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. Each week we talk about life and healing, using question as a starting point. Today we began with this question. I'm out. Now what?  

JANILEE: Mike, drop this early on.

LARISSA: Right.

JANILEE: Oh, man. Okay, I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. I was thinking about this all week and I was trying to come up with  an efficient way to talk about it. I even was, like, messaging and chatting with one of my friends and I was like, “I feel so wholly inadequate to even talk about this. How do you even talk about that space that exists once you are creating a reality of your own?”  

LARISSA: It's such a difficult thing because all of a sudden you realize that your reality isn't messed up and it is real, and that you've just been played so bad. And so you have this anger and this pain and this frustration and this confusion and this trauma bond where you keep wanting to go back to this person and thinking, “Oh, this person was so great to me.” But what you're really not realizing is that it was the illusion of that person. It's not that person. It's what that person sold you on. But it's still so difficult because all of a sudden you start to believe yourself, but you don't want to believe yourself, but you can believe yourself, but you're not sure if you should believe yourself. And it's such a confusing time.

I remember the first time that my reality was validated, and I was sitting in my psychiatrist's office, and the psychiatrist was like, “Sweetie, what happened? What you're talking about? It happened.” And I went, “No, no, I was told it didn't. I was told and had to tell people that it didn't. I was told I was a liar. I was forced to write letters telling people I had lied.  I was called a ‘little shit’ and ‘a liar’. And, no, that can't be accurate. Are you sure? And THAT’S why I'm failing out of college, is because my reality is THAT screwed up. Are you sure?” And her being like, “Sweetie, you're going to realize that one day life isn't this hard.” And the light bulb just clicked over my head, but at the same time, it was this sudden panic of, “If life isn't this hard, why has it always been this hard?”

JANILEE: “Why is my life the one that's been this hard?”

LARISSA: Exactly.

JANILEE: And I know we talked about last week how some people just genuinely don't understand how to have a pair of socks angrily folded at them. It's like, okay, “So if some people genuinely don't understand that, why has this been my life experience? Why is this something that I have to go through?” And also  for me, at least when you have that realization of, “Okay, well, life doesn't have to be this hard, and it shouldn't be, well, then I'm doing it wrong because I'm the odd one out. I'm the statistic that's off the chart where life has been this hard for me, so what have I been doing wrong?” And we put a lot of that blame on ourselves.  

LARISSA: Exactly. I remember in high school, one of my teachers saying, “You've had such a hard life already,” and me stupidly in the infinite wisdom of 14 or 15, being like, yeah, I'm getting all the hard stuff out of the way now. And the bemused look on her face that I could not comprehend at that age. And now I look back and go, “Yeah, I was an idiot.” But at the same time, {you say} “Yeah, I needed to grow and, yeah, I needed to do certain things, and all of my experiences have forced me to do that and have forced me to overcome so much of the damage and the pain.” That doesn't mean I don't go back into trauma mind. It doesn't mean that I'm not still damaged. I'm healing, not healed.

JANILEE: Right.

LARISSA: The chances I might still go off on people is still pretty high.

JANILEE: Right? Well, and here's the thing. When you have gone through something that is literally life altering traumatic, your entire life will be healing from that. I actually had someone, a friend, reach out to me and was like, hey, I'm experiencing a trauma response. And you're, like, one of the only people I feel safe talking to when I'm in this space, because they knew that if they acted like an emotionally immature child, which we all do, that I would be like, “You're normal. It's all good. We'll still be friends. Everything like that.” Right? And it was really hard for me to have to point out to this friend, “Yeah, that's normal.” You're never going to get to a place where you're not reacting to the trauma. You're never going to get to a place where you're just healed and you're over it and that your entire life will be

LARISSA: Primroses and pixies?

JANILEE: No, your entire life will be healing from the trauma and having trauma responses less and less often. And then after a couple of years, for me, it took a couple of years of I'm to the point where I see a trauma, like a trauma response happening, and I can be like, “That's a trauma response. I know how to deal with it,” and I can move forward in my life, and it's not as disruptive to my life as a whole, but that doesn't mean that they don't happen. And pretending that they aren't happening is not helpful. It's worse.

LARISSA: I get it. I mean, I'm only a couple of months out of a really bad situation, and, I still have days where I'm like, “Oh, I should go back. Oh, it wasn't so bad.” And I'm going, “I'm gaslighting myself. What is wrong with me?”

JANILEE: Right? And remember the simple slide definition. Just a quick reminder for everyone. Gaslighting is: “Your reality is not correct, and that you're perceiving it differently,” right? And even if, let's say, that you had to leave someone else in that environment, for me, it was my siblings. When anything happens with my siblings, there's a part of me that's just like, “I shouldn't have left, right?” Like, oh, I think that something happened to my siblings, or if I have a night terror, that something happened to them. My first reaction is, “I shouldn't have left. If I had stayed, it wouldn't have turned out this way.” And I can honestly feel those things and then say to myself, that is not true. I know that if I had stayed, I would still be part of this reality. I wouldn't be helpful. I wouldn't be useful in any term, in any way. But that doesn't stop me from feeling those things so deeply that every part of me wants to go back. And every part of me is like, “No, I could have fixed it. I could have stopped this from getting worse for these people that mean the world to me. “ 

LARISSA: And that's the thing, is it's so difficult for the person, the survivor, the thriver to not look at the people that still have to be in that situation and go, “I don't want them to suffer either. I've been through so much. I want to protect them from this.” But at the same time, remembering, “You can't be marlin from Finding Nemo.”

JANILEE: Yeah

LARISSA: You have to let them experience their brain revolution, for lack of a better term, their ability to grow from the situation and realize this on their own or it will be like a manufactured thing for them and they will end up going back. 

JANILEE: Like we've talked about before. Not only will they go back, there's a good chance they'll bring you with them.

LARISSA: Exactly.

JANILEE: Because you cannot save someone who's drowning if they don't want to be saved. And just taking a moment here and looking like just pausing. Because if you have left there's very high likelihood that you have left people that you know in those situations.

LARISSA: Yeah

JANILEE: Being able to look and see them hurt and not do anything is so hard. It's almost harder. It feels, at least for me, it feels almost harder than going through it myself to just sit back and watch and say, “I'm powerless to help them.” Because we've been powerless our entire life. And the first time that we realize we have power, we use that power to make a decision, and that decision is to leave, we feel powerless again. Where did that power that empowered us to make that decision? Where did it go? It's gone. And we're just in this space completely and totally alone.

LARISSA: Yep. And I've been there. I've been in that situation where I'm like, “I shouldn't have left because now this person's going to suffer. And these horrible things that were threatened to me or said to me or done it against me are going to happen to this person. And I can't let that happen. I love that person. I don't want that person to suffer.” And it would be so much easier to just go back. But then you're not going to be there for that person the way that they need you to be there for them when they finally do come out of it. And that's a really important thing to realize, is that you cannot be there for anybody else if you don't first have that mask on your face for yourself on that airplane.

