LARISSA: Welcome, friends. You've found

JANILEE: Janilee

LARISSA: and Larissa at the corner of “I'm living my life” and “Someone isn't happy about it.” This is vilified.

JANILEE: Each week, we talk about life and healing using a question as a starting point. Today we begin with this question: “If I leave, am I just giving up?”

LARISSA: Oh, that's a tough question.  It's a hard one, because you feel like you are. You feel like you're just giving up on the hope, and that's kind of what you're doing. But it's also accepting reality, right?

JANILEE: Yeah. And to be clear, like, we're talking about if we leave an abusive situation, right? We're not talking, like, any other type of situation. This is talking about leaving a situation where you are not being allowed to fully be yourself. And like we say in our introduction, where you're not being fully allowed to live your life,

LARISSA: You’re not allowed to go to the mailbox or you get screamed at because you have feelings.

JANILEE: Right. So basically, this is kind of going and off of last weeks…  Episode. Forgot what it was called for a second. This is going off of last week's episode. And so we're just going to keep going. And we kind of decided that what we're going to do for this week is Larissa is going to bring up kind of some doubts that we've both had and that some of you might be having that keep us in these situations. And I'm going to kind of bring the research side of things and kind of explain why that's not necessarily the way that reality is. I do want to say at the onset that I'm going to be using a bunch of quotes from one of my favorite sources. It's the book “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents.”

LARISSA: It’s a really good book.

JANILEE: It really is. It specifically talks about children, yes. But it has so much in it that works very well for leaving any type of situation with an emotionally immature person. So don't let the fact that maybe the emotionally immature person in your life is not a parent; Don't let that stop you from taking what's set in this book and really applying it into your life.

LARISSA: One book that really helped me understand whether or not leaving was a good idea or not was “Too Bad to Stay and Too Good to Leave”. I think it's by Dr. Ramani, but I'm not sure {Editor’s Note: this is listed under “Should I Stay or Should I Go” in the Show Notes at the bottom of this page}

JANILEE: That's okay, you send that to me and we'll put it in the show notes. It'll be perfect.

LARISSA: Perfect. But yeah. So beginning, “If I leave, what if the person gets better? … And I gave up on them?”

JANILEE: Oh, man, Larissa. You're just starting it with a hard one, aren't you?

LARISSA: A little bit, yeah.

JANILEE: Okay, so if we leave a situation and the other person gets better, I think that the very first question we should ask ourselves is, “do we want to be with that person?” But… because here's the thing I'm thinking about, like so here's a fun little story. When I was a kid, I had some peanut butter that was way past its expiration date, and I got salmonella poisoning. Didn't know that you could get that from peanut butter, but I had it, and for years, I could not eat peanut butter. Just the smell of peanut butter made me want to be sick. But I decided that it was something that I really enjoyed having before I got sick. And so I literally spent years readjusting and reacquainting myself with peanut butter so that I could enjoy eating peanut butter. Right. So that's a silly example, but I think it applies when it comes to is this a person that we want to keep in our lives? Do they make you sick? Are they actually good for your mental health? And I was able to picture the rest of my life without any peanut butter before I was able to make the choice, hey, I actually decide I want to have some peanut butter and put forth that effort. So I think that would be the first question to ask, is, like, if they do get better and you left them, then maybe some point down the road you can reconnect. But for here and now. Right. Remember, living in the present is an important thing.  If we're here and now, what we need to do for ourselves is not put the responsibility of healing someone else on ourselves, because our goal and our job is to heal ourselves.

LARISSA: So my next thought was, “Is it really me?”

JANILEE: Is what really you?

LARISSA: Am I really the problem, like I'm being told?

JANILEE: No, you're totally not the problem. Remember when we talked last week about narcissists? Right? Narcissists like to make everything - and by the way, emotionally immature people, they have so many characteristics of narcissists. We'll talk in a future episode about kind of the differences there. But they make it all about other people because they have no ability to self-reflect, right? And so if they can make it about other people, then their self-reflection doesn't have to happen because the problem exists external for themselves.

LARISSA: Like for example, I asked my therapist this morning, “Am I really just too broken?”

JANILEE: … Do you want to answer what your therapist said?

LARISSA: She said, “Is it even a problem if you are too broken right now, as long as you're working on it?” I was like “Yeah, but I don't want to work on it.”

