Latest / Surviving-ISH Podcast / Transforming Trauma: The Inspirational Journey of TJ Butler

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Transforming Trauma: The Inspirational Journey of TJ Butler · Surviving-ISH Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Surviving Podcasts, where we explore stories of resilience and triumph.
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Today, we have a very special guest joining us.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Please welcome TJ Butler, the author of the compelling book Dating Silky Maxwell.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Tj's journey to survival has not been an easy one.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: However, TJ's determination led her to reinvent her life by joining corporate America, but that wasn't enough for her.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: She found herself faking it until she became it.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Tj decided to chase her childhood dream of becoming a writer, leading her to become the author of Dating Silky Maxwell.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Today, TJ is happily married and works tirelessly to raise awareness about the journey of becoming a survivor.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Join us as we delve into the deep story and gain insight that will inspire and empower us all.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Before we get too deep into stuff, tell us about you.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: So it's interesting.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: We have these stories that we tell, we have these bullet points trauma survivors and people who've been through some stuff and live to tell about it.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: We can say, oh, this thing happened to me and this happened to me and this happened to me, and we take our humanity out of it when we put ourselves in these little bullet points.
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: So I was raised with domestic violence and there was a lot of alcoholism in the home and abuse, and my mother put me into foster care when I was 13.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: She gave a book class today and I lived in group homes and residential children's centers until I aged out at 18.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: And from 18, I had no family support when I got out.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: So I got into drugs.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: I went into the adult business and this was long before Instagram, long before OnlyFans, but, just as any woman in the adult business will tell you, there's still a lot of photos working around.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: I did that until I turned 30.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: And at 30, I thought, oh my gosh, I'm getting a little old here.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: So I had one of those life changing moments where I went back to school and I got a degree and I got a job in corporate and during that time I got married.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: My husband is a photographer, and so I was downsized from corporate in 2016.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: And during the conversation I was giggling inappropriately and my boss was like what are you doing?
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: And the first thing that I did when I left that conversation was I called my husband and I said I'm free Because, as trauma survivors and as survivors of things, we all feel different and we all know that we're not like all those other people, and I spent 12 years in a corporate career, feeling completely different than anyone else there.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: I looks like I had it together, just like everybody in corporate looks like they have it together, with the expensive work bag and the nice business casual clothes and coming after I was downsized to work with my husband.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: We own a production studio and so we have models and photographers, videographers.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: Washington Post is one of our clients, so it runs the gamut from anybody who needs photo and video rental space.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: So now I'm back in my element of being in a creative atmosphere and not having to hide the things that I've done.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: I feel like myself and along the way, I started writing and I have a book that is out, and so that's in a nutshell.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: I have lived a lot of lives and had a lot of pretty crappy things happen to me, but I've also had a lot of really awesome things happen, and, as we do, that makes up all of us.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: When you mentioned the corporate world, I that that's the world that I'm in with my day job, and there are so many times that I feel alone in the crowd of 3000 people, and but what is so bittersweet about that is that I'm probably not the only one feeling alone in a crowd of 3000 people.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: Right, so many of us have our issues that we're trying to leave at that doorstep to come in to play that character that we're assigned to play in that corporate world.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: Everybody has their own story and everybody has their own baggage.
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: Some of it was easier in childhood than others.
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: I think that one of the reasons the corporate environment particularly made me feel like I was an other not an other, but I was othered was because being in foster care and having the abuse that I grew up with and also a lot of the experiences aging out of foster care and not having anything to support and just doing crazy things at 18, 19 years old.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: When I think of people who work in corporate, I have this fantasy that they had lovely families, graduated high school, graduate college, went straight to work, and I feel like all of their stories that are a little off are going to start with this one time in college and it's going to be this little college thing they did.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: And here's me going.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: Oh, I lived that.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: And so there's probably many people who work in corporate jobs who are sitting at home listening and thinking I feel like the only one in my office building and maybe everyone is feeling like the only one.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: And hey, corporate people, we're all here, Right, I know when you first mentioned that, I was like in my head.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: I was like oh, thank you for validating me.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: I needed to hear that today.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean and I don't want to jump around too much, but I just keep thinking about the email that you sent me and you had mentioned, and if I'm getting too far ahead, I'm going to be going to the far head.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: We can always put a pin in it, right?