JANILEE: And also realizing that and this is something that I do when I make decisions, like if I'm going to audition for anything, I have to be okay, or if I'm going to apply for a job, which I view very similarly in my head. But if I'm going to put myself out there, I have to be okay with getting the job or the part, and I have to be okay with not getting the job or the part. And then whatever outcome happens, I'm still going to feel the feelings, the excitement or a disappointment, but it's not going to completely and totally turn my life upside down. And so that was what was really really hard. As soon as I put that wall came down and I said, “No, I'm not engaging with you anymore to my abuser, right?” Who, in this case was my mom. Women can be abusive too, trust me.

LARISSA: Yes.

JANILEE: But in that situation, she started using everyone in my life as a pawn, and she wanted to play this game of chess. And this is going to sound really silly, but the way that I kind of conceptualized that have you ever watched High School Musical Two?

LARISSA: Yes.

JANILEE: At the end, like near the end, Gabrilla walks up to Charpet and says, “You are really good at a game that I don't want to play, so I'm done here.” And that's exactly how I felt. My mom's setting up these chess pieces and using my siblings as pawns. And for me to be able to say to my mom and I didn't actually say it to her, right? This is just something I said to myself, something that I expressed to the people in my life who were allowing me to feel things to therapists, right? Like, to those types of people. I was never actually able to say it to my mom, but in order for me to say it and feel it and know that it was true, I had to be okay walking away. I had to be okay with the possibility that my siblings will never, ever talk to me again and that they will hate me for the rest of their lives. And that tears me apart inside. But in order sorry, go ahead.

LARISSA: I was going to say, I remember the first time you said, “You have to be okay with letting the other person suffer, and you have to be okay with letting the people around that person suffer.” And I went, “Oh, my gosh, am I there? And. Am I able to do that? And how do I get to that point?” Because that's such a difficult thing to do, to be able to shut off that feeling when you start to feel and when you start to have all these emotions again, to shut off certain ones and leave other ones open. And it’s, yeah. 

JANILEE: Can I tweak something you said? Yeah. Let's not say that “We're shutting off emotions” because in order to heal, you have to feel.  

LARISSA: Right.

JANILEE: So it's not “Shutting off emotions,” but it's feeling those emotions and responding to them appropriately. It's feeling those emotions and crying your eyes out and not being able to get out of bed for two days and talking about it relentlessly for a month straight as you go to therapy. Right. It's dealing with the emotions in a way that doesn't involve going back into that toxic, abusive environment.

LARISSA: I like that much better. Yeah. You're not shutting down the emotion, the feeling. You're shutting down the trauma bond.

JANILEE: Right. You're doing things differently than the way that you've always done them before.

LARISSA: Exactly.

JANILEE: There was something I saw that I feel. I want to point out right here. If you have a broken ankle and where said, you're a nurse, so if you were to have a broken ankle and you could look down and say, “Okay, so this bone was fractured at this point, and in order for the bone to be fixed, we have to do this, this and this,” right. You would understand that intellectually, right?

LARISSA: {laughing and nodding her head} Oh, yeah. And I also understand why the pain is there.

JANILEE: But it's not going to stop you from feeling the pain. Right?

LARISSA: Correct. I would be saying: “The pain is there for a reason. This amount of pain is acceptable. This amount is not. I'm going to treat this amount at this point.”

JANILEE: And you're still going to be in pain.

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: And it's the same thing when we deal with emotions. And that's part of why we talked in the past how “Janilee intellectualizes her emotions. Yeah. No shit. I know.” But knowing that doesn't fix the fact that in order to get through those emotions, I still have to feel them and I still have to be in pain.

LARISSA: You still have to ride the wave of the emotion.

JANILEE: Yeah. And sometimes that can be hard, to just say, “Yeah, I'm going to be in pain. I'm going to watch other people in pain. I am going to be powerless after this moment of feeling empowered, everything's going to be crumbling around me. I'm barely going to be able to function. And this is progress?! This is growth?! This is a good thing?!”

LARISSA: And it is in the long run, because you have to break before you can be put back together properly.

JANILEE: Yeah. And we've talked in the past about you actually said this, and I don't remember what episode, because I have yes, Larissa, you said this. I don't remember which episode because I've been editing a lot of them, but you said that: “We're not going to believe in ourselves, but we're going to hope in ourselves.” And I thought that was really beautiful. Yes, you are very wise.

LARISSA and JANILEE: {laughing a little with each other}

LARISSA: I listened to the first episode and went, “Wow, I sound smart.”  

JANILEE: Just kind of like breaking the fourth wall for a second here. If you're listening to the podcast, I actually made fun of Larissa because she does this thing where when she's putting her thoughts together, she has pauses in between words. And so it would be: “I…was…thinking…the…other…day,” I have to go through and I have to remove the positive so that it becomes “I was thinking the other day,” I'm like, we're going to wait for solid 15 seconds just for Larissa to get a thought out. Right. And then the number of times I say right, and I just did it, I'm like, Right. I need this constant reassurance that what I'm saying is making sense and that I know what I'm talking about. Right. I just, I did it again! Larissa and I are humans and we make so many mistakes.

JANILEE and LARISSA: {laughing at ourselves}

LARISSA: By the way, there is no such thing as a tur-chicken. I Googled.

JANILEE: Oh, yes.

LARISSA: The tur-chicken does not exist because apparently they are two different species. I'm sure eventually somebody can make a combination. But there is a Turkin.

JANILEE: What is a Turkin?

LARISSA: A Turkin is a featherless-necked chicken.

JANILEE: Maybe Larissa just really wanted the Turkin. {Both hosts laughing again} 

LARISSA: Right?!

JANILEE: Yeah, you texted that to me and I was like, “Wow, okay, well, you learn something new every day.” Right?

LARISSA: There is Turk-chicken, but it's cat food, and that's not fun. I don't have cats.

JANILEE: Yeah, I have a dog.

LARISSA: I like both cats and dogs.

JANILEE: Tangent aside, right?

LARISSA: Sorry {squirrel moment}

JANILEE: It's weird for me to listen to the podcast when I'm editing them because I'm like, “We sound so wise, and we sound like we have our shit together.” We don't! {emphasis added to transcript} How many times have we talked to each other? And we're just like, {intangible sounds as words}

LARISSA: “Here's my verbal diarrhea for you for the moment,” because I just can't cope anymore. Yeah, exactly.

JANILEE: There is some editing. I do try and keep a reasonable amount of saying “uuu” or “ummm’s” or those filler words because we're human. But I also want it to be something you can listen to at a pace where you're not just “Golly, Larissa, finish your sentence.”

LARISSA: {both hosts still laughing} You're not banging your head against the wall.

JANILEE: And I'm picking on Larissa. I know, I know. But things as well where I hear myself say, right? I was editing the first Just Janilee episode, and I was just like. Like, not the snorting, but like every time I took a breath it was so loud and I had to cut it out. And I'm like, “Every 2 seconds I'm cutting out. Not 2 seconds, but I'm like every other phrase I'm cutting out my breathing because I'm like, right by the microphone.” And I got so annoyed with myself. And so I was like, listening. I'm like, “Here it comes, here it comes.” {both hosts laughing} “Yes, I know I sound like I'm hyperventilating again.”