JANILEE: Here's the thing. If we do ever decide to leave a situation, it's going to be the hardest thing that we've ever done, right? Especially with us being people who not just me and Larissa, but a lot of the people that I'm gathering will listen to this; is we just want to make people happy. We just want the world to be a good place and *GROANS* to have like to be not able to fix something is so hard and we care about other people and everything is just a challenge, right? So I'm not saying that your therapist is wrong. I'm saying for me, I like to logically think through it in a slightly different way. And so I would have asked you, “What is broken?”

LARISSA: I think she did ask that first, actually.

JANILEE: Oh, good. So maybe,

LARISSA: It was a good long hour of discussing “Am I just too broken?” *sarcastically* It was fun. 

JANILEE: Sometimes those conversations can be really cathartic and be exactly what we need.

LARISSA: It was good. The trauma of my past, what I've been through, what I've had, it has broken me.  And that's made me who I am. And as long as I'm working on myself, which is the only person I can work on, I'm doing the right thing, right?

JANILEE: Yeah.

LARISSA: But you ask that you do when you leave the situation. I mean, I'm just fresh out of leaving one and I’m sitting here going, “What if he changes? What if it gets better?  What if he's just really hurting right now and I'm abandoning him in his time of need? What if this, that and the other?” And I have to remind myself that I can't keep fixing someone who isn't willing to be there for me in my struggle. You're not going to be there for me during my struggle. Don't expect a seat at my table during the joy. 

JANILEE: Yeah, totally. I think that's a really good way for me to bring in a little something from the book. Okay. Do you remember last time how we talked about how narcissists have their own worldview and everyone's just a character and they're all cast in a role and you play the role that you're given, right?

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: Okay, so there's this quote from the book that I like super extra million underlined highlighted because it's really awesome. It's talking about, it’s describing what life is like for people waking up from an ill-fitting role that they've been playing for too long. Okay. 

LARISSA: I know that feeling right now.

JANILEE: Yeah.

“This awakening stage often starts with a sense of failure or loss of control. Painful symptoms like depression, anxiety, chronic tension, or not sleeping can all be signals that old strategies to rewrite reality have become unsustainable. These psychological and physical symptoms are a warning system telling us that we need to get back in sync with who we are and how we really feel.”

LARISSA: No, it makes complete sense. And I was telling my therapist today, “I'm avoiding that pain, and I'm avoiding feeling that. And I know it.” And I know that what happened is that I was put on a pedestal. And when I didn't meet those expectations, I failed. And that's why there's so much anger. But I never put myself on that pedestal. It wasn't my expectations that weren't being met, and I never consented to those expectations, if that makes sense.

JANILEE: It does. And I love that you're able to see things from your perspective for me. And I'm sure you've struggled with similar things, as well as a lot of people. But I spent so long being like, “What about them? What about them? What about them? What about them?” And it took me so long to just think, “Well, what about me!?”

LARISSA: Oh yeah.

JANILEE: I remember being told when I was in the early stages of my leaving my abusive situation, someone looked at me and said very seriously, “It doesn't matter how thin it is,  a pancake always has two sides.”

LARISSA: Oh, wow. Yeah.

JANILEE: And you're focused so much on the side of the person you're leaving and the person who hurts you, but there's a side of it where it's you and it's your life, and it doesn't matter how thin you make it. Right.

LARISSA: It's still yours.

JANILEE: Yeah. 

LARISSA: No. And, man, that hits. Cause…yeah. And they can't see that other side, can they?

JANILEE: Yeah. So I really, really like this book, so I'm going to read another little section from it. So this one's a little bit longer. So settle in, buckle up. But I'm going to try and keep your interest while reading this very scientific, kind of psychological, non-emotional section of the book.  Okay. So it's talking again, remember, about breaking down and feeling like there's this loss of control and everything. So here we go. I'm just going to read it.

“People experience a breakdown when the pain of living in role cells begins to outweigh any potential benefits.  Most psychological growth exposes some distressing truths about what we've been doing with our lives. Psychotherapy and the like are AIDS to help us become aware of the truth that we already know in our bones. When you're going through a breakdown, a good question to ask is ‘What is actually breaking down?’ We usually think it's ourselves, but what's typically happening is that our struggle to deny our emotional truth is breaking down. Emotional distress is a signal that it's getting harder to remain emotionally unconscious. It means we're about to discover our true selves underneath all that story business.”

