Incestuous or inappropriate behavior by parents isn’t always easy to define. Paul’s friend “Barbara” and her boyfriend “Steve” (both using pseudomnyms) talk about their parents, their childhoods, and the issues they struggle with especially learning to use sex for power and manipulation instead of intimacy.
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Episode Transcript:
Paul: Welcome to episode 52, with my guests Barbara and Steve. I'm Paul Gilmartin, this is The Mental Illness Happy Hour, an hour of honesty about all the battles in our heads, from medically diagnosed conditions to everyday compulsive negative thinking. Feelings of dissatisfaction, disconnection, inadequacy, and that vague sinking feeling that the world is passing us by. You give us an hour, we'll give you a hot ladle of awkward and icky. This show is not meant to be a substitute for professional medical mental advice. Think of it less as a doctor's office, more of a waiting room that hopefully doesn't suck. The website for the show is mentalpod.com, all kinds of stuff there, please go check it out--there's a forum, you can buy a t-shirt, you can sign up for a mailing list...That's something that I would really love for you guys to go do, sign up for the mailing list at the website and then I can keep you informed and you don't even have to click on anything. What else did I want to tell you...You know what, there's a ton of shit that I wanted to tell you but none of it's really that important. This is our 52nd episode, one full year of doing this show, and we've had over a million downloads. That just blows my mind. I'm so grateful to have spent this last year doing this with you guys and getting the feedback that I get from you is such a great feeling. So I want to thank of course my guests who made this possible, but also you the listener for welcoming this show as you have. Alright, enough of my yakkin'. Before we get into our interview with Barbara and Steve--and I think I mention it in the interview, but they are pseudonyms that they wanted to use so that they would be able to speak more freely--I'm gonna read a survey respondent. This is from the Shame and Secrets survey, and this guy calls himself Wiggy. He's straight, he's 20 years old, he was raised in an environment that was a little dysfunctional, he says. To the question 'Have you ever been the victim of sexual abuse?' he checked the box 'some stuff happened but I don't know if it counts as sexual abuse' and he writes "My cousin would force me to touch her when we were younger, and once she discovered I was physically aroused by this she made me have sex with her several times when I was 9 up until I was 12. She was three years older than me." 'What are your deepest, darkest thoughts? Not things you would act on, but things you are ashamed to admit you think about.' He writes "I think my darkest thoughts always involve just leaving everyone behind, leaving my family for good. I know it's not really dark but I honestly say I haven't had thoughts of physically harming anyone or harming someone sexually. I guess the main difference is that this is something that is still possible and something I think I can do at any time." 'Deepest, darkest secrets? Things that have happened to you or things you have done.' He writes "My deepest secret is that I have yet to tell anyone about my cousin (cousins) sexually abusing me when I was younger. I just don't have the courage to come out with it and I suppose it stems from being so ashamed about it." 'Do these secrets generate any particular thoughts or feelings towards yourself?' He writes "I used to be really depressed about them but as I've grown up I don't think about them quite as much." To the question 'Do you have any comments or suggestions to make the podcast better?' he writes "Nope, I'm sorry Paul, I know you're looking for some harsh criticism, but I just have not discovered any flaws yet. Don't worry, give me some time, I'll come up with something."
[Intro/music]
We're going to pick it up mid-conversation with Barbara and Steve. As I've mentioned before, they are both using pseudonyms and they are a couple.
Barbara: Well, we met about seven years ago, we just celebrated our seven-year anniversary, and things were good the first couple of years, they were really solid. And then we both started getting really busy working and--
Paul: You're both actors.
Barbara: Yes. And I noticed that no matter what work came I kept disconnecting from him and pushing him away and making things impossible, even when our life was really good. So it came to a point for me where I have this wonderful man and I've always blamed past men in the past, when it finally hit me that it was actually me, something was wrong with me. Nothing that came to me could fill me, and I had this great man and either I changed or I was gonna lose him and I was gonna go through the cycle for the next years of my life until I finally decided to make a change and to get help and to go to therapy because I realized that if I kept on the path I was gonna be miserable for the rest of my life. And now that I've been in a support group for three years, and therapy, our relationship is stronger than ever, we communicate really well, we're very honest, we trust each other, it's really beautiful, actually. It's the most beautiful, healthy friendship/relationship/lover that I could ask for.
Paul: But you couldn't get there three years ago. Intellectually you knew 'This is somebody who's special, but I can't appreciate them. I can't absorb the feelings that I know are there.' Am I putting words in your mouth?
Barbara: No. You're completely right. He's such a beautiful man, understanding, funny, everything you'd want in a man and I was destroying it.
Paul: What were you doing to destroy it?
Barbara: I was driving him crazy, I was being overly demanding, I was selfish, I was self-serving, I didn't care about his needs, I put my needs first. I was acting like a childish brat and the turning point is he had so many beautiful things happen for him and I was like a jealous child, not getting enough attention, feeling abandoned. It just brought up all those feelings from childhood again and I realized 'Something is seriously wrong with me and there is a hole in me that I need to fix myself and with God that no man, no job, nothing can fix.'
Paul: And did you, Steve, was this something you saw coming? Because you'd been in support groups for years before so you had to have an inkling that...Well, don't let me put words in your mouth. Where were you at?
Steve: In the beginning of the relationship I found myself before we had met, I had gone a long period of being single and not really connecting with women in having any kind of a deep relationship. I had had a past relationship years before that I worked a lot through with therapy. In the first week of us being together I went into therapy. I think I cried pretty much every day of that relationship for a year and--
Paul: Your relationship with her?
