E21. Numbing Conversation

A life can look solid on the outside while feeling insecure inside. Is this universal? Is keeping oneself busy and useful an avoidance of pain and joy? Sadie shares how retirement, the end of a long relationship, and returning to therapy helped her recognize emotional numbing. Can enough approval-seeking and validation from others ever help us feel "filled up?" Does deferring wants and the "right-hand gal" role help one feel safer around power? We ponder these questions.

And we reflect on separating the adult self from the child self, building emotional awareness, and welcoming feelings instead of barricading the door, ending with Rumi’s “The Guest House.” 

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Transcript

Welcome And Series Themes

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Sadie Green Story about an older adult looking back on her abusive childhood. It's a conversation between Sadie and myself, Pam Colby, her longtime friend. We are exploring how early trauma can affect a lifetime. Thanks for joining us.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

I have enough validation though. I am enough. Hello there, Pam. It's a lovely day today.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Yes, we are in a beautiful Minnesota summer.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

That's right. So the next and last three episodes will be conversation. The impetus for this entire podcast series was to try and identify or understand how that history has affected my adult life. So we're gonna have three general themes, and those are grief, family, and how I've lived in intimate relationships. We started these conversations a year ago, and I can already feel how much has changed. The thing that changed the most is I'm a lot kinder to myself now and more forgiving than I was even a year ago. So we are just gonna talk.

Emotional Numbing And External Validation

SPEAKER_00 1:32

Our topic at the moment is numbing, emotional numbing. I think from just a brief conversation we've been having, you have some insights on how your trauma in life has affected your emotional responsiveness.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Yeah, and I was unaware, really. I feel like since I have retired and have more time, and I've slowed down, and since my breakup of a long-term relationship, I have learned so much. The fact that I'm in therapy, that therapy has really opened me up to feelings in general. And I am learning how much I was numbed emotionally throughout my life. The fact that I was so busy, overextended, and I also got my uh assurance or acceptance from other people. I feel like I needed a lot of people around me or engaged with a lot of people who gave me validation. I gravitated to safety and safe people who accepted me and reassured me even. I got that from the outside rather than having an intimate life with myself and feeling that confidence and assurance inside. And that's what I have been doing in the last two or three years is learning about who I am and what I want. I I have a really difficult time knowing what I want. And I've often deferred. I I just don't care, just don't recognize what I want, and so I go along, and some really big decisions in my life or directions in my life have been made by someone close to me who wanted that direction. And it's been amiable for the most part, but this whole thing about feeling like I'm living somebody else's life is in part because I didn't define what I wanted in my own life. I I didn't know myself. I was numbed emotionally. Often in my work life, I became close up to the leader, whoever was in charge. I became the right-hand gal. So I would get close to whoever was I saw as powerful. And I advocated for them, I worked for them, I wanted what they wanted. I was never a visionary. I I always prided myself on being a worker bee. And I was. I was a worker bee all the way. And I had to do it right, and I had to do it on time, and I had to do it the way it was expected. I wasn't a visionary myself. Even my goals, I've never really been led by my goals. I fall into things that I like and I stay there, and it's usually related to some kind of community. I do have values. I do have, you know, I do have things that are important to me about fairness, the common good, opportunity. I would fall into some community, and I would be happy there. I would stay there.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

I think you added a lot too to every community I've ever seen you work in. Your energy and input. And I know what you're saying. You're saying that you were going along, even though it was your values, it was who you were, but you weren't making the choices. You were uh finding someone who would direct you. Yes. Yep. And I think a lot of people can relate to that. Uh, but I just want to say also that there is a place in the world for people who give good energy and are part of the team. I'm really curious to hear more about what it's like to have that emotional numbing uh unfreeze, and how scary is that to feel like you are opening up to all of yourself.