LARISSA: No, I mean and that's the thing, is we're both human. We sound like we are well put together. But we both have times where we're calling each other or we're calling a friend and we're saying, “Help me get out of the spiral that I've put myself in. Help me cope with the trauma that I'm experiencing at this moment so that I can keep moving through my trauma. Help me rationalize this and make this make sense.”

JANILEE: I was talking to a friend earlier today where we were talking about a third party. A third friend, right? And I was talking about how this third person didn't understand why I viewed things a certain way and I needed that reassurance. And I literally said to this friend I'm talking to, “I'm not crazy, right?” Like, “The way that I view these things and the things that I am or am not willing to do or change my thinking on it doesn't mean that I'm the prideful one.” And my friend was like, “No! knowing you and what you've gone through, it makes perfect sense. But this third person doesn't know that this person hasn't gone through it with you. This person hasn't been that person on the other end of the phone begging you to not kill yourself so that I can talk to you in a couple of hours, right?”

LARISSA: Yeah

JANILEE: Like, that level of having gone through it is immense. When I was looking into, I went through a million ideas of this podcast, and one thing, like one repeated fear I had was, “I'm not a clinician.  What do I have to offer? Why should anyone listen to me over people who've literally gone to school and studied this?” And I came across a quote, and I don't remember where or I would cite it, but it basically is “Lived, experience, is expertise, and if you want to know how to make it through trauma, ask a trauma survivor.”

LARISSA: Yes. And it's the truth.

JANILEE: Yeah. So in this moment, right in this space that we're spending this entire podcast in “Of you left, and now what?” Everything is just tumultuous, right?

LARISSA: You feel like your world is completely upside down.  I remember saying hourly, “There is nothing more I can take. There is nothing else that can be put on me.  I can't take anything more.” And then something else would happen. And I'd be like, “{explitives}” That’s completely normal. Okay? And you have permission to feel that way. You have permission to feel like your entire world has crumbled down around you and you don't know what to do, because that’s exactly where you need to to start rebuilding. And it takes so much time and so much effort. But once you start to learn how to rebuild, it's going to become easier and easier every time you have to

JANILEE: I heard a phrase once: “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

LARISSA: Ooohh! I like that quote.

JANILEE: If you hit rock bottom. Jeez, you're going to have a great future if you can make it through. And I'm not discounting how hard it is to make it through.

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: Larissa and I have wide eyes looking at each other right now. Like oh, no.

LARISSA: Yeah. I'm trying so hard to not over, like, over talk you and say “But, yeah, it was sooo difficult. Rock bottom. I thought I wouldn't survive, and I thought it was gonna I thought I was gonna die, and yeah.”

JANILEE: Yeah. I mean, it's all of these emotions, they just come out of the woodwork, and if you've never really felt emotions before, and now that you're feeling emotions, they're terrifying.

Can we talk for a second about some things that people might do that can make things worse?  Yes. For instance, let's say we're reasonable people and we can understand that someone's trying to help me, but what they're saying is actually making things worse. Larissa, what do you do in that situation when you know that a person is trying to help you, but you would be better off if they just shut up?  

LARISSA: There's one of three things I do. Depending on the person, depending on my level of connection to that person, and depending on their authority over me type situation situation, I will either say, “But in this situation, this is completely different. And here is why.”

JANILEE: What if you can’t articulate “Why?”  

LARISSA: Then I just don't say why.  For example, “I'm going through hell. I'm pregnant. You're equating me moving in the snow to when you had to move in the snow while pregnant, but you had a supportive husband, and I don't.”

JANILEE: Thank you.

LARISSA: And I felt horrible doing that because I felt like I was being aggressive, not assertive. But when you're first starting out how to do it, you're going to feel it's aggressive until you get to that point. And I then followed up with, “I'm not trying to discount your experience. I'm just saying this is why this is so much more difficult for me. This is why I'm terrified. This is why this” and if I can't articulate that, if it's somebody saying, “Well, you had kids with the dude.” I'm going, “Well, I didn't know he was going to be a complete pile of poo. What do you want for me?” Is what I think in my head. But I don't always say it out loud. Sometimes I just go, “Yeah,” and walk away. Because there’s a saying in psychiatric nursing and in care of the psychiatric people, and what it is, is “Sometimes you can't fight the crazy.” {For example} I had an inmate when I was a nurse in the prison who was convinced that somebody had broken into his cell in the middle of the night and stuck a stick in his ear. And I remember first asking the officers, “Did you check the security footage to make sure nobody stuck a stick in his ear? Because I just want to make sure we've ruled this out. I know he hasn't taken his meds for a long time, and he's pretty psycho. He is the reason the cuckoo clock went cuckoo, and he is the taco and the platter short of the taco platter. But is there some logistics here that could have happened?” And they're like, “Yeah, we did that first because we knew you'd ask.” So I show up down there, and the poor guy had the most raging ear infection I had ever seen in my life. And as the goop came out of his ear, officers were puking. I {have} sucked snot out of people's trach’s and vents, and this almost made me throw up type sick. And I'm all, “Okay, I think I found the stick in your ear. Do I have permission to remove it?” Because I wasn't about to tell the guy, “Oh, you don't have a stick. You have an infection,” when he is dead set convinced that there's a stick in his ear, I'm going to work with the stick, because I have seen where you have dementia patients, and they're like, “There's something on my back. There's something on my back.” And you just go and pinch their back, and they're like, “Oh, thank you.”

JANILEE: Well, and think of a child as well, right?

LARISSA: Yeah, exactly.

JANILEE: “There's a monster under my bed. There's a monster in my closet.” “Let me check for you.”

LARISSA: Right? Exactly, “Let's do this.” Yeah.

JANILEE: What you're doing is you're validating their reality that they're in, and you're like, “Okay, I'll check for a monster. I'm pretty sure there's not a monster under the bed. And if there is, monsters, Inc. Is real, and the world is so much better.” But on the off chance that there's not a monster, you're still doing it because you're validating their experience, right? And you have dementia patients, or you have people who are genuinely crazy, and we'll get into diagnoses later. Don't worry. But you also have people who are emotionally immature, who are children, feeling and experience things for the first time, and that's where you are right now. And sometimes you need that validation.

LARISSA: Yeah. And it's okay to need that validation, and it's okay to seek that validation, but you might not get it from everyone. And that's where it's really important to stay strong in your personal knowledge that you are not crazy. It is okay. Your reality is your reality. And unless you're being told by a psychiatrist.  After a psychiatric eval that you are the crazy one. Do not let people tell you you're crazy, because you probably aren't.

JANILEE: Totally. You mentioned two things that you do. One is you explain why, if you're able to engage in a healthy conversation with a person. The second thing is, if you're not able to engage, you just walk away. I would like to suggest the third thing you can do if someone is trying to help you, but they're not to say, “Can you just watch TV with me? Can you just exist with me?”

LARISSA: Ask for what you need.