No, the previous one. And so I kind of had taken a sabbatical after that and I learned a lot about myself during that time. Then getting in the relationship at that point with Barbara, it was fast and furious, we kind of hit it off right away, she moved in within two months, and it kind of changed my world where all of the sudden where I was this lone wolf to I now had somebody living at my place. And it was really great, she brought a light and a life and energy to my life, to our home, and--
Paul: So she was present at the beginning of the relationship?
Steve: Absolutely. And yet at the same time I feel like I wasn't helping it along in the sense that I was kind of co-dependent and her needs were first and my needs were second.
Paul: Did you have an alcoholic or addictive parent?
Steve: Everybody in my family, except for my parents, are alcoholics or addicts or have some kind of disease of some sort. My mom has issues with love and relationships and my dad is a workaholic kind of thing. So there was always that kind of thing, so for me I think that I was always wanting to get that love and attention, and there it was. She was here giving me that love and attention so I found myself constantly putting myself to the side and during that time she was working a lot and I was not, and there was a lot of tension between--
Paul: Would you get jealous when she would be working a lot and you weren't?
Steve: Yes, I wouldn't take it out on her, it was more like I'd beat myself up for not having success.
Paul: Do you ever feel like "I'm not good enough for her because she's--"
Steve: Absolutely.
Paul: Would you ever express that to her, or just think it to yourself?
Steve: Yes, we'd talk. From the beginning what saved our relationship is we were always honest and we were always communicating from the beginning, even at the times where it used to be she'd slam the door of the bathroom and not come out and I'd just sit there and wait until she came out to talk about it. I was like 'We're gonna talk about this' kind of thing.
Barbara: Yeah, I'd be on the toilet, crying. I always sat on the toilet, I don't know what that was about.
Steve: But I think there came a turning point after the second or third year where I had to start making some changes for myself and started to kind of step up in my own career. So as I started making those changes I started pulling away and the attention wasn't always about her. It was like 'I have to take this time to go work on my stuff.' And that--
Paul: So you started getting healthy, or at least acting healthy.
Steve: Yeah, I was acting healthy and the healthier I was getting, the more...Not even success but just that fulfilling feeling, the more tension was happening between her and I. And so basically this point came where it was like 'OK, this is just not working', and I don't know if I said that you need help or that you need...It was something around that time.
Barbara: Yeah, I was on a trip and one of the other actresses on the trip was talking about how much help she gets from her therapist. And when she was talking I was thinking 'Wow, I really could use somebody to help me and to talk to.'
Paul: Had you never talked to a professional?
Barbara: Never.
Paul: Never been in a support group?
Barbara: Nothing. So I didn't have a god, I wasn't raised religiously. So I had nothing. I was like alone, floating in this dangerous place.
Paul: But you had show business!
Barbara: Oh yeah, cause that's so dependable! God!
Paul: So let's talk about your childhood.
Barbara: Well. Taking off the jacket, getting hot. My childhood was very...I was alone a lot. I have a father that would go into a room, get a headache, would ignore me when he was in one of his dark moods. He's very bi-polar, goes from happy ,angry, annoyed. I have a workaholic mother that--
Paul: Are your parents still together?
Barbara: No they're not. They're divorced. They divorced when I was 17. My mother was very cold, very bitter, overweight. So what happened is when I was a very young age I realized very quickly that I was my dad's shining star. I was his everything and I was daddy's little girl. But at the same time it was very unhealthy and today it really hit me that I knew from a very young age that I never wanted to be like my mother. I never wanted to look like her, I didn't want to be like her, because my dad acted so disgusted by her. So it's almost like I took the place of my mother for him, and every day now I've been trying my best to put up those boundaries and claim myself for myself and not be his object.
Paul: Yes. Can you give me some concrete examples of the way you would be the substitute for your mom for your dad?
Barbara: Well, from a very young age they didn't sleep in the same bed. I've never seen my parents hold hands, kiss, nothing. He would call her fat and I would go sleep in the bed with him at a very young age. And there's this one memory that I'm going to share that's very difficult for me to share. I thought that I had shared it with people until this last year, that I remember the specific moment where he was putting Vaseline on my private part because I had a rash because we had a pool. And it didn't hit me that that was wrong until I shared it with my therapist and at a certain age men should not be doing that with their daughters, and I didn't know that and I remembered feeling like 'This doesn't feel right', but I didn't know what that feeling was.
Paul: How old were you?
Barbara: Oh God, I think six, maybe? I have a hard time knowing certain ages 'cause I black out age range. It's very difficult for me, I black out really uncomfortable moments, but he--
Paul: Was that memory buried or was it just not given weight?
Barbara: It wasn't given weight. I do have a lot of memories I can't remember. I have a lot of blackout memories that I can't remember.
Paul: So from what age to what age were you sleeping in his bed?
Barbara: I remember crawling in his bed even at like 12, because he slept in a room where I had all my Barbies, so that was kind of our playroom.
Paul: When you would sleep in the bed with him, was there physical contact that crossed boundaries, or was it just...
Barbara: Honestly I don't remember if there was physical contact that crossed boundaries, it was just more of an energy. It was more of an energy. I feel that he was sucking my energy for himself, and that's the really messed-up part, is that I almost wish there was something concrete but there wasn't.
Paul: Oh my God I relate to that so much it's not even funny.
