Growing up untethered – Stacey’s Story
Stacey: [00:00:00] So now all these people are being raised in trauma. And we’re carrying all of that on our backs in this generation.
Carling: welcome to the, I did Not Sign Up for this podcast, a bi weekly show dedicated to highlighting the incredible stories of everyday people. No topic is off limits. Join me as we explore the lives and experiences of guests through thought-provoking, unscripted conversations. And if you enjoy this show and would like to support this podcast, consider joining my Patreon.
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I’m your host Carlin, a Canadian queer identifying 30 something year old, providing a platform for the stories that need to be heard
Well, Hello,
Stacey: Hi,
Carling: How are you?
Stacey: I’m good.
Carling: Good. Well, [00:01:00] I’m super excited to talk to you. You also have a podcast and that’s how we connected and I get to be a guest on yours. So we’re doing a little podcast So I would love it you could introduce yourself, tell me who you are, and then we’ll try to find where your story
Stacey: So, my name is Stacy Urich, and I live in New Jersey in the States, like maybe 30 miles directly west of New York City, like lower
Carling: Nice. uh, yeah, I’m really excited to hear your are we, what did you not sign up for? I guess is what I
Stacey: I love the title of your podcast and if I remember correctly, we have very similar podcasts where we just love to interview people and hear about their challenges, a story of an experience that they did not sign up for. And when I was thinking about it, I literally can remember saying to myself as a teenager, I did not sign up for this.
Carling: that’s
Stacey: [00:02:00] Yeah, and what I did not sign up for was my parents divorce. They, it’s very funny, I was just having this conversation with my brother last week that When my dad told me my parents were going to get separated, I remember having a reaction where I was sad, but I don’t, I do kind of also remember feeling confused because I was like, okay, like there was no part of it that I didn’t.
Yeah, no, you guys should stay together. I think there was something inherent that I knew, but I don’t have a single memory of them ever fighting or ever having any discord in my
Carling: Yeah.
Stacey: So it was confusing, but I kind of knew it was the right thing. I don’t know how or why that was not the challenge in my opinion.
The challenge was the decisions that my parents made in their
second marriages. That’s what I
did not sign
Carling: So how old were you when they got
Stacey: It was 1983, so I was just shy of
Carling: Okay. Yes. You were [00:03:00] little like, that’s such a pivotal
Stacey: I was 6th grade,
Carling: Yeah. And
did you know other friends or school classmates that had divorced
Stacey: Not in the 80s. I mean, it really was like kind of taboo still. I mean, this was early 80s, right? So I think my parents got separated probably around somewhere like 1981 ish because I know they were separated about 18 months and then they got divorced in the summer of 1983. So no I, well, I shouldn’t say that.
I did have one friend whose parents were divorced but like we, nobody talked about it and it wasn’t a thing. We just, nobody talked about it, but you were living it in your own way, right? It was very strange. But for us, what was strange was my parents got divorced in the summer. Like I’m, for some reason I always think it was August, so I’m just gonna run with
Carling: Sure.
Stacey: And then like by November, my dad was remarried. By [00:04:00] December we moved and by January my mom was remarried and by February she told us she was due in June.
Carling: my God, they moved fast.
Stacey: Everything.
moved very quickly and I so 1983 December I would have turned 12 my brother is 75 so he would have been. What, like
nine, right? So it was just like a very confusing time.
So here we are, this divorce happens, we sell our house, both of our parents get remarried, we move about an hour away but you know, it’s 1983, there’s no cell phones, there’s no, FaceTime, it’s either you’re writing a letter, you’re picking up the phone. And and I moved from an incredibly.
socially, economically diverse area where I had friends across the board. It was mostly middle class to lower middle class to a [00:05:00] town that was in the top 1% where there was nothing but white people. And I was like, what
the hell
Carling: look. Where am I?
Stacey: all of it. Yeah. All of it was just so unsettling and unnerving. And not if it felt real
Carling: Did both parents relocate to this area or just your primary caregiver?