Breakup Retirement And Grief Unfreezing

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Well, it started with the ending of the relationship. Twive years in relationship, and then four years sharing a duplex, thinking that we could do that, and in fact, I could not. So it's been a painful time.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

And let's just acknowledge it's a change in family, yeah. Which is very triggering for you that you had a family that you once were sort of as a kid. And and then this was your long adult family.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

Yeah, and it's complicated, certainly. I didn't know in the relationship how important stability and safety and security was to me, and I was still operating on family has always been uh trouble for me. Losing that relationship and being retired has really forced me to deal with loss and time and growth. You know, I've had very little therapy in my life, and especially not since my twenties. And now I've been in therapy and it's changing my life. I wish I would have known how valuable that could be to someone who has had a traumatic history. There's a lot of cruelty in the world right now, and I try and uh limit my news, but I'm also kind of a news junkie, and I think that resonates with my personal history of cruelty way back when most of my life I have I've lived in my mind, and my mind has given me a lot. It's allowed friendships and a lot of interests and a lot of activities, and now my that is different. I have a lot of grief. I can cry at the drop of a hat, which is totally new to me. I was never a crier. But I see it as a it's almost sacred tears. It's a release of pain that I didn't express before, and am now able to access it somehow. I jokingly comment that grief is my companion. I refer to that Rumi poem about oh, it's a classic poem about inviting all the emotions in, even if they're a group of sorrows. And I also have a mantra now, all spiritual paths lead to self-acceptance, and that is my job. I do think that our life's work really is learning how to love and accept ourselves. And I don't know how my trauma uh affects how I've lived my life. You know, it's hard to compare yourself to other people. I'm sure w what I go through is common for many, but that is a significant life change going from being really, really busy and trying to change the world by helping other people or by screaming at some power I have no effect on, to it's about love. We need love, and that starts with loving ourselves and walking in the world with love. That's really a change for me.

Stuff Scarcity And Filling The Deficit

SPEAKER_00 9:42

One of the things that we talked about earlier that I wanted to ask you about is that in your writing you talk about stuff and that gathering stuff was a way to help you deal with your emotions.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

I think I first noticed it with physical stuff. So I feel like I lived a long time without stuff. And so I had this deep deficit based on poverty or not owning anything.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

And that was your childhood completely without living in the woods and sleeping in porches and cars and literally not having anything to your name.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

Yes. And then as it is with many young people also in your teens and twenties, uh, there isn't a lot of money. So whenever there was something free that was available, I would take advantage. Whether it was on the street or in a program or a thrift store, or I would accumulate. I would accumulate. I did that for years. And I finally recognized, you know, I don't really need this stuff. I have plenty. And it was like that deficit was filled up, and so I had enough. Now I'm I'm, you know, going back to less is more. But I also recognized that there's a correlation emotionally. Like I really, and again, this is probably universal to a certain extent. When I was younger, I felt like I couldn't see outside myself very much. I didn't recognize other people's who they were very well. It was like a protection thing. And it was hard to look outside myself and really uh recognize other people in a way that wasn't superficial. Really knowing other people. If you live on the run, if you're constantly busy, you don't have time to really know other people or be known for that matter.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

So within this framework of not seeing other people, do you think that was based on fear of what other people would think of you?

Trauma Tunnel Vision And Fear Of Rejection

SPEAKER_01 11:56

Very much about insecurity for sure. It's a way of not having a broader view. You're tucked in and uh you just have a narrow little uh lens. Tunnel vision. Yeah, tunnel vision. And it's all related to how am I gonna be accepted? Are people gonna like me? It's so much about me and my fear of not being liked. Recently I read this book by Kimberly Ann Johnson in Call of the Wild, and trying to describe that tunnel vision, she says trauma narrows our vision, limits our options, shrinks our capacity, and gets us stuck, fixating on ourselves rather than seeing the big picture.

