Speaker 1 Like we understand how those things happen. So we can sort of mostly basically accept that it happens.

Speaker 1 And I think even with child sex abuse, which is obviously is more horrifying and did like take people longer to accept happened. We're like, we understand people have impulses.

Speaker 1 They act on their impulses. I think what is so hard about this abuse is that it's so strategic.

Speaker 1 I think some of the hardest things to think about and like, you know, there are cases where they come up with a computer forensic.

Speaker 1 So you, you really know this person was sitting at their computer, Googling things and putting together a plan.

Speaker 1 You know, it's not in a moment of like intense emotion the way that some of these other things are. And I mean, I think it is a very compulsive behavior.

Speaker 1 I think that's the calculating nature of it, I think, makes it that much harder to sort of

Speaker 1 understand

Speaker 1 how someone could really carry this

Speaker 1 very involved plan out. And it's not, you know, not always perfectly executed.
They're liars, they are sloppy about their lies like any other liar.

Speaker 1 It's very hard to keep track of when you have a big, you know, multi-pronged con going on. But I mean, there is a lot of planning and there are a lot of people pulled into it.

Speaker 1 And it's sort of, I think that's one of the things that makes it harder to understand than other abuse that we attach to impulses, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. And I think that speaks to the internal world

Speaker 2 of this type of abuser. If you are in a constant state of threat and internally, there is this constant state of threat.
Yes, what compels the research and the thoughtful cruelty is

Speaker 2 this internal, internal constant stress that really keeps you disconnected from yourself.

Speaker 1 That's a really good insight. That rings really true to me.

Speaker 1 And I think, you know, just before we talked to you, Joe was describing their mom's house, the way that it looked when they went to have to clean it out, which obviously was heartbreaking.

Speaker 1 And I'm very upset with Joe's family that they made them and their sister do that. But anyway.

Speaker 1 you know, that it was this disarray and this sort of hoarding and finding all this stuff and it was a mess. And that's how my sister's house looked.

Speaker 1 And after she had this fake pregnancy and my mom went to found out that she'd been evicted and not told anybody and the power had turned out and like she had rotting fruit.

Speaker 1 And then this was a person that seemed from the outside at that time, you know, very well put together, was still going to her job every day, was like clean and cute and everything else.

Speaker 1 I remember hearing my mom talk about going into the apartment and just finding it in this horrific state where you just think like, oh,

Speaker 1 like, something is really wrong.

Speaker 1 When you talked about like that disconnection from themselves, of like, I don't mean this in a judgmental way, but I think it's like when you look at those houses of like hoarders or whatever, there's a when a person's really, really disconnected from themselves, those things would go by the wayside.

Speaker 2 If you're running from a tiger, you can't think about cleaning your house or feeding yourself or like connection and desire. You're just trying to outrun the tiger.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you so much, Carly.

Speaker 1 This has been so helpful and insightful. Thank you so much for your time and expertise.

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