Latest / Adult Child of Dysfunction / E 381: The Past Is Still Present: Generational Trauma, Identity & Finding Yourself with Margaret Eastman Smith

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E 381: The Past Is Still Present: Generational Trauma, Identity & Finding Yourself with Margaret Eastman Smith · Adult Child of Dysfunction

• 0:00
  hello everybody.
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  Welcome back to another episode of Adult Child of Dysfunction.
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  Today we have with us Margaret Eastman Smith, who served on the faculty of American University's program on International Peace and Conflict Resolution for nearly two decades.
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  Her academic work focuses on the role of history and memory in divided societies, as well as grassroots approaches to peace building.
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  She pursued counseling studies to a greater understanding of these matters.
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  She holds a BA and MA in History from Boston University, a PhD in International Affairs from Tufts University, Tufts University's Fletcher School, and an MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Lesley University.
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  She is the author of Reckoning with the Past: Teaching History in Northern Ireland.
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  Welcome, Margaret.
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  So good to be here, Tammy.
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  Thank you.
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  Yeah, I think we're gonna have a great conversation.
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  We actually, I was just looking over your questions and everything, and I was like, there's gotta be...
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  I know you just wrote a book, and I've never been to Ireland.
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  My family is from Ireland, and I was looking and I was like, how interesting, My father went to Boston, and my mother got her doctorate at Tufts.
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  So I was like that's kinda interesting."
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  Oh, wow.
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  Okay.
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  So yeah, I was like, "Okay."
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  We have a lot of overlap.
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  Yep.
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  And the...
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  My father, my great-great-grandfather, I believe, was, like, the founder of Cambridge University.
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  I think that was in Ireland, right?
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  I don't know.
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  I don't know.
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  There's one in Massachusetts too, but- Yeah, there might well be one.
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  I can't think of it at the moment, but there might well be one.
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  Yes.
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  But what an interesting family history you have.
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  When we get into uses of memory and history and trauma and all of that the Irish story is just so powerful.
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  It...
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  And it's funny- because one of my fondest memory, but yet most traumatic memory, so not really a fond memory, just one of my only memories, was my mother dragging me to these Irish pubs on St.
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  Patrick's Day.
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  It's my family lineage, we used to have to get up there.
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  You used to have to sing that song.
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  Were green alligators and long neck those Irish, And I can remember every St.
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  Patrick's Day, and I still to this day like, "Tammy, what were you thinking?"
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  I would get excited because it was a holiday, and then I would end up, it was always the most traumatic event of my life every year.
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  I'm like, "Why do I get excited about this being a holiday?"
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  Because I would have to get...
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  She would at this point be about 15 drinks in, right?
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  My dad would- I was thinking that was probably what you had to deal with, was at the end of the day, everybody who celebrated massively has to be picked up from the pavement or whatever.
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  Yeah.
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  It can be really sad.
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  It, it- Yeah was funny, and I can remember having to get pushed up on the stage at, 10 years old in front of all these drunk people and doing that Green Alligator song, and it was so humiliating.
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  And then I- Yes I don't know.
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  It's just- funny, but it's that Irish, she was like, "No, we're gonna do it."
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  And my husband and I still go to, Irish bars on St.
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  Patrick's Day.
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  But anyway I did wanna talk to you because it was really interesting when you talk about the past and the present and the history.
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  I have to admit I am I never had a good history teacher, and I regret that, that I didn't seek out...
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  i'm not good at history because I never found it interesting to me.
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  But now I'm like, ooh, I love these historical novels and things like that.
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  But my sense of history is really bad.
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  But talk about what you were just talking about with the history and the past and the trauma and all that.
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  Yeah.
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  There, there are two sort of major paths we could go down here, because my first book, which was published 20 years ago, was really looking at the way these memories stay alive in, especially in places where the political
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  arrangements ha- are still compromised or are under debate or something like that.
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  Because each side sees that its way of telling the history is a way to present their political program.
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  And so history gets used in politics like a political football.
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  So that is the case in any society, but the more political tension there is, the more there's gonna be that problem.
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  But then it's, the reason that it's so powerful is that it's speaking to people's own experience, that you and I know that our parents, our grandparents lived through some terrible things.
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  There are things they never talked about.
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  There are things they had to just put up with or deal with or remain silent about.
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  And so we know that this past which we're hearing the politicians speak about belongs to us, too.
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  So that's a thing that you see in Ukraine, in Ireland, in Israel-Palestine, in, in any place where the, and of course Russia, who's going to, is trying to rewrite the history of Ukraine.
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  And we're seeing it in our own country also now, so that's another whole subject.
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  The, my latest book, which is called A Spectacular Inheritance, this is the book that's just coming out, and this book- is about my personal story of my own memories, but it's interwoven with the fact that my father was
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  Scottish.
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  And so this Scottish past is not the same as the Irish past, but it has some similar resonances.
