July 1, 2025 • 64 mins
This week we’re in session with Jordan, who wants to understand how seeing his parents’ dysfunctional relationship as a child might have contributed to his own marriage ending after only two years.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm Laurie Gottlieb. I'm the author of Maybe You Should
Talk to Someone, and I write the Dear Therapist advice
column for the Atlantic.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
And I'm Guy Wench. I'm the author of Emotional First Aid,
and I write the Dear Guy advice column for Ted.
And this is Dear Therapists.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Each week we invite you into a real session where
we help people confront their biggest problems and then give
them actionable advice and hear about the changes they've made
in their lives.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
So sit back and welcome to today's session. This week,
we're in session with Jordan, who wants to understand how
seeing his parents dysfunctional relationship as a child might have
contributed to his own marriage ending after only two years.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
There were red flags that I ignore. Here's this beautiful
woman that I get along with extremely well, and we
just seem perfect for each other, and we moved in
with each other, and it was within a couple months
I started to realize, second, this just doesn't seem normal.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
First a quick note, Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only.
It does not constitute medical or psychological advice and is
not a substitute for professional healthcare advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let iHeartMedia
use it in part orn full, and we may edit
it for length and clarity. In the sessions you'll hear,
all names have been changed for the privacy of our guests.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Hey Lourie, Hey guy. So who have we invited to
speak with us today?
Speaker 1 (01:30):
So today we have someone who is trying to figure
out why his marriage failed, and it goes like this,
Dear therapists. I came across your response to a letter
regarding someone who became a parentified child, and it completely
resonated with me. I am at the beginning stages of
understanding what went wrong with my marriage and the root
causes of it failing. My partner has experienced her own trauma,
(01:54):
but I'm now starting to look in the mirror and
would like to understand what my parents toxic, resentful and
use of relationship has done to myself and my brothers.
I hope you can help, Jordan.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
I'm always glad to hear that people are curious about
what's going on in their relationships and what's the legacy
of their childhood that they're carrying with them and Jordan
is clearly curious. It's one of those better late than
ever situations because the marriage is now over, but I
hope we'll be able to help him take some lessons
into his next relationship.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
I think when marriages don't work, the tendency can be
to blame the other person. And I like here he's saying, yeah,
my partner had some issues, but I really want to
look at my issues and figure out my role in this.
So let's go talk to him and see what we
can help him with. You're listening to Dear Therapists for
my Heart Radio. We'll be back after a short break.
(02:56):
I'm Lori Gottlieb, and.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
I'm Guy Wench and this Deatherapists. Hi Jordan, Hi Louri,
welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
Thank you so much for having me you guys, I
appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
You're very welcome. Julden, we wanted to hear a little
bit about your marriage, how you met, how it went,
what went wrong, so we can get a sense of
what happened here.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yeah, my ex wife and I met actually on zoom
because we both work for a school, me being a teacher,
her being a teaching assistant for a different class. And
we met over COVID. We just started talking and we
got close very very fast. We got married for religious
reasons so she and her daughter could move in with me,
So we kind of expedited things. I could go as
(03:41):
far as saying it it was rushed in some regards,
but that is how we met and grew close to
each other.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
And can I ask, just for context, how old are
both of you and how old is her daughter?
Speaker 3 (03:51):
I am thirty three, she is thirty one, and her
daughter is five.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
So this was a relatively short marriage, and I'm wondering
at what point things started to not seem as great
as they had been at the beginning.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Yeah, you know, Laurie, looking back on things, there were
red flags that I I ignored because not to give you
a full full backstory if I can really quick, but
leading up to meeting her, I had lost one hundred
and forty five pounds and I was sky high as
far as my confidence and just ability to approach her.
(04:29):
So I think she got the confidence from me, and
it was, you know, attractive to her and everything like that.