Stacey: So I was living with my mom. My brother and I were living with our mom. And my dad was living about a half hour to 40 minutes away and of course, again, remarried. when I go back and I think about, the part where I used to say to myself, literally, I didn’t sign up for this was, and I just started being able to put this into words within the last year, and this was 40 years ago, and I see it because I have friends who are, I’m going to call bonus parents or step parents of other children now, right? You’re saying that you have stepchildren. What I’ve been able to recognize and put words to is that we were not bonus. We were baggage.[00:06:00] I know.
Carling: that’s so sad.
Stacey: But that’s kind of the way I can see it and I can say it comfortably.
Either they didn’t know what they were getting into. Meaning my step parents or like they hadn’t given enough thought or they just didn’t care. I’m not quite sure what it was, to be honest with you, but there was no part of either side where this felt like I belong here. What it felt like was, I’m an intruder I’m not really fully wanted here, but I really have no place else to go, so I just have to suck it up and make the best of it.
But there was no embrace of the family unit. It was come along for the ride, and I say this carefully. Parents are not malignant people. I just don’t think they were thinking. I don’t think they were thinking of the bigger picture until they were too deep. in. And then once they were too deep [00:07:00] in, there was like, I guess in their opinion, like there was no turning
Carling: Like with their new spouses. Yeah. And I wonder, like, I do because, like, divorce wasn’t talked about as much, blended families weren’t talked about as much. I mean, now are entire, like, books and TV shows and, about, about all of
Stacey: this. was kind of uncharted territory. And there was a lot of shame, I know for the parental piece, there was a lot of shame of being
Carling: Mm. Yeah.
Stacey: right? Which I think is part of the reason why both of them may have quickly gotten remarried. They were both with their second, they both were dating for almost the entire separation, the person that they ended up marrying.
But you know, the reality is when you’re a teenager and now you’re thrown into circumstances that are not a healthy family unit on both sides, like there was no place to [00:08:00] get respite. It was very confusing, and it was very confusing to the nervous system. I was very dysregulated, but I had no idea what that was or what was going on. But I just felt so I went from zero to 100 feeling uncomfortable in my body.
Carling: that, like, that language that you’re using didn’t even exist, nobody talked about
dysregulation. Even when I was, like, growing up and my parents got divorced, like, I don’t even think that was language that was used
Stacey: No.
Carling: like, how you’re feeling.
Stacey: But I remember very much thinking I did not sign up for this, and of course the teenage mind is like very woe is me, like, how did I get here? This sucks. And really, as a trauma specialist, if I go back and I think about the trauma of that, it’s never the event. Trauma is never the event.
Trauma is never the event. the way the experience is interpreted in the system. And I think for me, the interpretation was I feel helpless. I feel powerless. I [00:09:00] feel out of control. I don’t feel safe. There were many times where I did not feel safe. I was left feeling very confused. I also felt very rejected and very betrayed. And very neglected. And what people don’t understand is that those things are very traumatizing, especially to a young child who doesn’t have a lot of options, right? So when we talk about, responses to chronic prolonged stress, our typical responses are fight or flee or freeze or fawn. My only choice I couldn’t really flee. I mean, I guess I could have and I did try a few times, but my biggest response was fight. So now on top of that, I was also kind of judged and designated as like the difficult one. But I was put into a situation where you’re now forcing me to you Put that hat on because if you’re not going to stand up for me, [00:10:00] I have to do it for myself.
And so to say I was a difficult child, I’m like, well, I mean, look, the circumstance was pretty bullshit. So what did you want me to
Carling: Yeah.
Stacey: What would you have rather me done?
Carling: And how often were you going between houses?
Stacey: I mean, I think the schedule as it was every other weekend to my father’s and like maybe something in the middle of the week once a week, but the middle of the week thing rarely happened. It was always, sorry, I can’t get out of work. Sorry, I’m too busy. And there was no option for me to get myself there.