Barbara: Yeah...
Paul: And it obsesses you, from once you begin to know something's wrong, because you don't wanna make too much of it but something inside you, there's like there's this gray ball of angst and discomfort and when you're around that person you recoil from them in a certain way and you feel a little guilty because you want them to be happy because they're your parent, you want to give them love, but you also want to take care of yourself and your mind is telling you you're being a bad son or daughter, but your body is feeling something else.
Barbara: Yeah. Well, for me it was more that would be happening inside and I wouldn't know, so I would actually want to please him, so there was a little girl wanting to please her father but not understanding--
Paul: Despite what her gut is telling her.
Barbara: Exactly, and then I just took advantage of it and got used to it, but then I was very angry.
Paul: How would you take advantage, because you could manipulate him to get what you wanted?
Barbara: Completely manipulate him, completely get him to do whatever I wanted.
Paul: Can you give some examples of that?
Barbara: He would make me chicken noodle soup and I would make him pick out all the pieces of chicken. He would make me a sandwich and I would be like 'This isn't good enough', so I realized when I got around 14, when boys started being attracted to me, I just wanted to destroy every man that ever came in contact with me. I had so much anger and I wanted to destroy them.
Paul: And I would imagine you had an innate sense of power that was intoxicating.
Barbara: Oh completely. It's like a high. I remember this one specific moment when I was going to the bus stop and there was a dance coming up and I literally got chased to the bus stop by these four guys because they all wanted to ask me to a dance, and I remember chasing and getting on the bus and seeing them all waiting, but the bus was driving away and I remember this overwhelming rush of feeling of like power and importance and it just gave me that high so I wasn't getting it from my parents and it was very emotionally incestuously wrong but I was getting it from these guys and I just wanted to relish in it and then destroy them and I took so much pleasure in it.
Paul: When you would say that you wanted to destroy them, what would the fantasy or the reality be of how you would actually destroy them?
Barbara: I would cheat on them. I would build them up and then knock them down. I would say they're the best man in the world...And also when we were intimate I would lie. I was a liar, I lied about everything. I lied about if they were pleasing me, if they were not pleasing me, it was just a game to me. It was a complete game.
Paul: So in your mind everything was approached from the angle of "What gives me the most power?"
Barbara: Exactly. It was just about power for me. 'Cause I felt so powerless at a young age.
Paul: Yeah. And Steve, what was your childhood like?
Steve: Not so dissimilar in an interesting way. At a very young age, around nine, my mom had started to have an affair on my father with one of his friends and I was the only one that knew what was going on.
Paul: Oh my God.
Steve: So it was one of those situations where my dad would work nights and so he would sleep during the day and his friend would work during the day, so I could see my dad's room while I was playing basketball in the front, and this guy would pull up two doors down and then when I saw him I was to go get my mom and have my mom come out. And she'd go flirt with him and talk to him and stuff while--
Paul: Your mom instructed you to go let her know when this guy showed up?
Steve: Yeah.
Paul: Did your mom know that you knew that she was having an affair?
Steve: Yeah, I think that during that time we never talked about it, she was just saying that he was her friend. And then she started to do a running club with him and his wife and they'd bring the kids and we'd go, and I could sense that something was going on. And then with the divorce when they came and sat us down--
Paul: Do you think she was kidding herself that you didn't know, or do you think she didn't care? Because that's just fascinating to me how you could put your child in that kind of a situation. Because to me there's a huge difference, if you thought you were getting away with it, that's vastly different than knowing the pain that you must be causing your child.
Steve: Yeah, you know I think now I can see how my sister has done that exact same behavior and is actually duplicating everything my mother has done.
Paul: And your sister didn't know that she was doing that? Obviously after your parents got divorced, she knew your mom had probably been seeing this guy and probably before they got divorced.
Steve: Yes, and she might have been kind of aware of it. I'm not sure if we've actually talked about it specifically, when she knew or when she didn't know. But I wonder if my mom knew or if she just was incapable of looking at that. I think she was somebody that was so unhappy from being a child. She married my father to get out of the house and when my dad and her were engaged and they were about to get married, a couple months away, it just wasn't working out and my dad called off the wedding. So she went home and told her father and mother that he had called off the wedding, and then her father came over to my dad's house and said "You will marry her or I will kill you."
Barbara: I didn't know that.
Steve: Yeah, so he was scared and he married her and they had sex once on their honeymoon, they realized it was not good, they had sex one more time and they got pregnant with me. And they had sex four other times and had two kids with that.
Paul: Now how did you know the number of times they had sex?
Steve: 'Cause I'm an artist, I was deciding that I was gonna use this as a breakthrough in recovery and it's always been in my mind in terms of the story and how it laid out and how my dad caught them and how they got divorced, and how it affected my life growing up and how I dealt with women and how I didn't trust them and all that kind of stuff, so I had this idea in my head to write a short film about this situation. So as I was writing it I didn't have enough information so I started asking both my dad and my mom 'What happened? How did you guys get to how both of you guys were responsible for it happening?'
Paul: Did they both feel that they were both responsible? Or did they both blame the other person?
