Episode 4 The Little White Lady

People have many different ways of recovering from life's setbacks. Part of my journey has been therapy.  Here is the first part of a two-episode conversation I had with my therapist that gives a general picture of my therapy journey.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:26

This podcast is meant to be about the journeys from life-changing setbacks to restoration. This journey takes on many forms and encompasses many different stories and topics, including addiction, prison, abuse, loss, illness, and other setbacks. The primary message is not so much the setbacks, but the personal, mental, spiritual, societal, physical, and other forms of recovery needed to emerge from these challenges with renewed hope and as better versions of ourselves. We will explore personal journeys and celebrate those who have waded through their own personal struggles and have come out on the other side, having not only survived, but against all odds, are better because of the journey. This is meant to be a message of hope with the overriding theme that it is not the falls that define us, but rather the getting up. That's the title Miles Behind, Miles Ahead. Welcome to episode four. Today I'm talking to my therapist, Elise, whom I affectionately call the Little White Lady. Hi, Elise.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Hey Samford, how are you doing today?

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Doing good. Could you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_01 1:48

I can. Went to high school here, grew up here, then went to undergrad at UNC Wilmington. Eventually did elementary ed in Psych and went to work in one of the public school systems here in North Carolina. Went back to UNC Chapel Hill to get my master's in clinical mental health counseling. And stayed in it ever since. And in my free time, spent time with my husband, my three kids, our two dogs, and our family and friends as much as possible.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Alrighty then. So how long have you been a therapist?

SPEAKER_01 2:36

I graduated in 2014 with my master. So I'm not great at math, I'm great at therapy, but we calculated up.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Yep, sounds like 12 years to me. Um, so um I'm gonna get right to it. So there was some skepticism in your office about accepting a person convicted of sex offenses as a client. Um, in fact, some wanted me to wait in a separate waiting room. Why was that? And what was your response to that? And why?

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Yeah, I think we still, as a world and as a community, still have a lot of destigmatization to put into place. Um for me, when I opened my practice, what I wanted was a place that had advocacy, had some destigmatizing opportunities, um, discussions of symptoms versus character. And really for me, the practice name being sante, meaning help in French, was for humans overall. Um, and so anytime someone's stepping into there, I'm I'm looking at how we can combine those things. Um, so I'm looking for also clients or patients, whatever people prefer to call them in their spaces, but for us as clients, that they're they're humans who have a willingness to remain engaged. It doesn't matter what they're coming there to be engaged with, um, it means something. So I'm I'm less interested in how we need to grow stigmatizing or further the gap of something, and more into how do we bring it together despite comfort levels right away. Um, because really the goal on on the provider and and as the client, and is you and I both well know, is we're gonna be uncomfortable. Um, we just don't want to be unsafe. And so I think that speaks to this idea of where do we sit, who do we work with, what time do we get to come, what kind of insurance do we have, and all of that.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

So uh and over the last 10 years, I mean, I haven't burned the building down or you know, any of that stuff. So um I really appreciate uh you taking that stance. Um so I came to you with a lot of unresolved stuff. And so that I can keep my brain organized, I want to start from my childhood and move forward. If memory serves me correctly, I started off talking about PTSD. I thought and still do think that I suffer from that as a consequence of my childhood experience. Would you classify my childhood experiences around physical abuse as trauma?

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Without question. I think anytime we're defining trauma clinically, whether it's, you know, people like to refer to little T versus big T trauma in this spectrum that's in between, the T is what remains. And so when we look at regardless of that intention of said trauma, PTSD is coming out of the post, meaning after, the trauma disorder, the disorder that comes after a trauma. And so for you, when we look at those childhood experiences, there's no doubt we we can't take those into account, whether it's the experiences, the severity, the timeliness, age appropriateness, lifespan and development, all of those are going to influence and impact a young person. And I think you came in with enough of that self-examination, you know, from your own recovery and your own experiences and other spaces where you had enough self-examination and awareness to then be prepared to take in the accountability and the framework of some other things.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Um yeah, I I did some work prior to coming um on different occasions. Uh so yeah, that's that's pretty plausible. Um, so I have over time um moving on, developed some effective strategies for dealing with it, but but I have to be vigilant. Like I have a series of things that I do so that I don't overreact, um, especially when I feel physically or emotionally threatened. And after all these years, it still sits back there in the background waiting to rear its ugly head. And I'm in my late 60s. So, what are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_01 7:10