My mom didn’t have just one baby. She ended up having a second baby. And so here she was, I’m like 13 and a half years older, well, 12 and a half years older than the one and 14 and a half years older than the next. So she wasn’t gonna just pop in a car at four o’clock in the afternoon with rush hour and drive me to my dad’s so we could have dinner with him.[00:11:00]
It was more like, if you want to make it work, you make it work. And then that didn’t really necessarily happen. And he wasn’t definitely not being encouraged by my stepmother to take the extra mile to make that happen. So I would say, what are we seeing him like twice a month, like a Friday night to a Sunday afternoon.
Carling: And did either of the step parents come with kids? Did you have step
Stacey: I did not. My stepmother had two children that she had lost along the way, meaning they had both passed. One had down syndrome and had a hole in her heart and died when she was 13. And then she was incredibly and they were very close and she was very close to her son. son who then subsequently ended up with cancer when he was like
20. And I think, she was not a, my stepmother was very acidic. She was very edgy. She really put up a lot of barriers and a lot of armor. And it [00:12:00] really wasn’t until I read Daring Greatly in 2012 that I understood her because I, at 12 or 15 or 18 even, or whatever, I mean, she came into my life when I was 10, essentially I couldn’t comprehend or understand what it would like to lose a child.
What I can see now, and I’ve heard my father say this before, was he had just had this hope that having access to these two new children. Would have given her like a second
chance at enjoy like having joy and love and like the whole thing and it was just a complete and utter backfire because the reality was, and I can say this clearly now, she was so incredibly devastated and heartbroken at the loss of her two children.
She was not actually going to allow anyone in. And she really didn’t even let my dad in fully, Yeah. because I can see [00:13:00] now, especially I specialize in hypnosis and I do a lot of work at the subconscious level. I’m quite sure the core belief was when you love you hurt. So we’re just not even going to go there. If I get close and I lose another child or I lose another person closely, I don’t think I can take
Carling: Yeah.
Stacey: she really always had this wall up so we couldn’t get close. There was only, you knew when you had gotten as close as you were going to get. There was more competition with her than anything. She was constantly in competition with us for my dad’s affection and my dad’s attention is a very confusing situation. I have to say,
Carling: what an interesting, as an adult, looking at your parents situations or an adult’s trauma as a kid is very different than understanding it as an adult. Like I look at, some of the choices that my parents made and as a kid, the outcome was [00:14:00] devastating and trauma for me.
But like now as an adult, I’m like, they were just going through it.
Stacey: Well, that’s kind of my point, like I don’t sit here and share any of this from like a victim’s seat. I kind of have this attitude of it is what it is at this point. And I don’t say that lightly because I’m not, I’ve done 25 to 35 years of work. I didn’t just feel like, well, that sucked.
And just well, I mean, I really did the work. But you know, one of the things I talk about almost Daily with my clients is intergenerational trauma and generational trauma and I can say my parents did the best with what they had with what they knew at the
time, and so really, I’ve done enough inner child work to go back to that younger version of myself, whose needs were not met in the way they did need to be met.
There was a huge missing piece and [00:15:00] that’s the sadness for the child, especially if you see and believe other people are having that need met. And by the way, as humans, like connection is the most important thing. So when you feel disconnected, and I think what was the real mindfuck was I didn’t have that before they married these two other people, I felt very seen and very important and very significant and very heard before they got remarried.
And then it was like, and it just like completely did a 180 overnight. So that deep confusion was like, what am I and where do I even belong at this point? And you’re stuck there basically for another 8 10 years, until I went away to university. So… It was a lot,
Carling: And what about your stepdad? What was the dynamic? You were there almost full time
Stacey: right?
Carling: and he didn’t have other kids, but then he had kids with your [00:16:00] mom, which I think is almost worse because then like a new family is created. I think it takes a lot of work to make sure that the kids that came into the marriage, feel that inclusion.