SPEAKER_00 12:45

That really does, because I see that in people sometimes who I know have had trauma and have themselves.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

For some reason, that finally having enough relates to you know, maybe I'm enough. Maybe I can pay more attention to other people than this just fear. It's really a fear, it's just a big big fear. I think that was part of my emotional numbness. And then in relationship, family was scary because it felt isolating and it felt dangerous. I wanted to be out in the world, I wanted to be out in the street, and then we don't always know why, and we make up stories or narratives about why, which we never really will know if it's true. But I can get stuck on a narrative, like that whole thing about family, where I did not want to be in this nuclear family, I did not want to be owned, I did not want to be uh trapped or whatever I associated with family. I hung on to that until the relationship was over, and then it's devastating that uh family actually was safety and security and all these things that I didn't recognize until it was gone. I wish I would have known things sooner and been able to change. You can't change if you don't recognize. It's so easy to go on status quo, just go on taking things for granted. And you're yeah. And now when I'm in therapy, my therapist will talk about having different aspects of yourself. You know, you're a different person now than you were when you were a teenager. You're different now than you were in your thirties or forties or fifties. And that was really hard for me to look at. But in doing so, it's a lot easier for me to well just move forward, really. I I don't feel as stuck, but if I can see that there's all these aspects of ourselves or how we change it allows me to change. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 15:03

Yeah. I think anytime you have the freedom to understand, then it's more f possible to envision what could be. Yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

And when you're just stuck in the mud of Do we really change? Are we always the same person? Not being in a personal growth period, not that I didn't grow in in other ways. I grew in all kinds of ways. I learned more about my job, I learned more about all kinds of things. But my personal growth, I do feel was stuck in this old narrative that family, nuclear family is really a scary place. All these things that I just took on and didn't let go of, and then you don't change.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

I I think given the trajectory of your life, you have grown and changed a lot. I just want to give you that. But it's interesting that now you're at the big seven-o. The big seven-o, I wasn't gonna let you say it. Yeah, but here you are at 70 and having these epiphanies about who you are the whole childhood and relationships and friendships and and how do people grow?

SPEAKER_01 16:30

Like maybe in families that are the so-called functional families, maybe they learn this progression of being a parent, being a grandparent. You you learn what you're supposed to do in these different roles. Or you accept them or you take them on. You know, I never did. I just didn't.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

Yeah, because when I became a parent, there were times when I just went into do-it mode because you're just so exhausted and overwhelmed, but you've got the voices of your parents in your head.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

Like it or not, sometimes. But you didn't really, because you really had to get rid of those voices.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

There was so much I didn't know or I didn't learn. You know, I just didn't learn it. And then because I had this avoidance of family.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

Yeah, I remember you during your avoidance of family phase.

Family Avoidance And The Parenting Question

SPEAKER_00 17:28

Yeah. Especially when my first son was born.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

And tell me more.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

We were at a cabin up in northern Minnesota, and my partner, Pasha, and I had the one-year-old, and he was walking between us, learning to walk. Yeah. And I remember you just looking and saying, Oh, what a lucky boy. And it was almost like you really love. Yeah, but it was it was more pain in the way that you said it and watching. I remember it really distinctly.

SPEAKER_01 18:00

Wow. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

Well, I think it was just hard when all of a sudden even your lesbian friends started having families.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

Didn't want to be a parent. And because my brain was always working, you know, I always was thinking.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

And yet you were a big sister to I was, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:20

And I loved her.

SPEAKER_00 18:22

Kids were always attracted to you.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

But it was always temporary. I was fun, but I was not uh I interrupt you're you s you were saying your brain was always thinking. Oh yeah. So I would say I don't want to be a parent because all women don't have to be parents. I'm a feminist, and uh the world isn't equal, and women are doing all the work, and I you know, I don't have to be one of those women. I don't have to be a mother. I can be a person without being a mother. And then also the the whole thing about I wasn't sure I could be a good parent. I wasn't sure that I wouldn't repeat what my mother Right.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

Yeah, I think that was the core of your fear was that you didn't have that because you when you are in that ultimate stressed out mode in parenting, those voices do come back of your parents.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

Yeah, so I just wanted to avoid it altogether. But you know, you give up a lot of possibility of learning about relationships and Yeah, and you don't have to you can do it differently. Yeah, now I could. That's ironic. Now I could. It's a little late in the game for me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

Although that many men become parents at seventy, you know.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

It's not fair. Yeah, yeah. Right. Do over.

