LARISSA: Welcome, friends. You found Janilee and Larissa at the corner of “I'm living my life” and “Someone else 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 “How did we get here?”

LARISSA: That is such a good question. Because sometimes I feel like “How did I manage this again? Or how did I manage to end up here?”

JANILEE: Especially if we end up in situations with these type of emotionally immature people and a lot of narcissists over and over and over again. “How is this my life? How is this a pattern that I am living over and over again? And how do I get out of this?”

LARISSA: Exactly! And that is not easy to answer.

JANILEE: No, it's not. But would you like to take a shot at it?  

LARISSA: My theory, and again, this is just my… I'm trained as a nurse, but that's all theory… is that I'm codependent and have toxic empathy.  

JANILEE: Yeah. So that is accurate. I feel like it's more of, like, describing the symptoms rather than the cause, right? Whereas I got really frustrated for a long time with all of the symptoms showing up over and over again, and I got really deep looking into the cause. So I wrote down - there's so many things I want to talk about, and that's why we have multiple episodes, so we can keep talking about these things. But I wrote down just a couple of things that I want to talk about here and now. And the first thing is something that we touched on last time. Okay. Remember when we talked about choosing the hell you know over the heaven you don't.

LARISSA: It's what feels safe.

JANILEE: Exactly.

LARISSA: And it's what you learned. It's what was modeled.  

JANILEE: So there actually has been a research done, and I will link the research and everything I'm referencing in the show notes. But there has been research done that shows people who are raised or people who have been subjected to these types of consistently abusive situations with emotionally immature people, they will seek out emotion immature people to repeat these patterns with.  

LARISSA: That sucks.

JANILEE: It does suck, doesn't it? Especially because I feel like the first time you hear that, you're like, “Oh, awesome. I'm just doomed. This is my life. This is what I'm stuck doing for the rest of forever.” And that's just a terrible, terrible way to feel.

LARISSA: Yeah, I don't want this. I was like, “Okay, so how do I heal my codependency and how do I stop being a toxic empath and how do I unlearn?” And yeah…

JANILEE: Okay, so I love that you're bringing all of this up, because my idea for this was we talked about Narcissists, right? That was the very first episode. And the last episode, I kind of mentioned and started talking a little bit about emotionally immature people. Today I feel like it would be really helpful to kind of go into what emotionally immature people are, but with so much love and so much empathy for ourselves, because I see myself reflected in these things, and I'm sure that you will, and I'm sure that a lot of people listening will. And so I feel it's very important to say from the start that being emotionally immature is not a bad thing. It is just a thing. It is a neutral thing. Narcissists use this emotional immaturity and become really good at weaponizing it and vilifying other people. Whereas people who choose to have an awakening and decide to make changes like we talked about last week, there are people who are emotionally immature, but who decide to take an action to prevent this from becoming a worse thing in the future.

LARISSA: And that makes sense, needing to give yourself grace, because you're a product of what you've experienced in life, and you're a product of what your ancestors have experienced and what you've been taught and just because you're struggling in some way, shape or form, the fact that you want to grow means that you can overcome. And that is something that the narcissist will probably never be able to do.

JANILEE: Yeah, unless they decide to change. I mean, there are people who are narcissists who do recover, right. But 100% of the time they have to want it. We cannot heal narcissists on our own. Right? Like, you can't save someone who's drowning. If they don't want to be saved, they will drown and they will just pull you down with them. Right?

LARISSA: Exactly. So giving yourself that grace and being able to say, okay, so looking at yourself very unapologetically and saying, honestly, “This is who I am, what do I do about it?” Is where we need to start from, right?

JANILEE: Okay, so to give us a little bit of science to help back the grace, because science can be a little hard, but let's give us a little science to help us understand how we got here. Have you ever heard of the term generational trauma?

LARISSA: Yes. It's that book “The Body Keeps the Score” right?

JANILEE: It is, and I've heard a lot of people who have been recommending it, it kind of got really popular on social media. I just want to say it is not a self-help book. It is a scientific book that explains things from a very scientific point of view. It's written by someone named Bessel van der Kolk. And I got into that book specifically based around EMDR therapy, and we will have an episode on EMDR therapy, okay? But it talks about basically how no matter what you've been through, your body is going to remember it. And so it talks about it from more of like a socioeconomic as well as psychological standpoint. But I wanted a little bit more detail, so I went a little deeper and I learned about something called epigenetics. Do you know what epigenetics are Larissa?

LARISSA: I know the term. I learned it in biology in.  Years. I'm not going to date myself so many years ago.

JANILEE: That's okay. We're all just timeless and young here. It's totally all right. Okay, so the thing about epigenetic, and I will go into this more in the Just Janilee episode, but for this conversation, it is helpful to know epigenetics is a gene expression. Okay? So we have all of these genes, and whether they are expressed or not, it comes from our biological parents.

LARISSA: Like the fruit fly experiment, right?