But once we started to get to know each other
even more, some of the deeper, deeper seated family things
with her started to come out, and I was blind
to it because I'm like, here's this beautiful woman that
I get along with extremely well, and we just seem
(04:52):
perfect for each other. And we moved in with each other,
and it was within a couple months I started to realiz,
wait a second, this just doesn't seem normal.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
What were some of the red flags that you noticed
before she moved in.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
One of the first things she told me is that
she said it in a joking way. She said out
daddy issues. So along with saying that, she would talk
about men quite a bit and get pretty specific about it.
And she told me, this is three weeks into talking,
that I was the first man that she's only speaking
with me that she in the past had spoken to
(05:28):
four or five six men at a time. She was
just getting through her previous divorce, So that was a
big red flag that she wasn't telling me too many
specifics about why she got her first divorce to begin with.
And she would speak about men and sexual encounters with
men quite frequently. Even someone that we used to work with,
(05:48):
this man who didn't know anything about me. He kept
messaging her and then she would say, I don't want
to get fired if I tell him to stop talking
to me. I said, well, if you're not welcoming those messages,
you can tell him that. And she didn't for a while,
and that always felt a little uneasy for me too.
It's you could put a stop to that if you
(06:09):
want to.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
You know, Jordan, you're saying that she will tell you
about sexual encounters with other men. There's a coworker who's
texting her repeatedly and she doesn't want to tell them
to stop. How did you feel about her telling you
these stories about sexual encounters? Did it make you uncomfortable?
And did you let her know if it did?
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, it made me very uncomfortable, and I did tell her,
And honestly, she played it off as disclosing all this
information to me as a good thing, like I'm open
to telling you all these things. I'm open to sharing
all these things with you, like, oh, I should feel
good about it. And I told her I would like
you to put a stop to that. And she always
had a way of still making me feel okay about
(06:52):
it at the beginning, until things just started to kind
of spiral downward.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
How did she make you feel okay about it? Because
you chose to move in together. So all this was
going on, you felt uncomfortable. She wasn't really respecting your
request to monitor some of these things that maybe were
not appropriate to share with you, and you decided to
(07:16):
move in together. What was happening that made you feel like, oh, well,
that's okay. I don't really have to pay too much
attention to these things that make me uncomfortable.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
It was interesting. She would almost sprague about you know,
these men messaging her, and then she would show me like, see,
I blocked him right away, and she said, I never
have done this before anytime I've ever spoken to a man.
I'm always speaking to another man, even in her previous marriage.
That's another red flag is that she confessed to me
(07:46):
that she cheated on her ex husband several times.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
What I'm asking is, given all of the red flags,
what made you feel comfortable enough to move in with her?
Speaker 3 (07:56):
I guess as time went on, we went a few
months of not having any incidents like that. I want companionship,
I want love. I showed her and her daughter tremendous
love and care and support, and I think it was
a classic case of just ignoring some of those things
(08:17):
and just wanting it, almost trying to force it and
manifest that companionship and partnership that I've always wanted.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Jordan, you said that right before this you had lost
one hundred and forty pounds. What was your romantic life
like before you met your ex wife and was it
affected by your weight?
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Yeah, so this is much deeper rooted. I clearly have
an unhealthy relationship with food. I was bigger in my
whole life in two thousand and nine to twenty eleven.
I lost one hundred and fifty five pounds then, and
I moved to Saint Louis to teach in public schools.
Down there. I was just totally engulfed in my work,
(09:02):
and I gained it all back and more. When I
first lost all that weight, I was dating quite a
bit and a couple serious relationships back then. I was
still looking for that partner, but emotionally just wasn't mature
enough in my early twenties, and that depression that I
fell into gaining the weight back, and my romantic life
was non existent until I lost the weight again.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Jorldren, your romantic life was not existent because you were
making efforts to try and meet women, but not being successful,
or because you withdrew for making those efforts.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Withdrew, I gained all the weight back, and I just
my confidence was at an all time low and I
didn't feel worthy. I didn't feel like I was myself.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
And how long did that period last of feeling unworthy?