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: But you had mentioned that at one point your mom's journal and then, coming to find out, you were also a writer.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: Do you think that is a trait for your mom that you got?
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: Have you always been that way?
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: Did you just come across it and realize it was therapeutic, like, what is your story behind writing?
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: So I am one of those kids who wanted to be a writer.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: I also wanted to be 20 years old and have my own apartment.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: There was no getting married, there was no having kids, because I knew what happened in families to kids and it was not pretty.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: So I just imagined myself at this magical age of 20 with my own apartment by myself, and I believed that would solve everything.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: And I wanted to be a writer.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: I didn't write for a long time and I fell into it.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: I was discovered when I was living full-time on a sailboat by the editor of Tiny House Magazine and he saw a picture I posted in a Facebook group of my tiny living situation and he's, oh, writes some articles for me.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: And so then I thought and I had been a lifestyle blogger about sailboat life, because everybody thinks, oh, living aboard a sailboat is living a dream and yes, it was sorry.
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: So I started writing articles and freelancing, and then that turned into writing fiction and essays, and when I realized that I could publish these things, I took myself a little bit more seriously.
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: There were some repercussions.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: I estranged myself from my mother in 2017.
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: And that led to my family taking sides.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: It was not mine, and so in about 2018, when I started writing seriously, I realized, oh, people want to read my words, people want to publish me, and I started writing my true, and I wasn't telling other people's stories, I was telling mine.
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: But in telling my story, I had to touch on the things that happened in my childhood, and one of my pieces in Huffington Post is about living in the most haunted, abandoned asylums in Virginia, and I was there.
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: It wasn't haunted, and so my family has seen all of these things that I've published, that you have to say why we're living in this asylum.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: It's because of family drama being put into the foster care system, and so my family said, oh no, that's all lies.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: None of that happened.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: I think a lot of people dysfunctional families kind of have a dance that they do and everybody who's in it is dancing in step, and when one person gets out of step, it throws the entire routine off and everybody who's continuing to dance says wait a minute, you're not doing, you're out of step here.
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: And sometimes the people out of step go back in step and they quiet down and others, like me, say, yes, I'm out of step and I am not doing this dance anymore.
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: Unfortunately, that comes often at the expense of our family, and I have since 2017, have not really had any communication with much of my family because I have been pretty vocal about sharing my truth.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: My mother, I believe, knows I have a book.
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: I've had a cousin and an aunt purchase it, but I don't know if she'll read it.
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: There are many bad mothers in my collection and I've taken quite a bit of my own life and written it into the collection, so anybody in my family will see, they will, they'll see themselves and the damage has already been done.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: It's my story.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: I'm telling my truth.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: I'm not disparaging of others, but here we are.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: It's crazy to me how the universe works.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: The things that you're saying I needed to hear today.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: When did you have that moment of where your relationship with the truth changed?
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: Oh, it was a definite moment when I was in foster care.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: My mother put me in foster care because my abuser was her boyfriend and the state essentially said I cannot live in a house with him and had my mother moved away from him, I would have been reunited, but she chose to stay with him, so I had to live in foster care.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: And, on a side note, my mother is a wonderful woman if she's just a human in the world but she was a bad parent for me and she just didn't have all the tools you need to be a parent.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: And as angry as I was from years of physical abuse and alcoholism, had she, when I was 13, moved away from him.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: She was not equipped at all to be a parent to a very angry 13 year old and I cannot even imagine the things that I would have done.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: I was angry, but I was not angry toward others.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: I was very angry on myself and so I was really self-destructive.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: If I had been reunited with her, I don't know what I would have done to myself and it probably wouldn't have been pretty.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: But growing up in in the foster care system, in group homes and children's facilities where children stay because they're never going home.
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: I had staff as parents, I had therapists and counselors and I didn't know.
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: From 13 to 18 there was no more family drama and so, looking on it now, it was the best thing that could have possibly happened to me During this time.
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: I didn't know that I was never going home.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: Social services had offered her a motel that she could stand and then we could be reunited, and then they'd give her an apartment and this family reunification thing, and she chose not to take it and she at one point had positioned that she was going to move to where her parents are in another state, and then I was going to get to come home and that was Kentucky, moving to Kentucky.
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: Those three words became this thing that I just clung to, and so I sent her letters, which somehow I ended up with.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: All these letters.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: I read these letters at the beginning of the pandemic and they all started with dear mama, can I please come home?