JANILEE: Yeah. And that's a super simplified version that I learned in high school. And honestly, I'm like, whatever. I still struggle to understand it. But with Epigenetics, what it is saying is a gene, once expressed, has to be expressed. Think of it like a seesaw, okay? So if no one's on the seesaw, it's just flat and unexpressed. But if someone gets on one side of the seesaw, the gene is on and it is expressed.

LARISSA: Okay.

JANILEE: However, we can take those genes and by doing our own work, by having grace, by listening to podcasts that help us grow and become better people, we can actually change that gene. Express genes are not just you're born with it the end. You have propensities, right? You have leanings. You can have children that are born with drug addictions because they were exposed to it in utero, right? But that is not a one and done forever the situation. If you choose to express and change the expression of that genome.  Then studies have actually shown that if you then have children, biological children of your own, that gene will have to be expressed, but it will be expressed the other way. Like the seesaw flipped and the other gene expression is there.

LARISSA: Wow. So I should have waited to have my kid?

JANILEE: Not necessarily, no. Okay, here's the thing, is we have the ability to do it, but so do our kids. Right. It's the whole nature versus nurture conversation, right. That you have kids when you have kids, and if you raise them right, they'll be okay. Right?

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: But I found this very interesting because a lot of people and it's something I've been looking into as well you talk about different generations, right? You have the baby boomers and the millennials and the Gen Z and also Gen X that just kind of gets thrown in the mix and never really talked about, unfortunately.

LARISSA: Yeah

JANILEE: But if you think about baby boomers, that would be.  Roughly my parents generation, they were raised by people who had to live through the great depression in America. Yeah. And it doesn't matter how much you love your children. If you're going through a great depression, you're going to feed your children at any cost, and emotions don't really matter because you're too busy living and you're too busy surviving.

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: Your environment changes that genome expression, and it is, we are going to make it through this depression with no food and no money, and we will survive. And then you have the baby boomers who raised a lot of, mostly millennials, some gen X and some gen Z, but mostly millennials. And millennials have all of this generational trauma, and they are starting to get this reputation of being the breakers of that generation. Okay. I actually have a quote that I special ordered from an artist on Esty that I have on my wall that says, “Cheers to the Chainbreakers”. Because if you think about all of this genome expression, and it's not just one gene, because genes are crazy and intense, right.  You're breaking this generation of.  All of this crap that's happened, and you're stopping it just by listening to this podcast, just by questioning these things, just by wondering these things, right?

LARISSA: Just by recognizing that it's not okay, what's happening.

JANILEE: Exactly. And by wanting something better. Right. I often view as a millennial myself, I often view millennials as this generation of, “Okay, we stopped the generational trauma, and we broke these patterns, but I'm tired, and I'm exhausted. So, Gen Z, you take it and run with it, and I will help you as much as I can. But I'm a little beat having broken these systems.”

LARISSA: No, that makes complete sense. I'm exhausted re parenting myself and healing myself from everything that I've been through, and it leaves enough for my kid. But the exhaustion is still there, and there's a constant, “Oh, my gosh, what do I do now?”

JANILEE: Yeah. Especially when it comes to being active in society or in political movements or in fighting for something you care about. I'm there, and I'm supporting it. But it is exhausting. It is exhausting having been part of that generation that stopped this. But that doesn't mean that millennials aren't crucial in that. Right. And obviously, these are very broad kind of statistically just, yeah,

LARISSA: We're lumping people into categories. It doesn't necessarily mean that if you're in a different category that you're not a certain person or you are a certain person.

JANILEE: Right. Yeah. You get this. We got this. We're good. Okay. So I felt like it was super important to kind of start with that, because there is so much science that goes into why we are where we are. And so as we go through these kind of common characteristics of emotionally immature people, it's really important to remember that being emotionally immature is not really your fault. And even if it is your fault, that doesn't mean that you can't change. It doesn't mean that you're a bad person. It doesn't mean anything other than these are the ways that people act when they have not been able to express emotions in a good way to grow as a human being.

LARISSA: It's just a byproduct of the environment you've been put in.

JANILEE: Throughout your life over and over and over and over again. Right? Okay, so I have this list here, and I have them marked up. And again, this is from that book that I mentioned last week, “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents”. So that's the lens that this is talking about, but keep in mind, it applies to any emotionally immature people.  Um, that you have come across in your life.  Okay, are you ready to jump into some of these Larissa?

LARISSA: Oh, yeah.

JANILEE: Okay. So here are some of the personality traits. The first one listed is - I’m going to read a quote here.

“They are either rigid or impulsive and try to cope with reality by narrowing it down to something manageable. There's one right answer. And they can become very defensive and humorless when people have other ideas that don't match their opinion.”

LARISSA: So that sounds like black and white thinking or all or nothing.

JANILEE: Exactly right. It's maybe not as nice a way of putting it, but have you ever experienced black and white thinking?