Steve: I think at the end of the day they both came to they were both 100% responsible for it. My dad saw the mistakes that he made, she knew where she made the mistakes. So my dad told me that story and my mom kind of mirrored that kind of thing as well. The amount of times, how they weren't a fit, she wanted to get out of the house, she wanted to live in a fantasy world, just have a great life, and maybe a kid will help that. Maybe a second kid will help that, maybe a bigger house will help that, maybe new cars will help that. And as we know--
Paul: I'm sure there are no people that can relate to that. Nobody married right now with just a dead, sick feeling inside can relate to that at all. Well I think the good news is that your grandfather didn't have to kill anybody. I think that that is ultimately why it's all awesome. So what was your relationship like with your dad and what was your relationship like with your mom?
Steve: My dad, during that time, up until the divorce, his whole thing was just to get out of the house. He loved us but my mom was just so demanding, very much like you're describing, punishing him for everything. He couldn't do anything right. He was never making enough money, he was never taking enough time, he would never give her enough trips, never buy her enough things, so he basically said that he did everything he could to work as much overtime and not be home. So he was there sometimes, he was always loving, he was somebody that had great morals, in a sense, I was just thinking about this this morning. We had a situation this morning, I'll just give you an example of, Barbara wanted me to call the plumber to tell them to come later than they were originally supposed to come so she could sleep and go for a run, and I didn't want to do it because I didn't want to inconvenience the plumber. So I'm basically putting the plumber over her in terms of importance, and that's the story of my dad. My dad would put everybody else first besides his family, besides us, all the time. So at any given moment if he was going to come to our baseball game he would not because he was working on some guy's car down the street who broke down.
Paul: So it sounds like your dad cared very much what other people thought of him.
Steve: Yeah. So I've happily carried that on through my life, it's served me very well.
Paul: Well you know what they say about people pleasers, when you stop being a people pleaser people aren't pleased.
Steve: Yeah, exactly. So growing up he was somebody that always felt people liked him. He worked hard, had great morals, great values, he was a really nice guy but not really connected to us. Now we have this great relationship and it's totally changed. Growing up with my mom I became her little man. Once that divorce happened and all the secrets were kind of still in our family, she confided in me about all that stuff all the time, so that was really tough because at ten I was having to be grown up and that relationship, once they got divorced, she sold the house to this guy and--
Paul: The guy she cheated with?
Steve: The guy she cheated with. And they were still continuing to date while he was married, so he thought the best thing would be to sell the house to him so they could rent that house out and we would all move into a house together. But his wife wouldn't divorce him so my brother, sister, and I and my mom moved in with him, his wife, and two kids.
Paul: What??
Barbara: Yeah.
Paul: What??
Steve: So for between nine and ten months we lived in the same house and he would sleep Monday-Wednesday-Friday with his wife, and Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday with my mom, and that is always fun and uncomfortable as a ten- or eleven-year-old to have those kind of...Everybody knows what's wrong, nobody's talking about it, my dad kind of just checked out. Was not going to be there for that.
Paul: That's like MacGyver came up with polygamy! "How can we slap together something..." That is, mind you I've done 50 episodes of this podcast, that is fucking crazy. That is crazy. What was her husband like? I mean the woman that wouldn't divorce him, what was--
Steve: He was a completely narcissistic person who thought he was amazing. The reason she didn't want to divorce him, she didn't want to leave him and--
Paul: Is she very religious, is that why?
Steve: No, he had had her under this thing. The rationale of the moment was "Until I can find a house for her to move into, we'll just all stay here since we have to rent out this other house."
Paul: No care as to the damage that would make your children feel? The shame that my dad is--
Steve: No, we were definitely not important. They did their own thing. We were--
Paul: They had kids too, right?
Steve: Yeah, he had two kids as well.
Paul: How did that affect them?
Steve: It messed us all up. The boys shared a room, the girls shared a room. It was supposed to be a month and it was nine to ten months. We had to share paper routes together, these dinners--
Paul: Would you ever talk about what was going on?
Steve: I don't think so.
Paul: How could you? How could you open that door?
Steve: You knew it was uncomfortable, you knew it was weird, but they kind of rationalized the whole thing. Like I said, "Just until we can get this place, and it's only gonna be temporary." And we were all going 'But there's two women here that you're with.' And we could hear him having sex with both of them at different times.
Paul: What??
Steve: Oh yeah. So after they moved out we got our own place and he was still with his wife but he was still dating my mother and then they broke up--
Paul: Your mom and him broke up?
Steve: Yeah, and she went this kind of binge of working two jobs and dating as many men as she could--
Paul: Your mom did?
Steve: My mom. Yeah. Bringing them home to our house, and it was just really uncomfortable. It was one of those--
Paul: Do any concrete examples stand out?
Barbara: Yeah, the one where she would come out.
Steve: Oh yeah. I had a paper route, so in the morning on Saturday and Sunday I would have to get up at like 5:00 and fold papers at 12 years old. We had a den connected to the garage, and then her bedroom was there, so on cold mornings I'd be folding in the den and my brother would help me sometimes, I would bribe him to help me, and she'd come out fully naked and say "What are you guys doing? He's trying to sleep! Stop it! Quiet!"
Paul: And how old were you at this time?
Steve: Twelve, thirteen.
Paul: Twelve years old? And she's coming out completely naked?
Steve: Yeah, knowing what she was doing, we heard her through the whole house, she was very loud. That whole thing. Now my brother and I have talked about that kind of stuff, and my sister and I, how inappropriate it was, and now he has kids, and she has kids, and they would never do any of that stuff.
Paul: Did you ever say anything to your mom about that?
Steve: You know, we've talked about it. She had blackouts with all that kind of stuff, so she finds it really hard to believe that she would do that. She's like "I don't remember doing that. You guys are making that up." And it's like 'No, we're not making that up. That really happened.'