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: And as an aspiring writer, one of them was just filled.
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: It was a persuasive essay filled with all these big words about why it would be a good idea for her to let me come home, and one of them it just broke my heart to read.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: It was telling her that if she didn't like me then she could give me back.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: But just please try me out.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: And we would go on weekend or on a Sunday afternoon pass, and so she would pick me up from a group home and her and my sister and I would go out to lunch and run these errands and then at five o'clock on the dot she would drop me back and then her and my sister would go home.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: And so I spent years developing this thing about being good enough for her to let me come home.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: And when I aged out of foster care, I had a couple of pretty bad years where I just was not kind to myself at all.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: And then my little sister started getting into trouble and I was working in the adult industry.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: So I was making cash and I wasn't spending it wisely, which I wasn't saving it.
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: I was spending it, and so I paid my mother's rent and I bought her first cell phone and computers.
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: This was back in the day when laptops were really expensive and desktops were fancy and affordable, and I was doing everything that I could to be the good one, because I was always the black sheep of the family.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: And it started to work.
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: And I started because I was behaving myself and throwing money around and doing good deeds.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: I didn't know it at the time, but my entire relationship with my mother was built on her quote unquote moving to Kentucky Long after it would have been possible for her to let me come home.
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: And she texted me a photo and it was me at probably eight, seven or eight years old as a flower girl in a relative's wedding and there was white lace and flowers and the text was oh to look how cute you were.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: And I looked at it and I was like, wait a minute.
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: The things had not gotten bad in the house with a boyfriend at that time and I was like, wait a minute, this little girl.
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: This was the before.
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: Like this wasn't when I wasn't ruined.
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: And it was just this.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: It fell out of the sky like a ton of bricks.
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: I realized that little girl had no idea what she was in for years of violence in the home and then years of foster care and then years of me just ruining myself as I did, until I figured out how to live as as an adult and then, after I had this moment where I'm like this little girl was not ruined.
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: And look at me now.
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: I realized it was my mother that kept me in that situation, and my mother never moved away.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: My mother didn't protect me.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: You hear about these stories of mothers.
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: I worked with so many mothers who were strippers so that they could put their kid in private schools, so they didn't have to live with an abusive man.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: So many mothers do things to protect their children.
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: And then here I am and so, looking at this photo of this little girl that was not ruined, I realized I can't anymore.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: My relationship with my mother was completely based on being good enough.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: I've been good enough for what.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: She never moved and I just thought, ok, I don't actually know how to have a relationship with my mother if it's not based on me being good.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: So I stopped talking to her and that in turn became something I was doing to her, something I was hurting her with.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: And then, a little while later, I started writing because I realized that my entire life was based on, and then I realized I had a hole.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: I've done many things in my life to fill the hole with men and drugs and spending money, all kinds of things that I've done to fill this hole.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: That is not possible to be filled and just realizing that the hole is not going to be filled, I could no longer maintain a relationship with my mother and not that long ago it was weighing on me.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: It's been years and I started going to therapy specifically to deal with.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: What do I do with this estrangement?
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: Do I contact my mother, do I not?
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: What do I do?
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: I have to do something.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: And the therapist said OK, you either do nothing or you reach out.
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: And I reached out by text message and I tried to keep it casual because the estrangement was very heavy and I've realized that my mother's just not that interested and during the time when we were communicating I didn't understand what boundaries were and so I would text her.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: I do photography and so I would have text her these really awesome photos or something that I published.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: And it amounted to one of those kids on the playground going hey, look at me, mom, watch me swing, push me on the swing, look at me run, look at me, hey, look at me.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: And that's just weird at my age to have a relationship where I'm just need somebody to be my mom who's never been my mom and doesn't have that capacity.
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: So that is where I am now with the family situation, realizing that the whole time I thought I was in control of the estrangement and my mother would come back or she would let me come back and she'd be thrilled to have me, and then we could just do this dance again.
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: And when that didn't happen, I have realized.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: So one of the things I realized was about my mother.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: During this whole growth period that I had was that my mother was a flawed human.
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: So I've talked a lot about my story and you mentioned journals.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: My mother is not a writer.
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: My mother is a recorder of information.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: There's a difference between a diary and a journal.