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Six seven years, so.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
That's a long time. Did you think to maybe try
and date regardless, not have to wait to lose the weight,
but bring yourself into the data world and see what happens,
or you didn't even want to take that risk.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
It's not even that I didn't want to take that risk,
is that I just knew that I wasn't going to
find the right partner. In the state that I was in,
I felt like I was a prisoner in my own body,
you know, because my whole childhood I was always bigger,
so to get used to that, and there were coping
things that I would deal with by being funny. Growing up,
I was the bigger guy, so I was being funny.
(10:26):
And then when I lost the weight and I got
down to a very healthy weight, I got a tension
that I had never gotten before. There was no effort
on my part because I wasn't myself. I didn't feel
like myself.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
You mentioned depression, and you said you felt like you
were a prisoner in your own body, But what about
a prisoner in your own mind? What was going on there?
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Yeah? I was a prisoner in my own body and
my own mind. I never acknowledged the fact that I
was depressed. I gained two hundred pounds in that time period.
I can only chalk that up to depression.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
The time. You didn't make the connection between the eating
behavior and the mood. How you were sort of self
medicating with food.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
No, no, I didn't.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
So what made you start against something must have affected
your mood. Do you remember what it was?
Speaker 3 (11:15):
I was dating someone and we had broken up after
almost a year, so I'm not sure if that's pinpointed
it or if it was partly that I was overworking myself.
I felt a responsibility to have a successful career and
be seen as successful amongst my brothers and in my family.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
When did you start to realize that maybe there was
depression going on, that maybe the link between the weight
gain and mood was a really strong one.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
The program that I was teaching through down in Saint Louis,
there was a big group of us that started at
the same time, all around the same age. It was
almost like being in college again. It's a two year commitment,
So for those first two years you kind of had
a family down there, and then third year, more people
left to go to med school in law school. And
as the years went on, more and more people started
(12:05):
to leave, and I was alone, and I was coping
with how much I was working with eating, and it
just started to spiral downward even more. And I would
say probably my fourth or fifth year down there, I
just started to feel like there was just no way
that anybody could get themselves to lose one hundred and
fifty pounds twice in their life.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
What was the motivation this last time to lose the weight?
Because you did lose it recently, right before you met
the person that you married.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
You know, when you're ready, you know. In August of
twenty twenty, when I started, I was fed up with
the body I was in. I felt trapped. I couldn't
do things with my body or my mind that I
know that I'm capable of doing. And I was able
to lose one hundred and forty five pounds in eight months,
like incredibly fast, because that's how disciplined.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
I can be Did your ex wife know about this
struggle that you've had with confidence and depression and how
the weight is played into that. In other words, she
was sharing a lot with you in the beginning. Were
you sharing some of your vulnerabilities with her?
Speaker 3 (13:11):
Absolutely? That was one of the biggest attractions to hers,
is how hard I was working and how much weight
I had lost. You know, I'll never forget when I
first shared my before pictures with her and she was
just in awe of what I was able to do.
So she absolutely knew about both instances in two thousand
and nine and more recently in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
But did you actually share with her, I have struggled
in my life with depression.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
I don't believe I said those exact words. I had
told her a lot about my years in Saint Louis,
and I know that she knew of my struggles down there.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Jordan, tell us a little bit about what happened once
your ex wife moved in with you.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yeah, So when she and her daughter moved in, like
I was on cloud nine. I have this instinct of
just to protect and care her ethnicity as Arab, and
she valued parts of it. Where the man is the provider,
the man is the protector, and everything like that, and
I took that role on one hundred percent. At the
(14:13):
same time, all the things that she had told me
about her exes in the past, they are disrespectful to me,
they don't help around the house. So I did the opposite.
I was always helping around the house. I was putting
forth a lot of effort to be that ideal husband
that she had always looked for.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Jordan, you said in your letter that you want to
look at what your contribution might have been to the marriage.
Ending mentioned some things that she did that you didn't love,
some history that she had that concerned you. Can you
tell us perhaps some of the things that you think
you personally might have contributed that might have been problematic
(14:50):
in the marriage.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Yeah, there's no shortage of me self reflecting and thinking
about like that. That's just the way that I I'm like, wow,
like what went wrong? When did it go wrong? Where
did it go wrong? And I don't see the things
that I did as as necessarily things that should abruptly
(15:16):
end a marriage the way that it did.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
How did it abruptly end?