LARISSA: Yes, I put myself in that box, but I'm ADHD and wasn't medicated for quite a long time or treated.  So that impulsivity is quite there, too. So I'm kind of this, like.  Both extremes. Just randomly.

JANILEE: Yeah and to have that black and white thinking it's in the moment. Right. And it changes from time to time. I remember the first time I had a thought that didn't align with the black and white thinking that I was allowed to have when I was growing up. I had a thought that didn't fit into the black and white. It was in the gray area. And I terrified me.

LARISSA: Yeah, exactly.  

JANILEE: And so if we react and we're terrified by these things, we react to them and we do bad, mean things to other people that's understandable.  

LARISSA: Or if we do it to ourselves.

JANILEE: Yeah.

LARISSA: It could also be the itty bitty shitty committee in your head.  

JANILEE: I hate committee. They need to be disbanded forever.

LARISSA: I know. I'm working on that.  

JANILEE: So keep in mind, again, I've done this. Larrisa has done this. We've all done these things. The important thing is we're changing.  

LARISSA: I think it's also important that it's human. It's human to look at yourself and go, oh yeah, I've done these things. And that makes you a good person? Yeah. I often remark to some of my friends, oh man, I did this thing and it was really bad and I'm a terrible person. And I look at them and I say, wait, “So you're telling me that you were human?  Did you acted like a flawed human? Wait, you're not perfect?  Oh, thank goodness. I don't like perfect friends. I don't have any perfect friends. And if you were perfect, we'd have to stop being friends.”

LARISSA: Exactly.

JANILEE: So don't beat yourself up for not being perfect. We've all done crappy terrible things in our lives. It okay. Here's one that I feel like is going to really hit home with you. It has with me in the past, but not so much lately, but emotionally immature people tend to have a very low stress tolerance.

LARISSA: Oh, yes. Okay. So I have this weird thing where like in trauma and.  I'm on it. I mean, I've dealt with blown off faces and concave skulls. As a nurse, I've seen some pretty horrific stuff and stayed calm, cool, and collected the entire time. I did bounce off of a wall and keep talking because there were three of them happening at once [one time]. But I still managed all of that. But I can't deal with harassment from somebody from my past.

JANILEE: Yeah

LARISSA: And it's weird. It's like, why is it that I can handle these major situations, but I cannot handle too many emails and text messages from someone?  

JANILEE: So it's a low stress tolerance for things that you don't know how to cope with.

LARISSA: Got you. Okay.

JANILEE: Yeah. So if you have, like you mentioned, you're a nurse, so you've probably seen a lot of kind of terrifying crappy, distorted things in that field, and so it's normal, right? But how often have you had boundaries and held to those boundaries when it comes to people in your personal life?  Far less often, probably.

LARISSA: Yeah.  

JANILEE: Not to put you on the spot here.

LARISSA: It's a good question. I mean, like, the example I'm thinking of is I put in boundaries and then I was told that I wasn't allowed to use those boundaries and court ordered to do something different. And now I'm sitting here going, well, crud, then what do I do?  

JANILEE: And here's the thing. When we are emotionally immature and then we start to mature emotionally, we change the way that we interact with things. So when people are truly emotionally immature right. They often will expect other people to soothe them down by just doing what they want. I've done that. I'm like, “I don't care what's reasonable, I don't care what makes sense, I don't care what's going to help with the long-term outcome. You need to do this thing to make everything feel better or I'm going to lose my cool” because I can't handle the stress for a situation that I'm not used to feeling stressed in.

LARISSA: No, I get what you're saying. It makes complete sense what you're saying, and yeah, I'm definitely on that spectrum.

JANILEE: Yeah. Okay, here's another one. “Emotionally immature people tend to do what feels best in the moment and then follow the path of least resistance.”  

LARISSA: Hmm. I mean, I definitely go more with the flow and just try and keep the cool and the peace. But I've always thought that that was like a survival mechanism for me.

JANILEE: It can be.

LARISSA: Because that was the easier thing to do until it wasn't.

JANILEE: Well, emotionally mature people interacting with emotionally immature people…

LARISSA: …you got to do what you got to do. Exactly.  

JANILEE: You have to live by the emotionally immature system because that's the only one that actually has reliable outcomes.

LARISSA: Yeah. Especially when it's based on your survival. No, that makes complete sense. Yeah. No, I definitely resonate with that one. Definitely resonate.

JANILEE: A lot of self-destructive behavior falls into this category as well, right? So I'm not shy about it, but I have been suicidal for more than half of my life, and I have, as part of that, done some self-harm. Now, if we look at self-harm from this lens, from this viewpoint, you do what feels best in the moment. You take the path of least resistance, not because you're seeking attention or you want people to do what you want, or you're trying to manipulate people, but because in that moment, the only thing that is going to make you feel better is to hurt yourself.

