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Judy Foreman: The Secrets We Carry Keep the Shame Trapped · Surviving-ISH Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I don't understand why it was me.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: I don't know if I'll ever be the same.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Is the same what I?
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: want.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: Anyway, you took what I thought I could never get back.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: I quit holding onto that anger and broke down just to begin again.
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: I'm better than you.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: I'm better than you.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: Welcome to Surviving Podcasts.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: We have a great guest with us today, miss Judy.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for being here and I'm excited to have this conversation.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: I did a little bit of research on you.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: You're an advocate for mental health and awareness, so give us a bit of an introduction on yourself.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: I'm a journalist of many years and I've also written.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: This is my fifth book.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: I had a book on chronic pain, two books on chronic pain from Oxford University Press and a third book on exercise as medicine.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Exercise is medicine is the title.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Then I wrote a novel, a medical thriller, called Crisperd C-R-I-S-P-R, post-A-V-D, and then this is my first and probably only memoir, so I've been all over the place.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: But basically I'm a journalist and I've been a journalist for decades and I've loved being a journalist and it's been a perfect match for my personality, which is I'm an extrovert and so I love to talk to people and that's a great trait for a journalist because you could get a new story.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: You could get a new story at any cocktail party.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: How did it when you, being an extrovert, how did it COVID affect you when everything shut down?
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it was hard, and thank God for Zoom.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Without Zoom, we would have all been lost.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: I take a class by Zoom and I also teach a class by Zoom.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: Harvard, like many universities, has a lifelong learning program and it's called Harvard Institute for Learning and Retirement.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: And thank God for Zoom, because I've been teaching a memoir class a writing, how to write a memoir class for a number of years, and when COVID came along, we just switched to Zoom and it worked fine, thank, goodness, thank goodness for modern technology, because I am well as an extrovert, I've got to be with people, I've got to feed off that energy.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: That's what fills my bucket.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: So COVID got a little rough there for a while.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: So do you mind to give us a little bit of backstory on your experience that led you to what you do today with mental health?
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: Sure, so my memoir is not all about abuse.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of interesting stuff paternalism and other things but when I was a teenager, my father, who was a vice president of one of the biggest corporations in America everyone would recognize the company.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: He was a typical.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: I don't know, a typical might be unfair, but he was like a cartoon, a caricature of a corporate bill in the blank, not a nice person, very impersonal.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: In fact.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: He would not let my brother and me call him dad.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: He was just all corporate all the time, thank you, and was not capable of empathy or introspection or anything.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: He would come to my bedroom door every night when I was a teenager, basically naked except for a short t-shirt.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: I was petrified.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: I was like a mock execution.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Every night I thought I was going to get raped, so it was incredibly traumatizing for me.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: It was also an alcoholic and a very angry man and everybody in the whole family tiptoed around him.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: Everybody was scared of him, basically including my mother, and why she didn't protect me is a big question.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: She claims to have not known, but where did she think he was going every night undressed?
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: To her adolescent daughter's room, and, in terms of making sense of it and trying to heal from it her lack of responsibility, essentially, and her lack of understanding and her emotional unavailability.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: She was very superficially charming, but no insides, no death, and in some ways that has been more traumatic than my father's abusiveness.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: It's interesting Both parents contributed in totally different ways.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: So I am a huge advocate of psychotherapy and mental health in general.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: If you want I can, but I don't have to rattle off the statistics of women in particular who are abused, often by family members, often by parents and my father was also an alcoholic and something like 20% of adults in America grew up in an alcoholic family and that has its own kind of abuse that people have to try to heal from.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: Those kinds of situations are very damaging to a child's brain that's just trying to understand the world, and for the child the whole world is the parents, and if they're not providing security, there's no security, and so you grow up with kind of a hole in the middle of your psyche which is hard to heal from.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: You're nodding.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, when I hear the stories of things happening to a child in those adolescent years and that brain that hasn't fully developed, knowing what I went through and where I struggle and how I had to reteach myself the definition of certain words such as what sex is as an adult, let alone a child, that in some cases that is their first experience with sex.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: Like you're taught that sex is abuse but it isn't Right.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and in my case, my father never touched me.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: Sure, but the fear of it, the fear of it.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: Was powerful.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: How old were you when your abuse happened?