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: One of them is this happened that's a diary and a journal is.
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: This is how I thought.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: This is how I felt, more thoughts and feelings.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: So this journal that I have of my mother's, it is in the months when she's pregnant with me.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: So she lived in Southern California in the early.
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: They used to go to a lot of plant parties and I'm not sure that my mother really had the many houseplants.
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: My father was a musician.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: They were constantly broke.
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: They my father went to band practice and it's just this retelling of events.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: So she's pregnant with me during the months that this little journal takes place, I always think about pregnant people as thinking nothing but the baby, the baby, this, the baby.
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: That In one entry she mentions going to the doctor and getting on the scale, and then there's some other entry further out where she mentions the doctor's appointment.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: And I'm reading this journal going.
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: Wait a minute.
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: The people in my life that I know today and everything I see on social media today, these people are obsessed with their growing bellies.
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: And here's my mother like go into the band practice and talking about what time my father got home and going to this plant party, and so that I have contemplated using my mother's journal in a piece of writing.
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: But to be honest, it's boring.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: She just went to the store.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: They borrowed $50 from somebody.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: They went to Goodwill, just they went here.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: There's no emotions.
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: She didn't record anything about how she felt.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: I know that they were broke all the time and she was on public assistance for the hospital, but other than that there was nothing juicy in it except me going hey, you're pregnant, what about me?
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: So that's the long-winded tale of my mother's journals.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: Was she non-emotional in real life as well?
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: My father was a musician and he was on the road a lot, and my mother was on the opposite coast of her family.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: She was also when she had me, she was 21.
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: And so she's a young woman living in crappy, cheap apartments and she always told me that she had me because she wanted a friend and I think that she was just lonely.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: When she got pregnant, they certainly didn't have the money for a baby, but before my parents divorced things were good, and then, two years after my parents divorced, we lived with my grandparents and there was no abuse.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: It all started when she moved in with her boyfriend.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: I would say that up until the boyfriend at six, I had what I would probably consider aside from divorce, which they divorced at four.
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: So I don't really remember it.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: I think my love of reading and writing came from just constantly being read to.
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: She didn't work I don't know where that money from, but she didn't work and all we would do was just go to the library and just read stories.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: But as far as her diary, even when she was older, she would get calendars with big spaces on them and just write things that happened during the day.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: So she's just a keeper of records rather than a recorder of humanity and thoughts and feeling.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: So this was just records of her day.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: You had mentioned her sister a couple of times.
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: Is she younger or older?
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: Because it seems like she was still a part of your mother's life when you were not.
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: So my little sister is four years younger and in this functional family every child has a role to play.
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: So I was the black sheep and my little sister was the golden child, or whatever other name they give it.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: So when there was verbal abuse, physical abuse, physical abuse, I was precocious.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: I was an early reader, I knew big words and so when the boyfriend started to become violent, I did it right back.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: So normally I think, when we see movies and TV, if an adult abuses a child in some way, you always think of the child being defeated and crying and curling up.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: But I don't know why, because I am not a big person I fought back.
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: So if I was pushed or pushed against a wall or kicked or whatever, I would jump up and go attack.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: And I can see that if you are a drunk grown-up that is prone to violence and you have this little creature that just attacks you if you hit them first, that's definitely the potential for crazy violence.
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: And so my little sister, because she was young, she would hide in our room during the violence.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: She would not come out of her room, and so she turned into this good child.
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: So I heard something a little while ago about siblings, that no two siblings have the same parents, and so my little sister's life was completely different than mine.
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: So, interestingly, my father, who was totally out of the picture, has two children my half-siblings and I've recently reconnected with him and I love them so much.
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: So my half-brother I'm the oldest, my half-brother was the black sheep.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: Like me, he was an explosive, just a really bad seed in the family at that time.
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: He's totally better now and my sister, who was younger than him, was a quiet one, and I drove 10 hours to meet both of them separately.
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: They just both happened to live 10 hours away.
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: My sister was telling me how much attention he got from the family.
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: She was telling me that she felt lost.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: It never occurred to me that we did not have trauma bonds, because I knew what I had grown up with and I just hadn't given it a lot of thought about my sister's experience.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: I just knew, oh, there was abuse in the house, there was physical violence, there was drinking, there were all these things.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: Oh, she was there too, and I didn't think about what her like, how her life was different.