LARISSA: Well, and it's also they've studied it and shown that people who are self-harming, they understand how to handle physical pain, but they don't know how to handle emotional pain. And the pain, like the intense emotional pain, they can handle certain emotional pain, they can handle certain rejection trauma, but their own feelings, they don't know how. So I can understand that. No, I've been suicidal before. I've been there, and it's not a fun place to be.

JANILEE: It is not. And if you're there, we got you. Larissa has been there. I've been there. We understand and we aren't judging, and we know that you're not doing it to be attention seeking. We know that you're just handling life the best you can. And honestly, really impressive.

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: But I do want to point out as well, Larissa, you were talking about how you can handle all this type of trauma in one way but not in others. That's the point. Right. We want to raise the next generation, you want to raise your daughter to be an emotionally well rounded person, right? People who can feel all of the emotions on all ranges and to be able to handle them, not to have one aspect of life where, yeah, I have zero emotional maturity, zero emotional skills to handle this. I'm just going to crash and burn.

LARISSA: Yeah, exactly.

JANILEE: Okay. Another thing, and I love that these kind of build on each other, but often emotionally immature people are subjective, not objective. And what that means, simply put, is how they are feeling is more important than what is actually happening. Again, the self-destructive behavior falls into that category. How you're feeling? Far more important than anything that's actually happening.

LARISSA: Yeah, that makes sense.  Yeah. I feel like I've trained myself to be much more objective, but I still am definitely feelings driven.

JANILEE: Yeah. Because honestly, when our emotions get too hard, too big, too strong for us to handle, we're just going to do what the emotions say, because that's the only way to let the emotions go well.

LARISSA: And sometimes you have to ride the wave of the emotion.

JANILEE: Yes, but do we ride the wave of emotion internally or externally?  

LARISSA: Ooo.

JANILEE: That's the whole objective versus subjective. Do we ride that emotional wave internally without doing anything about it and just feeling the emotions? Or…

LARISSA: do we try and get better with it?

JANILEE: … or do we just do whatever is feeling good in that moment?

LARISSA: Ahh.

JANILEE: And to be clear, none of them, some of these things are not bad to have. When I was in one of my most depressive suicidal ruts, I woke up and I went to work and I came home from work and I ate Hawaiian pizza and cookie dough ice cream while watching Jeopardy. And then I went to bed. And that's all I did every day for over a month. That was all I could handle doing, because emotionally, that was the only thing that gave me enough “I can handle tomorrow to survive.”  Yeah, these aren't necessarily bad things. These are just coping skills that over time can be proven to be maladaptive. But if they are working for you, where you are in your moment, that's not a problem. It's just maybe someday down the road, I don't have to rely on Hawaiian pizza and cookie dough ice cream to make it through my night.

LARISSA: Exactly. Eventually get out of the rut if you can.

JANILEE: Yeah.  Now, this one is … I love that we started this whole entire conversation podcast by talking about a narcissist reality. Because you do have your role self, right? And so oftentimes they have… “Little respect for differences” is how it's listed in the book, but it basically is your role self is more comfortable than anything else. And people who don't live inside of a role, they scare you because they don't have a set of parameters that they live their life by, and they're unpredictable and they could do something that you can't protect yourself from. There's a lot of planning for the future and trying to avoid pain in this scenario.

LARISSA: Yeah. And I can see that I've definitely moved myself more away from that one. But a few years ago, that definitely still would have been a safety thing for me, having to be able to predict everything that that person would do.  

JANILEE: Yeah. And that is extraordinarily normal. I've seen multiple - and by the way, social media, when you are following the correct pages and when you have it curated to be something that heals you instead of harms you, it can be amazing. And I've seen multiple people on social media who have said things along the lines of, “Wait, you're telling me you can't tell who's coming just by their footsteps and if they're angry and how you need to make sure that you're hiding or pretending to be asleep before the doors open. Like, this isn't normal? People aren't all doing this?”

LARISSA: Right?

JANILEE: I literally spent my childhood doing that. So much so that when I am really struggling with some past trauma that's come up, my safe place where I feel safest is on the floor with one blanket and no pillows and looking underneath the door. I live alone. No one's going to be coming down the hall. But that's where I feel safest because that's where I spent so much of my life.

LARISSA: Exactly. And I can relate to that. “So it isn't normal to spend an hour when, you know your partner's coming home preparing for whatever storm is going to hit you that day. Oh. Oops.  So that's not a normal reaction to your spouse coming home. Oh, um okay.”

JANILEE: I want to just one word. And I know I said the word normal, but let's say healthy because it is normal.  Yeah. It is normal situation.

LARISSA: That is a normal response to an abnormal situation.

JANILEE: Exactly.  

LARISSA: It’s “Oh, that isn't a healthy response.” Yeah, you're right. I like that.

JANILEE: We can dream for this better future, but realize as well that at this point,  we're all at different places in our healing journey. But for me, when I started, the biggest thing was just noticing yeah, “I just realized that I made this assumption.” Boom, you're already healing. You just noticed something.  Okay, this next one is when I first read the title of the section, it hurt really hard, but “they are egocentric.” Emotionally immature people are egocentric. Now, to break this down a little bit, remember, everyone has their different dictionaries egocentric in most people's. Dictionaries kind of societally is self-absorbed. It's that narcissistic aspect of being egocentric. Right? I mean, that's what I think of.