Barbara: She's very dissociated.
Steve: Yeah, so just to speed through, they ended up getting back...My dad remarried and said he wanted to take me with him to this new house and that he was going to slowly move us in with him. But he had just gotten married and so he had asked me, and I was 15 1/2 at the time, and I said 'Yes, please get me out of here.' At which point my brother and sister said "You're not going anywhere without us." And so we talked to my dad and he said "Sure, let's talk to your mom about it." And my mom was like "No, they're not going, you're not taking that fucking money from me." It was all about the money. It was all about the--
Paul: The child support that she would lose?
Steve: Yeah.
Paul: That's condom money!
Steve: Exactly. And we all knew that, we felt that.
Barbara: She made it really clear.
Steve: We knew what it was about. And then once she said that my dad was like "Done. I'm taking the kids." I moved in with my dad and his new wife who was fantastic. She is fantastic. She was young, I think she was 30, but to have this 15-, 13-, and 11-year-old that she's taking care of all of a sudden...But after that my mom was like "Woohoo!" As soon as that happened he filed for divorce from his wife--I'm sorry, he bought a brand new house and then divorced his wife and put his wife and kids in our old house and moved my mom into his new house that he had just bought with his wife, his wife had helped pick it out and this whole thing.
Paul: It's funny, if this was a screenplay I'd be like 'That is such a lame screenwriter, everything is so coincidental just to save money on sets.'
Steve: Yeah, exactly. So then she was kind of on her thing. She was--
Paul: I'm just thinking of what the real estate agent must have been thinking to themselves throughout this whole thing, like 'This is like the most fucked-up Brady Bunch ever.'
Steve: And I think he had a female real estate agent, I'm starting to picture just as you said that, this blonde woman, and I think he had had an affair with her as well. I think my mom told me later.
Paul: The other guy or your dad?
Steve: The other guy. The other guy had had--
Paul: Your dad was not a fooling around type.
Steve: No.
Paul: I want to talk more about your relationship with your mom and you being her little man, because that's something that I relate to very much and it really is a hard thing to deal with and to know exactly when it's crossing into unacceptable behavior. Can you kind of talk about that a little bit, give me some examples of things, when you became aware of whether it was healthy or not?
Steve: I think that as I got into my teens and when I was 18 I had graduated and I was drinking and doing drugs a lot.
Paul: Were you sleeping around a lot?
Steve: A little bit, I was a late bloomer, so it wasn't until I was 18 when I lost my virginity, and I wasn't confident, but drinking made me confident. I was sleeping around a little bit but not a lot. I ended up moving in with my mom and stepdad and they ended up getting married, and I found out that it was just because they wanted to not have to pay the child support for me, even though I was 18 and I was still living under my dad's thing, they could save some money if I moved in with them. Which was fine with me because I wanted to do my own things, and my mom at that point was just never really around and she was that kind of hostile, never really there for us, but then she would call us all the time and give us a guilt trip for not wanting to hang out with her, but we were like 'Why? It's not fun hanging out with you. It's all about you.'
Paul: And would you say that to her?
Steve: No, of course not. My stepmom would always get the phone and we'd all see it on caller ID and my stepmom would be like "It's your mom," and we'd all just look at each other like 'You talk to her. I'm not talking to her, you talk to her.'
Barbara: That's how my sister and I are with my dad, too.
Steve: So it was really tough, so I ended up moving in with them because my disease was taking over and all I cared about was partying, and my dad was catching me all the time with beers in my car, and by that time I had wrecked seven cars, so the alcohol and drugs were affecting my life. So I moved in with them and that's where she would drink with me, she would go buy beer for me, and that's where we kind of bonded.
Paul: Sick bonding.
Steve: Yeah. And he had beat her up a couple times and I was aware of it, and he was so big and there's no way I could confront him with it. She just confided in me with everything. She ended up cheating on him with somebody else and got caught, she got caught by my dad in the act. She got caught by my stepdad with somebody else...
Paul: It's not hard when you're wandering around the neighborhood nude...
Steve: Yeah, it's easy to spot. Trying to get to specifics, I don't remember anything specific where it was kind of inappropriate, but it started to get at times when I was here I'd be doing a play or something and she'd come down to see the play and I would have a girlfriend there and she'd come up and be acting like she was my girlfriend.
Paul: In what way?
Steve: She'd hug me, she'd be touching my face, she'd grab my butt, she'd say how cute I am, how handsome--
Paul: Oh my God, my mom did all of those things. Yeah.
Steve: And at the time the girlfriend would have to say "Hey, he's my boyfriend."
Paul: She'd say that out loud?
Steve: Yeah, out loud. And she was like "I know, I know. But he's so cute how can I not..."
Barbara: "I wish I had a man that looked like you."
Paul: What would that make you feel inside?
Steve: It just made me cringe, like 'Really? Why are you doing this?'
Paul: But you couldn't find the words to say it because your mom's so fragile you don't want to hurt her feelings.