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  And certainly what we experienced at the hands of the English has stayed with us in many ways.
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  And so I recognized in my father's life the thing was that he was born in 1914, so that's the year that the First World War started, and he was born in Scotland, and his father, who was a minister
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  of the church, was going around looking for ways that he could help with the war effort, and finally went over to France in the war and was a chaplain to the British servicemen.
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  And then developed cancer while he was over there, and came home at the end of the war and died of cancer when the children were quite young.
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  My father was five.
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  So here their father died, but he wasn't killed in the war, but they were nonetheless put in the category of all the children whose parent, whose fathers had died in the war.
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  And this shattering, shattering national experience where the whole sociology of Scotland changed through that First World War, and then these families all having to grin and bear it or just not look too self-concerned because they knew that everybody
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  else had gone through the same experience.
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  And so here he is with his mother, having six children, having a very tiny pension, having to figure out how they would keep going.
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  And I could see that my father was a traumatized person and a person whose family had been in some sense shattered by this experience, and at the same time would know that it was not unlike the experiences of
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  a very large number of other people.
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  So anyway, I'm, I've been talking too long without giving you the chance to ask a question.
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  But, No, that's okay but this is the sort of framework in which I think about my own life.
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  So talk about, you made a comment in something that you wrote, and it was...
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  Where is it?
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  The past is present.
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  The past is present in a host of ways.
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  How does the past call us to, in our present work?
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  So talk a little bit about that, and talk a little bit about, because we, being that we're on the Adult Child of Dysfunction podcast- Yeah I love that you said your book kinda steered it back to the past
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  traumas.
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  And trauma is so generational.
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  It's, it just is gen- Yeah it's...
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  And you can go f- from it from a scientific standpoint as far as, the trauma actually changes your physical brain, which changes your DNA.
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  Or you can just look at it like a lot of people just look at the kind of adaptive framework of it where this trauma did this to my mother, so she by default acted like this, and then treated
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  me like that.
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  And by default I treat my children like that.
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  Yeah.
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  But either way, it gets passed on and passed on.
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  Yeah.
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  And there are so many, when you think back about history, there's so many things.
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  Like my, my grandparents grew up in the Great Depression, and so they had hoarding tendency, as I guess you could say.
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  Yes.
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  That's very frequently something that, that shows up also with refugees.
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  Yeah.
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  I've talked to Cambodian young Americans whose parents came from Cambodia in the late '70s and early '80s who see that in their families.
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  'Cause once you, when you've lost everything, you just wanna be sure you've got a backup.
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  Yep.
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  It was...
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  I remember my, I would be like saying to my grandmother like, "Why did he just go out and buy 36 turkeys?"
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  She was like, "Because they were nine cents a pound."
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  Wow.
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  Wow.
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  And we would have cases of toilet paper, and it was...
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  And you're right, he just grew up not knowing where the next meal was coming.
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  So if he could afford- Yeah something and it was a good deal, he got it.
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  And, Just snap it up.
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  Yes and it's funny though, because that's two generations later that I had to deal with my own scarcity issues in my mind- Oh, interesting from growing up with them.
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  Yes.
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  Yeah.
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  You never know where your next gallon of milk is coming from kinda attitude.
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  Yeah.
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  So I could see how just, those are just small examples of that in play.
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  But talk about your book.
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  My book really starts with my parents' story because my parents be- in the 1930s.
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  The I'm a little bit older than you, so my parents were a little bit older than your parents.
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  So my parents were going to university in the 1930s.
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  They were both college graduates, my father in Scotland, my mother in Los Angeles.
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  And they met in a very powerful Christian-based organization that was trying to mobilize people with some kind of hope for the future by saying that, the world has gone through this cataclysm of the Depression, and before that, the
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  cataclysm of the First World War, and there is a way that all of us can do something to make a difference so the future will be better."
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  And the proposition of this group was that, "You guys are Christians.
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  We're all Christians in this group."
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  That's how it started.
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  Later it was a little different, but at the start they said, "But we don't always live our Christianity, so we need to live our Christianity better."
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  And so how do you do that better than you did?
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  One way is that there's a sort of moral compass in all of our hearts, and we need to be more responsive to it.
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  We need to be sure that we hold ourselves accountable to the n- things we know we should do.
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  So we should be absolutely honest.
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  It's a little bit hard to quarrel with that.
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  Absolute honesty was one of the bedrocks of this.
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  There are other standards, absolute unselfishness, absolute purity, absolute love.
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  Also hard to quarrel with, but maybe a little bit harder to define.
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  But in any case, they believed that God could guide people, and God would use us all to remake the world.
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  And this organization took wings in the 1930s.
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  And then in the 19- 1939, just around the time World War II started, people were talking about re-arming for the battle that was ahead in World War II.
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  And so this organization renamed itself Moral Re-Armament because they wanted to talk about how it wasn't just about military armament, it's about morality and spirituality.