LARISSA: Ouch.  Yeah.  Wow. No.  Yeah. I'm realizing that my toxic empathy and my patterns of codependency cause me to want to end up in relationships with people who are like my original abusers. And it doesn't help.

JANILEE: There's actually quite a bit of statistics that I've looked into where people who've been in any sort of emotionally abusive situation, they tend to seek that out going forward.  I've heard it summed up into the phrase, “The hell you know, versus the heaven you don't.”

LARISSA: Exactly. I was reading about that last night, and I was just like, “Oh, my gosh” because it hits so hard. Choose the path that's not familiar, and it's the path that's going to bring the most growth and the most joy.

JANILEE: But it's also going to be the most terrifying. Just to be clear, like, trying to be super honest here.

LARISSA: Oh it totally is the path that is the most terrifying. It is the path that… I mean I'm sitting here going, “Is it worth it? Is it worth it to sit around and wait for this person to maybe change?” And the answer is no.  All I can do is work on me. And if they change and it's supposed to be, it'll be. But knowing that and accepting that because I want to try and control it, and I want to know the outcome, and I want to be able to protect myself because I've lived so long in protection mode.

JANILEE: Yeah, there's this possibility of what the future could be, and that scares us little bit because we are giving up on what could possibly have become a good situation, right? And so in those situations, I find it helpful sometimes to remember. And I really loved this paragraph because it asks such a good question. “What is actually breaking down?” So earlier in our conversation, Larissa, you were saying, “Am I just that broken?” Well, what is broken? Is Larissa broken? Or is Larissa's ability to remain emotionally unconscious broken? 

LARISSA: It's the emotional unconscious. It's the reality that's hitting me like a ton of freaking bricks in a car in a semi truck going a million miles an hour.  I am hating it because it's…  It's grieving the possibilities. It's that grief of that person, or those people, for that matter, that are still in your life and that are still alive. Even if there's, like, a restraining order or even if there's no contact. Even if you are lucky enough to be able to go no contact with the person or minimal contact or gray rocking or whatever it is that you have to do with that person. Even if you limit that contact, you're still having to disillusion from the possibilities and look at and wake up to the actual reality of what's going on.  I mean, I'm less broken than I was before. I didn't stay as long. I didn't allow as much to happen. I didn't just decide that, oh, well, I'm disabled. I can't get better, so I might as well stick with it. Which is a quote. … I, I'm growing, but growth is hard and it sucks and it's terrifying. 

JANILEE: and it hurts!

LARISSA: While I work through these patterns, it hurts. Exactly. It's so painful.

JANILEE: And not comfortable.  Have you ever met anyone who's gotten stronger without being uncomfortable and sore and in pain? And like I mean, there's so many funny, like, videos and memes about it. But, you know, you do leg day and you just can't walk the next day, right?

LARISSA: It’s the same thing emotionally.

JANILEE: And so if it's if it's a long if it's a longer period of time in an emotionally neglectful relationship, it's going to take a very long time to be able to heal from it, and that's normal, and that's okay. I love that you brought up grieving people who are still alive, because I do have that on the list of future episodes. So grieving people who are still alive is such a weird thing. But we'll talk about it and we'll cover it for sure.

LARISSA: There's definitely a finality when you're grieving someone who's passed. Like when my sister died, I knew she wasn't back. I mean, it took me about a day to really process that and comprehend, no, she's gone. She's fully gone.

JANILEE: Right.

LARISSA: But I didn't have that. What if I didn't have the well, there's still a possibility, right? There's all these unknowns and… *SIGH* Living in the what ifs will never bring you the joy you want. 

JANILEE: Boom mic drop. But not literally, because that would sound terrible

LARISSA: and cost a lot of money.

*both laugh*

JANILEE: Okay. Larissa, do you have anything else on your list of thoughts, things that we wonder when we're leaving these situations? 

LARISSA: “When I leave, am I abandoning that person in their time of need?”

JANILEE: That's a heavy one,

LARISSA: And the answer is technically, yes.  But yes, in reality, yeah, you are. But you have to be willing to, right? I guess. I don't know. That's a tough one for me.