Stacey: Yeah. I mean, I just, it wasn’t good, I don’t know how else to put it. It was not a good situation. And so, I kind of sometimes see my cause I’ve done so much work. I use a lot of visualization in my head. I kind of see my brother and I like untethered, we kind of just floated with no real anchor. Yeah. I have a place that we really felt like we had a home, but we didn’t really feel like it was our home. You kind of always felt like you were kind of tiptoeing around because there was always this kind of underlining message of I don’t really want you here, and as I got older, so, I would say definitely by the time I was like 15, 16 years old, there were a lot of things being said that clarified that.
I don’t really want you here, was one of them. [00:17:00] I don’t care if you’re sleeping outside on the wet leaves underneath a tent. I don’t even want you inside my home. Because there was also additional… angst because I think there was some games being played with child support. And so, my mother wasn’t working.
And I think my stepfather was very anxious and very uncomfortable with the fact that he just went from, taking care of himself to taking care of a family of what is it? Six. And didn’t love that. I think that was very stressful for him. you know, in theory, he wouldn’t have been doing that.
In theory, he would have been taking care of a family of four or just him and my mom and then my dad would be picking up his piece. But I think there were a lot of games being played in there. So that also caused a tremendous amount of angst and discord. We were the closest target for that, so if there was anger and frustration and tension and disappointment and fear [00:18:00] on my stepfather’s part for all this extra expense, he wasn’t taking it out on my dad. He was taking it out on us because we are the extra
Carling: yeah,
Stacey: So again, I literally can really remember thinking to myself, I did not sign up for this.
Carling: that’s so hard.
Stacey: I think from the child’s seat, the ideal messaging to receive is, it doesn’t really matter if your dad’s paying or not, you’re important to me. I’ve got you. That was not the message being sent. And so, there was that extra level of heightened awareness, and I would almost say hyper vigilance of like, what’s going to be said today?
And what do I have to brace myself for? And what because they were constantly on court. back and forth fighting about this and no one was keeping that on the hush, The court date would end and my mom would say the judge said X and my dad would say the judge said Y. So [00:19:00] like you couldn’t even make, it would almost be like the judge says the grass is green and I’m right.
And he’d say, well, the judge says the grass is blue, and they were like so deeply convicted in their truths that. You couldn’t make heads or tails of
Carling: Yeah.
Stacey: but you definitely felt in the middle and that’s that powerlessness because who can do anything at the age of 10 or 12 or 15 or 17 for that matter, like you just there’s nothing you can really do
Carling: Yeah. And you’re so busy trying to figure out where you fit in this world and, your body’s changing. Your mind is changing.
and
Stacey: Yeah, there’s a lot going
Carling: there’s a lot going on. The last thing you need is the two caregivers in your life or four caregivers in your life battling it out and playing you against
Stacey: Yeah,
it wasn’t
Carling: Mm hmm. And what about your half sibling? So your mom had two kids. Were you close with them? Are you close with them? Oh,
Stacey: Very close. So it’s that’s the gift [00:20:00] and the challenge, right? I can always go back and say, what, I’ve done so much work and I do a workshop on resilience, and I often use some of these experiences in the workshop as my own examples and models of, the fact that there is a gift in every challenge and there is purpose and pain, right?
And Sometimes I’ll, exemplify or illustrate for the people in the workshop, what was the thought of the 12 year old or the 15 year old at the time, but how can I see it through my 50 year old lens now and what did I gain from it above and beyond resilience? And I would say, I’m very close with my sister.
She was just here with her daughter last night for dinner. She only lives, eight miles from me. So, it’s such a blessing, and , I love my brother dearly, we just have such a massive age gap, I might as well be as, I mean, really I just went and watched his little daughter, a couple of months ago, and I got in my car afterwards, cause again, I’ve got an 18 year old, he has a 1 year old and I got in the car [00:21:00] and I was like, oh shit, when she’s 30, I’m gonna be 80 there’s just such a massive gap so, Love them to death.
I just, we’re just not as close as I might be with a sibling that’s a little bit closer in age. And I think for my sister, it’s just because we’re sisters, we’re the only girls in the family. So we have kind of unique bond in that way.