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  So to make a long story short, I was born into this organization in the 19- late 1940s, in the post-World War II era, and my parents were entirely engaged in trying to do something to reconcile French and Germans
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  after World War II.
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  So I was born into this high-minded, highly moral, very dedicated, very unselfish family you could say, because it wasn't just my parents, it was this whole crowd of other people they were doing it with.
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  And- If you have any example in your own life or anybody else's life of what it is to be born into a powerful culture you might know something about what that's like.
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  But for me, it was so powerful, so admirable in many ways, and yet as a kid I could also see where the holes were and the problems and so and so forth.
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  But how seriously could I take them when these people were doing such high-minded things?
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  And so I had the burden of growing up in this thing, trying to decide what my own separate future would be, being unable to find a way to break out of it, becoming an adult within it.
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  Only when I was 35 did I recognize that however good or bad this thing might be, I've got to get out.
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  I have got to measure my life in some different frame.
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  And so I left.
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  So this is a story about a powerful culture and leaving a powerful culture, but it's also And this is what's interesting, I think, is what happens after you leave.
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  Y- you can talk to lots of people who do leave powerful cultures.
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  You can see in the literature of people departing from real cults- I was just gonna say, I was just gonna say that- Getting out Yeah getting out is big, but then there you are very much alone, very much
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  not quite knowing what your values are in this new world that you have entered, struggling to just get your feet on s- sort of firm land, and maybe you have to find a job in this situation.
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  You have to deal with the whole question of romantic relationships.
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  You have to find your way in a world that you don't really know very well.
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  And so I wanted the book to also capture that aspect of the whole thing So that's my spectacular in- inheritance, is the title of the book, what I kept and what I left behind.
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  But your subject about dysfunctional parents, there was a way in which my parents' dysfunctionality contributed so much to this, because I was rescuing them all the time.
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  They were the ones who jumped into this kind of massive dedicated group of people, and I think it was partly because of their own trauma that they felt they needed to do this.
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  And so it be- I could see that they were too fragile for me to quarrel with what they had done.
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  I felt like I had to go along with it in order to keep them whole.
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  And that's where I think my story speaks to your particular frame of reference here when you're talking about dysfunctionality of parents.
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  Oh, it and it does, because it's just, like you said, it's generational.
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  But the, you just feeling like your needs probably came bef- less than your parents.
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  Like you said, you were- Oh, I had no idea about my needs yeah.
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  My needs were something I felt imp- un- permitted to explore.
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  The, the very notion of it seemed sinful.
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  Yeah.
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  Yep.
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  I have a couple episodes going way back on even just the religious groups, and like I have people that were in cults.
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  I also have people that, a l- a girl that was in a just very up, her father was a minister or preacher, whatever, in the church, and she had really bad things happen from people in the church.
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  And so she was like ostracized and kicked out.
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  And like divorce was not okay even though she was abused.
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  Yeah.
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  And like all kinds of stuff.
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  But it's hard too when you throw in that religious aspect of it.
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  Because when you have that kind of chaotic mess in your life, so many people turn to religion or turn to God or their spirituality.
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  And if that is, was a driving force of the beliefs of your parents per se That's tough.
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  It is.
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  One way I had a friend who described this as actually like having a third parent.
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  You've got your two parents, but then you've got this very strong religious framework that's quite hard to quarrel with because it sounds so, so ordained by God.
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  And so you feel like you c- gotta show that you can be on board with that because otherwise they will sideline you, they will marginalize you, they will disapprove of you.
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  So i- this whole thing about the problem we have as kids is that we are trying to keep our parents close.
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  We're trying to be on board with them so they won't abandon us, but at the same time, we're compromising ourselves when we do that.
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  And so i- it's just so blooming complicated.
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  Human is a complex, humanity is complex.
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  Flat out- That is true it just it is.
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  That is true.
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  So talk about when you did leave and you had to start here you are, you step out.
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  You said you were 29 or- I was 35.
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  You were 35.
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  I was 35, and I had not been to college.
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  And I had a little bit of money from my mother's father, so I thought I could l- launch into a college degree.
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  I had very little knowledge of how the American college system worked, the, that my father was Scottish.
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  We had lived in Scotland for all my high school education, so but then we'd come back to America, so here I was and I really was so outside of my culture, but I didn't know that.
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  And so I thought because I'd done pretty well in school, I was a bit of a nerd in school, so that college wouldn't be that hard for me, which at some level it wasn't when it just came to
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  doing the work.
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  But the sort of social side of this is a sort of...
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  And then the fact that you're supposed to be trying to figure out a future for yourself.
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  You're trying to find a career, but you're also trying to find what is etched in your heart because you've never been quite sure.
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  And so this whole thing about whether a career really comes out of some deep personal desire or whether that's just a lot of hogwash and you should just get on and find something to do that will earn you
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  some money.