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: She has, in no uncertain terms, told me that everything that I have said about the family is a lie and I realized later after talking with my half-sister that it's not true for her.
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: My little sister said something about there are pictures of me smiling back then, so nothing could have happened.
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: You would never have been smiling in pictures.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: So my little sister right now she had a traumatic brain injury in 2011.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: And I'm not even sure what she's doing.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: She's blocked me on social media and her nephew's, her son, my nephew's they won't speak to me.
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: So I would love to have a relationship with them, but it's all conditional upon me.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: I don't even know what the word would be for giving my mother and coming back into the family and then starting that dance again that everyone's doing.
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: And I've just done a lot of soul searching and I've learned a lot about myself and about how families work and decided I can't go back into that and it's unfortunate that I can't have relationships with my certain members of my family because of my feelings toward the dance and stuff.
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: So I hope that answered your question about the journal and my sister.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: The next thing that I really related to is when you were talking about, like, the different stages and jobs and periods of your life.
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: with those yeah, like feeling out of place in corporate.
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: So when I came into corporate I got my first corporate job through a temp agency and I just never left.
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: And then I ended up getting other jobs through that and got a business degree.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: I realized that this is what I want.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: I want to wear business casual clothes, I want to look a certain way, I want to blend in, I want to just be another person at a desk in an office building, and so I know that we always hear this thing that says fake it till you make it.
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: I decided to fake it until I became it, and so I spent a long time mimicking the people, the women in my neighborhood, pilates classes and the farmers market and all of these stereotypes of people, like the white woman stereotype that drinks, soilates and wears yoga pants and does all these things.
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: I didn't know, I didn't have those, but I saw that stereotype as normal and for the years before I wanted to be in the same line as everyone else and so, going in and molding myself after coworkers and women that I knew of, I became that corporate person with a business degree and I always as we were talking earlier felt completely different, because when you enter the workforce at 30, your coworkers in your positions are younger and I have been very lucky to always look a little younger than I am and I attribute that to some blocks, so please wear your sunblock every day.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: But I blended in with coworkers that were a little younger so nobody really knew.
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: And then there was this huge thing hanging over me, with nobody knowing that I had just come from, coming out of, coming into corporate, got me and I saw the power that a business degree gave you.
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: And I saw the power that, like for a long time I had a fabricated resume because I couldn't put this was I mean years ago, but I couldn't put those things on a resume.
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: And so I saw the power that blending in and learning how to become that worker B office person, it gave me a lot of power.
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: And then I have taken that power and not there anymore.
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: But before we started recording you had said control in your narrative was a line that you use, which is a line that has always just impacted me so hard, and we were talking about writing and what that can mean.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: I would love for us to take a minute to talk about and what advice you would have for people that maybe only has a pen and paper or a keyboard or whatever it is they have.
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: So I wrote my short story collection to.
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: I didn't know it at the time, but the story has just kept coming.
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: I realized that I wrote the stories to control the narrative.
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: I have been saying, oh, these stories are for women who've seen some shit and live to tell about it.
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: And these stories are for you.
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: If you own your mistakes now, maybe at one point you took the money and ran.
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: Maybe you still know where the bodies are buried these stories are for you.
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: The thing about writing, the thing about analyzing difficult truths, is that you can control the narrative.
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: Like many situations that I've lived through little scenes and anecdotes or family scenarios and I've given those to my characters but instead of having them suffer the same fates that I did, they won and I was able to give them a many-year-truth.
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: So many trauma survivors and people with stories and things that have happened to us.
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: We've heard people say, oh, you should write a book.
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: Or sometimes we think I've got a lot to say.
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: I lived a life.
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: I'd like to write my story one day.
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: But writing a whole book is, first of all, really hard, but second of all, it's daunting because you think about filling up 200, 300 pages.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: So what I say to new writers I meet, or just humans that are interested in getting a couple words out.
• 34:49
  Speaker 2: Start with a couple of paragraphs.
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: Anecdotes and vignettes are just scenes, just a little thing that happened at the dinner table that Thanksgiving, or just a little thing that happened when you walked down that dark street and you thought you were being followed.
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: Like two paragraphs about that, and something that they tell writers is the first draft, is you telling the story to yourself.
