February 28, 2019 • 36 mins
Debbie Millman's story is one of extraordinary resilience in the face of trauma and the redemptive power of love and strength found in the unlikeliest of places. (Warning: this episode contains explicit information about sexual abuse.)
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Please
be advised this episode contains explicit descriptions of sexual abuse.
Listener discretion is advised. I've been thinking a lot lately
about the people who save us, who shine a light
and help us see away forward, even when our lives
(00:20):
seem hopeless and bleak. These people aren't necessarily our parents
or grand parents, or aunts or uncles. They don't have
to be related to us by blood or live under
the same roof. When we encounter them as children, as teenagers,
or even later in life, we don't always recognize them
(00:41):
as our guardian angels. But this is what they are.
My guest today is Debbie Millman, and this episode is
about the possibility of extraordinary resilience in the face of
violence and trauma, and the redemptive power of love and
strength found in the unlikeliest of places. I mean, I
(01:02):
think that the best advice that I could give anybody
who's had this experience or is having this experience, is
seek help. Seek help. There was once, and I don't
know if it still exists. It probably does in some
parts of the world, in some parts of the United States,
or even seeking help is a statement of weakness, and
(01:25):
that's not the case. It's the biggest possible strength that
a person could have is to say I need help.
I need help. Debbie is a force of nature, designer, author, artist, illustrator,
branding genius and co founder of the world's first master's
program in branding at the School of Visual Arts in
(01:47):
New York City. She's also one of the most luminous,
soulful people I know. It's an honor to share her story.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, secrets that
are kept from us, secrets we keep from others, and
(02:10):
secrets we keep from ourselves. So I would like to
begin by asking you about the landscape of your childhood,
your family, the town you grew up in. Um, can
you just talk to me a little bit about little
Debbie Sure? Um? Well, I was. I'm a native New Yorker.
(02:34):
I was born in Brooklyn in one and we lived there,
my mother and my father and me for two years,
and then they moved me to Howard Beach, Queens and
I lived in Howard Beach until the middle of third grade.
And by that time they had had another child, my
(02:55):
younger brother who's two and a half years younger than
I am, and in the inutile of third grade, my
dad bought his own pharmacy. He was a pharmacist and
had worked in Manhattan at a pharmacy that no longer exists,
a mom and pop type shop called City Drug and
that was across the street from the Carnegie Delhi and
(03:17):
I remember him telling me as I was growing up
that Bernadette Peters used to come into the pharmacy quite
a lot, and he thought she was rather spectacular um.
And so we moved to Staten Island in the middle
of third grade and lived there until the end of
fifth grade. In that time, my parents ended up getting
(03:37):
divorced and at the end of fifth grade. By the
end of fifth grade, my mom was getting remarried and
moved my brother, me, and her new husband, who had
two daughters of his own, to Long Island. And I
lived on Long Island from sixth grade until the end
of twelfth grade, and then immediate high tailed it to
(04:01):
college and never went back to Long Island to live.
Debbie falls out of touch with her father for several
years after her parents divorce, and only reconnects with him
when she's twelve or thirteen years old. Her most positive
memories of that time are very connected to one particular person,
(04:22):
a woman named Betty who was in a long relationship
with Debbie's dad. Betty lived on two Street in Chelsea,
and she was, um, I guess what you'd call a
career girl. You know, she was Uh. She lived by
herself in a studio apartment on the third floor of
a brownstone. She was a typist, that's what she did.
(04:45):
But she was fiercely independent and really celebrated and relished
in her independence. I thought she was very beautiful. She
did everything effortlessly well, and she was kind to me,
and she was one of the first consistently kind people
(05:07):
to me in my life. And I think it was
watching the way she moved through the world, her independence,
her strong mindedness about what was just, her efforts to
protect me when my father had um anger episodes. Those
(05:30):
were things that I think embedded her deeply in me.
And as an impressionable young girl, she was the first
role model I think I actually encountered somebody that I
could see living their own life on their own terms,
supporting themselves. And I think that's really what ultimately influenced me.
(05:57):
I wanted to dress like her, I wanted to live
like her, Um, I wanted to be her. Kindness was
in short order in the homes Debbie grew up in.
She has described her father as both brilliant and turbulent.
My dad was very charismatic, and he had a wonderful
(06:20):
oratory talent that he used quite well, so he was
able to express himself with a lot of conviction. He
was very tall, he was very handsome, he was fast
on his feet, very witty. But he also had, and
(06:42):
it was quite hidden most of the time, UM, a
really intense temper. And that temper could be triggered by
just about anything. You never really knew when it was
going to emerge and what would trigger it. And so
I don't really ever remember a time in my life
(07:03):
when I wasn't afraid of him, because I was terrified
that something that I did and inadvertently would cause him
to blow up. And so I was always very scared
around him, inasmuch as I was also and this is
sort of where it gets complicated, really trying to get
his approval and really wanting very badly for him to
(07:26):
be proud of me and to love me. And there
was no question in my mind that he did love me.
It was just really really hard for him to express well.
And what you're describing to that hair trigger living in
a situation where you don't know what's going to set
it off exactly exactly, and so good times could immediately
become horrific because somebody would say something or do something,
(07:51):
or he would get angry about something, and then suddenly
everybody was on on watch. Debbie's father doesn't but come
physically violent until she's a bit older. The first episode
she remembers involves Betty Thanksgiving and a turkey we were eating,
(08:12):
and I remember there was a football game on and
he was watching it, and he ended up getting very
angry with all of us for not being appreciative enough
and happy enough. He always wanted us to be happy.