Steve: Exactly. So at one point while I was in therapy and I was starting to look at all these issues that were coming up, she had come down and my therapist kind of coached me into talking to her, because at that time she was very vulnerable and I was vulnerable and I said 'I don't have a mother. I have a friend who I now am the adult. I've been the adult since I was ten.' But my therapist said "You don't have this relationship, it's not a mother-son, it's a best friend-best friend kind of thing. You need a mother and you need to tell her that this is what you need right now." So she came down, I can't remember what it was for, but we went for a hike and I just told her 'I'm working through this stuff and I'm in this relationship and I'm crying every single day and I don't know what's going on. I don't know how to have a healthy relationship and I'm not blaming you, I'm just saying that it's tough, I don't know how it's supposed to work. So when you tell me all these things, like intimate details of your relationship and whether you had sex or not had sex with this guy or whatever, I can't deal with it. I need a mom and I don't wanna be your friend that way.' And of course she was crying "Of course that's what I want, I wouldn't want to do that to you." And I said 'The way you touch me sometimes, you grab my butt, and it makes me uncomfortable.' And she was like "Well I just do that because you're my son and it's like you're cute. I don't mean anything by it." And I was like 'I know, but it makes me uncomfortable.' So after that it was a couple years of uncomfortable every time she would like "Oh, sorry, didn't mean to do that. Oh, sorry!" You know, like making me feel bad for what she was doing. And then we saw less of each other, and when I first moved here and there was pagers she would page me every single day, and I basically had said 'You can't page me every single day, and don't get upset that I'm not calling you back--'
Paul: Did pagers go out? 'Cause I still have one.
Steve: Yeah, you might wanna get on the tip on that. But basically then I distanced myself and now she's now retired and she's had nine careers but she's retired from this one and I can see that she's very needy, so today--
Paul: Is she in a relationship?
Steve: No. She hasn't been in a relationship in 16 years.
Barbara: For a long time.
Steve: Yeah. So she's up there with my brother and his kids and she babysits for them, she's connected more with that. But I'm still her #1 son and I'm still her guy. And just recently she came down and it was really uncomfortable. She's getting back to really needy...
Barbara: It was like every time I touched him, she touched him. Every time I hugged him, she hugged him. She wouldn't leave him alone, she kept going and standing right over him when he was trying to work, and literally I would touch his leg and she would touch it. And it was so uncomfortable for us.
Paul: Were you looking at each other the whole time like 'Oh my God'? Or were you just afraid--
Barbara: No, we didn't. we wanted to just disconnect and not feel that, but the next morning he was in such a bad mood and I was like 'What is the matter with you?' and he was like "My skin is crawling." And I was like 'I'll take her to the airport.' And he was like "No, no, no, you have stuff to do." And I said 'No, I'm gonna take her. Because I hope you would do it for me, and I'm gonna tell her that we have to go now,' and I took her. And--
Paul: What was that ride like? Did you just wanna yell at her?
Barbara: So uncomfortable. Because she's kind of inappropriate with me. She likes to touch me a lot, she tells me hw beautiful I am all the time, she likes to touch my hair. It's too much, and it's the energy coming at you.
Paul: Yes! You know it's funny because people...There can be a goodness inside of what they're doing, but it's so intense it crosses over this line, like somebody telling you you're beautiful is a really sweet thing but then stroking your hair, it's like--
Barbara: And she keeps repeating it. It's this--
Paul: And then it makes it so hard for you to say something because there is that part of it that is nice, you don't wanna seem like an asshole, so you're just trapped in this fucking miserable silence of 'I just want this to be over with' and you shut down and you're dead around them and you're just looking at your watch.
Barbara: Yeah. And the thing is she's so much different from my dad, 'cause my dad I feel like he knows exactly what he's doing. I've literally said to him 'You can't talk to me this way, I have these boundaries, you cannot cross them.'
Paul: Give me some examples.
Barbara: There was this fight. We got into this fight. We were driving to Target and we got into this fight in the car, and I said 'You almost hit that person', and he was like "It's their fucking fault", and he was going off, and I was like 'OK, but if you keep almost hitting somebody maybe it has to do with you'. And he was like "You're my daughter, you need to listen to me, I'm always right." Like he literally will say that. And we get into Target and right before we got in I said 'Please let's just stop talking about it, we can agree to disagree, let's just leave it at that, I don't have to agree with you just because I'm your daughter, it just doesn't have to be...' And literally we got into Target and he kept at it, he keeps at it and he's like one of those birds that keeps pecking at your eye. And I said 'Get the fuck away from me. Seriously, leave. I'm trying to get something, just walk away, walk away.' And he finally walked away, and there was this moment, this woman came up to me and was like "Are you okay?" and I was like 'Yeah, it's my dad. He's just crazy.' And it's like someone else saw it for the first time, and it was so painful because...So that was one example...
Paul: And the thought that a complete stranger--
Barbara: Noticed that!
Paul: --and can see your need more than the man who's supposed to protect you.
Barbara: Exactly. And it was just so...I started laughing, 'cause that was the only thing that energy...He literally has said...'Cause at a very young age, I wanted to talk about this, he would see older men looking at me at 13, at 14, and he literally turned to me one time and said "I don't know what they see in you, I don't know what these men see in you, you're not my type. You need to have long brown hair and big boobs." I mean, why would your dad need to say that to you?
Paul: You know, my dime store opinion is that's your dad's way of convincing himself that he's not attracted to you.
Barbara: Yeah, my therapist said that too. And then from a very young age I remember--I'm about to share something--that inappropriateness, he would lay me on the ground at a very young age, four, five, six, as I can remember, and he would put a blanket over me and he would lay on top of me, and I would scream because I'm very claustrophobic.
Paul: Who wouldn't be?