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  All of these questions are surrounding you, but you don't know how to ask them, and so you're just going one step at a time.
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  And I guess that's really the way all of us live in the world, is our lives are a process of kind of exploration, seeing where we fit, doing things because other people seem to think they're a good idea,
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  then realizing that's not a good idea for me, then going on to the next idea.
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  And it's just that all got going rather late for me, and I think you asked what it was like to leave.
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  Coming out, I think I thought that, okay, the group of people I was with seemed to have not been as right as they thought they were about what is the secret to living, but there must be somebody else
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  out there who's got the secret to living.
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  So if I just look around a while, I'll find someone else.
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  And so I, in exploring I began to realize how we're all groping in the dark, and nobody's got the, nobody's got the true answer.
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  And so that is a powerful revelation, and for me I call that recognizing that I'm in the wilderness.
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  And that I just have to thank God for the wilderness, because that's the way it's gonna feel, so I might as well get used to it.
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  And even if it makes me feel anxious to recognize that there's this reality to life, that's when you're really living, because you're not trying to pretend something anymore.
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  And that's the heart of everything I do, because so many of us are putting on this mask.
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  We wake up in the morning and we're like, slap the mask on that society, our parents, our grandparents, our situations, our experiences has told us, "You're gonna be this, you're gonna do this, you're gonna say this, you're gonna
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  act this way."
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  And it's when you start peeking out from under the mask, it's okay- Who am I?
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  And- like I was mentioning right before we got on here, 50, 50 to 65 years old, and all of a sudden all these people are like, "Who the hell am I?"
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  What do I like to do outside of what I was told?
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  I don't know how many people come to me and I'm like, "Oh, what made you be a doctor?"
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  I don't know how many people will say my dad was a doctor and he told me I would, he would pay for my medical school so I would be a doctor."
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  I'm like, "Do you like being a doctor?"
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  And, "No, I never wanted to be a doctor."
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  I'm like, oh my gosh.
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  Yeah.
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  So at 55 to 65 years old it's like this whole open- opening up of I'm gonna do what fricking lights me up.
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  Yes.
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  And that's what we all- It- deserve really at the end of the day.
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  We do, but then even figuring out what lights us up is a little harder to find than just saying, "Okay, I'm gonna flick that switch," so you have to try a few things and- Yep yep.
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  I feel like you were almost blessed in that you did start that whole process later, because I feel so bad for kids that go into college at 19 now and are 18, and have to know what they quote
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  unquote "wanna do for the rest of their lives."
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  Because if you didn't know at 35, can you imagine these kids coming out of high school and having to know at 18?
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  Oh I know.
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  Of course in the United States I, I think a lot of people go to college without knowing what they're doing.
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  They're postponing figuring that out.
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  And but we don't really prepare them for this process very well.
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  I th- I think that the messages that they get, that we all got from our parents, from our professors, from whoever were the people who were mentoring us as we went along, and I don't, I'm not saying that
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  anybody really ever mentored me.
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  That's the truth of the matter.
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  But people who seemed to applaud me from a distance they're n- really not telling me what it's like to figure out your life.
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  And certainly for a woman, I think the idea that she's gonna get married to a man who's figured out his life, that was the way it was presented.
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  And so I wasn't finding a man to marry, so that was a problem too, because the pressure was on me in some way that was completely non-traditional.
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  It's hard to describe that now because of course women in, in our world are not subjected to that form of energy in quite the way it was presented to us in olden times, but- Yeah, much d- much different
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  now.
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  Much.
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  Much different.
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  Back then p- k- they were getting married at 15, 16, 17, and that just was the way it was.
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  That was it, yes.
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  So talk about your process.
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  How did you discover what you loved and start really trying to- decide who you were and figure out who, who is Margaret?
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  F- first of all, I gotta say the process never ends, so let's not kid ourselves.
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  Yeah.
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  I realize that it took a long time to dismantle some of my expectations maybe particularly maybe where men were concerned that, that sort of, I really thought that I'd find some man who would solve it all for me.
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  So even though I was willing to have a job and do things for myself, I still didn't know how to be inner directed about myself, and so that was a hard process to go through.
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  I feel like what was remarkable in the man whom I did marry, and I, and we got married not that long ago finally was that I didn't feel I had to put on any pretense at all because he
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  was not putting on any pretense about himself.
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  And at, at some level that was a little bit disappointing because I wanted to feel he was aspiring to great things and so on and so forth.
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  It was like he want- I wanted him to still to be playing some game I was playing.
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  And then I realized he was just so determined not to play that game, just to do things because he liked doing them.
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  So you know, he loves cooking and I thought that I was a good cook, so one of the f- things I had to do was to give, give way to him in the kitchen, and to enjoy cooking together.
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  And that has actually been fun that we do that as a common task.
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  So we enjoy that.
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  We also enjoy music.