He threw the turkey across the room and started to
(08:34):
chase Betty around the room, and then she tried to
get away from him by running outside, and then he
ran outside after her and picked up a shovel and
was chasing her through the woods um and then came
back alone. We were not allowed to go outside to
(08:58):
help her. He didn't hit her, but he locked her
out and kept her locked out all night, and she
ended up sleeping in the unlocked car thankfully that was
open and um, that memory is just seared into my
brain and I'll never forget that. While her dad is
(09:20):
chasing Betty around the yard, Debbie and her brother hide
in the bathroom and locked the door. Eventually things calmed
down and her father becomes contrite. Tries to pave over
his behavior with extravagant gifts and gestures, but the pockets
of peace never last very long. That was the first
time I witnessed any violence. But then later he'd be
(09:44):
throwing things. I don't know that he ever ever hit
any of the women he was with with his hands.
That I'd never witnessed, but I did witness a lot
of throwing things, rocks, furniture, lamps, um, some which would
would hit hit us or hit her. And that was
(10:04):
that was really hard, really hard, yeah, really really hard
to have a parent with such a terrible and unpredictable temper.
But the incident with the turkey and Betty, that's nothing
compared with what comes next. We're going to pause for
(10:25):
a moment. Debbie's newly divorced mom attends a meeting of
parents without partners. Imagine match dot Com for divorced or
widowed people, except in real life unfolding chairs, probably in
a church basement, And there Debbie's mom meets and marries
(10:48):
her next Mr. Wrong. She married a man who, um
was brutal. You know, whatever anger issues my dad had
at that point, you know, we had never ever beaten
me or my mother. Um he had. He had a temper,
and I was terrified of that temper as far back
(11:09):
as I can remember. But I had never witnessed anybody
actually hitting anybody until he came into our lives and
he hit all of us. He hit my brother repeatedly.
He beat me. He beat his own daughter once so
badly she couldn't go to school. He would beat me
(11:30):
and my brother every time we did come back from
my dad from a weekend with my dad. At that point,
I have to say it was my choice to say
I'm not going to see him anymore because I couldn't
bear being beaten. Now, my dad didn't protest it. He
didn't go to court to try to continue to see us.
(11:50):
The he did stop paying his child supports and my
mom had to take him to court. Okay, I just
want to be sure you're hearing what's happening here. Debbie
is put in the insanely impossible, heartbreaking position of either
a seeing her dad and being beaten for that offense
by her stepdad, or be not seeing her dad. I
(12:13):
remember going with her to court, and I remember getting
all dressed up that morning because I wanted to look
pretty so that maybe when he saw me he tried
to rescue me. But he didn't show up. I was
wearing a dress that my mother had made me. She
was a seamstress and made all my clothes pretty much, um.
(12:33):
And it was a orange and pink and white, tiny
little flowers pattern all over the fabric, and it had
put sleeves, and I was wearing a pair of white boots.
And I thought I looked really, really good, um, and
thought he would think that too, but he never showed up.
(13:00):
Debbie has another memory of being on the front porch
of her house. Her father has come by to give
her a birthday present, and her mother and stepfather won't
let him in the house, so Debbie has to go
out on the porch, and Debbie's father wants her to
tell him that she wants the present, that she really
really wants the present, and she does. She really wants it.
(13:23):
She feels guilty for wanting it because her mother and
stepfather have told her that her dad is a bad guy,
but finally she admits that she wants it. And at
that point, I guess my mother and stepfather were so
worried about what he would say or do um that
he turned on the intercom in an effort to listen
to what was happening. But they pressed their wrong button
(13:44):
and music went on the microphone. And so I stood
there and I think we were all It was all
this sense of humiliation and shame and fear and longing.
I want to talk about shame. It's almost redundant to
(14:05):
say that shame is a taboo subject. I mean, it's
practically synonymous with taboo. But over and over again, what
I see in my life as a writer, as a
teacher of writing, and as host of this podcast is
that so many of us walk around feeling consumed by shame,
and that feeling is one of being very very much alone.
(14:28):
And the only cure, the only way to blast our
way out of that horrible isolation chamber of shame, is
to speak to its source, to tell the truth, because
I can promise you this. Whatever we feel the most
ashamed of is also what makes us most beautifully, imperfectly,
(14:48):
profoundly human. Things go from very bad to very much worse.
Debbie stepfather, the one who Mom met in the Parents
without Partners meeting, is not only beating Debbie. That's not all.
The real dark, dark dark years were between nineteen seventy
(15:12):
two and in nineteen seventy five, the right after they
got divorced and right before I was reunited with my dad.
Seventy two, seventy three, seventy seventy five were the dark
years of my life because this man who my mother
married UM was not only physically violent and not only
emotionally violent, he was also sexually violent and was a
(15:36):
um and and and raped me repeatedly from the time
I was UM maybe ten and a half eleven, twelve thirteen.
In those years until until he finally until my mother
finally divorced him um I. It was a very different
time than it is now, and at that time in
(15:57):
my life, Danny I didn't know that something like this
could happen to anyone like it. This was something that
didn't seem conceivable to even happen, and I thought I
was the only person in the world this was happening too.
(16:17):
He was very strong, he had been a professional boxer
in Germany. He was German, and told me that if
I ever told anyone that he would kill my brother,
and I believed him. He beat my brother repeatedly and
treated him terribly while we were all together, but I
(16:42):
and I really thought that he would and could, and
he said he had it all figured out, and so
I didn't tell anybody. I didn't tell anybody. I actually
didn't know that it ever happened to anybody else until
I read a letter in newsday I was. I loved
getting the newspaper my parents. My mother got the newspaper,
(17:03):
got it every day, and I'd read the comics and
do the cryptograms. And there was a letter to Anne
Lander's about somebody who was writing to her about being abused,
and she urged that person to tell someone. And I
cut the letter out and put it onto my mattress
because I suddenly realized I wasn't alone. But for years
and years I was too afraid to tell anybody because
(17:25):
I was really convinced. I was ten eleven, twelve thirteen
years old that I would be responsible for my brother's death,
and so I didn't tell anyone, no one. Imagine a
little girl who cuts the letter out of a newspaper
and keeps it under her bed to remind herself that
(17:48):
she is not alone to give words to what's happening
to her, even if she is unable to speak these
words for many years. This conversation between Debbie and me
took place during the few days following the courageous testimony
of Dr Christine blass Ford a neat response of Brett
Kavanaugh to her testimony. The idea being there was no corroboration,
(18:12):
the idea of being why didn't she say something at
the time, The idea being it's her word against his.