JANILEE: Right. Ask for what you need. And we ended last podcast episode talking about this. It's okay to ask for what you need. Someone asked me what I needed once, and I was like, “I really want some ginger ale and some crackers. Like, I'm not throwing up, but the amount of emotional turmoil I'm going through, I feel like I'm going to,” and they just went to the store and brought me back some ginger ale and some crackers.

LARISSA: And see, that's such a wonderful thing. And being able to advocate for what you need is healthy, normal, you have permission to do it. And if you don't know what you need in that moment, it's okay to say, “I don't know what I need in this moment. Can you just sit here with me until I know?”

JANILEE: Yeah. And the thing is, sometimes when people ask, “Hey I want to help you. I want to help you,” oftentimes they want to make your sadness go away because it makes them uncomfortable. And you can even explain that. Like, hey, I was listening to a podcast, and it said this one person on there said that: “Sometimes you want my sadness to go away because it's making you uncomfortable. If you would try to sit with me and be comfortable in my sadness with me, it would be nice to not experience the sadness alone.”

LARISSA: Exactly. And I have had situations where I've asked for that, where I've said, “I'm feeling really anxious right now. I'm not able to cope right now. I need support.” And you're not always going to get it. Unfortunately. It's important to remember that some people are not emotionally mature enough, or they're narcissistic or whatever their situation might be, where they are not able to help you in that moment. I've been told, “Well, you need to search the fuck!ng Lord.” And I'm standing there going, “Well, thanks. That was helpful. Because in the history of telling people to calm down, telling someone to calm down has ever made them calm down.” You know?

JANILEE: But it's the whole idea of, “Oh, you're depressed. Have you tried being happy?” “Oh, my goodness! My depression is cured! Thank you! I don't know why I didn't think of that!”

LARISSA: Exactly. And it's so impossible for some people to be there in that moment. And if they can't be there, that's not a reflection of you. That's a reflection of where they are emotionally.

JANILEE: Right?

LARISSA: And just know that that person might not be the person you turn to next time you need help, next time you're struggling.

JANILEE: And also, that doesn't mean that this person doesn't want to help. It doesn't mean that this person can't help you in other ways. Maybe this person is best running errands for you because they want to help you. But being in those emotionally nitty gritty situations are hard. Right? I remember the first time walked a friend through:

“Hey, my partner is really struggling in life.”

And I'm like, “Cool. You can't fix any of the things. Like, we went through their situation. You can't fix anything.”

“So what do I do?”

“Be there.”

“But I want to fix it.”

“You can't.”

“But, but, but”

“You can't {just fix it}. Be there. Just be there.”

“But”

“I know you want to, but you can't.”

And it was just like this cycle of a conversation when this friend finally realized, “Okay, I can't fix it, but I can just watch TV with them. I can just be there. I can maybe do laundry. Right?” They can do little things. Right. There are some people, though, who say things that can be really problematic, and I wanted to go through just a couple of those.  

LARISSA: I think “Seek the fuck!ng Lord” is one of them, just in case you were curious.

JANILEE: Sorry, what?

LARISSA: One of the problematic things that could be said to you is: “Seek the fuck!ng Lord” or “Calm down” or “Stop being depressed.” Those things not helpful, right?

JANILEE: Or sometimes one that and I struggle to say this because these are people who were extraordinarily crucial to me getting better, and there's a good chance they'll be listening to this podcast. And I don't want them to feel bad, but in the sake of being open and completely clear, I was often told to “Stop letting my mother live rent free in my head.” As if she was so easy to evict.

LARISSA: Yeah, because it's not easy to evict the itty bitty, shitty committee that gets planted in your brain by the cruddy people in your life. And telling your brain, “Stop letting the person live there” does not work. And that is such a tough one, because, yes, you're trying to learn how to do that, and you're working very hard to do this. That does not mean you're going to be able to. It doesn't mean that you won't get to that point. You're just not there yet.

JANILEE: Right. And like we mentioned at the beginning, it will repeat one as well that I don't like is the song popped in my head. But “What doesn't kill you makes you stronger".” Yeah, in some situations.

LARISSA: My response to that has always been, “Just because it makes me stronger doesn't mean I want to be stronger. It broke me.” 

JANILEE: Okay, listen to this.

LARISSA: Okay

JANILEE: Instead of saying “Those who've experienced trauma are stronger because of it, recognize it wasn't the trauma that made them stronger. It was healing from it. There was no choice in healing strength. Birthed from hyper vigilance to survive isn't as beneficial as you think.” Combined with someone put it in a little less therapeutic way and said, “I almost thanked you for teaching me something about survival back there. But then I remembered that the ocean never handed me the gift of swimming. I gave that to myself.”

LARISSA: Exactly. It's kind of like saying, “Shout out to my ex. Because now I'm living my best life.” I'm living my best life because of my efforts, not because of my ex. The only reason why the ex is is not in the picture is because of myself.

JANILEE: Or one that I hear often is, “I am not the way I am because of my parents. I am the way I am in spite of my parents.”  Everything we just did in the last, like 30 seconds to a minute.  It is doing nothing more than reframing the way that we think about things. It just allows us to feel differently about this situation that we're in. Right. I mean, if we go back to the original question of the episode, “I'm out now. What?” “Survive.” That's my answer. Do whatever you have to do to survive. You will, over time, get to a point where maybe you feel like you can start rebuilding on that rock bottom that you've hit. But in the meantime, make yourself comfortable, as comfortable as you can be existing at that rock bottom.

LARISSA: Without compromising yourself. Survive. Because it would be easy in that situation to go into new toxic things to go into, “Well, I'm now living on the streets. What do I do? Okay, I'm going to sell myself on the streets.” That's not what we're saying. Or “Go steal to eat.” We're saying, “Within the confines of staying true to yourself. Survive, and eventually you will be able to thrive.”

JANILEE: Yeah.  I found another quote that has an unknown source. It says this: “Unless you are a survivor of emotional abuse, you have no idea what it means to fight daily battles in your head with a person you no longer have contact with. Verbal, emotional, and physical abuse has residual effects on survivors. You don't just get over it.” I remember when I was in one of my darker spots, I confided in someone close to me, and it was a risk. I didn't know this person that well. Looking back, I'm glad I did, because we're still really close. But I confided in them that my depression was just debilitating. And this was when I was in this was, like, a month after a suicide attempt. So we're talking, like, deep depression. And what ended up happening is, over the next couple of months, this person would send me a quote about depression or send me a fact about depression and be like, “Oh, my gosh, I can't believe you're doing this.” Right? One of them was, “Even if you don't get out of bed, the amount of energy you're putting into fighting your demons inside is admirable.” And so this person cared enough about me to look into it. And this podcast is mainly for people who've been through shit, but if you also want to help someone who's been through shit, look into it, find these things and say, “I can't believe you fight demons in your head every day. That's impressive!” Because it felt so validating when I was struggling so hard to have someone actively looking and educating themselves about what depression actually is like and then being able to say, “Wow, I am impressed that you're able to make it through this.“ 

LARISSA: Yeah, I can relate. It's so difficult to shut down that committee in your brain, going a mile a minute and looking back at the past and judging yourself and saying, “This person said this,” and “Then this person said the same thing, and I'm too broken for a relationship, and obviously it was my fault. And obviously, if more than two people say something, it probably is true,” when in actual reality, it was two people who were very broken, who were hurting me because of their brokenness.