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  We sing with a choral group.
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  We and having people to our house.
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  That's part of the cooking thing I guess.
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  But I think we really genuinely do getting to know people and trying to get to know people in our own setting so that we know about our homes as well as talking to people at restaurants or at parties
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  and things like that.
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  So we're probably seem a bit old-fashioned in, in the way that we I think really have decided that our lives are gonna be about genuine connection, and looking for how you do that.
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  And I think that's what the world is missing right now.
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  It's absolutely missing right now.
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  And honestly, because of all the abandonment, and I, I deal with mostly people from a trauma lens.
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  Yeah.
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  So because of all the abandonment and everything else, connection, and I was just talking to someone about this right before we got on here, connection to that person, that feel, that idea of connection was scary.
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  Yeah.
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  It wasn't safe.
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  Fair enough.
• 25:13
  So- Fair enough he was talking about me and Neville Goddard, and you know- the best thing you can do is visualize your future self and step into that future self.
• 25:23
  And, he was like I, why can't I step into this future me?"
• 25:26
  And I said, "Because the future you of being 100% connected with all these great relationships scares the crap out of you."
• 25:34
  Yeah.
• 25:34
  So when you're coming from that lens of trauma and dysfunction and chaos, you have to back it up a little bit and take it a little slower because when connection is scary, you, like you said, you weren't even
• 25:46
  connected to yourself.
• 25:48
  Exactly.
• 25:49
  Exactly.
• 25:51
  And so I'm still trying to figure out what this is really, and as, as I did train to be a mental health counselor.
• 25:59
  I haven't worked exclusively in that area, but I was aware that everything I was thinking about and writing about was so connected to that.
• 26:07
  But I do think that in this country where we have such a obvious crisis of mental health and of connection, that we all have to learn how to do this for each other in kind of natural ways rather
• 26:19
  than having to go to a therapist's office and do this.
• 26:22
  Yeah.
• 26:22
  And so I feel like I'd like to be part of a process that explores how you do that.
• 26:29
  I- That's what I want from my life.
• 26:31
  And that sounds that's amazing.
• 26:32
  And I tell people I'm very energy/frequency oriented.
• 26:36
  I truly believe the one thing, if you get nothing out of meeting Tammy, you will understand that the energy that you put into the world is the energy that you get back.
• 26:47
  So connection is, if you're sitting there and you're looking at this brand new relationship or brand new person, person with doubt, fear- Not, lack of discernment, criticism, or anything like that, those are the people you're gonna connect.
• 27:07
  They're gonna come at you with that same energy, or else they're not gonna want anything to do with you.
• 27:11
  So- I am always constantly trying to tweak people's mindset as far as curiosity versus judgment.
• 27:20
  Curiosity versus- That's wonderful.
• 27:21
  That's wonderful.
• 27:23
  The whole idea of attunement of how we find that we're m- emotionally aware of where the other person is, that's something that I didn't grow up understanding at all.
• 27:35
  No.
• 27:35
  And so every human interaction seemed a little bit like billiard balls hitting each other and bouncing off, but you w- weren't exploring what was going on below the surface.
• 27:46
  And so yes I'm grateful that to live in a time where we've come to understand that better, but it's so interesting that even though we understand this better, the problems seem to be getting greater rather than less.
• 27:58
  And so this is the conundrum of our time.
• 28:00
  What would you think...
• 28:01
  I have my theories about why this is, and it just goes down to the work I do.
• 28:05
  But what would you think, just throwing out there something, what do you think the reason is for that, that, the lack of connection?
• 28:15
  I think that there's been very rapid social change on so many different fronts.
• 28:23
  So the- there is a way in which the world is much less predictable, I think, for young people as they're growing up in their families and in their school situations, et cetera.
• 28:35
  Then social media has added to that.
• 28:37
  I, I think that the sense of- Unpredictability is going to create more anxiety, and so how do we have kind of predictable relationships?
• 28:50
  I and that doesn't mean they have to be boring, but that we know that we can count on people in our lives.
• 28:56
  And so we need more rituals more events where we do things.
• 29:01
  But I don't want to pretend that we all know how to do this.
• 29:05
  We've got a big, a, a lot of learning to do.
• 29:08
  Yep, we really do.
• 29:08
  Love to hear how you answer this, Tammy.
• 29:10
  How do you answer this?
• 29:12
  I even forgot the question.
• 29:13
  It was really about why do we have so much mental health crisis or so much dysfunction- the lack of connection.
• 29:19
  And I think I was going back to a lot of it is the social thing.
• 29:22
  I think a lot of it is the fact that all of our connections, or not all of them, but we're now so ingrained in having these superficial connections that we don't even know a true one when it hits
• 29:35
  us, first of all.
• 29:35
  But I use my kids' rela- I, I use my kids dating as an example all the time.