JANILEE: Here's a question that I want to oppose, kind of in response to that. “What is making this a time of need for them?”  Remember when we talked about when you are leaving the situation that you hold all the cards and that this narcissist is terrified because their world is shattering, right. That's what's causing their time of need is an inability to control a person. And it's not like they're hungry or homeless or starving and you're just walking away. You're not letting them control. So their time of need is being created by an inability to exert their desires over other people.  I understand that people are people, but at the same time, F IT! You have to be willing.  I don't remember if we mentioned this in the last episode or not, but when you're taking the self-defense class, right, one of the very first things that you're told is you actually have to be willing to cause pain. Like you have to be willing to hurt the person who is attacking you or you are not going to get away. And it's a similar thing here. You don't have to physically assault them, but you have to emotionally set up that wall and that boundary and say, “NOPE. You no longer have access to me and my life because I am too precious for you.”

LARISSA: Yeah, I know when I let the snark and the constant diatribe of smart alec responses out in a scream that I'm at that point where I'm willing to hurt them back. And yeah, it's tough. It's because  you don't want to think that they are the person that they've been. You want to think that they're the person that they were during the stage where they hooked you, where they brought you in, where they were so sweet and so kind. And what you forget is that that's the mask.  The mask isn't the joy time. The mask isn't their anger. That's when they've let their mask down.

JANILEE: Yeah.

LARISSA: And it's tough to accept that, and it's tough to look at that person and say, “No, this person's actually choosing to hurt me. Am I going to choose to let them?” … and am I being selfish if I choose to not let them? 

JANILEE: Yeah. And, I mean, you've probably spent a large part of your life being like, I don't want to hurt people. I don't want to cause harm.

LARISSA: Yeah. I don't want to do what other people have done to me. I don't want to be that person. I want to be that person who brings joy and healing and health and happiness and rainbows and butterflies and, you know, glitter shooting out of my butt or whatever. I don't know. But it’s that primroses and pixies that I want to be able to believe that the world is when I know it's not. 

LARISSA: The next question, I think that I wonder when I look at that and go, “Well, [if] I am being selfish, then am I worthy?”

JANILEE: Worthy of what?

LARISSA: “Am I worthy of worthy of better, worthy of happiness? Or is this just what my worth is?” Cause this person's telling me that's my worth.

JANILEE: Right. Well, I can tell you right now that your worth and my worth and the worth of everyone listening is totally - like, yes, you're still worthy, and yes, you deserve better. But I do understand that it's a very hard thing to feel and hard thing to understand. When I was making that decision to leave, I had just a couple of people in my life who would tell me that I was still worthy of having a better life. And I asked them constantly. And that was a hard thing to be able to ask for something I needed and ask for help. And that's something else that we can talk about later. But it was huge. I just asked all the time, like, “Are you sure I’m worth sticking around?” And even then, it was really hard to believe. And the reason I bring this up is because that's an external validation, right? And we cannot thrive and spend the rest of our life living on external validation. But it is super helpful. And there is nothing wrong with asking people for validation.  Because you can say, hey, and I've done this in recent years, been like, “Hey, I'm a little down on myself today. Can you just text me something you like about me?” And my friends will do it. And it's just the most amazing thing to be reminded that I have a positive impact outside of the world that I live in that is just in my head, right? And so that external validation is part of community and it's part of belonging. (And “Atlas of the Heart” by Brene Brown is also a very good book. I’ll put it in the show notes.) But we need to belong. We need to be part of a community. And so lean on that while you're developing. Eventually your sense of worth that comes from you. Lean on the external validation of the people who aren't emotionally immature and the people who do actually care about you and the people who are there for you.

LARISSA: Well, and it's tough.  Nobody protected me, so.  Am I even worth the protection and the effort? When you get that message so much, it's tough to know. And so, yeah, getting that external validation is important until you can stand on your own two feet. It's kind of like a baby learning to walk. You have to help them. They hold on to everything that they can, including your fingers, until they're strong enough to do it themselves. And as long as you're not using that crutch, you'll eventually get there.

JANILEE: And I love that you bring up babies too, because in this sense, and this might sound a little harsh, so please be patient with me, but in this sense we are all a little like babies emotionally. We're still learning. Because even though we have grown up and we are fully functioning people who take care of ourselves right.  Emotionally, I didn't have a chance to grow until I was in my twenty s. And so it's like I spent over two decades of my life as an infant emotionally and then I became a toddler and good golly, you fall down a lot,

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: You fall down a lot and you hit your head and it's super terrifying and everything, but I've gotten to a point where, hey, I feel like I can understand things emotionally from a different level. And that's kind of partly why we want to do the podcast. Just FYI. But once you get emotional intelligence, you can do things with it, but also be gracious and understanding with the fact that you are a little bit like a baby right now. Not like “*CRIES*life is hard!” - not that kind of baby, but you're just learning. And so if you wouldn't be rude to a toddler for not knowing how to walk, don't be mean to yourself for not knowing how to emotionally understand that you're worth a lot that will come in time. You just have to keep going on this path. 