Barbara: He said "I'm trying to break you of this claustrophobia. I don't want you to..." And then he would say "I think in a past life you were a prostitute--", I remember him saying that, "--because somebody must have killed you or suffocated you laying down on you or something. Maybe in a past life..." Because he believed in past lives. He thought I might have been a prostitute. So it's situations like that, and now I just have to say to him, he goes "Well you're my daughter," and I said "It doesn't matter. I'm an adult, I'm not your daughter anymore, I'm an adult." And he will say, he in his mind thinks that I'm his daughter so he owns me. And I have to keep saying to him "No, you don't. You don't own me anymore." And I have to hold those boundaries because in his mind, which I think is different from Steve's mom, is that he thinks he's right and he knows what he's doing. He is very manipulative.
Paul: And I think there's a way that we convince ourselves when we're thirsty for power because we feel like our life is spinning out of control and we're completely powerless, I think sometimes we convince ourselves the things that give us a hit of power, we find a way to rationalize it. Because it sounds to me like your dad, it sounds to me like you're his biggest power rush, just like when you would destroy those guys at 13, that was your biggest power rush, and I think some people never look beyond that feeling of "This just feels good, I don't want to question it."
Barbara: Well and he has said too that my sister and I are the best things he's ever done, he's been the best dad. And I have literally said to him 'I don't want to be the best thing you've ever done. You need to--'
Paul: "--find your own thing."
Barbara: Yeah.
Steve: He had even said to me, when I'd go there and if she wasn't there but her sister was there, he would say things like "You know I raised them, the best thing I've done is I've raised them, and then I get nothing from them now. Now they just abandon me and use me."
Paul: Sure, he's the victim.
Steve: Yeah, it's like 'You did your job as a father, that's what you're supposed to do, and now you have to let them go.' But he can't, that's his control.
Paul: And the sad part is there's I'm sure a good guy inside there but these are his blunt tools for trying to cope with his way of getting love in the world.
Barbara: I don't know. I'm not there yet. Because I talked to my mom and she had a moment where she said "I'm sorry, I didn't know how to be a mom. I'm sorry, I didn't have a mom. I'm sorry I was so cold." And she's changed dramatically if you look at her now from who she used to be, it's not the same person. And when she said that it lifted off of me because she took responsibility. And I'm not angry at her and I can look at it clearly now but it's very difficult for him because he takes no responsibility whatsoever for his actions and that's where right now I'm really, really working on letting that go in a healthy way, keeping my boundaries, because some people say "You know, he's getting older," and part of me is like 'Good!' And this is another thing I'm sure other people can...He even said he was going to commit suicide to me at 18. And you know what I said? I said 'Fucking do it. You would do that, you selfish son of a bitch. Go ahead, do it.'
Paul: Well thank God you had a part of you that stood up for yourself.
Barbara: Yeah, and I feel bad that I just said that out loud, because some people would think that's horrible to say, but it he's such a manipulator that I was calling him on it. And a part of me honestly wishes he wasn't here. I know that's hard to say, but it's so difficult.
Paul: It's overwhelming.
Barbara: Yeah, and I try to talk to him every couple of months and sometimes if I let the conversation go along he crosses it and I have to keep...it's very exhausting. It's exhausting to be the only one wanting a healthy relationship.
Paul: My metaphor sometimes for it is it's like dealing with an octopus, it's like you grab the one arm and another one is coming right around and it's just draining. It's just draining. I know we're getting short on time, can you talk about where you are today and any intimacy that you've been...Do you feel like you guys are more intimate as a result now? And what's that like?
Barbara: I feel like emotionally we are stronger than ever. We talk about--
Paul: And we're talking about you two right here, not you and your dad.
Barbara: Not my dad! No. We have the strongest bond that we've ever had and I feel emotionally really connected. I still have a hard time being intimate because being sexual for me has always been attached to a power struggle and it's a power thing. So I don't know how to be intimate with someone I really care about. It's very difficult for me. I'm still working on that.
Paul: Do you go into your head, then, when you're in those moments? Because I found myself for years having trouble being present, being intimate with my wife, I would go into my head and fantasize or something like that, and while I don't think that's bad I think to rely on that can kind of be damaging in the long run and something one of my therapists suggested to me is "Invite your wife in," so that's what I do and then there's an intimacy in that, in bringing her in., Because there's the fear of being judged, you know 'Hey, here's a fantasy I have about this...' But my wife is totally cool with that, but it feels weird every single time I do it because intimacy is...you're vulnerable.
Barbara: Yeah, for me, I don't even go into fantasy.
Paul: Where do you go? Are you present?
Barbara: Not until recently. Honestly I am so in this...it's like I go out of body and I'm almost watching myself and critiquing myself and critiquing the whole situation. So it's not even like I'm getting off...it's just very difficult. I almost wish I could fantasize and say 'Let's act this out' but I just have not found...My therapist put it very well: I'm still a little girl, and a little girl wouldn't be comfortable with that. A girl at ten, eleven, wouldn't be comfortable with that. So instead we touch each other and kiss each other and we're very physical but I don't know how to go...
Paul: And you're okay with that stuff? That stuff feels--
Barbara: Yes.
Paul: Yeah. Probably because just like to an 11- or 12-year-old girl, that's what they're--
Barbara: Yes, they're like touch-y and pet-y but when it gets to the genital or that area, I don't know how to do that yet. And I'm okay accepting where I am. It's frustrating, it's very frustrating, because this is the man I love and I wanna be intimate but it's very difficult for me still, so it's something I'm working on.
Paul: Well thank you for being honest about that. [To Steve] This is something she's shared with you before, but hearing her say this..