JANILEE: So here's something kind of like a question: “Have you ever worried that you wouldn't be able to heal because you don't know why you were broken?”

LARISSA: Yes!

JANILEE: Okay.

LARISSA: I still do to this day. And it's not just Janilee who's been down that path of suicidal depression. I have been there.  I have been to the point where I literally thought nobody wanted me alive and that everybody would be happier if I joined them. And it is not the case. It. But I've been there and I've been there more than once in my life. I've just made a commitment to never again act on it and it is a completely rational and normal thing {for survivors of abuse to contemplate or even attempt suicide. We are not encouraging anyone to act on the impulse, we just understand that this abuse can lead a person to this point}. When you are in the crux of narcissistic abuse

JANILEE: or really being out of it

LARISSA: Or just getting out of it or any of the abuse and everything's hitting you at once and all of the pain is there and you are going through so much to feel like it would just be better. I was reading an article about a woman who left her physical, emotional, financial, spiritual, all of the above abuser. The abuser got custody of the kids and she killed herself. And I remember when I left the situation with my daughter thinking “She is the only reason I'm surviving, she is the only reason I'm getting my butt out of bed every day is because she is dependent on me.” And in that moment, she kept me alive. And so I could not even imagine what it would be like to not have that person that got me out of bed every day for probably three years in my life on the regular. I mean there were days where she went and spent time with the other people and I spent most of them crazy cleaning wherever I was living and manically stressed and wanting to drink as much as I could or numb the pain or do whatever and terrified out of my wits end but, there's a quote that talks about grief, and it talks about how “The pain never actually goes away. What happens is you build scar tissue in your brain over that pain,  and it eventually dulls the pain.” And that has happened for me. I could now send my daughter off on her visits and be like, “Okay, what's gonna happen is gonna happen”, you know? Um.

JANILEE: And not spend all of the time that she's gone with these maladaptive coping skills. And that's the technical term for it, but  in the moment is doing whatever it takes to survive.

LARISSA: Exactly. And so sorry, I think we went off on another tangent.

JANILEE: That's okay. I like when we go off on tangents, because here's what I'm thinking. Larissa, let's have an episode in the future on suicide.

LARISSA: Okay, done.

JANILEE: And here's the thing. We mentioned things, and every time I'm editing the podcast, I have a list that I write down. It's like “We mentioned we'll talk about this.” So even if it's not like the next episode, we WILL talk about these things. But I do want to throw it out there, just because we are talking and we did go off on this tangent, just a slight way to re-frame suicide that helped me was: “People who are suicidal don't necessarily want to kill themselves, but they want something about their life to end,” and often that can be an internal experience. So it's not that I wanted to die. It was just that I wanted to stop being tortured by the demons in my mind.

LARISSA: Exactly, sucking my energy out of me.

JANILEE: Yeah. And understanding for me that it wasn't because you have all of these stigmas around suicide, and we'll talk about those in a suicide-specific episode, but all of these things okay, I'm going to go off on a little tangent for a second, and I guess it's kind of getting back on the main road. It doesn't matter. These are just conversations. They just happen. And I sound weird and throw out weird accents, apparently. Okay. Do you know who Steven Fry is?

LARISSA: Yes. I think

JANILEE: He's an actor.  I have only seen him in one thing. I haven't seen a lot of movies. I know, it's shocking. Everyone who's ever heard that is like “Oh” and I'm like, “Yeah, breathe. It's okay. Just deep breath in, deep breath out. Okay.” But I have seen Bones, the TV show, and he shows up in Bones as a psychologist, and they call him Dr. Gordon. Gordon,

LARISSA: Yes! Okay, I know who you're talking about.

JANILEE: Yeah, that guy. Okay, so I saw he was giving an interview, and I was like, “Hey, I know that guy. He plays a funny dude on a TV show that I really like.” So I listened in, and he talks about how there were three things that can help you when you're in these types of situations that we're talking about today:

One.  Understand that it's real. Like you said, your therapist the first time, your reality is validated, right? It's real. It happened to you. You're not crazy.  It is real.

{Two} The second thing is understanding that it is out of your control. Is it raining inside your soul, yes, but it is also out of your control. You don't get to control the weather. And this is where a lot of the neurology and like the neurophysio, how your body works,

LARISSA: Neurophisiological {both hosts laughing}

JANILEE:  I can't speak words! A lot of that is very interesting. And I'm sure there's a Just Janilee episode that's coming out soon that's going to talk about it probably. But those things, they're really happening and you don't really get to control it.

{Three} And understanding the third thing he mentioned is that it will pass. And I know I'm not doing a very good job of summing up what he said, but essentially it's real, it's out of your control and it will pass. And just kind of clinging to those three things can really help as well. I do want to touch just really quick on. We were talking about how sometimes it's hard to heal and we don't know why it happened. And we talked about “Why, why, why?” You ended an episode earlier by saying: “We'll probably never get to the bottom of that.” Right? There is a psychologist who, his name is Matthias J. Barker, and he has his own podcast. And he mentioned this on episode three of his podcast. So I'll link it in the show notes, but here's a little clip of it that I just wanted to share. You ready?

“When we go through something traumatic, we want to know why they did it, why they left, why.  It doesn't seem to bother them why they won't just admit it. These questions swirl around, and it could feel like our healing is dependent on knowing why. That's not how healing works. You don't need to know why to heal a wound. That's not how you heal physical wounds, and that's not how you heal emotional wounds. I'm not saying it's not a valid question. I'm just saying your healing isn't contingent on it. In a situation where the person in question isn't available to answer that,  you're not alone. Healing is still there.”  

LARISSA: Yeah, I know. For myself, that rationalizing it by saying, “Well, they were broken. They had a tumultuous upbringing, they were hurt by so many different people.” All of those were excuses. They were a grown adult making their own choices. I did my darnest to make sure that I didn't take my childhood or my adulthood and apply it to that person and harm that person. So knowing that all I'm doing is giving them an excuse for why they did what they did, and that just opens the door for more harm by them or somebody else. And so it's important to realize they may never know why. They may never be able to articulate why. Therefore, you may never get to find out. And  just because they're broken doesn't mean that you have to fix them. That's where you're going to get into a codependent relationship with somebody is if you're saying, “Oh, they're broken, it's okay that they're doing this to me.” No, it's not. Just because they're broken doesn't mean that they get to break somebody else.

JANILEE: Yeah. And it's a normal thing to wonder. These are normal questions to ask. “Why this? Why this? Well, they're broken that,” like I want to explain why my mom could treat me in such a terrible way.

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: But even in cases like with me, one thing, one rationalization I used a lot generational trauma, right? Might happen to my mom and happened to my grandma. So of course it's happening to me is realizing that I stopped it. And that's partly why I love the phrase, “Cheers to the chain breakers.” I broke the chain of generational trauma. It was possible for my mom to do so as well. She chose not to because it's hard. And that's something as well, when people want to do these things or thinking about leaving. And I hope that Larissa and I have done a good job of explaining it, but it is hard. And no matter how hard it is to explain or tell you, it is going to be harder. It's going to be harder than you imagined. And it takes all of the strength. And I even have friends where I'll mention something, right, they're talking about their childhood. I'm like, “Oh, here's a memory from my childhood.” And then everyone goes silent and I'm like.