The sense of the loneness that you must have felt,
and not having the language for it right, not even
(18:33):
having the neural pathways to understand what was happening. I
had no idea, no idea. At some point, when she's
twelve or thirteen, Debbie gets her period, and then she
doesn't get her period. She becomes petrified that she's pregnant.
She doesn't speak the truth to a single soul. Instead,
(18:57):
she makes up a story because what else can she do?
Who can she turn to? I ended up concocting a story,
and I told my mother that I had been assaulted
at school, and she took me to a doctor. She
(19:18):
also informed the school, and and then I had all
the added guilt of lying, and she took me to
a doctor and the doctor examined me, and the doctor
told my mother that it was not possible that this
was a one off situation because of this scar tissue
(19:39):
that I had, and told her instead that I must
be lying because I must have had a boyfriend because
of what he saw as repetitive activity. A twelve year
old girl, a sixth grader must have a boyfriend, Yeah,
(20:00):
that must be it. So I wasn't believed, and I
just had to continue on. My mother never confronted me
about it. She didn't accuse me of lying. We're going
to take a quick break. We'll be back in a moment,
(20:24):
So let's fast forward more than forty years. Debbie tells
me that during Dr Christine Blassie Ford and Brett Kavanaugh's
testimony just a couple of days earlier, while she's glued
to the television along with so many women in America,
her mother texts her and asks how she's doing. I
wrote her back and said, you know, it's been a difficult,
(20:46):
in challenging a couple of days, and we then got
into a back and forth text conversation and I once
again asked her how it was possible during the time
that it was happening to me, because it all happened
(21:06):
in the house where we all lived, in the one
bathroom that that we had in that house, with the
door locked, How she could not know? How could she
not know that this was happening to me? And she
insist that she didn't, And at this point I really
(21:28):
do believe her, because I don't think that she would
have been able to live with herself if she did
believe that it was happening. Nevertheless, um she told me
something that I didn't know before, which was that after
she told my stepfather what had happened to me in school,
(21:55):
that he responded with such indifference that it was leave
then that she knew what had happened. And that makes
a lot of sense now because she never berated me
for lying, she never accused me of having a boyfriend,
and then very shortly after that experience, she did divorce him.
(22:17):
It's amazing the way of family secret can continue to
reveal itself and reveal itself over the course of a lifetime,
like this other layer that you in your mid fifties discover. Yes, Yes,
because if somebody had said, well, what why did your
mother ultimately leave your stepfather, I would have said, I
(22:39):
actually don't know. I just assumed it was because he was,
you know, a heinous person um. And now I know.
Remember how I said, this is a story of resilience. Well,
that's feeling a little bit too easy to me. We
bat around the world resilience a lot. It falls into
a basket of words like authenticity, vulnerability, ideas that many
(23:02):
of us, like a lot, see value in, but aren't
sure exactly how to achieve. This next part is what
most inspires me, not the horrific story of abuse you've
just heard, but the story of a spirit that was
greater than the violence perpetrated on it. This, my friends,
is about the deepest kind of triumph. You know, your
(23:25):
brain can only only except what it thinks it can tolerate.
And I wish that I had the memory of every
single assault that was perpetrated on me. I wish that
I remembered every single time so that I could figure
(23:46):
out a way to erase it somehow. I mean, I
wish I remember the first time. I remember specific times,
but I don't remember every time. But I do remember
walking one day on the sidewalk of my neighborhood in
on Long Island, thinking, if only this wasn't happening to me,
I would be the happiest person alive. Just think about
(24:12):
what it takes to formulate that thought. If only this
wasn't happening to me, I would be the happiest person alive.
I am only now thirty years into analysis and therapy,
really trying to understand how did I actually managed through event?
(24:34):
And I always wanted a better life. I started therapy
two years out of college, So I did six years
of therapy with one UH with one counselor, and then
went into like a real analysis that began in and
I've been working with the same doctor ever since. And
(24:57):
so she saved my life. She has given me a
way out of that horror I was. I was functional,
and I'm very fortunate that I was never addicted to
drugs and I was never self destructive. But I think
that wanting so much more, and also being creative and
(25:19):
seeing that I could make things allowed me to essentially
escape and otherwise really dismal, dismal experience. Yeah, let's talk
about that, because I feel like so much of your
story and mine in this regard, has to do with
(25:43):
being saved in a way by creativity, by art. Do
you know the term narrative medicine? No? Yeah, I love it. Interesting,
I thought you would. It's it's a it's a it's
a relatively new literary field. And I remember the first
time I heard it, um, and I heard it in
(26:04):
relation to my own work, to my memoirs, that you
know that what I have been doing all these years
without having the term for it is narrative medicine in
some way. And I kind of recoiled against it because
it felt a little bit too self helpy to me,
or too much like writing a therapy or journal ing. Um.
But I've come to understand what it means to share
(26:28):
a story, to shape a story, to craft, to craft
art out of the chaos of a life. Well, because
I thought about this so much, I've come to the
conclusion that my longing for a better life was bigger
than my shame about my existing life, and so that
(26:54):
is what propelled me forward. I also, the older I've gotten,
the less secretive I've been, and I kept the my
abuse and violation and even even the fundamental um dysfunction
in my relationship with my dad pretty much secret. Until
(27:19):
the last five years. I was really ashamed of of
what happened to me. I felt that I would be
seen as damaged or inferior, and told my closest friends
and and partners, but was not in any way a
(27:39):
spokesperson for overcoming trauma or abuse. And initially it was
more motivated by a sense of not letting those bad
experiences sort of win or overtake the theme of my life.