Steve: I feel like because I've had years of recovery and support groups and therapy and stuff, it's great because I understand what she's going through, so it's not like I'm going 'I need my needs met! How dare you! Go down!'
Paul: And you know that she's not stuck in that place, that there's movement and she's trying to heal and she is healing. The three years that I've known you, I've seen such beautiful moments of breakthrough in our support group, times where there are just tears rolling down your face and you're talking about the pain of your childhood and your dad, but then I'll see you claim this healthy power, not the sick power of wanting to destroy men, and to me that's real recovery and real healing, when we grab the healthy power that is there for us. I want to thank you guys so much for coming and opening up, and I feel a little guilty because I injected myself a couple of times into the conversation, but the subject that we're talking about is probably the biggest hurdle that I've had to overcome in my life, so it was irresistible to me to not compare notes and say 'Oh yeah, I know what that's like,' because it's very complicated and sometimes I think the thing that can lead us to depression or obsessive-compulsive behavior is the fact that something is so complicated and we don't want to go in there, because we don't know where the truth is, and then we just feel like we're going to be even more overwhelmed than we are in this vague feeling that we have right now.
Steve: One of the things I wanted to say was that when we first were talking about doing the podcast the most important thing for me is realizing that my secrets will kill me, and that I'm only as sick as my secrets. So for me, somehow to share those things with somebody trusted, so that I can get through them, because if I don't I think that those things are real and those things define who I am, so by sharing them with another person, a support group, a therapist, I have you shaking your head "Yes, I know that feeling." So when we have that support around us to go 'We're not alone, I'm not unique that this is happening to me,' I can start to see that there's recovery and steps to take and there's action and there's hope. Because without that I'm in my head thinking 'I'm just the worst person in the world', and to have that now, to have hope that there's peace and serenity in my life, is fantastic.
Paul: Wow, that's very beautifully said. Thank you guys so much.
Many thanks to Barbara and Steve for being so open and honest, and especially to Barbara for being my friend. We taped this episode you just listened to about ten days ago, but last night she and I were at our weekly support group and she was sharing something painful about the shame of her past and the way she's treated people and it really triggered something in me and I started to cry so we both went outside and I just sobbed for two minutes because I didn't realize how many layers of magma of shame and self-hatred keep coming up. And it was so nice to have somebody there that felt exactly like I do, and I didn't even know, I thought I had dealt with my shame. And the reason I bring this story up is one, to talk about what an awesome person she is, and two that you never know what is buried deep down inside of you until you are around other people talking about that stuff, until you're talking about that stuff. That phrase that we're all connected, that's not just bullshit, we really are, and when somebody expresses something you may not know that that's layi9ng dormant inside you, and that's one of the great things about going to a support group is there's the potential for that to happen. For these things inside you that have been dragging you down your whole life to be released and have them come out, and I felt fucking awesome last night after sobbing like a baby for two straight minutes, and it felt great. So I encourage anybody out there who's never gone to therapy and never gotten into to a support group to go check that out.
Ok. Before I take it out with a survey respondent, I just want to remind you the website for this show is mentalpod. A couple of different ways to support the show...If you want to support it financially, go to the website and you can make a PayPal donation; you can buy stuff through Amazon through our link, they give us a couple of nickels and it doesn't cost you anything; you can buy a t-shirt. And the other way you can support us non-financially is go to iTunes and give us a good rating, it helps boosts our ranking and we really appreciate that. Especially when you write stuff that's nice, that's always nice to read.
Ok. This is a survey respondent who calls himself 'Longtime listener, first time caller.' He's straight, he's in his 20s, the environment he was raised in, he writes, was "a little dysfunctional, distant." Have you ever been the victim of sexual abuse? He writes "Some stuff happened but I don't know if it counts as sexual abuse. When I was a kid my mother made me lay in my bed every morning while she snuggled with me, which was more or less just spooning but it made me uncomfortable and still makes me cringe when I think about it, but that's all that ever happened. I don't think it was abuse but I do think it was too invasive." Deepest, darkest thoughts? He writes "I have a lot of dark thoughts, in fact most of them are dark. I fantasize about my own funeral. I fantasize about people I dislike getting hurt or killed. I fantasize that I'll be the one that does the hurting. I never fantasize about the killing because I know I would get caught. I fantasize about sex almost constantly and keep a list of girls that I know I could easily hook up with and what I would say to them to make them keep it a secret." Deepest, darkest secrets? He writes "I've dated the same girl for a long time and have cheated on her both physically and mentally. I hooked up with a stripper. My being a hypochondriac makes all this a weird and agonizing combination as I get tested every few months, and not even with the public clinic tests. I pay over $300 regularly for tests that cover everything from HIV to genital herpes, and sneak out of work early to have them done. I don't make much money, and sneaking out of work makes me even less. So far I have managed to keep all of this a secret." Do these generate any thoughts or feelings towards yourself? He writes "Mostly afraid that I'll never be able to make it stop. I'm afraid that I'll get married and still won't be able to control it. I'm afraid that I'll get caught, whether now or then in the hypothetical marriage, but it isn't the shame of getting caught that scares me, it's that I'll get caught and not give a shit and I'll find out that that's who I really am." Wow, that's fucking deep. And then he writes "It felt very strange but kind of good to type all this out." Well, I don't know after listening to the last episode and then hearing this email, I don't think there's any question that there is hope and that you are not alone. So thanks for listening.
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