LARISSA: Yeah. Is this more like the ID and ego?

JANILEE: ish? Yeah. Okay, so here's it explained very well. It talks first about children, right? And how when you have if you've ever interacted with a young child, their world ends if they lose their favorite toy, their world ends if they don't get to eat what they want for dinner. And they are so egocentric because they are discovering who they are. And when you're emotionally immature, all immature means is that your emotional age doesn't match your physical age. So we're emotionally children, which makes everything that we're doing, like we mentioned earlier, it is normal. It's not necessarily healthy for our age, but it is completely normal. And so this egocentric viewpoint is, “I have a self.” Huh. “I'm an individual.” Huh.

JANILEE: Okay. I was going to save this for one of those Just Janilee episodes, but Larissa, I feel like you're going to love it. Are you ready?

LARISSA: Yes.

JANILEE: So the person who wrote “The Body Keeps The Score” - Bessel van der Kolk, love him. He performed a study, and basically he took ten chronically traumatized people with complex PTSD and ten random people off the street and put them… and so keep in mind, this is a very small study. It's literally 20 people, but the findings were interesting because he put them in an fMRI *MUMBLES* bleh words!

LARISSA: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine. So basically what they're doing is they're monitoring the movement and the function of whatever they're examining under the actual imaging. Instead of it just being like a solitary picture, it's multiple pictures.  

JANILEE: It's real time watching what parts of the brain light up. Right?

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: Perfect. Thank you, Nurse Larissa, for saving me from not being able to say words! So in this, this was with a group of Canadians. And so when I was listening to this lecture that Vanderkolk was giving on YouTube and again, I'll link it in show notes, but he mentioned everyone was put in the fMRI machine and told to “just think”.  And so he said, “Imagine if you were just a Canadian who came in off the street and you were put in this fMRI machine, and you're probably thinking to yourself, man, I'm really nice to do this. Also, this is a really hard surface I'm laying on. Probably should have gone to the bathroom.  I wonder what I'm going to do after this.”  Your brain just thinks!

LARISSA: Random normal drifting off into the crevices of your mind.

JANILEE: Exactly. And then when these non-chronically traumatized people had these thoughts along the section of their brains  I love the name that van der Kolk came up for this. He called it the “mohawk of self-awareness neurons”, because if you had a Mohawk of hair, that's where the neurons were in the brain images that lit up.

LARISSA: For the unaffected people?

JANILEE: For the unaffected people, yeah. Okay, so they're just laying there thinking about how they should have gone to the bathroom. They're really nice Canadians, and this bed is really hard that they're laying on, and they have their Mohawk of self-awareness neurons that just start lighting up, right?

LARISSA: Okay.

JANILEE: Now, the chronically traumatized people, they didn't have any brain activity at all.  

LARISSA: Right. The first thought I had was my brain would turn off.

JANILEE: Yeah. Right. And so when they were put in these imaging machines right.  Nothing lit up. There was no Mohawk of self awareness neurons. And van der Kolk took that to say a lot of people will say, “Oh, if you're trying to heal, do some, like, meditation.” And I had some experience with this as well. When I started healing, I was like, “Yeah, I'll try and do meditation.” But van der Kolk used the phrase, “you got to make sure someone's home before you knock on the door.”

LARISSA: *laughs* The reason I'm laughing is because I was blaming my ADHD for this, but the longest I could meditate on my Wii was 90 seconds on high dose Vivance,  and it was less than 30 seconds off of the Vivance.

JANILEE: Yeah. I literally was reduced to tears when I first started meditation because I could not do it, because it was so uncomfortable and so exhausting and painful to be forced to live in an empty house where you don't have a sense of self.

LARISSA: And that makes so much more sense as to why I couldn't do it. I just blamed my ADHD and blamed my brain and moved on. Obviously, it was partly brain, partly trauma, but I've never actually tried again. If I can only make it 90 seconds, what's the point?  

JANILEE: You get zero benefits of meditation, right, when you can't really meditate. It's an exercise in futility.  

LARISSA: I just blamed my hyperactivity.

JANILEE: But, yeah, there's actually a fair amount of research into the difference between  neurological ADHD and trauma induced ADHD. Same thing with anxiety and depression. And not to say that any of those things are bad, right? It's just necessarily what caused them might be different, but that doesn't mean that we don't treat them the same name, and we can get into that later.

LARISSA: And it can actually indicate which treatments are going to be more effective. I mean, there's a reason why I was on the highest dose of brittle in the United States allowed and couldn't fill it overseas, and it still wasn't working.  

JANILEE: There is a diagnosis called a developmental trauma disorder that I get all nerds about. We'll get into it, but…

LARISSA: I started researching it from your recommendation, and I'm like, “Oh, so this is what I have.”