LARISSA: Horrible looks from everybody else in the room.  

JANILEE: Right?

LARISSA: Oh, that's not normal? Oops…

JANILEE: Yeah. And I even have friends who will say that and just repeat over and over again.  I don't know if I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but a very weird compliment I get very often is, “How are you not a serial killer?” And they mean it genuinely, because you listen to any documentary or you read a book about a serial killer and their environment and their circumstances are the same, but the difference is the person and the difference is you. And the difference is what you choose to do. And you have the ability to break that chain, but it's not going to be easy. And the more that people learn about the details of your past, these are the people who want to like the friends I've talked about, but these are the people who are like, “How in the hell did you make it out?

LARISSA: “How in the hell are you alive?”  

JANILEE: “How did you not kill yourself?”

LARISSA: Yeah. “How did you not kill yourself?” “How are you still standing?” “How are you so well put together?” And I look at them and I'm like, “Well, I'm really not.  I'm faking it till I make it.” And at the same time “I'm put together because I don't have another option.”

JANILEE: Yeah.  

LARISSA: Yeah, because “I'm making the choice to not give myself that choice to break. You either bend or you break. And so I bend and I'm breaking that chain by bending and changing myself.” And, yeah, it's a lot of work. It's not easy. It is one of the hardest things I will ever do in my life. And I sumited mount St. Helen city 18 with no training.  I did pointe ballet in college.  I've done some tough stuff and I still don't really know how I did those things,  did them somehow. Magic. Magic for me. But at the same time, I made a choice to do these things and I made a choice to start this path. And maybe it's that I'm just so stubborn headed and thick skull that I'm like, screw this, I'm not turning around.

JANILEE: Its a useful skill to have.

LARISSA: Yeah, it is determination and true grit is not easy to have. But you choose where you're going to put your strength. Like I've said before, “Everybody has that strength within them.” 

You're choosing to break that chain.

You're choosing to do the hard thing because it's going to make it better for everyone else later and because your life will be flourishing later.

JANILEE: To quote Larissa from a past episode, “You don't believe in yourself, but you have hope in yourself,” and maybe you don't have hope. I used to hate that word because I hated hope. The idea of hope was illogical. It was irrational. I'm still ridiculously cynical, and I have one friend who's ridiculously optimistic. He actually is helping with PR for this. So Larissa has met him.  

LARISSA: Oh, he is amazing!

JANILEE: He's a ridiculously optimistic person.

LARISSA: Yeah. I do not understand how he's been through what he's been through and is still so optimistic. But, hey, I'm thrilled for him that he has that ability, because yeah. 

JANILEE: And I've been through what I've been through, and I'm cynical, and Larissa has been through what she's been through, and she's Larissa. And the point is, there's no wrong way to get through what you're going through. You can be an illogically optimistic person. You can be really cynical and really protective. There's no wrong way to get through what you're going through. You you got out. Now what? Keep going.  

LARISSA: That's the answer is keep on the path, keep making the good choices, keep taking the high road, not because it's going to get you there faster or it's going to be easy, but because it's the more beautiful path and because it's going to give you more reward in the long run and because you're on the warriors {path}. You're in for the war, not the battle.

JANILEE: Yeah, I love that. Larissa, can we talk about one other thing?

LARISSA: Course.

JANILEE: Okay, so you are a nurse, and you understand that there's this physical body and it does this thing, right? That was a really dumb question.

LARISSA: There are a lot of “Things”

{both hosts laugh}

LARISSA: Yes. I took lots of anatomy and physiology. What are you asking?

JANILEE: Okay, can you explain to us very briefly? Pretend that I'm like a child. What is the central nervous system?

LARISSA: So the central nervous system is basically the thing that makes your body function. It starts with your brain, and you have three different parts to that. And then it goes down your spine down into the vagus nerve, which is the longest running nerve in your body, and it ends in your butt.

JANILEE: Ok, that way the anatomy of what the central nervous system is?

LARISSA: Yes.

JANILEE: What does the central nervous system do?

LARISSA: It controls your entire body. It controls fight or flight. It controls your digestion, it controls your breathing, your pulse, your blood pressure. So an interesting thing, my central nervous system, my parasympathetic and sympathetic, autonomic-or automatic-nervous system is completely haywire. I think it's related to the trauma.  

JANILEE: It is. Okay, we might have to have Larissa in on the next Just Janilee episode because she definitely knows what she's talking about in this. But this is something that I hit on and it really helped me understand. Okay, so you have the autonomic nervous system,

LARISSA: Which does all of your automatic functions, anything your body does without thinking, digestion, peeing. I mean, some of it. There's a little bit of thinking like peeing and pooping where you do hold your sphincters, hopefully. Um, breathing,

JANILEE: But you still can't when you're on the toilet. Hopefully on the toilet

LARISSA: Controlling the sphincters. Yeah. So all of those things are completely automatic and they're ran by your central nervous system or your autonomic nervous system. Yes.

JANILEE: So central nervous system and autonomic nervous system are the same thing?

LARISSA: Well, you have some body systems that are different. So the autonomic nervous system runs all of your automatic functions and then you have functions where you do actually have to consciously think, like, I'm going to move my arm above my head.

JANILEE: Okay, so the central nervous system controls everything in our body and autonomic nervous system controls the things we do automatically.

LARISSA: Yes.

JANILEE: And part of the autonomic nervous system is, Larissa has mentioned it already, the sympathetic or the parasympathetic nervous system. Now there's a lot of things and the body is really complicated and it's fascinating, but I want to hone in on the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system in relation to that vagus nerve that Larissa talked about. There's twelve cranial nerves and the vagus nerve is one of them. There's like the polyvagal theory is super fascinating and we'll get into it later. But for the purpose of here and now, if you have an automatic part of your body that responds a specific way, let's say sympathetically or parasympathetically, can you really get mad at your body for responding?  

LARISSA: If you want.

JANILEE: Yeah. I'm not saying that you can't get mad at your body. I'm just trying to logically talk us through and find a little more grace in that science. Right. Because you have sympathetic and parasympathetic, and let's just take those in response to emotional situations. Do you want to explain the difference between them? How would you respond to an emotion situation? Sympathetically or parasympathetically?

LARISSA: So your sympathetic system is your fight system, isn't that right? And your parasympathetic is your flight, which is your shutdown.  

JANILEE: My understanding was different, and not to be the one to correct the nurse.

LARISSA: No, you might be more accurate than me. It's been a while since I've taken anat and phys.

JANILEE: Okay. But your parasympathetic is your rest and digest, whereas your sympathetic nervous system is I got to do something about it. So it's not that your parasympathetic is flight. Fight and flight are both part of sympathetic. Parasympathetic is what happens after you have a really good cry. It releases stuff not to get too technical, it releases stuff in your body that makes you want to sleep. It makes you tired because your body needs to rest and digest what just happened.