LARISSA: Exactly. And it's so tough to accept that because you want to look at yourself and be like, oh, yeah, I'm fully formed. I'm good.  It's a weird dichotomy I feel like when you're leaving the situation because you feel  so torn down,  but at the same time, you've recognized this isn't okay and this is toxic.

JANILEE: Yeah.

LARISSA: And so you feel like, well, it's toxic. Well, maybe it isn't. Well, is it? No, it's not. And you’re going to go back and forth in your mind and it's okay to do that, right? I mean, it's okay to question yourself. That's part of what makes you not the narcissist. 

JANILEE: I'm so glad you said that, because now I get to read another part from this book. That's so amazing! Okay, so there is a lot of research put into this paragraph, like, you know, how they note the people and put it in parentheses and whatnot?

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: There's like four or five of them. So this paragraph is all about the idea of …Let's see. “

In order for people to learn anything new, their old mental pattern must break up and rework itself around the new incoming knowledge.” 

Okay, first of all, this is something that emotionally immature people never do, right? You have to have self-reflection. You have to be willing to have something breakdown. You have to be willing to have that sense of self really shaken in order to rework it around any incoming information. But people who are closed-minded and who won't see anything new and won't accept any sort of valid information, they're the ones that are, like, emotionally immature. And I can tell you that it feels a lot better in the moment to not have to question yourself long term. Right? And that's what we're here for, right? We're here for a long term good, happy, healthy life. One of these researchers gave the term positive disintegration to describe the times when people break down inside in order to reorganize into more emotionally complex beings.

LARISSA: Ooo.

JANILEE: Right? They mentioned as well, here

“psychologically unaware people weren't likely to change after an emotional upheaval.”

Right? And I love that phrase ‘emotional upheaval’ because that's what we're going through, right? When we decide to leave. It's this emotional upheaval. It's this breakdown of self. It's “this everything in my life is different and changing and, oh, my, what is happening?” Right? It's overwhelming and it's terrifying. But understanding that instead of shutting down and getting defensive when faced with difficult experiences, people with developmental potential try to discover a deeper understanding about themselves and reality. Right? 

LARISSA: You grow.

JANILEE: Yeah. It's kind of this idea that we've been talking about where, yeah, like, reality is not what the narcissist reality is. It's the real world where we're able to be full and complete individuals. Right? And so when we're going through all of that and this is, like the full circle moment, the byproducts of self-examination, it can create anxiety and guilt and depression and tackling the deep questions like, it will “yield a stronger, more adaptive personality”. But you remember all those things we talked about at the beginning that questioning everything and a sense of failure and loss of control.  That all happens because what we're doing is good. And I feel like that's a super important thing to bring up over and over and over again is, yes, you feel failure. Yes, you feel a loss of control. Let's work through and break down why we're feeling it, what's broken everything like that until we get to the point where we realize that the reason we're feeling those things is because what we're doing is amazing. It's emotionally intelligent. It's learning and growing and becoming better.

LARISSA: It’s also recognizing patterns, which is difficult to do sometimes, right? 

JANILEE: Mmm-hmm.

LARISSA: Yeah. No, it's true. It’s … You feel like you're in a puddle when you leave.

JANILEE: Yeah.

LARISSA: You've disintegrated, literally disintegrated. And you're sitting there struggling, going, “Can I take much more? Can I… Can I cope? Can I do this?” And you don't have any belief in yourself when you're doing it, but at the same time you have hope in yourself.

JANILEE: I feel like we just kind of need to take a deep breath.

*deep breath in, deep breath out*

JANILEE: That was a little heavy.

LARISSA: Hot cocoa breaths.

JANILEE: What?

LARISSA: That's what I call it with my kiddo.

JANILEE: Hot cocoa breaths? I love it!

LARISSA: Yeah, you breathe in like you're smelling the hot cocoa, and then you breathe it out.  It’S The only one that works.  She’ll actually come up to me and say “Hey, hot cocoa breaths.” And it works!

JANILEE: That's adorable. I love it.

LARISSA: It’s like she’s parenting me. 