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: I was 42.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: I was 34 when it happened.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: Wow, yeah, yeah, so you had an adult brain.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's still.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: What is so shocking is how much it changed me even at that age and at happening.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: And so when I hear stories about happening to a child, I try to not compare traumas.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: Everybody's journey and their journey, right, but when it comes to children, that's a whole different thing yeah, it's very traumatizing.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: It's very traumatic, yeah, as you say, even for an adult, and much more so for a child.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: And I don't think this country really recognizes how pervasive it is.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, According to, first of all, definition of sexual violence is defined as sexual activity in which consent is not obtained or freely given.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: So that would be every our situations.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: According to the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly one in five American women has experienced a completed or attempted rape during her lifetime.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: That's a lot.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: That's 20% of women.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: That means if you're in a cocktail party, one out of every five women is a statistic, as it were.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: And one in three female rape victims is experiences rape for the first time between age 11 and 17.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: And one in eight female rape victims a report that occurred before age 10.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: And here's the one that gets me More than 90% of child sexual abuse victims know their attacker and in fact the majority 77.5% of perpetrators were the parents of the victim, and that figure comes from the US Department of Justice.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: This is huge.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: This is a huge problem and essentially in this part of the memoir I was trying to use myself as a vehicle or as an example to illustrate this larger problem.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: The rest of the memoir is about my own trajectory through journalism and a lot of adventures, but this part is an attempt to say how common this is and still how under recognized it is.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: Yes, that it being under recognized and brushed under the rug blaming the victim is.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: I do not realize yeah.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: And so you had made a and the email that was sent to me that introduced you.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: There was a couple of bullet points that just really stood out to me.
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: One of them is the the various battle scars that have actually inspired you.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Yes, I have been in therapy for a lot of my life and I'm a very strong component of psychotherapy for people and I think it's a shame that mental health is not treated on a parody with so called regular medical health, because many the prevalence of depression and anxiety in this country is huge, Suicide what they call diseases of despair.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: A lot of the opioid abuse problem is a mental health problem.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: People are in psychological pain and they try to medicaid themselves one way or another alcohol or drugs.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: That, combined with the gun epidemic, this country is in a mess and a lot of it is caused by other human beings.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: They're suffering caused by violence psychological and physical violence toward other people and I wish we had mental health parity so that everyone who wanted to go to therapy could find a good therapist, certified therapist not a crazy do-it-yourself therapist, but a legitimate, certified therapist who could really help.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely.
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: I say probably every week in my recordings that therapy is saved my life.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: It's a safe space where I can release.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: And not to feel alone with it.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: That's huge.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's really huge.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: One thing that I find so interesting interviewing people is when it comes to parents and their generation.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: I know this may be backtracking a little bit, but do you think that where times were where the generation was with your mother when you were a child, with that it seemed like women have still most of this day are trained to sit down and shut up Right Years ago and still currently, people still have that mindset.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: Do you think that played a factor into her turning a blonde dye and only seeing what she wanted to see?
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: I certainly think.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: Yes, I think I do think things are a lot better now.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: In her generation, nobody had heard of therapy she wouldn't have even, and I didn't even identify it as a problem.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: It was normal what you grew up with.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: That's normal, no matter how screwed up it is.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: When you later get out of the situation, you look back this was not right, but that was normal.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: And she had no job, no career.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: She depended on him for money.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: Being the marriage was all she really cared about, and that means you don't protect your kids, or, in this case and many other cases, it means you don't protect your kids.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: So, yes, I think we're in way better shape now in terms of women being able to speak up, but it's still hard if you don't have the education or the means to get a job and be able to support yourself and your children.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: That takes a lot of money.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: And of course money is what drives everything.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: At least a large part of things All right.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: So tell us about your book.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: Okay, since you had a little trouble stumbling over the title, I will tell you how I came up with it.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: My husband and I were taking a hike in the Swiss Alps this is quite a few years ago and it was a beautiful day and we were hiking along and it was great.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: We were heading back after lunch towards Zermatt, major city in Switzerland, and I just aligned from a poem and I'm not even a big poetry fan, but this line from a poem jumped into my head and the complete line was if equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: And it's a line from WH Rodden.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: And I stopped on the trail and I said this to Ken, my husband, and I said that's amazing.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: And he said, yeah, it's like a marriage vow, and I said okay, let the more loving one be me.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: And then he gave me a huge hug and he said no, let the more loving one be me, which was very sweet.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: And so I decided that's what I was going to call my book, because one thing I have learned, I think, over my life and this fits in the therapy idea is that as I have gotten healthier, the men I have chosen to marry have gotten more and more capable of intimacy.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: This is my third marriage.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: My first marriage ended in divorce.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: My second, my husband, died of prostate cancer.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: So this is my third.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: But each partner, each husband, was actually the right choice for where I was emotionally at that time, which is interesting.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: It makes you wonder how people can be married for 70 years to the same person.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: More power to them.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: In putting together the memoirs of this book, I realized that there was a theme, and the overarching theme was really a search for the truth, not just a search for the truth about what happened in my family, but also I've become a huge advocate of freedom of speech and the free press and searching for truth in the wider world.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: And in that sense, not just because I'm an extrovert and journalism demands extroversion, but this sort of compulsion or drive to find the truth, or multiple truths, which is usually the case that kind of propelled me for both things.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: So it turned out there was actually a guiding principle which I wasn't aware of when I sat down to write the book.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and I mean that comes with that just putting that pin to paper and opening yourself up.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that can be very useful too If we're getting it down on paper and you think, wow, this really happened.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: I didn't set out to write a memoir book.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: At this program I was telling you about at Harvard, the Harvard Institute for Learning and Retirement, I decided to take a memoir class.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: So I took a memoir class and you had to write a memoir every week for the class.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: Then I took the course several more times and pretty soon I had a huge stack of memoirs.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: I thought this could be a book, and piecing it together was a hard part how do I arrange it?