• 29:41
  And we used to when, and I'm sure you unders- you know, when you wanted to go on a date or you wanted to go out with a guy or you thought a guy liked you when you were in
• 29:49
  high school or whatever, you would sit by the phone on a Saturday night and do nothing but read a book, enjoy your time with yourself, and hope that he calls, right?
• 29:59
  Now, I said, you start...
• 30:01
  I watched this with my kids and it drove me crazy.
• 30:04
  You would literally be talking 24/7 on the phone, texting back and forth with this person while you were out doing the rest of your life.
• 30:13
  Yes.
• 30:14
  And so by the time you actually, let's just say, even started to have some kind of physical connection, which normally would normally take a really long time because you went on several dates before you got to know the
• 30:25
  person, by the time you even get into that bo- that area, you've connected, "connected" quote-unquote, you see my air quotes, with this person for hundreds of hours, but you don't really even know them.
• 30:40
  You've never physically sat down.
• 30:41
  You know what I'm saying?
• 30:42
  Does that make sense?
• 30:43
  I totally do, yeah.
• 30:44
  Oh, my, and I watched it with my kids and I was like, oh, my God, literally he, my son is out at football games and doing things with his buddies and hanging out and having fun, and meanwhile just
• 30:54
  texting the girl to kinda appease her.
• 30:57
  That wasn't connection.
• 30:58
  And I was like, "What is happening?"
• 31:00
  I just, I was like, and you, they take it for granted.
• 31:04
  So we got in this world of instant gratification.
• 31:07
  We got, so much stuff has just changed so much and- I don't know.
• 31:12
  I just, I think we don't...
• 31:14
  And now, people come to me.
• 31:16
  Every single day somebody approaches me, a company approaches me that says, "Tammy, we can clone you and your business can skyrocket.
• 31:24
  A fake person can get on the internet and be you, and people will come s- flocking to you."
• 31:30
  I'm like, "Oh," and then they see me and they're like, "Whoa, that's not you?"
• 31:33
  I s- I say, we, we've...
• 31:35
  It's, oh my gosh, I don't know.
• 31:37
  I don't even know where to begin to start with it.
• 31:39
  It's the most frustrating thing.
• 31:40
  But I'm like, I literally spent my entire, I spend my entire life talking to people about being unapologetically, authentically themselves.
• 31:49
  Yeah.
• 31:49
  And then you wanna clone me and let some other computer be me?
• 31:53
  And those are the people I want to pay me to help them?
• 31:56
  I'm like, what, are you kidding me?
• 31:58
  Oh my gosh, it's just crazy.
• 32:00
  Huh.
• 32:01
  Huh.
• 32:01
  It's crazy.
• 32:02
  Yeah.
• 32:02
  But it seems- you figured it out.
• 32:04
  You got married.
• 32:05
  You have those, those things.
• 32:07
  So that's good.
• 32:09
  But it- I got married three weeks before my 70th birthday Oh, amen to that and for my first marriage.
• 32:17
  And so there was something that was it was a very wonderful day and a wonderf- wonderful seven years we've had since then.
• 32:27
  We just had our seventh wedding anniversary- Aw a few days ago.
• 32:30
  But there was also something painful about that that somehow I felt this was not the trajectory for my life that I felt my parents would have wanted for me or that I wanted for myself.
• 32:40
  So I, having to come to terms with li- with the fact that life has thrown me things that I didn't expect, made it harder for me than I thought, even though I feel there are many millions of people
• 32:54
  who have much harder life than I do.
• 32:57
  But still, it's this sort of existential fact that it's not going the way I thought it should, and now I have to figure out what to do about it.
• 33:08
  That moment of truth, which I think is what you're describing with these different people who suddenly reach 50 or whatever it is and thinking, "Who am I?"
• 33:16
  And so on and so forth.
• 33:17
  So it's refreshing to get to grips with that, but it's also scary.
• 33:22
  And- It really is.
• 33:23
  And I- But we support each other.
• 33:25
  Yeah.
• 33:26
  And it really is scary.
• 33:27
  And like I said, those people, they do.
• 33:28
  And I ask, I tell them every day, wake up and you have to start In order to know what you need to stop and ask yourself, "What do I need?"
• 33:38
  And I tell people, wake up every morning and just be like, "What do I need today that would make me 1% more at ease in my own body?"
• 33:45
  Because literally that's where we're running around in like dis-ease.
• 33:49
  We're out of alignment with our own truth, with our own wanting, with our own needs.
• 33:54
  And it's like, what's one per- thing i'm l- living in a one-bedroom apartment right here.
• 33:58
  I've been married for 25 years and my husband is over across town, but for the last two years I've been waking up and saying, "Tammy, what do you need?
• 34:07
  Because you just have this unsettled, like I don't even know."
• 34:11
  And I kept saying to myself, "Space."
• 34:14
  space.
• 34:15
  So I've got space right now.
• 34:16
  It's really small space.