JANILEE: I wanted to keep going. I'm telling you, man, this chapter of the book is…

LARISSA: a good one?

JANILEE: … life changing. I love it very much. So it talks about waking up.  It talks about waking up to what you really feel. Right? So sometimes giving up a healing fantasy. It’s essentially everything can be fixed, everything can be put back into place. And I don't actually need to leave or change. Right. There's this healing fantasy that everything will just heal itself and get better, right?

LARISSA: Yeah. I call that magical thinking.

JANILEE: I mean, it's pretty magical, right? And the thing about the healing fantasy, just like very briefly, that's kind of the whole point of why we are leaving, right? Because that magical thinking is “I want this other person to change, I want this other person to this and that. I want this situation to work out.” And sometimes that just comes with this deep kind of hard feeling of understanding that we don't get to choose that. That is not an option. So we have to look at our options going forward from a realistic point of view, which is no, that’s not gonna fix it, we can focus on ourselves.

LARISSA: If they wanted to, they would have already.

JANILEE: Yeah. We’re waking up from those we think that we'll finally win love from them in the healing fantasy. So when we wake up from that, what we're doing is we have to face unwanted feelings about the people we care about because.  The healing fantasy is that they're gonna eventually love me and I'll finally be able to win their love and waking up to realize that that's not going to happen. It [the book] talks about the two feelings people seem most reluctant to admit are, one, being afraid of someone, or two, not liking someone. And those are hard things to come to grips with, especially if it's like your parents or like a romantic partner or a friend that you've hung out with for years, is realizing and understanding that there is a reason that you are thinking about leaving/are leaving. And it's because they hurt you. You're scared of them. You don't really want love from them. You want love and you want acceptance. And they've taught you that you only get that through them. But you're scared. And it's hard to think these terrible things about people when you're the type of person who really tries to see the good in everyone.

LARISSA: Yeah, it's true. I can completely relate to that right now.  “Well, what if I put in all this effort and then they change afterwards? What if it's me? And if I could just do this one thing differently, they'll do different. If I could just be slightly better. If I could, if I should, if I would. If I…” And it's looking at that and going, love isn't earned.  Love is supposed to be a gift that's freely given regardless of what is going on and true love isn't going to be just taken away. Real love, non-narcissistic love isn't earned and can't be earned. It's just a gift.  And yet in relationships and interpersonal communication and in an interpersonal situations, you're not always going to… love is a choice. And so you're not always going to easily be able to give that gift.  But are you giving that gift regardless of whether or not they're hurting you? And are they giving it to you when they feel hurt?  When you don't meet that pedestal? When you aren’t the perfect you, when you're struggling, when you need help, are they there for you? Are they validating you? Are they bringing you up? Are they pulling you down?  And it’s so difficult to accept that there isn't anything you can do to qualify for that love in a narcissistic situation because you will never meet their requirements and their objectives because they're never going to tell you what they are.

JANILEE: Yeah. You reminded me of something that I feel is important here. Remember we talked about dictionaries, right? Different definitions of words. My mother used to tell me all the time you are so lucky that I love you unconditionally. And in her dictionary she did. But it wasn't love. Right. It was that narcissistic love that you were talking about. Right. And so unconditional love. I did not experience that until I was like halfway through my twenty s. That was the first time I felt unconditional love. And it was weird and I hated it and I was like “get out of here with that crap. Yeah, no.”

LARISSA: “What on this planet is this?” Yeah, exactly.

JANILEE: Yeah. Because it was unfamiliar and uncomfortable

LARISSA: And you reject whatever is unfamiliar and uncomfortable and so it's unlearning that and learning. No, this is real love and this is what you've been seeking all along and. And it is possible. It's difficult and it's hard and it's worth it, but it is possible.  There is hope for you. There may not be hope for the other person because you can't control their hope. You can't control their destiny and their joy and whether or not they're going to choose to grow. And if they choose to grow with somebody else, you have to be willing to just be happy for them for that instead of having that “what if,” but in all likelihood, even if you think they've changed, they probably haven't.

JANILEE: Also, I mean, you're listening to this podcast, so that says a lot about you being willing to listen, especially this far into the second episode.

LARISSA: So very true. I mean, I think we're interesting, but…

JANILEE: I think we're amazing. That's great. Um, Larissa, can I tell you a story?

LARISSA: Yes.