JANILEE: I love it. Maybe that's what we'll have to talk about next week.

LARISSA: That sounds great.

JANILEE: Okay. But to circle back to the phrase “they are egocentric”, if you imagine a little kid, there's no one home because the kid was just born. And so they don't have self-awareness neurons. And their world does end when they lose their little favorite toy because those self-awareness neurons are being tried out for the first time. Their axons are being myelinated, and everything is just brand new and exhausting.

LARISSA: So when we're healing, is it kind of like we're finally, for the first time, safely experiencing this?

JANILEE: Yeah.

LARISSA: Holy crud. Sorry. It's like light bulb moment. You guys can't see my face, but there's a light bulb that just lit up over my head.

JANILEE: We like it, we hear the light bulb. Explain the light bulb.

LARISSA: Well, no, it makes sense. It's like, “Oh, that's why I'm so cruddy at handling interpersonal conflict. I've never done it before, and whenever I have, it's been an overwhelming thing because when I tried to do it before and it wasn't safe.  I got smacked down hard.”

JANILEE: As adults or non-three year olds, we have these expectations of being a grown up or acting your age. Have you ever been told that? Because you’re supposed to be able to…

LARISSA: *singing* What's my age again? What's my age again? Sorry.  

JANILEE: I love it. That's awesome. But that's exactly the point, right? We've never been able to experience these things in a healthy format, and so we stopped trying to experience them because what matters is making it through the Great Depression without having to die. So who cares what our emotions feel like? And when we start to feel our emotions for that first time, it's terrifying. And we have had no interpersonal experience, and especially not any that have gone well. We've only been dealing with emotionally immature people up to this point, so we have emotionally mature people and we just can't believe that they genuinely don't care that I didn't text them for four days. They're just like, “You do what you got to do and I'm here when you need me.” That's weird. We've never experienced that. And it's terrifying.

LARISSA: Right.

JANILEE: So being egocentric, it's a good thing. We're emotionally being children, and that's such a hard thing to be when you're an adult. You have to find people that you can be safe with being emotionally childish.

LARISSA: And growing and healing

JANILEE: Because you have to develop those self-awareness neurons or no one's going to be home and you're always going to be in pain when you're stuck with yourself.

LARISSA: Man, that hits. Yeah.  

JANILEE: I'm going to read you a quote from the book. It says about this egocentric nature.

“They live in a perpetual state of insecurity, fearing that they will be exposed as bad, inadequate or unlovable. They keep their defenses high so other people can't get close enough to threaten their shaky sense of self worth.”

LARISSA: Wow. I mean, I know that I struggle with feeling worthy and feeling like I'm worth it, like I'm worth the effort, worth whatever. And I know that that's my trauma speaking, but I also am pretty open about it, so I'm not afraid to let people know that that's the case. It's more being reinforced that that's the case.

JANILEE: Yeah. See, what we're doing here in this conversation is we're explaining from a very intellectual viewpoint all of this stuff.

LARISSA: Exactly, yeah.

JANILEE: Right. I can be like, “Well, of course, Larissa. You feel that way because you have no self-awareness neurons.” Right?

LARISSA: There's no Mohawk for me.

JANILEE: And you can understand that intellectually, but until we experience it emotionally, it doesn't matter how well we can explain it. And that's the scariest part for me. At least it was for me. And honestly, it still kind of is. My trauma informed therapist. One of the things she told me more than anything was, “you intellectualize your emotions so you don't have to feel them.”

LARISSA: Hi, me. I'm the problem. It's me. Yes.  And apparently, I am extremely resistant to EMDR for that reason.  I'm like “I'm sorry. I don't know what to tell you.” Yeah, because I can just go, oh, well, here, let's process this.  Rationally and logically when that's not really how emotions in your reptilian brain works.

JANILEE: But here's the thing is understanding it rationally and intellectually, it helped me because I knew that there was a reason, despite what anyone said to me. I knew that the reason that meditation was hard for me was not because I couldn't focus or because I wasn't trying hard enough, or I was using the wrong meditation app. I knew that the reason that it was hard for me was because I didn't have anyone home and I needed that sense of self. So it helped me give myself a safe place to experience the emotions that made me feel unsafe. So even if there are…

LARISSA: There's a purpose and a place and a healing that comes with being able to look at the situation and go, okay, so this is why this and this and okay, process it that way,

JANILEE: Right.

LARISSA: Okay.

JANILEE: So even if we are in that situation where things just feel really unsafe and we're not really sure how we're going to  handle things and we're not sure if we can trust people in our lives, understanding intellectually that you're not crazy, there is actual science that backs this up. And yes, understanding the science helps, but you still have to experience the emotions. It's a balancing act, isn't it?

LARISSA: And I’ve pretty much spent my long, long life trying to only understand it and never feel. And so that makes sense where I'm lacking and where I'm struggling.  It's like the light bulb still is clicking.