Carling: Yeah. did they see growing up that tension of you and your
Stacey: you could not live in that house and not know it. You couldn’t live in that house and not know the tension or feel it or experiencing and that’s the thing, everybody experiences it in their own way, ? So, it was a very different environment for them because they were very much wanted there like deeply wanted, deeply appreciated.
They were in their 40s when they had late 30s, early 40s, they weren’t expecting to have more children, it was kind of a surprise. And so, they were very happy about [00:22:00] that. So these kids were intense, immensely loved and They were, it was a very grateful thing.
So you know, you had two kids that were coming out of this. We had four kids in the household, but two were coming out with a very different experience than the other two.
Carling: . And they had the constant two parents and you were being shuffled back and forth.
Stacey: Yeah.
Carling: And did all four people stay married?
Stacey: So my dad is no longer married to my step mom, but they were married for 34
Carling: Wow.
Stacey: Yeah, and my mom is still married to my stepfather.
Carling: Wow. And so have you, when they got divorced, your your dad and stepmom did you keep a relationship with her or just sort of like, okay, now she’s gone?
Stacey: It’s so complicated. So, my stepmother had dementia.
Carling: Oh.
Stacey: And she she was significantly older than my dad. So, it got to the point where that was no longer… A working unit. And so she went and stayed with family. [00:23:00] And then while she was living with that family, maybe she had been with her niece maybe four years before she passed or five years before she passed.
So it was kind of complicated because. You kind of got closure, but you didn’t. Like I went to go say goodbye to her before she moved and she didn’t even remember who I was anymore. So it was like, it’s very, it’s like a super layered
Carling: , That is tricky. My dad was married several times, like six times, and I always thought it was interesting because He would get divorced, but I had been sort of expected to develop a stepmother, stepdaughter relationship with each woman. But then his divorce was his finality. So I ended up being close with almost all of them for even after their marriage. And so I would always refer to like my mom, my stepmom, my dad’s ex wife, my dad’s current wife,
Stacey: So my dad is, my dad’s been married three times. So my dad is hence [00:24:00] remarried again. And exactly what you just described was the scenario because he was now dating this woman who I had known for 20 years while my stepmother had then moved on to be with family. And they were not divorced yet.
And my stepmother this separation and hence. divorce before she passed was not something she would have chosen, but she didn’t choose it because she had dementia. It’s very confusing. So in her dementia state, and this is why I think Darren greatly hit it home for me with my stepmother, because what I understood when I read that book was that she was wearing this layer of armor.
To protect herself from being hurt again, however, it was a very conscious decision. And when the dementia kicked in, and I know dementia, she had frontal temporal dementia, Pick’s disease, it affects people differently, and so what I [00:25:00] found for her, she softened and she got nicer and kinder. And that wall that she had put up had melted away.
So, a good example, I had everybody over for Christmas, and she was always impeccably dressed, and I always kept things on the surface, because you just couldn’t get that close, and this was like, 28 years in and I remember saying something to her like, Oh, I like your top.
And her normal response would have been, it’s very expensive. You can’t afford it. But this time the response was so genuine. She goes, Oh my God, you like my top. Do you want to borrow it? You can borrow it anytime. And my, I was like, Oh shit, what is happening? Like
Carling: Hahaha.
Stacey: I was like in a twilight zone, but it was a very clear indicator to me how far this had progressed and what that looked like for her. She was so armored up for the first, I don’t [00:26:00] know, 30 years of our relationship. She was constantly calling me, asking me for advice. She had dementia. So the whole conversation would play on repeat just as we were getting off the phone again. But I had a lot of compassion. I had gone from being very, very hurt to very indifferent. over the course of that 30 years to very compassionate.