Speaker 3 (15:20):
It was kind of on course to end for a
few months. I will say this, she grew more and
more unstable.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
What does that mean? She grew unstable? What did that
look like?
Speaker 3 (15:31):
Right before she moved in, she shared something with me
that she hadn't shared before, and she said, in my
late teens and early twenties, I had seen several doctors,
and those doctors recommended that I take medication for my
anxiety and depression. And she was living at home with
her three brothers, her dad, and her stepmother, and in
(15:53):
that culture, he says, it's very frowned upon to seek
help through therapy, to seek medicaid. Her dad found her
medication and made a big deal out of it and
threw it away. Her anxiety and depression stems from being
the person who found her mother deceased at fourteen years old.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
It was a suicide.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
You know.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
That's interesting because when she worked up the curse to
see a doctor again in February or March of this year,
I was in the room with her, and she had
said things to the doctor that I'd never heard her
say before. One of them was that she realized that
her mom probably did commit suicide because of the abuse
by the hands of her father. For an entire year
(16:37):
leading up to her mother's death. She remembers almost having
to call police every week, and the one night that
her and her brother next youngest brother was ten, and
she described it to me as her being, you know,
in a zombie like state. But she had seen that
tons and tons of times before, and she had a
(17:01):
discussion with her brother should recall the police. Her dad
was not in the house at the time, and they
both agreed, no, no, she'll snap out of it. And
she didn't snap out of it.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
So you're saying that you saw her mental health take
a bit of a slip at some point in the marriage.
You knew that she had been to psychiatrist, that she
had been on medication. Clearly there was a history of
trauma as well. When you saw that change in her
behavior or her mood, did you address it with her,
(17:31):
did you suggest she might need to see a psychiatrist again?
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Yeah. I just kept seeing episodes happening more frequently, and
her taking her anger, frustration and stress out on myself
and her daughter, and it just became more and more
irrational and unreasonable. I did bring up to her like, hey,
maybe you should seek help, to see a therapist. That
she would get more angry at me whenever I would
(17:55):
bring it up.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
She refused to do that.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Then, yeah, she told me October she said, I think
there's something wrong with me. I think I need to
see somebody. She said, you know, can you find a
therapist for me? And I said absolutely. I spent a
whole month trying to find the perfect therapist. I said, baby,
you want a woman, right, So I was researching for
(18:21):
women therapists where we lived. Well, I narrative searched down
to Muslim women therapists. She said, oh my god, that
would be perfect. Someone might know what I've been through.
I found someone finally, and she started in late October,
and oh my gosh. She never took it serious. She
had four sessions. She went to three of them. She
(18:44):
was lay for two of them. But she always told
me that she did feel a little bit better after
she spoke with them, but she had it made up
in her mind that it wasn't going to work.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Did she explore medication at all? Since my father had
taken away her medication when she was younger, but that
seemed important.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
No, she didn't. Children.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
You were telling us about the incident that goes the
end of the marriage. What was that incident?
Speaker 3 (19:10):
She actually faked a positive COVID test to be able
to get out of work, and because her daughter was
also exposed to her COVID using air quotes, she had
to miss school as well. All three of us were
at the same school, me being a teacher, her being assistant,
and her daughter being in preschool. I stayed home with
(19:31):
her daughter and she was at school, and she was
texting me throughout the day. She said, I can't tell
you guys how much I miss the two of you.
I can't wait to get home. Our policies at that
school were if you are vaccinated, you only have to
be out for five days, and since her daughter isn't vaccinated,
(19:51):
she had to be out for ten days. So I
stayed on two days with her daughter. So this is
the second day now where she didn't call until you
almost an hour after school. So when she called, I answered,
and I said, what took you so long to get
out of school. The intention was not to question her
or anything like that. I was genuinely wondering, oh, was
(20:13):
there a meeting after school. She had a very strong
reaction to me, saying then she said with expletives, how insecure,
blah blah blah, and and I was just so taken
it back by what she was saying that I was
just why are you saying this? But she said, let
(20:35):
me talk to my daughter. Let me talk to my daughter.