Yeah, that I think that's the important piece of looking at it over time. You know, at this juncture, if you look at it diagnostically, we have acute PTSD, we've got chronic PTSD, we've got complex PTSD. So to some, they may say, oh, we're just cherry-picking and creating new things. But to a lot of us, we're going, no, really, we are expanding something that we wanted to define in one uniform way, and we're looking at it with a deeper lens that it doesn't always create the same impacts. Um, and so we want to take that in into account because what we definitely know to be true is it's going to affect whether it affects attachment, whether it affects our abilities to be in healthy relationships, not just with ourselves, but others, um, whether it affects how we cope and regulate various emotions, you know, uh love all the way down to shame. Um, those are things that in our time together, you know, this it was less about going, what is my diagnosis? And do I check this box of symptoms? And more so of going, this is my experience, and it fits into what we define as trauma or PTSD symptoms and criteria and those courses of action. So we're taking the person first and seeing what is best for them versus putting a label on it and prescribing, quote unquote, if you will, what they ought to do.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

Gotcha. Gotcha. Um, so my father, as I said, physically and emotionally abused my mother and me. I know for me, I grew up in constant fear. Wasn't every single day, but it was there. When he was drinking, no matter how you behaved or answered the question, he was going to, at a minimum, slap the shit out of you. What are some of the long and short-term effects of being a victim of and seeing others victimized by that type of physical abuse as a child?

SPEAKER_01 9:10

Hmm. That's a good one because now we're looking at the it's not linear. You know, when we grow to expect an outcome, especially as young people, we are looking for patterns. We are observing. And so, yes, we're we're hearing our parents or grandparents or maybe teachers or coaches or theater people, we're we're hearing their words, but as young people, we're also observing. We're taking it all in to go. If I come in and I see your face looks a certain way, but I grab your beer, well, that may have that may have absorbed something for me and you. Um, if we walk in and we see, you know, like you said, our father physically abuse our mother, and we move out of the way, we're not saying it's okay, but we may save ourselves from being in the midst of something that's physically abusive. Um, and so the the long and short term of that is going, we're constantly observing, which is going to lead to living in our limbic system. Now we're not, we're not living as young people over that that lifespan to survive, I mean to meet our needs. We're now living to survive. To go, what do I need to make sense of to ensure that my impact is lessened? And when we do that on repeat and repeat and repeat, now we have those long-term effects of, well, I live in survival mode. I live in my limbic system all the time, to the point where a lot of people will report that even when they're not in those scenarios anymore or those circumstances, they're they're still emotionally patrolling because that's what their system has grown so used to. And even that is a long-term effect to go being okay with being okay.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

Gotcha. Got you. And and I'll ask the question about that a little later because I think we're talking about hypervigilance.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

Um, among other things.

SPEAKER_00 11:05

Um, so what about for an adult? Like my mother suffered from spousal abuse. Um, what are some of the the long and short-term effects for for an adult having married into something like that or walked into that situation?