And yet my dad was already in this other relationship and wanted a lot of affirmation, as you mentioned. And it was like, well, when are you going to and can you call and let them know that you’re okay with this relationship? And I was like, listen, you do you like, I don’t need it. And I don’t
Carling: Yeah. She’s not gonna raise
Stacey: done that. Like you forced me to do this, you forced me to be in this other relationship and now you want me to just like literally erase her name off the family tree and just put a new one there and [00:27:00] it just doesn’t work that way for
Carling: Yeah. Hm.
Stacey: I absolutely love my dad’s third wife, and we’re very close. And I’m closer to her than I ever was able to be with my stepmother. And I knew her for a very long time before they started dating. This was not a new person for
Carling: Yeah.
Stacey: So I already had my own relationship with that person. So that was another.
layer of that onion that had to be unwound and peeled back and accepted and understood and leaned into, but you know, when you’re in your forties, you’re kind of like, dude, I’m able to make my own decisions and I’ll do it on my own timeline. And this really has nothing to do with you. So if you’re happy, go for it.
But please do not put the pressure on me to be accepting of the situation. We’ve already gone there and done that. Okay. I get to make my own choices and I will get to it. I’ll come to it at my terms when I come to it, but you got to give me some [00:28:00] space, because I’m now processing all of this Stuff and trying to figure out where everything fits, we’re not robots, we’re humans. So, I had to process a lot
Carling: I know that’s what’s so hard with kids is like, they’re just along for the ride. like
any two humans can procreate and that doesn’t mean that they should be parents or are equipped to be the best parents It’s so wild that you can just find yourself with this small developing human in your life, you know, as a stepparent, like I, I made the decision not to have kids, but I also made the decision when I started dating that I would be open to somebody with kids and I, I don’t know what I’m doing.
It’s like, it’s such a weird, we have no idea what we’re doing. We’re just doing the best we can and hopefully not totally traumatizing.
Stacey: Amen. And listen, my kids are adopted. So that’s, when I just was saying to somebody the other [00:29:00] day, like the amount of questions that we had to answer. The number of short answer questions that my husband and I had to answer, which we would pop open a bottle of wine at four o’clock on a Sunday and spend three or four hours.
We had to do that three or four times. It was so much work, crazy questions. Like one of the questions was, Describe your childhood. What would you do? Same? What would you do differently? I was like, how much time do we have so if people were forced to go through that kind of application process just to have a biological child, it would be a very different situation, we very intentionally, very purposefully, very consciously went through this adoption process.
Yes. Where we had to sit down and ask each other these questions like okay, well, here’s another one like how are you answering that so really kind of created a very interesting dialogue with my husband of things you would [00:30:00] never necessarily have a conversation about, especially before you become
Carling: Yeah. And I think like my parents generation, your parents generation, and every generation before that, it was just a given that you got married and had kids. Like I wonder if your parents were today years old, would they have gotten married and had kids?
Stacey: No, I mean, look, are they the same person? Because, I look back and I’m like, okay, I know my dad’s childhood. I know his upbringing. I completely can see why he made the decisions that he made and why he navigated life the way that he navigated. My mom, I’m not as keen on it. Like I’m not, I don’t have as much information, but clearly nobody just wakes up one day and it’s like, I’m going to neglect my child or betray my child or do something that’s not in my child’s best interest.
Nobody’s consciously [00:31:00] making that decision. So from that point, there’s some grace, but at the same time, I mean, if they’re the same people with the same lived experience. And they haven’t done any work like likely they would make the same decisions like they’re making the decisions based on their lived experiences up to that point, and societal pressures and all of that. And I actually think they’d probably do the same
Carling: Yeah.
Stacey: Because look, what I always say to my clients is, If my client is coming to me with a challenge with a spouse or a sibling or a coworker or their parent or whatever the situation is usually they’re coming to me because they even have a challenge with a relationship within themselves.
Or a challenge with someone else, right? That’s, it always comes down to that ultimately, I’ll often say, okay, well, just tell me a little bit about your paternal grandmother or your paternal grandfather. [00:32:00] What was their upbringing like? Or what was your father’s upbringing like? They don’t think of that right away, but it’s the first thing I go
Carling: Yeah.