And I would always tell people, I, you know, I'm
(28:00):
not going to give in to that. I'm not going
to let that thought me And in fact, you you
you don't have the capacity to let it stop you
or not. It will impact you if you don't deal
with it. It will catch up to you and overtake
you if you don't. It's only really in the last
couple of years that I've become very transparent about these
(28:24):
experiences with my close friends and partners and colleagues. Um,
this is the most substantial conversation I've ever had about
it in any kind of public forum. Debbie did briefly
touch on her history of abuse when she was a
guest on the Tim Ferris Show a couple of years back. Tim,
(28:46):
who is as prepared as he is intuitive as a host,
asked Debbie about her work as a board member for
the Joyful Heart Foundation, an organization dedicated to eradicating sexual violence.
On their website. Tim had noticed a comment of Debbie's
about her work for Joyful Heart. She said that it
made her entire life makes sense, and Tim wondered, what
(29:09):
does she mean by that? Do I tell the truth?
This is this? I mean at that point it wasn't
a secret, but it was very private, really private. This
is my personal trauma. I'm now going to talk to
one of the most popular podcast hosts in the world
about this very personal, very tender trauma. And I just
(29:30):
took that, as you put it, Danny so well, that
step into courage and I told my story. I told
it for the first time, and life has not been
the same since. You know, Tim, the show is a
really popular show. I get emails every single week, sometimes
(29:51):
every day, and that podcast was done several years ago
with people sharing and disclosing and needing help or wanting resources.
And UM, and now I'm having this conversation with you
because I did talk to some degree to Tim about it,
but not not to this degree, not to this degree,
(30:14):
because I'm wondering how it has felt for you as
this has stopped being a secret, because what our secrets,
secrets are built on shame. If we keep a secret,
it's because we feel afraid, guilty, most often a shame
that somehow alone, you know that, somehow this is not
(30:38):
an okay way to be, It's not an okay way
to feel. And when we actually um explode that, there's
something on the other side of that. Can you talk
about that at all? Absolutely? Um. You know you said
something to me after I interviewed you on our podcast
(30:59):
that I've repeated it probably thousands of times. At this point,
you and I were having I don't know if you
remember this, but we're having a conversation about confidence. At
that point in time, like three or four books on
confidence had come out, and somehow it came up in
our conversation and you, very very um clearly, he said, Oh,
(31:22):
I think confidence is overrated. And I stopped and was like, what,
because this is something I've been searching for my entire life.
Confidence and you said, oh, I think it's overrated. I
think that, you know, overly confident people are mostly obnoxious.
And I said, well, then, what how do you how
(31:46):
do you exist in the world? And you said, I
think what is more important than confidence is courage. Courage,
courage to take that first step. And then my life
was changed because okay, courage, courage is what you need.
(32:09):
Tearing allowed for a certain camaraderie from others that were
also abused that suddenly we could look at each other
and say me too, in a really profound way. There's
also parts of me now and looking back on it,
you know, why didn't I tell anybody? Okay, I know
you tell my brother, But why didn't I run away?
And I'm thinking about it now, is the adult that
(32:31):
I am not as a little girl that had no
place to run or was afraid that her brother would
be killed, or was powerless to a much larger, stronger
person who was supposed to take care of me. Um
and and trying to make sense of all of that
is likely going to be a lifetime. Take me a lifetime.
(32:52):
But I don't hate myself as much as I did
for it had thing happened at all. And I still
really grapple. You know, there is not a pat ending
to this story or this experience. I grapple a lot.
It's all an evolution. And I can look back and
(33:15):
at my twenties and my thirties and my forties and
now in my fifties, and what I can sincerely tell
you is that every decade has gotten better, and every
year has gotten better, despite mishaps or you know, bad
experiences or sad experiences or heartbreak. What I can tell
you that there's not a year that's gone by in
(33:36):
my continuing to try to understand and it makes sense
of it and make sense of who I am and
my place in the world. That I can tell you
has not gotten better and has not gotten clearer. And
I just hope that that will continue over the rest
of my life. This really rough story has a really
(33:56):
lovely PostScript. Remember Betty her single working girl apartment on
West Street in Manhattan. That's signified for Debbie the possibility
of independence, security, glamour, and success, the one happy home
experience she had ever known as a kid. Well, guess
where Debbie lives now, because she lived on two Street
(34:20):
and that was my one sort of memory of having
a happy home experience. Whenever I would go to restaurants
in Chelsea or the high Line, I'd always cut across
twenty four Street and touch the numbers for for nine whereas,
which is where she lived, on the gate, on the
outside gate of the house. And then I, ultimately, because
(34:41):
of that, was able to buy a place on street
that I saw was for sale, and I live at
four four nine, but I live really close by and
and see it all the time. But I told Betty
she sent me photos that she had of the block
um that that she had had from from back in
(35:02):
the seventies, and she was just so touched and thrilled.
And where we still keep in touch, so he knows
where I am and what I'm doing. I'd like to
thank my dear friend Debbie Millman for appearing on Family
Secrets and sharing her story of courage and resilience. You
can find out more about Debbie's work on Debbie Millman
(35:24):
dot com, and I urge you to listen to her
fantastic podcast, Design Matters. I also encourage you to learn
more about the Joyful Heart Foundation, which carries out its
mission through an integrated program portfolio of healing, education, and
advocacy for survivors of sexual assault. That's Joyful Heart Foundation
dot org. Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production.
(35:48):
Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer, Andrew Howard and Tristan
McNeil are the audio engineers, and Julie Douglas is the
executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like
to share, you can get in touch with us at
listener mail at Family Secrets Podcast dot com, and you
can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, and
Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fam Secrets Pod.
(36:11):
That's fam Secrets Pod. For more about my book, Inheritance,
visit Danny Shapiro dot com
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Please
be advised this episode contains explicit descriptions of sexual abuse.