LARISSA: Yeah. Which is also a good way of explaining that there's not just fight and flight. There's also fawn and freeze, and so there's a lot of different stuff. But so your sympathetic system gets you prepared to  do certain things to do, basically, and your parasympathetic system allows you to stop doing. And it's kind of like a turn it on and off. Usually when you're just chilling at home and when you're just in your equilibrium state and you're just happy as can be and nothing's wrong and you're not in trauma and you're not having a trauma experience recently, your body kind of plays off of each other and they'll do a little bit of this and a little bit of that and a little bit of this and a little bit of that.  But for me, for example, when my blood pressure should increase and my heart rate should decrease, mine does the opposite and I pass out.

JANILEE: And when Larissa says “Should,” she means based on a normal non traumatically, chronically traumatized person.

LARISSA: Yes. And it has resulted in the need for a pacemaker to correct and control. And that was one of the most difficult things waking up in a patient's room at Phoenix Children's Hospital and waking up crying because my body does not do what it's supposed to do. In trauma response situations, in being able to run into a situation where somebody has a concave skull and have no shaky hands and be completely calm and then have a situation where I'm just standing there but I'm in some pain and I pass out. Your body just it's Jacked, because of everything you've been through type situation.

JANILEE: Okay, I want to read you a quote. This is from an Instagram post that I will link in the show notes. And it starts like this:

“We can't talk our way out of nervous system dysregulation. Nervous system dysregulation is brainstem dysregulation. The part of our brain connected to the body, the skin sensations, senses, energetic resonance, survival responses, nature and the outside orientation. So it makes sense not only to work with the body, nature and the nervous system, but to do it in a way that is gentle, safe and not overwhelming.”

And all of that, to just say and what Larissa was talking about, she started kind of explaining a little bit about the polyvagal theory. But I want to put a pin in that because the point that's not yeah, it's fascinating to get into, and we'll get into it, but it's

LARISSA: it’s own episode.

JANILEE: It'll be a fun episode. It's just going to be amazing. But the reason that I wanted to bring up the science side of it is because sometimes we can talk ourselves out of any sort of rational understanding. We can talk ourselves out of, “Oh, I should feel this way because of blah,” “Should feel that way because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And the one thing that I clung into almost is the fact that my body is responding the way it is responding, because what I've been through is messed up and what my body is doing is normal. And there's so many people who are at war with their bodies, and I understand that. I've been there. I still am there in a lot of ways, but understanding, at least cognitively, my body is feeling the emotions and therefore it's healing. Even if I can't cognitively or emotionally feel these emotions, I know that what I went through happened because my body doesn't respond in the way that a stereotypical. And I'm putting normal in quotation marks here. A stereotypical “normal person” would

LARISSA: Exactly.  And accepting that, and for me learning to run with that and say, “Okay, well, that means I'm really great in trauma. I should be a trauma nurse.” I'm not going to be a trauma nurse. I'll do minor trauma, but don't need to peeve off my central nervous system any more than it already is.  I'll just have some intermittent trauma in there with whatever I'm dealing with. But it's important to recognize it is completely normal for your body to struggle dealing with the emotions, the pain, the feeling, the rock bottom. When it's never done that before and when it's never been safe to do that or when it's suddenly safe to do that again.

JANILEE: Yeah. Think of it like a mento in coke.

LARISSA: Yeah, that's a good way to explain it.

JANILEE: When you leave your environment and when you leave that toxic environment, you're taking the lid off of the coke. What do you is going to happen? Larissa is imitating an explosion, right. Everything's going to go crazy. And that doesn't mean that you're wrong. It doesn't mean that you should go back and again, we're not telling you to do something this way or that way. Right. My favorite response when influencers or creators are asked “Well, what should I do in my situation?” The only appropriate way to respond to that, in my opinion, is: “It's your choice. I don't get to decide these things for you. It's your life.” And living your own life is terrifying when you've never been able to make a choice before and when every choice has such catastrophic consequences. But I promise you, whether you eat chicken nuggets or pizza for dinner, the world is not going to explode.

LARISSA: I remember when I had just left everything feeling like I couldn't make a single decision and having so much fear about what picture I should get to hang on the stupid wall that I just ended up not buying one because I was so stressed out about it until I finally just had a manic episode and went, okay, I'm going to go buy some stuff. And suddenly I was happy again because I had done it. Finally I'd finally made that decision and the world was not going to end if I,

a didn't have a picture,

b did have a picture,

or c chose the wrong picture,

But because I had been put through so much and because I was so afraid to spend money that I didn't have but did have, I would not do it. And I remember turning to a friend, a trusted friend at the time, and saying, “I feel like I can't make some simple decisions.  I feel like I'm in decision fatigue,” for lack of a better term. And she was all, “Well, that's completely explainable or completely normal. It's completely reasonable. You weren't allowed to make decisions. You weren't even allowed to leave your home for two weeks to take a shower without being called lazy, narcissistic, possessive, and selfish. You weren't allowed. And then injured trying to leave, you weren't allowed these things. So it's completely normal for you to not want to make any decisions because you're terrified that if you do, something bad is going to happen.” And it's okay to be there. It's okay to be afraid. But you have to make sure you eat. You have to make sure that you make simple choices and start out small.

JANILEE: Right.  Well, here's the thing. If we think about Larissa's situation and that example she just gave, if she had still been in that previous situation, would the person that you were living with have lost their mind? If you got a picture and hung it on the wall that they didn't like?

LARISSA: It would it dependent on the mood.  50-50.

JANILEE: There you go. It's a 50-50. So it's not a safe bet.

LARISSA: Exactly.

JANILEE: Remember, we are so used to and everything we've ever interacted with before is an emotionally immature situation. And so when we're in a place where it's safe to be emotionally mature, we're still going to make emotionally immature decisions because that's the only thing that has yielded a reliable outcome.  One thing as well. I'm just kind of thinking through everything we said. I genuinely hope that this is helping, but there's really not one thing that can be done or said. And we'll keep giving episodes in the future about more specific things. But really the point that I wanted to make is that it's okay and whatever you experience is normal and it's going to be the hardest thing you've ever done. Words cannot describe or prepare you for it, but you are strong and you are resilient, and it is not because you went through trauma, you're so strong, right. I actually weirdly told my therapist that at one point I “Was afraid to heal because I wouldn't have my superpowers that I got from being traumatized.”

LARISSA: You wouldn't be strong anymore.

JANILEE: Yeah. And the thing is, I healed past that point and I still am able. I had one conversation with a person and it was like an hour long conversation. And within that hour, I knew that this person was going to be problematic. They were going to try and do this and that to assert their control over me in my life. Right. And I was dead on the money. I was completely and totally accurate. I didn't lose that ability. What I did is I managed it so that it stopped controlling me and it is just a tool that I use when I want to, rather than a tool that I can't take off my hand so I hurt everyone and everything that I ever touch.