Stacey: because you know what, based on how I’m going to use this term domesticated and the way that you were raised, but your parents. Did that from how they were raised, and we are not that far removed from, a lot of immigration to this country, if I’m working with clients of the BIPOC community, Jesus, I mean, we’re just not that far removed from massive tragedy in their communities, and it cannot be ignored.
And I
feel
Carling: Yeah.
Stacey: as though this particular generation, your generation, my generation We are living in a time where there’s the least amount of stigma to date on mental health, there’s the most access to free information by way of podcasts, YouTube videos, [00:33:00] Instagram accounts from some major thought leaders.
And the dialogue is becoming a little bit more normalized. So I feel like we are a generation of cycle breakers. And if there were cycle breakers in the generation before us, like with our parents, it was very unusual. It was a very, it was not going to be the norm where I feel like now my 18 year old and 14 year old, I’ll be like, Oh, when so and so coming over, Oh, after their therapy appointment, like it’s so normalized. Where it’s like I had to beg, borrow and steal literally in order to go to therapy in 1983.
It was like, don’t we don’t need to be telling anybody about this, I feel like we’re finally getting to a point where we can have these open dialogues about it. But when I go back and I look at my clients, family histories and somewhere along the line, someone is immigrating from Europe and very.
Poor and scarce. [00:34:00] And they’re coming from uneducated families, or we’ve got Holocaust survivors, or we’re coming from generational poverty. Like we’re just not that far removed from, and no one was talking about it. It was just plow ahead. So now all these people are being raised in trauma. And we’re carrying all of that on our backs in this generation.
So I’m constantly saying to people, you’ve got an invisible backpack on, everybody has an invisible backpack on. So let’s just carefully take it off and let’s start to unpack it. What are the coping strategies that you have in there right now that are serving you and not serving you? And whose are they?
They’re either yours, or they’re your mom’s, or they’re your dad’s, or they’re your grandparents, and we’re each carrying like six, seven generations deep of coping strategies. I can’t tell you, I had one client, Who you know, is she’s in her 60s, [00:35:00] and she’s still having a hard time resolving the relationship that she had with her father who would now probably be in his late 80s, 90s, I don’t, he’s not alive anymore.
She was upset that they couldn’t be closer than she would have liked. And I was like, well, just tell me a little bit about him. Tell me about his childhood. Well, he was born and raised in Europe from a family of farmers, and none of the kids were allowed to go to school.
So he wasn’t educated and he wanted to be educated. So he had to learn how to navigate life about not having his needs met. And I would say to her, why do you think he would be capable of meeting your needs when he couldn’t even meet his
own? And nobody else was meeting his own. So when we can start to peel back the layers on that, it doesn’t mean that we feel any less sad that our own needs weren’t met, but we can now get a little bit more compassionate and understanding of it wasn’t [00:36:00] me.
The moment we start thinking it’s because we’re not enough, there was something wrong with me that they couldn’t meet my needs and they can say, wow, maybe it didn’t start with me. Maybe it didn’t even start with my dad. If my dad wasn’t able to get educated past, eight years old, because he had to come now work in the family, in the farm what about my grandfather?
What did he experience? What did my great grandfather experience? And now you’re like, well, I’m the most evolved of the bunch,
Carling: I’ve been thinking about that a lot about how, our parents were raising us when they came from a generation where either they were at war, literally, or their parents were. And then before that there was more war and more poverty and immigration. so like, I feel like this next generation,
yeah, like these kids now that we’re raising. I think we’ll be the first generation where, like you said, like therapy isn’t shameful and men and boys do cry and talk about their [00:37:00] feelings and so I’m excited to see, if they decide to have kids, what that experience will be like, because we’re doing this hard work.
Stacey: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s interesting cause I do see it and I read about it a lot. Like our kids generation, my kids generation, my kids are 18 and 14. A lot of people say this generation is really soft and really, coddled. But I think, and I’m not disagreeing. I think that, when I’ve done these workshops on resilience, A lot of people will say, Oh, my God, I wish you could do these workshops for teenagers or for children.