JANILEE: Well, and here's the thing too, is you've mentioned that you often feel that you're not worthy and you struggle to feel that worth. So it's not that we spend our life not feeling, it's just that we spend our life not feeling in healthy or helpful ways.

LARISSA: In the healing ways, yeah.

JANILEE: Yeah.  Hopefully this podcast will help us with that. That's part of what I'm trying.  Okay. One other thing that they talk about in this book is being self-referential instead of self-reflective. So we've talked about how narcissists are not self-reflective at all, and that is true, but there is this thing called self-referential. Do you know what that is?

LARISSA: Well, I'm assuming it's reference. So referencing self?

JANILEE: So as you talk to people who are self-referential, they will turn whatever you say back to one of their own experiences.  One of my favorite examples of this was given it was on a talk for single people. And it was, have you ever noticed how single people turn every conversation back to how they're single? Like, “Oh yeah, did you the freeway is under construction?” “Yeah. And I'm still single.” “Hey, did you hear that they're serving free pizza night?” “Yeah. And I'm still single.” Right?  In the context, it was pretty funny. But if we think about it that way, like, we're very referential because we can't even perceive ourselves as three-dimensional beings, so we can't perceive others as three dimensional beings. And so when someone says something that we can relate to, we're going to jump on that, especially if it's an emotionally mature person. And in the system that we don't know how it works because we've only ever functioned in emotionally immature systems with people, when we're in an emotionally mature situation, we're going to be referential so that we feel like we have a place in that system that we feel that we're contributing somehow

LARISSA: And we're part of it. Yeah, okay.

JANILEE: Yeah. So being self-referential again, it's just one of those things. It's like… if you ever talk to a kid, right? If they ask you like, “Oh, how are you doing?” You can be like, “Oh yeah, I went to work.” “Did you take my dinosaur to work? Did you name my dinosaur? Is my dinosaur there helping you? Because I got another dinosaur and let me tell you about my dinosaur.” It's normal.

LARISSA: *laughs*

JANILEE: It's normal, right? This is how we come to understand and experience and develop a sense of self.

LARISSA: No, it makes sense. Yeah. I can picture that with my child right now.

JANILEE: Now on the other side of it, where people are not self-reflective - so if we're dealing with someone who's emotionally immature and leaning more towards that narcissistic side right. They'll say things like, oh, if they caused a problem, they'll dismiss it by saying things like, “Oh, well, I didn't intend to hurt you. That was not my intention. Therefore, I didn't do anything wrong because I didn't intend to hurt you.”

LARISSA: I've seen this on social media where “That didn't happen, and if it did, it wasn't my fault. And if it was, it wasn't that bad. And if it was that bad, it was your fault.”

JANILEE: Yep. Right. And so that's where we get into the difference between, yes, it's hard to be self-reflective, but when you cause something, it is easy. And I've done this where it's like, you shouldn't have been offended. I didn't mean to hurt you. Right. But for me, when I was working on kind of being emotionally self-aware, it would be, “I didn't intend to hurt you, but I'm sorry, how can I not do this again?” Right. It's…

LARISSA: I’m sorry that I harmed you, let me fix it. Exactly.

JANILEE: Yeah. Sorry. I don't mean to keep talking over you.

LARISSA: No, I'm sorry. I don't mean to either.

JANILEE: You're good.  Okay, so let's see if we can just end today. I just want to read one quote to kind of have our conversation end on a note that kind of links back to everything we've talked about further and also what we can talk about going into the future.  So this is again a quote from that book and it says this:

“Terms like self absorbed and narcissistic make it sound as if these people enjoy thinking about themselves all the time but they really have no choice in the matter. They have fundamental doubts about their core worth as human beings. They are profoundly self involved because their development was stunted by anxiety during childhood. In this way, their egocentrism is more like the self preoccupation of someone with a chronic pain condition rather than someone who can't get enough of himself or herself.”

LARISSA: So it's not like they are choosing to be that way, they just don't know any other way.

JANILEE: Right, but here's the difference. And I have had people in my life who've had chronic pain conditions physical, right? If you can have a conversation with someone who has a chronic pain condition.  And you can talk about yourself, then they've learned to manage their pain, and their life doesn't revolve around that pain. Right? But if you talk to someone who only ever talks about the pain, you kind of want to stop hanging out with them because that's all they ever talk about.

LARISSA: Yeah, it's just a circle. It's just a loop.

JANILEE: Right. So I wanted to kind of end with that quote, because here's the thing. If you talk to me for any amount of time, I'm going to bring up the fact that I've been through crap. And it's not because I want attention or because it's all I can talk about. I mean, I can nerd out about all of the things, believe you me. I bring these things up because I find it can be helpful to others.  But I didn't used to do that. I used to meet someone and trauma dump on them. I told them everything that I was going through because I wanted that connection. Because the way that I survived was by having people see… me as a person. And you take that away and there's no me left.  