SPEAKER_01 11:20

Sure. Uh I mean, again, it the age is definitely something to take into account because a young person is just not in a space with a frontal cortex and other brain functionings to make sense of it. But then you go, we have an adult who may or may not already have that impact, and to have those experiences, we're still going to have reactions. It's more about going, have I already experienced this or is this brand new? And now I add in in the shock value or a factor of being blindsided. And so when we look at the effect of an adult with that spousal abuse, we've also got to look at, okay, but can I survive? You know, I'll hear oftentimes people go, Well, why didn't you leave? And so there's this mentality that that women or even men or children can just get up and walk out the house. And it's it's it's it's really minimizing to go, oh, in your mind, you thought it was just as simple as me packing my little to-go bag and hopping in my car with my kids, and we're gonna be okay. But for them, it might be at the cost of housing and shelter, it might be at the cost of financial hardship, um, it might be at the cost of further uh physical, sexual abuse, or misconduct. Um, so that mentality of, oh, why didn't you just leave is diminishing returns. Um, and and we know research supports that. I think the the other piece of that is as well of everything comes at a cost. What we know about abuse is it it's not just because. And we've heard that both on the offender side and the victim side. So it comes at a cost. If I stay, it comes at a cost. If I leave, it comes at a cost. And people who are trying to decrease offenses and also abstain from offenses, and you've been there too, there's a cost and it's uncomfortable. That doesn't make it okay, but it puts it in clinical terms that it's not that easy and it's not that simple because it creates a new pattern of how we relate to attachment and what is love and what is safe and what is healthy. Um, you know, something that's coming up for me just in live time right now is how many people go, well, when my parent yelled at me after my sporting event today, that told me that they cared. And it's like, what do you mean? What do you mean that if they don't yell at you, it tells you they don't care? And so when you're asking about spousal abuse, it's like, well, if I walk in and my husband or wife asks me why I'm late, where have I been? That tells me they care. They miss me, they wanted me there. I should have been there sooner. And so that mismatch of maladaptive behavior or communication skills leading us to believe that it's a positive thing, even when we know it's not healthy or well. And that can be that can be a long-term cycle that people get trapped in because it it starts out as confusing and off-putting, but can often solidify into something that you go, oh, well, I just thought this was love, or I thought this was compassion, or I thought this was how intimacy went. And so if we see that and experience it, there's no denying that you're going to create a pattern that you fall into, whether whether you've consented to it or not.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

Hypervigilance. Could you explain hypervigilance? And I think you already did, right? But could you just tell us a little bit more about what it is and what how people um who are hyper-vigilant, hyper-vigilant, how they uh react to the world or how they how they live, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Sure. I mean, my first time my first notion, just for the audience and putting us all on an even playing field of understanding, is let's just break the word down. Hyper meaning more, over, vigilance meaning to patrol, to be vigilant, um, and that's the act of. And so when we put that all together to go, we are looking at the act of and over awareness or patrolling due to personal experience. Um, and so, much like anything else, if we if we you and I looked at a pyramid, and I wish I could show the audience a little bit, but if you think about the food pyramid and we're gonna replace the words on it, the bottom of it is looking at experiences, which is then gonna feed into belief systems, which is then gonna feed into our actions and behaviors, and then the the tip top of that pyramid, meaning the results of said actions and behaviors, and then we start over to experiences, and so hypervigilance is a symptom, a behavior, if you will, that comes out of that on repeat. If this is my experience, and I believe I can control it or avoid it or um de-escalate it, what have you, and my actions do that, and then the results go well or better than I thought they could have, then we start over. And so it almost becomes this not just a thought pattern, but a tangent off of an obsession and a compulsion. Because if it worked, it's like, well, now I gotta watch for it all the time. And it's not always, I think a lot of times people think of hyper-vigilance in the the way that we're talking of that it's it's bad and we shouldn't do it. But we watch people do it about their looks to go, if I look in the mirror and I see this, that means this, so I need to go to the doctor, and that means I'm taking care of myself. It's like, but is there something there, or are you becoming over-patrolling because of something that may or may not really be there? Um, so when we look at it in this sense, we're looking at it from a space of if I can emotionally patrol and get really good at it, then maybe I can do something to make it more manageable or tolerable or not exist at all. And that's a that's a full-time job for some.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

Yeah. I I feel like mine um mine uh is uh fear-based, right? Um it's it seems like when um when I feel in any way physically or emotionally threatened, right? Something says trouble is coming. And whatever you gotta do, you need to do it so that trouble doesn't come. Whatever you gotta say, whatever you gotta do. And so that's kind of how mine comes. Um and and as I said earlier, I've developed a strategy for it, and because of that, and I think because of practice, maybe and repeated behavior, it's not as um, it still comes up, but it doesn't come up in in such a severe state like it used to. It doesn't like the blood pressure, doesn't go up, the heart rate don't speed up, all that other stuff. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