Listener discretion is advised. I've been thinking a lot lately
about the people who save us, who shine a light
and help us see away forward, even when our lives
(00:20):
seem hopeless and bleak. These people aren't necessarily our parents
or grand parents, or aunts or uncles. They don't have
to be related to us by blood or live under
the same roof. When we encounter them as children, as teenagers,
or even later in life, we don't always recognize them
(00:41):
as our guardian angels. But this is what they are.
My guest today is Debbie Millman, and this episode is
about the possibility of extraordinary resilience in the face of
violence and trauma, and the redemptive power of love and
strength found in the unlikeliest of places. I mean, I
(01:02):
think that the best advice that I could give anybody
who's had this experience or is having this experience, is
seek help. Seek help. There was once, and I don't
know if it still exists. It probably does in some
parts of the world, in some parts of the United States,
or even seeking help is a statement of weakness, and
(01:25):
that's not the case. It's the biggest possible strength that
a person could have is to say I need help.
I need help. Debbie is a force of nature, designer, author, artist, illustrator,
branding genius and co founder of the world's first master's
program in branding at the School of Visual Arts in
(01:47):
New York City. She's also one of the most luminous,
soulful people I know. It's an honor to share her story.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, secrets that
are kept from us, secrets we keep from others, and
(02:10):
secrets we keep from ourselves. So I would like to
begin by asking you about the landscape of your childhood,
your family, the town you grew up in. Um, can
you just talk to me a little bit about little
Debbie Sure? Um? Well, I was. I'm a native New Yorker.
(02:34):
I was born in Brooklyn in one and we lived there,
my mother and my father and me for two years,
and then they moved me to Howard Beach, Queens and
I lived in Howard Beach until the middle of third grade.
And by that time they had had another child, my
(02:55):
younger brother who's two and a half years younger than
I am, and in the inutile of third grade, my
dad bought his own pharmacy. He was a pharmacist and
had worked in Manhattan at a pharmacy that no longer exists,
a mom and pop type shop called City Drug and
that was across the street from the Carnegie Delhi and
(03:17):
I remember him telling me as I was growing up
that Bernadette Peters used to come into the pharmacy quite
a lot, and he thought she was rather spectacular um.
And so we moved to Staten Island in the middle
of third grade and lived there until the end of
fifth grade. In that time, my parents ended up getting
(03:37):
divorced and at the end of fifth grade. By the
end of fifth grade, my mom was getting remarried and
moved my brother, me, and her new husband, who had
two daughters of his own, to Long Island. And I
lived on Long Island from sixth grade until the end
of twelfth grade, and then immediate high tailed it to
(04:01):
college and never went back to Long Island to live.
Debbie falls out of touch with her father for several
years after her parents divorce, and only reconnects with him
when she's twelve or thirteen years old. Her most positive
memories of that time are very connected to one particular person,
(04:22):
a woman named Betty who was in a long relationship
with Debbie's dad. Betty lived on two Street in Chelsea,
and she was, um, I guess what you'd call a
career girl. You know, she was Uh. She lived by
herself in a studio apartment on the third floor of
a brownstone. She was a typist, that's what she did.
(04:45):
But she was fiercely independent and really celebrated and relished
in her independence. I thought she was very beautiful. She
did everything effortlessly well, and she was kind to me,
and she was one of the first consistently kind people
(05:07):
to me in my life. And I think it was
watching the way she moved through the world, her independence,
her strong mindedness about what was just, her efforts to
protect me when my father had um anger episodes. Those
(05:30):
were things that I think embedded her deeply in me.
And as an impressionable young girl, she was the first
role model I think I actually encountered somebody that I
could see living their own life on their own terms,
supporting themselves. And I think that's really what ultimately influenced me.
(05:57):
I wanted to dress like her, I wanted to live
like her, Um, I wanted to be her. Kindness was
in short order in the homes Debbie grew up in.
She has described her father as both brilliant and turbulent.
My dad was very charismatic, and he had a wonderful
(06:20):
oratory talent that he used quite well, so he was
able to express himself with a lot of conviction. He
was very tall, he was very handsome, he was fast
on his feet, very witty. But he also had, and
(06:42):
it was quite hidden most of the time, UM, a
really intense temper. And that temper could be triggered by
just about anything. You never really knew when it was
going to emerge and what would trigger it. And so
I don't really ever remember a time in my life
(07:03):
when I wasn't afraid of him, because I was terrified
that something that I did and inadvertently would cause him
to blow up. And so I was always very scared
around him, inasmuch as I was also and this is
sort of where it gets complicated, really trying to get
his approval and really wanting very badly for him to
(07:26):
be proud of me and to love me. And there
was no question in my mind that he did love me.
It was just really really hard for him to express well.
And what you're describing to that hair trigger living in
a situation where you don't know what's going to set
it off exactly exactly, and so good times could immediately
become horrific because somebody would say something or do something,
(07:51):
or he would get angry about something, and then suddenly
everybody was on on watch. Debbie's father doesn't but come
physically violent until she's a bit older. The first episode
she remembers involves Betty Thanksgiving and a turkey we were eating,
(08:12):
and I remember there was a football game on and
he was watching it, and he ended up getting very
angry with all of us for not being appreciative enough
and happy enough. He always wanted us to be happy.
He threw the turkey across the room and started to
(08:34):
chase Betty around the room, and then she tried to
get away from him by running outside, and then he
ran outside after her and picked up a shovel and
was chasing her through the woods um and then came
back alone. We were not allowed to go outside to
(08:58):
help her. He didn't hit her, but he locked her
out and kept her locked out all night, and she
ended up sleeping in the unlocked car thankfully that was
open and um, that memory is just seared into my
brain and I'll never forget that. While her dad is
(09:20):
chasing Betty around the yard, Debbie and her brother hide
in the bathroom and locked the door. Eventually things calmed
down and her father becomes contrite. Tries to pave over
his behavior with extravagant gifts and gestures, but the pockets
of peace never last very long. That was the first
time I witnessed any violence. But then later he'd be
(09:44):
throwing things. I don't know that he ever ever hit
any of the women he was with with his hands.