And I said, I'll give her the phone. Just tell me,
why are you so upset right now? Give the phone
to my daughter. I said, I'll give her the phone
in two minutes. Just tell me what's wrong. She hung up.
She called the police, and she told the police officer
that I wasn't giving the phone to her daughter fast enough.
(20:58):
She called back again and I did give her the phone,
but it was already too late. So she arrived home.
I didn't know at that time that she had called
the police and she ran in. You could just tell
that there was this such a strong response. I know
that she's very protective of her daughter. She had shown
(21:18):
very very strong signs of protection over her daughter, and
she attributes that to the loss of her mother and
the irrational fear of her passing away and her daughter
growing up without a mother as well.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Can you tell us what happened when she arrived, She.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Ran in, she picked up her daughter, and it was
maybe within a minute or two, a police car arrived
in the back of the house and I looked at her.
I said, did you call the police? And she very
proudly said yes. I said, why did you call the police?
She said, you weren't giving the phone to her fast enough.
I was speechless. I went outside to speak with the
(21:58):
police officer and I gave him a little bit of
a backstory that she had just started this new medication
about six weeks prior to that. After the officer spoke
with her as well, he brought me back out and
nothing came of it. He just said, hey, one of
you should leave the house to cool off. Well, she
moved out. Her and her daughter moved out.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
You're talking so much about her trauma, and what I'm hearing, Jordan,
is your trauma. But you're not talking about your trauma.
You're talking about her trauma. Every time we are trying
to understand more about you, you go into an explanation
for her trauma and what she experienced and why she
(22:40):
might have acted in the way that she acted. I
think that having the police called on you after all
of the other trauma that had happened in this relationship
is extremely traumatic, especially because you had been trying to
help in the various ways that you knew. How wow,
(23:01):
and you get the police called on you. How did
you feel after the police officer left and how did
you communicate that to her?
Speaker 3 (23:12):
I felt numb, like I had been for a while.
And you know, you're right, Laurie, That's all that I
ever did was make excuses for because I just I
kept on wanting to figure it out. I connected with
her and felt her pain so much when she always
(23:35):
talked about her experiences in her childhood. I always had
this need to want to help her because I saw
how much pain she was always in, and she directed
that pain towards me and her daughter.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
You get so oriented towards trying to understand the why
of her that you do not look at what's going
on with you. And it's similar with the feelings you
had about the weight loss and the weight gain. There
wasn't an exploration of what was going on inside you,
inside your own heart, with your own feelings, and you're very,
(24:15):
very oriented towards the other people's feelings, but at the
expense of looking at your own.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
And you know, I've done a tremendous amount of thinking,
and I was able to understand where a lot of
my trauma comes from. And one of her biggest things
about me was that she said that I over communicate,
I talk too much. And I told her at the
(24:42):
beginning of our relationship that my childhood, with the way
that my parents were, is the exact reason why I
want to talk about issues between her and I my
entire life. Even to this day, my parents live under
the same household and they do not speak to each other.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Can you tell us a little bit more about what
was going on for you growing up where you also
had your own trauma.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
Yeah. There's four boys, and I'm the second to youngest.
My youngest brother has Down syndrome, and he is the
absolute the love of my life and he always will be.
He's the center of all of our universe. He is
the reason that my mom and dad stayed together. I
(25:30):
give a lot of credit to my parents for coming together,
as ironic as those words are, because they were together
in the house physically. I can count on one hand
the amount of days that I've seen my mother and
father speak to each other. The only positive memory that
I have is I was nine years old and it
(25:54):
was at a wedding, and I remember looking over and
seeing my mom and dad slow down together, and I
remember that being so weird to.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
See You're tearing up as you described that. Can you
talk a little bit more about what it felt like
to see them together like that?
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Over the years, I've actually asked myself was that even real?