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: So it made sense as a flowing thing, but eventually I did hit on the way to do it.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: It was very rewarding.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: The interesting thing is, when I have given talks about this book, people come up to me afterwards with their own stories of trauma in childhood or even, as in your case, midlife or early midlife not to do with anything to do with sexual abuse, but other kinds of abuse.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: For instance, a man who's actually living in my building came up to me and he said on his deathbed my father said to me you will never amount to anything.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: That was hugely traumatic, and other people have had suicides in their family or deaths of a parent at an early age that have left a huge mark on their personalities In the wider sense.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: It's not just abuse that can lead to the need for figuring things out and therapy later on, but other forms of trauma can really affect people and can be helped by therapy.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: So that's actually the last question I had for you is with the stigma that comes behind therapy, with all the cliches and negativity that comes with it, and even though we've come a long way from that, we're not where we need to be with it.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: I think that's right, yeah, absolutely.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: And so what advice do you have for people who therapy's been recommended to, or they feel like they need it, but they're just terrified of the stigmas that come with?
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: Do it anyway would be my advice, but also they can do.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: What you're doing is joining a group of people with a similar problem, and that's I mean, like the whole world of alcoholism.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: There's obviously there's groups, frankly, in every town for alcoholics.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: But also for a long time I went to a group called Children of Adult, children of Alcoholics, and there's programs like that for people with obesity problems and overeating, and you know there are groups and sometimes they're free, like the alcohol world, and I don't know if you have to pay for your group, but those can be helpful too as a way to get started.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: And then if you want to do individual stuff, that to me that's the best, but groups are very powerful.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: And I will say I do also do individual.
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: I did individual for the first year and then they asked me about being interested in starting a male group therapy session.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: So every Tuesday I do my individual and every Thursday I do my group.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: So yeah, so there's definitely more to that yeah no, that's great.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: That's great and that's a role model for people.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I hate that there's a stigma to that, but I think the more people go public with it, that lessens the stigma.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: As with anything, it's the secrets that carry that keep the shame trapped, I think 100%.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: And with women and sexual abuse, women tend to blame themselves.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: I don't know if men do too, but and there was something recently that I read I think was in the New York Times about rape victims If it's in a court, they often are not believed, unless they scream or try to run away.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: But in fact, what really happens to people in a situation of terror is they freeze, and freezing is not convincing to a jury or a judge, only what Hollywood would have you do, and that's unfair too, because you would react according to your own physiology.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Freezing is like what animals do if they're being attacked they play dead.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: So there's even or not even.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: But in the justice system in particular, it has not believed women.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: Look at Joe Biden, whom I like, but he if you need a Hill hearings nobody believed her when she was satisfying against Clarence Thomas.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: It's taken a whole generation to get past that.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: So I'm glad we're making progress, but we have a long way to go.
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: We are.
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: We've mentioned COVID a couple of times.
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: I try to find something positive in everything, and the one positive I can find with COVID is that it woke people up to mental health and self-care.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: I think it made people very aware of the need for community, which we haven't been, I think, culturally that aware of.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: We have a lot of people living alone an epidemic of loneliness at this point and it's hard on people.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: It's not like a little Italian village where everybody knows everybody, which can certainly have its own problems.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: But basically we need each other.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: We're mammals, we need each other.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, miss Judy.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for being here with us today.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: I really enjoy the conversation.
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: Please, before we go, you mentioned how you've written all these books, and so where can we find you in these books and educate ourselves on what you have to offer?
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: OK, so my name is Judy Forman, my website is judyformancom.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: I have all my books on that, and you can also go to Amazon, and all my books are on Amazon too, so I hope you buy them all.
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: And that wraps up another powerful episode of Surviving Abuse.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: I want to extend my deepest gratitude to our incredible guests for sharing their transformative journey with us today.
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: Your bravery is an inspiration to us all.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: Before we go, I want to remind you to stay connected with us on our social media platforms.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: Follow us on Instagram, twitter, facebook and TikTok, where we will continue the conversation, share resources and provide support for survivors like you.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: Remember you're not alone.
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: To all of our listeners, thank you for joining us again.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: Your resilience and willingness to heal is what makes this community strong.
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: As we embark on this journey together, let's remember that there is life.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: After trauma.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: We can rise above it and create a future filled with hope and joy.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: Join us next week as we dive into the healing process and share more incredible stories of triumph and resilience.
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: Until then, take care of yourself and remember you deserve love, you deserve happiness and, above all, you deserve an abundance of healing.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: And I'll pray for you.
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: I'm done hurting and I'll be the only one who can hang our hope as you win any longer.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: Then we begin again.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: Now I'll beg and I'll pray for you.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: I'm done hurting.