That I'd never witnessed, but I did witness a lot
of throwing things, rocks, furniture, lamps, um, some which would
would hit hit us or hit her. And that was
(10:04):
that was really hard, really hard, yeah, really really hard
to have a parent with such a terrible and unpredictable temper.
But the incident with the turkey and Betty, that's nothing
compared with what comes next. We're going to pause for
(10:25):
a moment. Debbie's newly divorced mom attends a meeting of
parents without partners. Imagine match dot Com for divorced or
widowed people, except in real life unfolding chairs, probably in
a church basement, And there Debbie's mom meets and marries
(10:48):
her next Mr. Wrong. She married a man who, um
was brutal. You know, whatever anger issues my dad had
at that point, you know, we had never ever beaten
me or my mother. Um he had. He had a temper,
and I was terrified of that temper as far back
(11:09):
as I can remember. But I had never witnessed anybody
actually hitting anybody until he came into our lives and
he hit all of us. He hit my brother repeatedly.
He beat me. He beat his own daughter once so
badly she couldn't go to school. He would beat me
(11:30):
and my brother every time we did come back from
my dad from a weekend with my dad. At that point,
I have to say it was my choice to say
I'm not going to see him anymore because I couldn't
bear being beaten. Now, my dad didn't protest it. He
didn't go to court to try to continue to see us.
(11:50):
The he did stop paying his child supports and my
mom had to take him to court. Okay, I just
want to be sure you're hearing what's happening here. Debbie
is put in the insanely impossible, heartbreaking position of either
a seeing her dad and being beaten for that offense
by her stepdad, or be not seeing her dad. I
(12:13):
remember going with her to court, and I remember getting
all dressed up that morning because I wanted to look
pretty so that maybe when he saw me he tried
to rescue me. But he didn't show up. I was
wearing a dress that my mother had made me. She
was a seamstress and made all my clothes pretty much, um.
(12:33):
And it was a orange and pink and white, tiny
little flowers pattern all over the fabric, and it had
put sleeves, and I was wearing a pair of white boots.
And I thought I looked really, really good, um, and
thought he would think that too, but he never showed up.
(13:00):
Debbie has another memory of being on the front porch
of her house. Her father has come by to give
her a birthday present, and her mother and stepfather won't
let him in the house, so Debbie has to go
out on the porch, and Debbie's father wants her to
tell him that she wants the present, that she really
really wants the present, and she does. She really wants it.
(13:23):
She feels guilty for wanting it because her mother and
stepfather have told her that her dad is a bad guy,
but finally she admits that she wants it. And at
that point, I guess my mother and stepfather were so
worried about what he would say or do um that
he turned on the intercom in an effort to listen
to what was happening. But they pressed their wrong button
(13:44):
and music went on the microphone. And so I stood
there and I think we were all It was all
this sense of humiliation and shame and fear and longing.
I want to talk about shame. It's almost redundant to
(14:05):
say that shame is a taboo subject. I mean, it's
practically synonymous with taboo. But over and over again, what
I see in my life as a writer, as a
teacher of writing, and as host of this podcast is
that so many of us walk around feeling consumed by shame,
and that feeling is one of being very very much alone.
(14:28):
And the only cure, the only way to blast our
way out of that horrible isolation chamber of shame, is
to speak to its source, to tell the truth, because
I can promise you this. Whatever we feel the most
ashamed of is also what makes us most beautifully, imperfectly,
(14:48):
profoundly human. Things go from very bad to very much worse.
Debbie stepfather, the one who Mom met in the Parents
without Partners meeting, is not only beating Debbie. That's not all.
The real dark, dark dark years were between nineteen seventy
(15:12):
two and in nineteen seventy five, the right after they
got divorced and right before I was reunited with my dad.
Seventy two, seventy three, seventy seventy five were the dark
years of my life because this man who my mother
married UM was not only physically violent and not only
emotionally violent, he was also sexually violent and was a
(15:36):
um and and and raped me repeatedly from the time
I was UM maybe ten and a half eleven, twelve thirteen.
In those years until until he finally until my mother
finally divorced him um I. It was a very different
time than it is now, and at that time in
(15:57):
my life, Danny I didn't know that something like this
could happen to anyone like it. This was something that
didn't seem conceivable to even happen, and I thought I
was the only person in the world this was happening too.
(16:17):
He was very strong, he had been a professional boxer
in Germany. He was German, and told me that if
I ever told anyone that he would kill my brother,
and I believed him. He beat my brother repeatedly and
treated him terribly while we were all together, but I
(16:42):
and I really thought that he would and could, and
he said he had it all figured out, and so
I didn't tell anybody. I didn't tell anybody. I actually
didn't know that it ever happened to anybody else until
I read a letter in newsday I was. I loved
getting the newspaper my parents. My mother got the newspaper,
(17:03):
got it every day, and I'd read the comics and
do the cryptograms. And there was a letter to Anne
Lander's about somebody who was writing to her about being abused,
and she urged that person to tell someone. And I
cut the letter out and put it onto my mattress
because I suddenly realized I wasn't alone. But for years
and years I was too afraid to tell anybody because
(17:25):
I was really convinced. I was ten eleven, twelve thirteen
years old that I would be responsible for my brother's death,
and so I didn't tell anyone, no one. Imagine a
little girl who cuts the letter out of a newspaper
and keeps it under her bed to remind herself that
(17:48):
she is not alone to give words to what's happening
to her, even if she is unable to speak these
words for many years. This conversation between Debbie and me
took place during the few days following the courageous testimony
of Dr Christine blass Ford a neat response of Brett
Kavanaugh to her testimony. The idea being there was no corroboration,
(18:12):
the idea of being why didn't she say something at
the time, The idea being it's her word against his.