• 34:18
  It's a one-bedroom apartment shared with a bunch of girls I don't know, but- it's okay.
• 34:22
  But it's finally okay, now I'm back to that time that I used to have where I could sit and go, "Okay, what do I like to do?
• 34:30
  What do I wanna do on my day off?"
• 34:31
  "Do I still like to read books?
• 34:33
  Do I..."
• 34:33
  What is this new..."
• 34:34
  Not even a new me.
• 34:35
  What is the me that used to be before life lifed on me?
• 34:39
  I think one thing that we're all very afraid of is space that we all feel we have to keep busy.
• 34:46
  And I think there's something in our culture that seems to reinforce that idea.
• 34:52
  So the, the idea of imposing some space on ourselves, whether it's through meditation, through just going physically to some place where you're not interacting with other people, and getting used to being just centered in some way is a
• 35:06
  great exercise just so that we stop being afraid of that.
• 35:10
  It's funny you said that.
• 35:11
  I just m- had T-shirts made up.
• 35:13
  I was trying to think of a way to support adult children in a kind of fun way, and so I made up these T-shirts and it said, "Only an adult child," which is an adult, for those of you
• 35:21
  listening, if you've not listened to any of my episodes before, you would know that adult child is kinda short for adult child of dysfunctional families or alcoholics or whatever that kind of...
• 35:30
  The dysfunction is all the same.
• 35:31
  Umbrellaed adult child of dysfunction.
• 35:34
  And it says, "Only adult child would understand," and then it's "I say yes when I wanna say no."
• 35:39
  And one of the things I put, and I've only picked four of all of the concepts that I coach and teach on, was- stillness feels uncomfortable.
• 35:50
  How interesting isn't that?
• 35:52
  And it's, and people read that, and they go, "You're right."
• 35:55
  And that's because of that trauma response.
• 35:58
  Yeah.
• 35:58
  It's because of that hypervigilance.
• 35:59
  It's because of if I'm not doing, I'm not performing, I'm not...
• 36:02
  Then something, then I'm not worthy.
• 36:05
  I'm not good.
• 36:05
  I'm not doing what I was programmed to do.
• 36:09
  Yes.
• 36:09
  And it is an amazing concept, and it took me probably, ugh, years before I could sit on my bed with my legs crossed, crisscross applesauce, and just be still.
• 36:24
  It was so- violently uncomfortable, 'cause I would be like, "Oh my God."
• 36:27
  My r- my mind would start racing.
• 36:29
  I couldn't do it.
• 36:30
  It was years before I could do that, and a lot of practice.
• 36:34
  And now I have absolutely no problem sitting on my bed, putting my phone down, turning off the light, shutting the door, and sitting on my bed for an hour.
• 36:42
  But I guarantee if anybody is out there that wants to challenge themselves, see how long you can do it before it gets uncomfortable.
• 36:49
  And you'll feel it in your body, because every single thing that's going on is in your body, in every single cell of your tissues.
• 36:57
  You'll feel that uncomfortableness But it just to decide to do it for 15 minutes every day, even if it does feel uncomfortable, even if your mind wanders, but just knowing that you're gonna do that every day for not
• 37:13
  too long, but a, a reasonable amount of time, that's a way to start a different rhythm.
• 37:19
  Yep.
• 37:19
  St- and absolutely, and then it cha- and you start to get kinda safe in your own body.
• 37:23
  Wow.
• 37:24
  Yeah.
• 37:24
  Yeah, I...
• 37:25
  And that's- Exactly.
• 37:26
  Exactly that's what we do.
• 37:27
  We're all here just trying to be safe in our own bodies, and feeling it's okay to be me.
• 37:32
  It's okay to sit with who I am.
• 37:35
  I'm not, my worth is not based on what other people, society, the groups you were in, the, those over, whatever you call them, you used the word, but those controlling c- type groups or just- Yes, authoritarian groups, controlling-
• 37:52
  Authoritarian, yeah people.
• 37:52
  Yeah.
• 37:53
  Like- yes.
• 37:54
  Sure they make you who you think you are, but it's not necessarily who you are.
• 37:59
  So yeah, I love it.
• 38:01
  I love it.
• 38:02
  I c- is your book already out?
• 38:04
  Yes.
• 38:04
  So my new book The Spectacular Inheritance, it just came out officially on the 11th.
• 38:10
  Oh.
• 38:10
  So today it's the 19th, so that's just a week and a day or something like that.
• 38:15
  Okay.
• 38:16
  And so I'm going around doing book talks about it and so on.
• 38:20
  And this organization that my parents worked for actually was the place where Alcoholics Anonymous first formed, and then the people who were doing that part of it separated themselves from the organization.
• 38:33
  So there is an AA element in the book.
• 38:37
  Also, the youth music group Up With People I don't know if you've heard of that.
• 38:43
  You don't look like you recognize that name.