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: This means that we are free to just get the words out, just tell yourself the story, change the narrative, control it but it's not for anyone else and then write it and keep going or write it and put it away and then, if you would like to read it again, you'll go over it and you'll find some things that could be changed.
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: And then this is the process of drafting something that you will come out with a final.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: But sometimes people find that writing about let's use that time at Thanksgiving writing about that Thanksgiving dinner that went wrong or that really funny thing happened or something happened.
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: It is enough getting it out of your head that you don't need to go back to it, because you have said you told the story and you have allowed yourself to triumph over whatever.
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: Or maybe you tell the story exactly like it is and you say this really sucked, this was awful, it hurt.
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: Maybe somebody hurt you, maybe you inadvertently hurt someone else, but just get your story out there and two paragraphs or even a couple of sentences is fine.
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: For people who want to write something but they just don't even know what the first sentence should be, start typing I don't know what to say, I don't know what to say, and you type that until you do know what to say and nobody's going to read it unless you show them.
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: You can delete it, you can save it, but writing our truth is just so important.
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: Another thing that will give you permission.
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: So most of our stories are either I did something or you say he did something, she did something.
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: But when you write in the second person, you say you and I have been able to write very traumatic things only in the second person.
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: You go down the hall to your bedroom X in your bedroom.
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: Or you walk to your car in a darkened parking garage.
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: You looked around and you saw somebody coming toward you.
• 37:51
  Speaker 2: That is a heck of a lot easier to write than putting myself in the parking garage, putting myself in that place.
• 37:59
  Speaker 2: So those are some things that if anybody's inclined to knock out a couple sentences or paragraphs, those are some easy ways to start doing that.
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: I love that.
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: One thing that I love about my show and when I do interviews is I always like this rush, this burst of energy, and I'm having that right now.
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: I'm motivated, I'm inspired, I want to give and do something.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: I feel like I could talk to all night.
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: I've loved this so much and I feel like we were all over the place.
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: But that's what I love about these conversations, because I feel like, with me being a trauma survivor, with you being a trauma survivor, our minds can take us in a million different places over the smaller situation, and so I think that's how we and my community and we all connect.
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: When I first started releasing episodes, I was like, oh my gosh, you're going to think I'm so scattered, and everybody was like you're just like us.
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: It was just really cool.
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: I can't thank you enough.
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: Oh, thank you so much for letting me come on and talk a little bit about my book.
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'm not done with that yet.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: The door is always open, but I pulled up your to work on closing us out.
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: I want to make sure we hit your book again, because October 20th, is that right?
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: Yes, october 20th is a release date.
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so we're coming up on.
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: By the time this is released, it will have just been out, right?
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: So in the email that you sent me, the name of the book is Dating Silky Maxwell, and so it's a collection of short stories, and you have one that says it's about women's choices.
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: How a facial scar alters a former sex worker's identity a jilted bartender.
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: I'm obsessed with this.
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: I love that.
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: It's not targeted toward one person.
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: It's not targeted toward one gender.
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: It's not targeted toward one situation.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: It's we're all going to find something in it that relates to us.
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: It's from what I can tell.
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: I covered.
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: So I took a lot of things from my life, but I do have to tell you I personally did not ever kill a man and feed him to the hogs, nor did I ever burn down a dive bar.
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: So you'll have to guess at.
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: But I covered a lot of taboo subjects In one I have a father changing his toddler's gender to protect her from the assault that happened to the mother.
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: I have abortion.
• 40:47
  Speaker 2: I have incarceration.
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: I have fraught family scenarios.
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: I have women.
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: I have somebody who's been left at the altar.
• 40:57
  Speaker 2: I have women who have spent their time with men and women.
• 41:02
  Speaker 2: And then I also have, in the title story, dating Sylvie Maxwell.
• 41:06
  Speaker 2: She's an influencer who finds that her blood shambles and so she ends up going to trying to improve her private life.
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: So there are, and she had a perfect family.
• 41:26
  Speaker 2: So not all of my characters in my book had traumatic families.
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: I've got a family dealing with a suicide.
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: There's just a lot of taboo subjects.
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: As far as trigger warnings go, none of the dogs die.
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: There's somebody who has lost a dog, but there are dog pets and they are super awesome, so that's safe.
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: But as far as trigger warnings, there is just about everything, but because I'm a survivor.
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: Nothing is graphic I have as far as controlling the narrative.