The sense of the loneness that you must have felt,
and not having the language for it right, not even
(18:33):
having the neural pathways to understand what was happening. I
had no idea, no idea. At some point, when she's
twelve or thirteen, Debbie gets her period, and then she
doesn't get her period. She becomes petrified that she's pregnant.
She doesn't speak the truth to a single soul. Instead,
(18:57):
she makes up a story because what else can she do?
Who can she turn to? I ended up concocting a story,
and I told my mother that I had been assaulted
at school, and she took me to a doctor. She
(19:18):
also informed the school, and and then I had all
the added guilt of lying, and she took me to
a doctor and the doctor examined me, and the doctor
told my mother that it was not possible that this
was a one off situation because of this scar tissue
(19:39):
that I had, and told her instead that I must
be lying because I must have had a boyfriend because
of what he saw as repetitive activity. A twelve year
old girl, a sixth grader must have a boyfriend, Yeah,
(20:00):
that must be it. So I wasn't believed, and I
just had to continue on. My mother never confronted me
about it. She didn't accuse me of lying. We're going
to take a quick break. We'll be back in a moment,
(20:24):
So let's fast forward more than forty years. Debbie tells
me that during Dr Christine Blassie Ford and Brett Kavanaugh's
testimony just a couple of days earlier, while she's glued
to the television along with so many women in America,
her mother texts her and asks how she's doing. I
wrote her back and said, you know, it's been a difficult,
(20:46):
in challenging a couple of days, and we then got
into a back and forth text conversation and I once
again asked her how it was possible during the time
that it was happening to me, because it all happened
(21:06):
in the house where we all lived, in the one
bathroom that that we had in that house, with the
door locked, How she could not know? How could she
not know that this was happening to me? And she
insist that she didn't, And at this point I really
(21:28):
do believe her, because I don't think that she would
have been able to live with herself if she did
believe that it was happening. Nevertheless, um she told me
something that I didn't know before, which was that after
she told my stepfather what had happened to me in school,
(21:55):
that he responded with such indifference that it was leave
then that she knew what had happened. And that makes
a lot of sense now because she never berated me
for lying, she never accused me of having a boyfriend,
and then very shortly after that experience, she did divorce him.
(22:17):
It's amazing the way of family secret can continue to
reveal itself and reveal itself over the course of a lifetime,
like this other layer that you in your mid fifties discover. Yes, Yes,
because if somebody had said, well, what why did your
mother ultimately leave your stepfather, I would have said, I
(22:39):
actually don't know. I just assumed it was because he was,
you know, a heinous person um. And now I know.
Remember how I said, this is a story of resilience. Well,
that's feeling a little bit too easy to me. We
bat around the world resilience a lot. It falls into
a basket of words like authenticity, vulnerability, ideas that many
(23:02):
of us, like a lot, see value in, but aren't
sure exactly how to achieve. This next part is what
most inspires me, not the horrific story of abuse you've
just heard, but the story of a spirit that was
greater than the violence perpetrated on it. This, my friends,
is about the deepest kind of triumph. You know, your
(23:25):
brain can only only except what it thinks it can tolerate.
And I wish that I had the memory of every
single assault that was perpetrated on me. I wish that
I remembered every single time so that I could figure
(23:46):
out a way to erase it somehow. I mean, I
wish I remember the first time. I remember specific times,
but I don't remember every time. But I do remember
walking one day on the sidewalk of my neighborhood in
on Long Island, thinking, if only this wasn't happening to me,
I would be the happiest person alive. Just think about
(24:12):
what it takes to formulate that thought. If only this
wasn't happening to me, I would be the happiest person alive.
I am only now thirty years into analysis and therapy,
really trying to understand how did I actually managed through event?
(24:34):
And I always wanted a better life. I started therapy
two years out of college, So I did six years
of therapy with one UH with one counselor, and then
went into like a real analysis that began in and
I've been working with the same doctor ever since. And
(24:57):
so she saved my life. She has given me a
way out of that horror I was. I was functional,
and I'm very fortunate that I was never addicted to
drugs and I was never self destructive. But I think
that wanting so much more, and also being creative and
(25:19):
seeing that I could make things allowed me to essentially
escape and otherwise really dismal, dismal experience. Yeah, let's talk
about that, because I feel like so much of your
story and mine in this regard, has to do with
(25:43):
being saved in a way by creativity, by art. Do
you know the term narrative medicine? No? Yeah, I love it. Interesting,
I thought you would. It's it's a it's a it's
a relatively new literary field. And I remember the first
time I heard it, um, and I heard it in
(26:04):
relation to my own work, to my memoirs, that you
know that what I have been doing all these years
without having the term for it is narrative medicine in
some way. And I kind of recoiled against it because
it felt a little bit too self helpy to me,
or too much like writing a therapy or journal ing. Um.
But I've come to understand what it means to share
(26:28):
a story, to shape a story, to craft, to craft
art out of the chaos of a life. Well, because
I thought about this so much, I've come to the
conclusion that my longing for a better life was bigger
than my shame about my existing life, and so that
(26:54):
is what propelled me forward. I also, the older I've gotten,
the less secretive I've been, and I kept the my
abuse and violation and even even the fundamental um dysfunction
in my relationship with my dad pretty much secret. Until
(27:19):
the last five years. I was really ashamed of of
what happened to me. I felt that I would be
seen as damaged or inferior, and told my closest friends
and and partners, but was not in any way a
(27:39):
spokesperson for overcoming trauma or abuse. And initially it was
more motivated by a sense of not letting those bad
experiences sort of win or overtake the theme of my life.