So what you're referring to is that zone of proximity to go, my body, based on my experiences, says, wake up, look around. How much of that thumbnail does it meet? And then the more thumbnail that a file or an experience starts to meet, our body and our brain start to go, wake up. And if it becomes out of protection, you know, that limbic system of fight, flight, freeze, fawn, the more we experiences we have with it, the more we just fall automatically into it. And so you're right, like when we when we notice our body say, Wake up, we've been here, this is a threat. And all we do is go, well, hold on, it might be. Let's see if it actually meets the thumbnail, or it just feels like it meets the thumbnail. And that can be in, you know, intonation and how people speak, it can be in um our body language and what they don't say. Um, it can be in certain words, you know, words start to create meaning and go, wait, I've heard that word in that way. And so the thumbnail starts to get met. And so what you're talking about too is that slowing down to go, my body says it's time to wake up and protect. And let me just make sure.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Mm-hmm. Yep. Kind of what I do now is make sure, right? So I agree. Um, so my great-grandfather and grandfather were violent men. Like I know that my father was also a victim of parental violence. I understand that some behaviors passed from one generation to the next. And I was bound and determined not to abuse my children in that way. And I think my mother leaving early and with the help of my wife, I did not. I think my mother left early enough where um where it wasn't something um that transferred to my children. I can't like tell you the clinical reason why, but that's what I believe. And so, you know, we hear the term like hurt people, hurt people. Um, so is that generational curse or that type of behavior uh uh passing from one generation to the next, is that a real thing?

SPEAKER_01 21:19

For sure. I mean, if it's I joke around a lot of times, like in the practice or with colleagues, or even sometimes with clients have going so if you believe that you can only pass down your eye color and your IQ and your toe shape and all of that, but you don't think that you can also pass down your state of existence from a mental and physical wellness on the inside, that's a wild theory to me personally. And there may be there may be audience members or people out there that don't agree with that. Um but but we know as humans, and we know it's it's it's reported that families pass down far more than just genetics. Um, because we we're looking at modeling of coping and communicating, and how do we show love? How do we handle conflict? How do we what is self care versus what is just I want to do what I want to do? Um so all of that gets passed down in some capacity, whether we want to agree with that or not. Um, and hypervigilance is only. Really, one of the unhealthy patterns that can move through generations, um, or even societies as a whole. We've got we've got plenty of others in there that I think we could get into from uh emotional avoidance or uh being a pursuer. Uh, we could get into how we interpret shame and criticism and and offer feedback. Uh oh, relationship dynamics. You know, we learn those at first to go, okay, how do we show and receive love? Um, how do we do repair work and amends and take accountability while being kind? Um I think even the way we cope with emotions that are difficult to visit with. Do we go journal? Do we go gamble? Do we go run a mile? Do we go meditate? Um, there's so many things outside of genetics that we end up passing down that if we're not, if we're not careful, it's painful many years later, as you know.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

Yep, yep, yep.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Um I mean, ooh, here's a good one. Sorry to cut you off, but one just came to mind um that I think your generation really had, and then my generation ended up kind of this torn population, this idea of men aren't allowed to cry.

SPEAKER_00 23:50

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 23:50

Like man up. So that in itself is not genetics, that is generational. Um, the idea of I can remember, and I don't know if you had this, but this idea of what happens in this house stays in this house.

SPEAKER_00 24:07

Yep, yep.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

Those types of belief systems. Um think about our gener your generation, my generation, on achievements. On if you're not getting the MVP or you're not the spelling bee champ, or this, that, and the third, then you're a loser. If you're not first your last type mentality. Um, so it's a lot more emotional and mental generational elements way beyond genetics that that takes a big toll on us as humans.

SPEAKER_00 24:40

And and even uh even some of the um uh uh male-female uh things that have passed down, because I I I always tell my buddies I love them, right? Um and those guys my age are not very comfortable saying that, right? Because, you know, men don't say I love you to other men. Uh so yeah. So right.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

It's like why are you saying that to me? And it and it goes in the inverse too of going females to your point that is more uh, you know, not to get into gender and sexuality and all that, but are inclined to do those types of things, and I'm not. And they'll be like, Why are you so stoic? You never say you love us, and it's like because I don't, I show it differently. So I I think it can go both ways of if you're not operating in the norm, if you will, this idea that something's wrong, and it's like, yeah, but that got passed down, and maybe it's still a biases or a belief system that is just not quite checked or or figured out yet.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

Wow, really good information. Unfortunately, we're out of time. We're gonna continue this on the next episode. As usual, thanks for listening. And we'll see you next time.