• 42:02
  Speaker 2: I have a woman defeating a would-be rapist because she knows from childhood that he's allergic to bees.
• 42:10
  Speaker 2: So she lures him as he's trying to commit the act into a barn and slams her fist on a yellow jacket's nest, knowing that she's gonna be stung.
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: But that's the only way that she can defeat this predator.
• 42:27
  Speaker 2: My characters have agency, they have power.
• 42:32
  Speaker 2: She has a voice and I hope that readers who read the stories will maybe see themselves in some of the scenarios but find that the character overcomes what maybe they couldn't overcome in their time of trauma.
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: I love it so much and I'm perfect timing too, because during the fall and winter I live in the South, so during the fall and winter I'm inside the house with my snuggy and fireplace.
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: You know what I mean.
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: It is my favorite time to read, and so I cannot wait to get this book.
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: There's something that I used to do to end the show, and I haven't done it in a long time, but spending this time with you like I was like I wanna do it tonight.
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: Okay, I'm totally up for it, whatever it is.
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: Okay great, it's a fun little question.
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: No right or wrong answer, of course, but if and when there is a lifetime movie about you, what actress would you find best to play you?
• 43:39
  Speaker 2: Juliet Lewis as Mallory Knox from Natural Born Killers.
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: I've been dying for somebody to ask me that.
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: I love that.
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: I love that you immediately had that answer.
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: That is amazing.
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: I love that.
• 43:53
  Speaker 2: So she would need to be.
• 43:55
  Speaker 2: It would need to be a time in my life when that movie was very relatable to me.
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: I just listened to the soundtrack last night.
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: I'm Gen X and Mallory Knox and Natural Born Killers was just.
• 44:09
  Speaker 2: I was fresh out of foster care and that just really covered my rage and I still, like it's weird, even all these years later.
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: I totally relate to the rage in that movie.
• 44:27
  Speaker 2: The soundtrack has quotes that I can just verbatim.
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: I'm outing myself as being a little older here, but yes, it would totally be Juliet Lewis as Mallory Knox.
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: So there you go.
• 44:40
  Speaker 2: If anybody's got a lifetime connection or knows Juliet Lewis, please send her my way.
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: Look, things are gonna happen.
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: Don't forget about me when they do.
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: I cannot thank you enough.
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: Of course we're gonna be in touch, but tell everybody as we close out where we can find you.
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: Follow you.
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: Keep up to date with the things that you have going on.
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: So my website is tjbutlerauthorcom.
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: There is another author, TJ Butler.
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: It's Tawanna TJ Butler.
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: I'm not her, I am TJ Butler.
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: My.
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: I have Instagram.
• 45:19
  Speaker 2: That is TJ Butler author.
• 45:23
  Speaker 2: On my Instagram it's pretty much only pictures.
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: I am a black and white, gritty, lost and lonely photographer, but you can get to all that through my website.
• 45:33
  Speaker 2: My book Dating Silky Maxwell will be available everywhere that you love to purchase books, and so I hope that you will check it out and you can find anything through my website that is tjbutlerauthorcom.
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: And that wraps up another powerful episode of Surviving Abuse.
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: I want to extend my deepest gratitude to our incredible guests for sharing their transformative journey with us today.
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: Your bravery is an inspiration to us all.
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: Before we go, I want to remind you to stay connected with us on our social media platforms.
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: Follow us on Instagram, twitter, facebook and TikTok, where we will continue the conversation, share resources and provide support for survivors like you.
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: Remember you're not alone.
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: To all of our listeners, thank you for joining us again.
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: Your resilience and willingness to heal is what makes this community strong.
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: As we embark on this journey together, let's remember that there is life.
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: After trauma, we can rise above it and create a future filled with hope and joy.
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: Join us next week as we dive into the healing process and share more incredible stories of triumph and resilience.
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: Until then, take care of yourself and remember you deserve love, you deserve happiness and, above all, you deserve an abundance of healing.
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: Music, dance.
• 47:13
  Speaker 2: And I'll pray for you.
• 47:15
  Speaker 2: I'm done hurting.
• 47:17
  Speaker 2: I'll do the anger.
• 47:19
  Speaker 2: Alright, you can't take it longer.
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: Then we begin again.
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: Now I'm back and I'll pray for you.
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: I'm done hurting.