LARISSA: Yeah. So that you don't push everyone away. You only push the toxic ones or the ones that are likely toxic. And I remember starting to date again after everything and going through and just swiping left, which was “deny” on everybody. And then I would talk to one random person and this person would be a nutcase. And then, so I swipe left on everyone again for a while.

JANILEE: And as we've talked about, Larissa and I are HUGE advocates of the block button.

LARISSA: Yes, block buttons are your best friend and you can always unblock and change that block later if you need to. But block is not a bad thing.  

JANILEE: It's very good thing.

LARISSA: It keeps you from doing stupid things as well as stopping other people from doing stupid things. So it's a wonderful tool.

JANILEE: Okay, I want to throw out let's say Larissa and I have talked about therapists, right? And I actually happened when I had my most recent suicide attempt I was working at a place where I could afford to go to therapy, and it still cost me like every penny I had in my bank. But sometimes that's not the case for everyone. And so I wanted to  address that a little. And here's something that I'm not in a situation where I'm able to go to therapy now, and it's not the same. And if you can go to therapy, I highly recommend it. OOhh! Larissa, what if next week we talk about different types of therapy?

LARISSA: Well, I also have some great resources for low income sliding scale throughout the country for therapy and things like that. So sounds like a great thing to talk about.

JANILEE: Okay, so Larissa, send me those resources, and we'll put them in the show notes for this episode and next episode {please look to the JJ episode on resources, where the therapy options and low cost options are listed}. Next episode we'll talk about different types of therapy so that you can kind of know what you're getting into and everything. But if you're not able to something that I have found helps me is honestly my social media. I don't manage our Facebook page. Larissa does that because Facebook became a very toxic place for me, and so I am exclusively only on Instagram.  And so it became this thing where it was such a conscious choice for me to quit Facebook and go to Instagram that I just made it very consciously, this is going to be a safe place for me. And so I would follow all of these different pages, some of them by clinicians, some of them by people who'd been through things, some of them who just were eloquent at wording, things that just brought comfort, right? And it became so helpful. There's like this trend, and it's been going on forever. So it's not really a trend, but there's this theme of videos that I come across a lot, which is “Things my therapist told me.” And if you can't go to therapy, I'll include a couple of hashtags that you can search on social media of things that other people's therapists have told them so that you can kind of maybe have some of these breakthroughs in a small way, where maybe you can see things in a different way. Where it can be helpful in a situation where maybe you're not able or you don't feel ready to be in a more personal, intimate, one on one conversation with the therapist.  

LARISSA: And there's nothing wrong with needing space and time to get that therapist. There have been times where I haven't had one. And yeah, it was difficult for me because this, that, or the other, or my insurance wouldn't cover it. My insurance covers three therapists in all of the area that I live, including three counties.

JANILEE: Don't even get me started on insurance in America.  

LARISSA: And I'm just like, Are you kidding me? Because this is national insurance, so how does this not cover this? And that's where I had to find other resources. And there are so many different places and ways to be able to get that therapy and different forms of that therapy. So I think that's going to be, like, a really great episode for us to have separate from this. But I have used my TikTok to find a lot of healing phrases and then repeat them and just be like, “You know what? I don't have to explain myself. I don't even have to explain who this is about.” I'm pretty sure the people who think it's about them, it's not.

JANILEE: Anytime I'm in that situation. I always think of “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon.

LARISSA: Yes. And I just want to scream at these people, “Do you actually think that this is all about you?! Because it's not.” And just being able to heal out loud has really helped me because there have also been times where my therapists aren't available for months on end because of this, that the other, and me being being sick and my kid being sick and then somebody else being sick and then they get sick. Yeah, COVID is great for that. There are other things. Just make sure that you're not making it your everyday all day only thing. Yeah. Then you're going to become toxic with it.

JANILEE: Well, and here's the thing.  I wrote down a couple of things. There was literally a video that was things that I've learned in therapy. And I just wrote down a couple of them to share as examples. But one of them is that: “Your value is not attached to your accomplishments.”  “You have to be able to be there for yourself first.” Things that Larissa and I have talked about,  and here's one that relates to what Larissa just said. “Who you are: Figure out who you are outside of who you've had to be for others in order to survive.”

And so part of being in this space is also going to be well, what do I like? Right? I remember I was talking to a friend and this friend had just barely listened to the first episode of the podcast. And in there I mentioned that my mom had told me, you take away all of these things like I said, I don't want someone to love me because I can cook and clean and we take all that away and what's left? Right? I was talking to a friend and they brought that up and I was like, “Yeah, it's terrible. But let's think about this hypothetically for a minute. Take away all of these things that are on the surface for you right now. What's left? Who's the real you?” And this friend was like, “I don't know.” And I was like, “Well, you like to write books. You're an author.” And here's another one. And I was like, “It starts with M and then a U.” And then they're like, “Oh yeah, I'm a musician.” I said: “Yeah.”

Who are you underneath all of these things? Find who that person is. And it's going to be hard, right? In this moment, in this deep, dark moment, probably all you're going to be doing is surviving and coping however you can. And 100% kudos to you. But as you start getting a little bit further away from the situation, if you want to figure out who you are, figure out who you are.

LARISSA: And there's nothing wrong with defining yourself based on your own choices. I remember being made fun of because I really liked the country life and things like that and people would make fun of me for it. And I remember walking away from that stuff because, “Oh, I would never be able to hack it” and “Oh, that's just so screwed up,” The itty bitty committee in my head because of other people's statements. And now I'm like, “Yeah, I can do this, I can handle this. Yeah, I have an irrational fear of bees that comes from a head injury", but that's a whole nother drama. That does not preclude me from being able to live out in the country and enjoy my life with horses.” If a bee comes around, I'm going to take deep breaths and I'm going to act like an immature adult. I have not always done that and there are some hilarious stories revolving around that.

JANILEE: So pretty much, I guess to sum up what we've talked about today, Larissa, you are where you are. It's indescribably hard and you are indescribably strong. And there are some maybe social media can help. Maybe. Hopefully listening to this podcast is helping. If you have people who are trying to help you and they're not doing a great job, you can either have a meaningful conversation with them or you can walk away or they can help you in ways that don't require that emotional ability if they're uncomfortable or they don't want to do it.

And just remember that. And the other thing was you can't talk yourself out of emotional or not emotional central nervous system dysregulation.

LARISSA: You also can't talk yourself out of emotional stuff. You can. But you're going to have to work through it first and you're going to have to heal.

JANILEE: You're going to have to feel in order to heal.

LARISSA: Yeah, do that and it sucks and it feels like you're breaking I promise you are stronger than this break, and it will get better. And you just have to keep your eye on the prize. Keep yourself centered on that prize. Yes.

JANILEE: So if you're going throughout your life this week and something's just everyone's just mad at you for leaving this, and everything is going crazy, and you're just trying to do your best and everything, just remember that you're being vilified and you're in great company, because that's what we're all here, vilified friends.

LARISSA: We're all at the intersection of I'm living my best life, and somebody isn't happy about it

JANILEE: Or what will someday become your best life. Exactly. And it's okay that it's a struggle. Right now, we're on the struggle bus with you. This is VILIFIED.