Separating Adult Self From Child Self

SPEAKER_01 19:44

I think I heard this on a podcast recently a guest of Anderson Cooper his grief podcast. And they were talking about how if you don't separate the adult from the traumatized child, if you don't recognize this separate child and who you were, you know, and comfort it and acknowledge it and recognize the pain it went through. Then as an adult, whenever you are in uncomfortable situations, you will default to the child. Your brain can't help itself. It's fairly new to me that I'm recognizing this younger self that was afraid and very alone. And one of the things this person was saying was as adults, because we don't want to go there, we don't want to get into our grief, we don't want to feel that kind of pain. What we are actually saying to that child is, I'm not willing to feel what you've been carrying. You know, if we don't go there, the numbness comes back. So we have to find a way to embrace that grief. At some point, we have to try and heal the child as a separate person that you were in order to act as an adult.

SPEAKER_00 21:16

This is something that really speaks to you about your life. But for me, I think about somebody close to me who is still acting like the child. And then I wonder, what can I do as an outsider? It's not my I can't.

SPEAKER_01 21:36

Well, they have to recognize that they have feelings, yeah, and that they have a reaction to feelings. And if no one has ever cared for your feelings, or if you've never been really connected to your feelings, uh, you you almost have to have somebody to tell you, I care about your what are you feeling? What isn't that you're feeling and I care about what you're feeling. I couldn't identify feelings. Not only didn't recognize how I felt often, I couldn't identify them. What kind of is it sad? Is it I mean there's uh multiple feelings. And I actually could have a graph. To look at this graph.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

Of what all feelings are out there. This being self-aware and even going the length of seeing yourself separate from the child that you were it allows you to comfort that child. And do you think this is I think in the 80s there was all this inner child talk.

SPEAKER_01 22:43

Is this growth of that? I just poo-pooed all that. Ah you had no inner child. Yeah no that was just uh navel gazing really starving in the world and war was happening and all these things were much more important. I I thought flowers were a distraction that that allowed people to not do what they should do. You know we should be changing the world. We should be making this a better place.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

You know that is kind of how I felt like you thought of me being a parent at that time.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

Yeah it probably that I wasn't able to Yeah that's who I was yeah uh we you know we have to be doing stuff. We can't be sitting in our houses and worrying about our flower gardens. That's just a cop out.

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Yeah interesting well that hit the spot of who you were but yes there was everybody was in the inner child mode yeah in a certain segment of my community. Yeah not me no no my brain I overcompensated with my brain and then you just think of all the people out there who are homeless who you know are living on the street or on drugs and alcohol and just think how hard it is for them to find their feelings. Yes just because of trauma. Who don't have the same opportunity to heal and to hear and to help nobody care because from the time I've known you you've just been surrounded by love and comfort and I have food and community shelter.

SPEAKER_01 24:19

Community I've always connected to community somehow. Now I spend a lot more time by myself and I enjoy being by myself I'm learning to really like who I am and identifying who I am really wise elder. Instead of just reacting yeah isn't that wild. But we do have to take it on oh yeah you know we have to grow who else those old senators and presidents they're not the elders they're not wise they probably are in their brains I mean there's different ways of being wise but it's the feelings that really matter it's the relationships that really matter in the world. That's why we're so messed up We've put so much in front of our hearts and satisfied and having enough not too much and if we don't have somebody there to attend to our feelings as a child we learn to just dismiss them and then that just carries on into our adult life. So

The Guest House And Closing

SPEAKER_01 25:27

before we end entirely today I do want to read that poem I mentioned earlier by Rumi called The Guest House that has meant a lot to me in the last two or three years The Guest House This being human is a guest house every morning a new arrival a joy a depression a meanness some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all even if they are a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture still treat each guest honorably he may be clearing you out for some new delight the dark thought the shame the malice meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. Be grateful for whatever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond that is the guest house by Wow and so the guests are feeling most of us just are guarding the house don't come in even if they are a crowd of sorrows that is so roomy yes so that will end our conversation for today we will have a couple more of these if people want to hear more about how trauma might affect a lifetime thanks so much for listening it means a lot to us thank you Sadie