And I would always tell people, I, you know, I'm
(28:00):
not going to give in to that. I'm not going
to let that thought me And in fact, you you
you don't have the capacity to let it stop you
or not. It will impact you if you don't deal
with it. It will catch up to you and overtake
you if you don't. It's only really in the last
couple of years that I've become very transparent about these
(28:24):
experiences with my close friends and partners and colleagues. Um,
this is the most substantial conversation I've ever had about
it in any kind of public forum. Debbie did briefly
touch on her history of abuse when she was a
guest on the Tim Ferris Show a couple of years back. Tim,
(28:46):
who is as prepared as he is intuitive as a host,
asked Debbie about her work as a board member for
the Joyful Heart Foundation, an organization dedicated to eradicating sexual violence.
On their website. Tim had noticed a comment of Debbie's
about her work for Joyful Heart. She said that it
made her entire life makes sense, and Tim wondered, what
(29:09):
does she mean by that? Do I tell the truth?
This is this? I mean at that point it wasn't
a secret, but it was very private, really private. This
is my personal trauma. I'm now going to talk to
one of the most popular podcast hosts in the world
about this very personal, very tender trauma. And I just
(29:30):
took that, as you put it, Danny so well, that
step into courage and I told my story. I told
it for the first time, and life has not been
the same since. You know, Tim, the show is a
really popular show. I get emails every single week, sometimes
(29:51):
every day, and that podcast was done several years ago
with people sharing and disclosing and needing help or wanting resources.
And UM, and now I'm having this conversation with you
because I did talk to some degree to Tim about it,
but not not to this degree, not to this degree,
(30:14):
because I'm wondering how it has felt for you as
this has stopped being a secret, because what our secrets,
secrets are built on shame. If we keep a secret,
it's because we feel afraid, guilty, most often a shame
that somehow alone, you know that, somehow this is not
(30:38):
an okay way to be, It's not an okay way
to feel. And when we actually um explode that, there's
something on the other side of that. Can you talk
about that at all? Absolutely? Um. You know you said
something to me after I interviewed you on our podcast
(30:59):
that I've repeated it probably thousands of times. At this point,
you and I were having I don't know if you
remember this, but we're having a conversation about confidence. At
that point in time, like three or four books on
confidence had come out, and somehow it came up in
our conversation and you, very very um clearly, he said, Oh,
(31:22):
I think confidence is overrated. And I stopped and was like, what,
because this is something I've been searching for my entire life.
Confidence and you said, oh, I think it's overrated. I
think that, you know, overly confident people are mostly obnoxious.
And I said, well, then, what how do you how
(31:46):
do you exist in the world? And you said, I
think what is more important than confidence is courage. Courage,
courage to take that first step. And then my life
was changed because okay, courage, courage is what you need.
(32:09):
Tearing allowed for a certain camaraderie from others that were
also abused that suddenly we could look at each other
and say me too, in a really profound way. There's
also parts of me now and looking back on it,
you know, why didn't I tell anybody? Okay, I know
you tell my brother, But why didn't I run away?
And I'm thinking about it now, is the adult that
(32:31):
I am not as a little girl that had no
place to run or was afraid that her brother would
be killed, or was powerless to a much larger, stronger
person who was supposed to take care of me. Um
and and trying to make sense of all of that
is likely going to be a lifetime. Take me a lifetime.
(32:52):
But I don't hate myself as much as I did
for it had thing happened at all. And I still
really grapple. You know, there is not a pat ending
to this story or this experience. I grapple a lot.
It's all an evolution. And I can look back and
(33:15):
at my twenties and my thirties and my forties and
now in my fifties, and what I can sincerely tell
you is that every decade has gotten better, and every
year has gotten better, despite mishaps or you know, bad
experiences or sad experiences or heartbreak. What I can tell
you that there's not a year that's gone by in
(33:36):
my continuing to try to understand and it makes sense
of it and make sense of who I am and
my place in the world. That I can tell you
has not gotten better and has not gotten clearer. And
I just hope that that will continue over the rest
of my life. This really rough story has a really
(33:56):
lovely PostScript. Remember Betty her single working girl apartment on
West Street in Manhattan. That's signified for Debbie the possibility
of independence, security, glamour, and success, the one happy home
experience she had ever known as a kid. Well, guess
where Debbie lives now, because she lived on two Street
(34:20):
and that was my one sort of memory of having
a happy home experience. Whenever I would go to restaurants
in Chelsea or the high Line, I'd always cut across
twenty four Street and touch the numbers for for nine whereas,
which is where she lived, on the gate, on the
outside gate of the house. And then I, ultimately, because
(34:41):
of that, was able to buy a place on street
that I saw was for sale, and I live at
four four nine, but I live really close by and
and see it all the time. But I told Betty
she sent me photos that she had of the block
um that that she had had from from back in
(35:02):
the seventies, and she was just so touched and thrilled.
And where we still keep in touch, so he knows
where I am and what I'm doing. I'd like to
thank my dear friend Debbie Millman for appearing on Family
Secrets and sharing her story of courage and resilience. You
can find out more about Debbie's work on Debbie Millman
(35:24):
dot com, and I urge you to listen to her
fantastic podcast, Design Matters. I also encourage you to learn
more about the Joyful Heart Foundation, which carries out its
mission through an integrated program portfolio of healing, education, and
advocacy for survivors of sexual assault. That's Joyful Heart Foundation
dot org. Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production.
(35:48):
Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer, Andrew Howard and Tristan
McNeil are the audio engineers, and Julie Douglas is the
executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like
to share, you can get in touch with us at
listener mail at Family Secrets Podcast dot com, and you
can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, and
Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fam Secrets Pod.
(36:11):
That's fam Secrets Pod. For more about my book, Inheritance,
visit Danny Shapiro dot com
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Charlie is America's hardest working grassroots activist who has your inside scoop on the biggest news of the day and what's really going on behind the headlines. The founder of Turning Point USA and one of social media's most engaged personalities, Charlie is on the front lines of America’s culture war, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of students on over 3,500 college and high school campuses across the country, bringing you your daily dose of clarity in a sea of chaos all from his signature no-holds-barred, unapologetically conservative, freedom-loving point of view. You can also watch Charlie Kirk on Salem News Channel