Or did I make that up in my head because
I wanted to see it so much, you know, So.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
The tears just now were feeling what that.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
I feel like I never saw the love that I
should have seen between my mom and dad that I
saw them in movies growing up. I saw them in
some of my friend's parents, and I just saw tension
and hostility.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
So the tears were sadness and loss.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Yeah, the tears were also for you as a nine
year old boy who was aware that there's oldest tension
and distance between his parents and sees one grief tender moment,
and the way you characterize it now was it was weird.
But I think probably at nine it was weird on
(27:09):
the one hand to see your parents embrace in that
way when you're not used to seeing it, But there
must have been something that felt really good about it,
maybe even.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
Hopeful without a doubt. You hit it on the head.
I feel like that moment, in a lot of ways,
really transformed me into hopeless romantic. I. You know, my
brothers would make fun of me, you know, in high
school because I you know, the girlfriend that I had
in high school, I was just so over the top
with how romantic and how thoughtful I was towards her,
(27:42):
because I feel like I was maybe trying to make
up for what I didn't see my entire life, and
I still am to this day.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
You characterized in your letter the relationship with your parents
as abusive and toxic. Can you tell us what you
meant by that?
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Individually? My mother and father are two of the best
people I've ever met in my life. How supportive they
are of all of us boys, They're just tremendous. But
to each other, it's extremely toxic to this day.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
What did it look like between them when you say
between them it was toxic and abusive.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
I'll go back to early childhood. First. My two older
brothers were superstar athletes, had a lot of success, and
they spent a lot of time with my dad, and
I feel like I went on a different path because
when my two older brothers were spending time with my dad.
I spent time with my mom. So my brothers were wrestling,
playing football and my mom. You know, I took tap
(28:43):
dancing class and was auditioning for commercials because I wanted
to be in plays and movies. And it was just
very different from my two older brothers, who I love
and look up to so much. But I felt there
was already that division between I mean, my two older
brothers with my dad, and then it was me with
(29:04):
my mom that has sprinkled into our adulthood. I've always
been the middle ground with my family, and I've always
been the one that has tried to help the situation,
and it always seemed to not work because there's forty
five years of disdain and tension.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
So you were trying to kind of save their marriage
as the nine year old who saw them embrace, and
that was the hope. But tell us what you actually
saw between them. What you're describing as a lot of distance.
They slept in separate rooms, they didn't really talk with
each other. Is that what you're referring to or is
there more how.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
They communicate to each other nonverbally. So my mom writes
notes to him. And I was home in May when
I was going through what I was going through, and
I looked down at my dad's area or whatever, and
he has one of the notes sitting on the desk
and it just capital letters, and you could tell it
was scribbled really hard, the word clown. And that made
(30:06):
me so angry. It's like, why do you have to
be like that towards each other?
Speaker 1 (30:11):
You know, so you didn't see them screaming at each
other from a very young age. You saw them writing
notes to each.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Other, total silent treatment.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
You never saw your parents speak to each other, so
what would happen at meal time? They would speak only
to the kids, but you never saw them interact with
each other.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
There was a lot of fighting through us. Jordan, tell
your mom this, Jordan, tell your dad this. I want
to say, you know, I was saved by my age
because I feel like my two older brothers got the
worst part of the deal.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
I'm hearing you describe your childhood, and again the focus
is significantly on what was happening with your brother, with
your mom, with your dad, between the two of them,
and I'm not hearing enough about you, and I want
to ask you you're describing you have two older brothers
who are your dad's boys in a way because he
(31:06):
was involved in their athletics and training them, they hung
out with him. And then the two younger brothers, there's you,
and there's your younger brother who has down syndrome, who
are not hanging out with Dad, who are not the
athletic ones. And I'm curious about how that felt for
you to be one of these four boys where this
seems to be some kind of division down the middle
(31:27):
there that the two older boys are the athletic stars
with Dad, and the two younger boys are staying home
with mum. And I'd like to know whether you felt
that division and how that felt for you.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
Yeah, that's spout on. That's exactly how I felt. I
never felt validated by my dad. You know, we've gotten
so much closer over the years, but that's because I
over compensated with not being a successful athlete with being
a successful teacher and coach where I wanted to impress
them that way. I didn't play football as early as
(32:03):
young as my two older brothers. I waited until middle school,
and I never came close as good as those two were.