JANILEE: This was kind of the last point that I wanted to hit in this episode today. So I was in college and I was living in an apartment with a couple of roommates and.  The management of this apartment complex was terrible.  So one time I opened the front door, I lived on the third floor, and the stairs to go downstairs were missing. The stairs were just gone. I was like, what is happening? And I called the front office and I was like, what's going on? Right? And they're like, oh, we put, like, a letter on your door. And I was like, no, you didn't. And I checked with my roommates, and they're like, no. And so then they went and they looked in the files, and they had a paper for my apartment that they didn't put on my front door. And so I just couldn't leave my apartment. I had no stairs, and it was terrible.

LARISSA: Sorry. I'm just picturing, like, making a shift, like a makeshift slide or something. 

JANILEE: Yeah, it was not the best place to live, all things considered. And so there was another day that they decided they were going to change the flooring. They were going to rip up all the carpet and put down this vinyl floor. And so this was like on a Friday night, I come home and there's this paper on the front door. They actually gave us a paper this time, and the paper said that by Saturday night - so 24 hours from when I get this letter - I had to be living in a temporary apartment across on the other side of the complex for a total of at least three days while they had the floors switched up. And also before I left, I had to make sure that everything was off of the floor, other than the furniture? This is a college apartment, and it was, like, super small, and I had a bunch of stuff on the floor because that's the only place that there was to put things. And I had to move entire bookshelves. And I was just, like, in the middle of doing this, and I was kind of losing it. And so I picked up the phone and I called one of my friends, right? And this was, like, the only genuine friend that I had at the time. And I explained the whole situation, and I was like, “okay, I'm trying to be understanding, and I'm trying. I know that this, that and the other, and my life could be so much worse, and there's people starving…”  And this friend just cut me off and said, “Honey, you're angry. Go punch a pillow! Go be mad!”  And it was like, the most liberating feeling, right? And I literally was around 20 when this happened. And I didn't know how to express anger, much less I didn't even know I was experiencing anger. I had to have a friend straight up, tell me “You are angry. Go express your anger and then problem solve afterwards.” Right?

LARISSA: No, I understand that one.  It took me about 27 years of my life to realize that every time I broke up in hysterical crying about something that was happening and it was anger, because that was the only way I knew how to express and live through anger. And then I'm all of a sudden going, “Oh, wait a minute, that's not how anger is supposed to be expressed.”

JANILEE: So I wanted to end with this just because and again, I'm just going to end with a quote from the book. But anger is an expression of individuality, right? It's the emotion that emotionally immature people will punish you for feeling. Right? “How dare you be angry at me? I didn't do anything wrong.” Right? But is

“a helpful emotion because it gives people energy to do things differently, and it lets them see themselves as worthy of sticking up for. So it's a really good sign. When overly responsible, anxious or depressed people begin to be consciously aware of feeling angry. It indicates that their true self is coming to the fore and that they're beginning to care about themselves.”

 So in all of this and I feel like we spent most of our conversation today talking about all of the emotional stuff, right? But there's anger, and that's a very valid emotion. It's the turning point where things go from crap to good. So don't discount your anger. And if you feel angry, go punch a pillow. Go scream at the universe. I mean, anger is good. Don't let anyone ever tell you that being angry means there's something wrong with you, because scientists have literally researched and also Larissa and I are saying this anger is good. It's a good thing.

LARISSA: Contrary to what I was taught for a very long time and told for even longer, anger is a healthy emotion.  It's exhausting to feel it long term, but that's if you don't use it the way it's intended.

JANILEE: Yeah, that's if you repress it. So, I'm thinking that maybe we're going to have some conversations about anger in the future, which is very exciting.  And also I was thinking about, hey, maybe we can talk about what leads us these situations. Why are we… because we've talked about how we're emotionally immature and not in a bad way, but we didn't have the chances to grow. So next week we will talk about why we are this way. Because sometimes it helps to understand why something works for it to work.

LARISSA: I think understanding is quite essential to the growth. So that sounds like a great topic. I'm excited.

JANILEE: Okay. It's going to be awesome. Larissa, thank you for making a podcast with me.

LARISSA: Thank you for making this podcast with me, too. I love this. I'm so grateful for the opportunity.

JANILEE: Yeah. Okay, remember, everyone, if you go throughout your week and you are vilified, it's just because you're at the corner of “living your life” and “someone else isn't happy about  it.”

LARISSA: This is VILIFIED