But I think that our generation did receive such a brunt of all of this unchecked work that everybody needed to be doing that we kind of overcompensated and went to the other Thank you. Thank you. end where we wanted to make sure all children were seen and heard and understood and significant and important.
And, we went to this other extreme and because we received so much hurt, we don’t want our kids to feel [00:38:00] any hurt and any discomfort. So we’re constantly trying to, interject there, but that’s not necessarily great either.
Carling: It’s like the pendulum is now swinging.
Stacey: swinging. We really just need to be in the center.
You have to really consciously keep your kids in the center. It’s very easy to swing to the other side because society swung to the other side. So if you don’t play the game and you’re trying to keep it in the middle, you’re on the outer edge of what’s happening in the parenting
realm.
Carling: Wow. I love that. I love that, you can look at something like your parents divorce, and I don’t think enough people Um, sit back and think like they’re like, Oh, of course, like all, most marriages end in divorce. It’s probably more than 50% now, but you know, it was just the way that it was but to now be able to pan out and look at the actual impact it had on you and really dive into that I think is really important.
Stacey: Yeah, I mean, it really has been like a journey. I want to say I started therapy [00:39:00] at 15 years old, and did some form of some sort of help till I was in my 40s. And still, I’m very happy to reach out to my own coaches and my own support system when I feel very dysregulated and uneasy. And I can figure out how to do the work on my own and say, okay, what is that feeling and is it true?
Is my body reacting to something real time or is this old
Carling: So then can you tell me a little bit about your podcast, why you started it, how you started it and where people can find you?
Stacey: Yeah, so my podcast is called Flip That Shit. And the idea is that we all have shit, right? We all have a story. We all have had experiences. We’ve all had diversity or adversity and, the reality is. Growing up in the 60s, 70s, 80s, even the 90s, I think there was this idea of don’t [00:40:00] share your dirty laundry.
Don’t share with people that thing. What it really insinuated was life is only supposed to show up great and perfect and anything outside of that. is shameful and we shouldn’t talk about and so we learned that we were indoctrinated into that, and so what it taught us subconsciously is life is supposed to be good all the time. And when it’s not, there’s something wrong with it and it’s broken.
Carling: And don’t talk
Stacey: And so we have all these people sitting in what I call the shadow of shame. Where they’ve been kind of taught to deal with struggle and isolation, but that is the last place that struggle should be dealt so we have these higher rates of anxiety and depression and disconnect, and we don’t know why. So, with my podcast, what I try to do is get people to share one of these challenging experiences with the hopes that the listener [00:41:00] says, holy shit, that’s my story. And now, doesn’t feel so different, and doesn’t feel so alone, because once you start to share, shame can only live in secrecy.
Carling: Yeah. I think that’s so perfect. And I, similar to mine, I think when people listen to yours, even if you can’t relate to the exact story, there’s pieces of it that you’re like, Oh, I feel that too, or I experienced that too. And it just, I don’t know, it makes everything feel less lonely,
Stacey: Yeah, it’s the goal, right?
Carling: I love that. Well, I’ll make sure I’ll tag you in social media and I’ll put links in my show notes and I’m so excited to be a guest on your show.
Stacey: Yeah, I think it’s going to be great. I cannot
wait. good. Well, enjoy your
Carling: Thank you. And we will talk really soon.
Stacey: Thank you. Take care.
Carling: Thank you so much for joining me on this episode. I hope you found our conversation informative and entertaining. If you enjoyed this episode, please don’t forget to follow me on social media. Share [00:42:00] this podcast with your friends and leave a review@ratethispodcast.com slash I did not sign up for this.
Your support means the world to me. If you want more interviews, exclusive content and add free episodes, join the patreon@patreon.com slash I did not sign up.
I hope you all have a fantastic week ahead and we’ll talk soon
I Did Not Sign Up For This- Podcast 