I mean, they were all state athletes. I even played
football in college for two years. I was half decent myself,
and I never felt like I got that approval from
my dad.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Did you feel that you were getting validated from your
mom for your talent in theater and the things that
were interesting to you?
Speaker 4 (32:28):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (32:29):
Yeah, you know, because she's the one that got me
into that stuff and I had an interest in it,
and she did everything she could to do that for me.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
Sounds like something that was very meaningful and special to you,
that you really enjoyed, that you've brought out perhaps the
best of you, that you felt confident and and good at.
So I'd like to hear us a little bit about
how the career out of it went.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
It was short lived in my elementary years, where I
auditioned for a couple of commercials and then had one
of the auditions out was spotted by a talent agent
to join this like acting modeling school, and it was
very expensive to do that for a summer, and I
do recall my dad not being in support of it
because of how much money it costs, and my mom
(33:15):
went ahead with it and supporting me through that. And
then after that I did plays in middle school and stuff.
But as I got older, I just felt more pressure
to play football, and I kind of let that dream
die because I just felt like with my last name
in the city that I grew up in, I got
to play football.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
It's unfortunate in the sense that it sounds like you
had a lot of joy and that you had to
give up this joy in middle school because of the
pressures to play football and be yet another one of
the successful family football players, and that you gave up
something that was very valuable for you to do that.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Yeah, I feel like maybe a little piece of my
childhood died.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
I want to go back to where things ended with
your marriage. So that happened a few months ago. Are
you both teaching at the same school, and what has
happened for you since then? As you're trying to make
sense of your role in the marriage.
Speaker 3 (34:17):
She was not hired back, if you will, but she
has essentially ghosted me. She would always speak of how,
almost boastfully, that she would talk to a man for
two three months in ghost them, and she has essentially
done that to me.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
There's this saying we marry our unfinished business and for you,
as the little boy who wanted to save his parents' marriage,
who wanted things to work out for them, who wanted
them to have love and closeness and connection, and took
on this role of I need to save this. And
(34:55):
then you have, from her perspective, someone who told you
quite clearly, I want someone to take care of me.
I didn't have that. I wasn't protected by my father,
and my mother died by suicide because of my father's abuse,
and we felt helpless, and he threw away my medication.
I need, as she said early on to you, she
(35:18):
had daddy issues. I need someone to take care of me.
So in a way you are a perfect dysfunctional match,
because the puzzle pieces fit together again in not a
healthy way. You want to save someone, she wants to
be saved. Those are your childhood wounds, and boom you
(35:38):
found each other, and oh that feels so delicious and
good until you start to realize maybe this isn't going
to be the way to heal my childhood wounds. In fact,
maybe this is going to throw salt on my childhood
wounds and re traumatize me again. And I think that's
the realization that you have when you wrote to us
(36:01):
that I want to look in the mirror, you said,
because I don't want to bring my needs as a
child to the expectations of what my partner can or
can't do for me. I want to come whole and
as an adult, as someone who has these wounds but
(36:23):
who can work through that. And so I wonder, have
you started going to therapy? Have you tried talking to
somebody about these unprocessed feelings from childhood that still live
very very deeply inside of you.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
Yeah. I attempted a couple of years ago, both in
person one session and just didn't get good vibes, and
then virtually with another a couple of years ago and
didn't like that. But then more recently the spring I
did and went a handful of times and stopped going.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Can I ask why you stopped, I honestly.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Don't know the answer to that. One of my brothers
is living out of the country right now. I had
the opportunity to just live with him, you know, for
a while, and really kind of remove myself from the
situation and work on myself. I felt like that was
a good opportunity.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
I have a theory, and my theory is this, when
you're in therapy, the focus is on you, and it's
on your feelings and it's on your experience. And most
of what you've told us today has been about how
other people feel. And many of the times that we
try to bring it back to you, you took us
(37:38):
somewhere else. And I think that's because it's hard for
you to stay there, that you have this idea that
if you feel uncomfortable, if you feel the pain of
that little boy, that it's going to be overwhelming. The
way it truly was when you were younger, you couldn't
let yourself go there because it would be too painful.