• 38:45
  No.
• 38:45
  But anyway, the, it's a sort of it's a program for kids to be in a musical show betw- in a year between high school and college.
• 38:53
  Oh, okay.
• 38:53
  And it has been a lot of fun and a sort of mind-blowing experience for many young people.
• 38:59
  But it grew out of the same organization.
• 39:02
  So I'm in part trying to tell a little bit of the story of the people in this organization and their hopes to change the world, and how things worked and how things didn't work, and all of that.
• 39:13
  So that's all wound into the story, too.
• 39:15
  That's great.
• 39:16
  And the story of the camp, just whatever you said, that year between after high school with the music- yeah and the theater.
• 39:22
  Science will tell you there is absolutely no better way of healing past woes than expressing them in some way, whether it's speaking, writing, drama, acting, whatever it is.
• 39:32
  That's- There you go.
• 39:34
  There you go It's an emotional physiological release of that trauma when you can just express yourself.
• 39:41
  That's true.
• 39:42
  Yeah.
• 39:44
  That's true.
• 39:44
  Love it.
• 39:44
  Huh.
• 39:44
  You have the book.
• 39:45
  Do you...
• 39:46
  Tell us if, do you talk to people one on one, or what is your...
• 39:50
  Do you just- I'm I am doing podcasts with people like you.
• 39:54
  I'm also we are setting up various book talks where I invite a group from the community.
• 40:01
  So I did one on the day of the launch.
• 40:04
  And so I give some background to the book.
• 40:08
  The book is, operates on many levels, 'cause, of course, it's about a woman going out to have a kind of second coming of age when she's 35.
• 40:17
  And so that's one story in the book.
• 40:20
  It's also about my parents' trauma and how I r- get into a clearer relationship with our family's story, and- Love it the way that memoir works to write a family story, but to also find some healing from family
• 40:36
  trauma.
• 40:36
  And then the third thing is the whole question of how can ordinary people make a difference in the world, and th- that was a big topic in the world I grew up in.
• 40:46
  And so I learned a few things that I wanted to impart along the way about that too.
• 40:51
  So it's it's a book that I think would be great for book groups and so on, because there's so many different things you can discuss in this book.
• 40:57
  Yeah.
• 40:58
  I'm actually looking forward to it.
• 40:59
  I have, oh my gosh, with so many podcast hosts that have books, I have literally stacks of 10 foot- I bet you do, yes.
• 41:05
  I have so many books that people are constantly...
• 41:07
  Every day I open my email, and it's like, "Hey, does she wanna come on?
• 41:10
  And here's her book to read."
• 41:11
  So I'm like, "Oh, gosh."
• 41:13
  But I usually get through the f- I just have hundreds of books.
• 41:16
  But but yeah, no.
• 41:17
  And it's...
• 41:18
  That's awesome.
• 41:19
  And I'm curious to read it, because we all need those, those tips and those tricks and everything else.
• 41:25
  This was super fun having you on.
• 41:27
  I'm excited.
• 41:28
  Oh, and I will put the links to your books and everything- Great in the show notes.
• 41:32
  Before you leave, though you're not off the hook yet.
• 41:34
  But first of all, thank you for coming.
• 41:36
  Appreciate you.
• 41:38
  And before you leave, if you could give the world or listeners we're in 45 different countries now, so that's nice.
• 41:45
  So it is kinda like the world.
• 41:46
  Yeah.
• 41:47
  One message or words of advice or words of wisdom, what would it be?
• 41:56
  Be true to yourself and find connection Amen.
• 42:02
  Yeah Thanks for asking that question.
• 42:04
  And the question is then how to live it out but that's what all of us are trying to do.
• 42:10
  And so finding each other and making it work better, I guess that's what it's all about, Tammy, so thank You are very welcome.
• 42:17
  And for everybody else out there listening, you heard it.
• 42:20
  I- you've heard me say it 1,000 times, but now you're hearing Margaret say it.
• 42:24
  Margaret Eastman, she's saying, "Be true to yourself.
• 42:27
  Find true connection.
• 42:30
  Ask yourself," and I'm just gonna add, ask yourself, does it feel right?
• 42:34
  And if your body clenches or you feel some kind of physiological response, that is your truth.
• 42:41
  We have to start learning to listen to it.
• 42:43
  And listen to your body, listen to your mind, and know that you deserve, I 100%, Margaret, I'm sure you're gonna agree with me, you deserve to have those good connections.
• 42:53
  It doesn't matter if you're 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, or 105.
• 42:57
  You deserve to have them.
• 42:58
  So if you did- haven't had them, it's never too late to start.
• 43:03
  So thank you all.
• 43:05
  Thank you.
• 43:05
  Yes.
• 43:06
  Love it, Tammy.
• 43:07
  Love it All the best to you.
• 43:08
  Thank you so much, and you all have a blessed week, and we will see you back soon