LARISSA: And see, I spent most of my childhood and life in the shame based portion of that going. I can't let anyone see, you don't air the dirty laundry, and if you do, you're a problem. So instead of even trying to reach out, I just internalized.

JANILEE: But what did you talk about when you did talk with other people?

LARISSA: I was really, really good at small talk and talking about everyone else and not myself.

JANILEE: Yeah, there’s totally different stages of things here, right? I had a time where there were certain things I didn't talk about, and when I did, it was phrased a certain way. And then I got to the point where I'm like, I don't care. I'm talking about all of this and I've gone through phases and I've grown. But the reason that I feel like it's important to end with that is because talking about everything that you've been through and talking about your trauma, it's not always a bad thing. Oftentimes it's not, because nowadays when I bring up trauma that I've been through, sometimes I'll get the response “That helped me. Thank you for sharing that story.” And that's why I still talk about it. But when I talked about it before, I needed that attention and I didn't know that's why I was doing it, but that is why I was trauma dumping on complete strangers.

LARISSA: Okay.

JANILEE: And so the difference here is not necessarily in the action. I'm literally making a podcast where I'm trauma dumping and nerding out about it. Okay?

LAIRSSA: But the intent is to help heal others. Exactly. And that's the difference. And yeah, no, I'm slowly learning that I can talk about these things and bring up examples and I'm not going to be punished and I don't have to fear because of it. So it's helping me. What you're doing is helping me, and I know that, and I'm grateful for that. Hopefully, other people out there too.

JANILEE: Yeah, but if I had trauma dumped on you 5 or 10 years ago, it wouldn't have helped either one of us. Right. And it doesn't mean that if you've trauma dumped, it's a bad thing. It just means be aware of your intentions. Right. Remember that narcissists will be the ones that be like, “Well, I didn't intend to hurt you, so stop talking about it. It's not that big a deal.” Right?

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: So I feel it's kind of important to end, like, a conversation we started it with kind of like some scientific race of, like, you're not crazy. There's a lot of stuff that goes into where we are and how we got here. Right. But ultimately, the final answer to what we started with today is how we got here. We weren't allowed to emotionally be children. We weren't allowed to emotionally discover those self awareness neurons and grow that awesome Mohawk in an fMRI machine.

LARISSA: Yeah. It's the learning. When I was living in the shelter with my child, after some really big stuff, there was a quote that they put up one day, and it was talking about how.  It's okay that you're exhausted because you're finally no longer living in survival mode. And it's okay to be exhausted. It's okay to not be perfect. It's okay to be real because you can't get any better until you do.

JANILEE: And it's okay to eat nothing but Hawaiian pizza and cookie dough ice cream while you watch Jeopardy for months.

LARISSA: Oh, I did that - similar.  It's normal.

JANILEE: Yeah. And whatever I'm doing to survive is normal, and it's just on the path towards healthy. So if you see similarities between yourself and narcissists, it's just because we're all emotionally immature and we're all trying to grow. Well, we are trying to grow, right? And that's the difference, is our intent. But we're worried about what we can do for ourselves and how we can make it through. And hopefully, Larissa and I can continue to help you on that journey.

LARISSA: That's our goal. Yeah.

JANILEE: It is, indeed. All right, Larissa, anything else that you wanted to throw in here at the end?  

LARISSA: Nope. But I think maybe to summarize: genetics cause people to be stuck in situational and environmental situations that have led you to where you are. It is not your fault if you are struggling, if you are, like me, codependent and toxic empath or emotionally immature or wherever you are on whatever spectrum there is. And there are spectrums, and it's okay if you're going, “But I do that. And that's narcissistic.  That does not mean you are a narcissist, and it doesn't mean you are the villain.  It's. You are a product of your environment, and it's the fact that you are self-reflecting and you are looking into what happened. And trying to heal means that there's hope.”

JANILEE: Yeah, I wrote down a quote to kind of end with, and this is from me. So if I'm accidentally ripping someone off, I'm sorry. But it's that “Choices led to and choices lead from now.” Choices of our generations and our ancestors and society. Choices of others have led to now, but our choices will lead from now into our future and the life that we want. So have those emotionally immature reactions, knowing it's completely normal, it's healthy. You're on the road to healing. Because what's important is that you want to heal and that you're trying and that you're even listening to this. Ten out of ten.

LARISSA: And even if you're taking two steps forward and two steps back, you're still trying. Yeah. It's okay.  

JANILEE: Yeah. And we're here for you.

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: So remember, even if you're feeling vilified, you're not always the villain. That's what Larissa is saying.

LARISSA: Yes, definitely.

JANILEE: All right, friends. So join us next week, and we'll keep talking about kind of a second version of how we got to where we are. We'll talk more in depth about this developmental trauma disorder and ways that we can view ourselves and our personal circumstances more complexly. So until then, we…  I don't know. We need a sign off Larissa.

LARISSA: Until then, this is VILIFIED.