(37:59):
You didn't have the support that you didn't have anyone
to go to. You didn't have anyone to comfort you
or to help you make sense of what was going on,
and how unsafe it feels when you're younger to see
parents who can't communicate with each other, who are hostile
toward each other, to see this division, and to see
other families and say, I don't understand this. And also,
(38:21):
you love your brother with down syndrome, your younger brother,
so much, but when there is a child in the
family who has these challenges, it takes up a lot
of emotional space in the family. So sometimes the other
kids who seem just fine, they don't get a lot
of attention in that way because everybody's so focused and
(38:41):
you're nodding, so I can see that was the experience that,
of course your younger brother's going to get a lot
of attention because he had more needs in some ways,
But that doesn't mean that the other three of you
didn't have a lot of needs too that may not
have been as visible as your younger brother's needs. And
(39:02):
so there's a lot of pain around that that felt
unbearable as a child. But now you go to therapy
and the focus is going to be on you, and
maybe that feels a little much like, oh I don't
deserve or I can't handle what might come up. And
I want to suggest along with this theory that if
(39:26):
you start to feel that in therapy, that you can
say to the therapist, Wow, I'm feeling really overwhelmed right now,
can we slow down? And so I want to ask
you right now, what has it been like for you
today talking with us, when we've sometimes interrupted you, when
you've gone off to other places, when we've tried to
(39:47):
direct you back to yourself, when we've asked you to
sit a little bit in some of your own feelings.
How has that felt to you? What has that been like?
Speaker 3 (39:57):
It's hard to describe. I don't I don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
That's the numbness that I think you were describing before.
Numbness isn't the absence of feelings. Numbness is a sense
of being overwhelmed by too many feelings. And I think
I can tell from your face and your body language
that you're having so many feelings right now, and I
just want you to be aware of that. It's not
that you don't feel, it's that you feel a lot,
(40:23):
and it's going to be really helpful for you to
become acquainted with what you are feeling.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
You're right, Judren, that's important, and for multiple reasons. One
of them is you wrote to us because you're interested
in having a better relationship next time. You describe yourself
as a romantic and you are very much a romantic,
but you have a very specific version of that in
(40:52):
your head, and it's related to your childhood. In your childhood,
you had a brother with special needs. You had to
pay parents with special needs as it were, because they
had such a conflictual marriage, and you were very occupied
with understanding what's going on with everyone around you, trying
(41:13):
to help them as much as possible. And that is
the romance that you sought out, the rescue the damsel
in distress who came out of this bad childhood, bad marriage,
was in a difficult situation, had a daughter needed to
get married right away. Turned out there were all these
red flags, and you were in that role of I
(41:36):
will rescue her, and that will be the most romantic
thing of all, because if I can rescue her and
rescue her means somehow making her traumas go away or
not impact her in the presence, so she can be
more present with me and we can live this love
story that I didn't see in my parents, but I
know is out there because I've done enough theater to
(41:57):
know that love stories like that are out there. And
that's what you gravitate toward. You feel much more comfortable
rescuing than you do needing rescue, and you need rescue.
You wrote to us for that reason. You have all
these needs and feelings and history that you have a
(42:18):
hard time getting in touch with. You get flooded and
then you get numb, and you're going to have a
very hard time setting limits and maintaining them, stating your needs,
setting expectations, doing all the thing you would need to
do in another relationship, and you are more likely to
go for another rescue in which your needs and feelings
can be put aside in the service of others. But
(42:41):
you were deprived of that attention in your childhood. It
wasn't something that you didn't need. It's something you didn't
get and you're going to prevent yourself from getting it
now unless you can change that. And within your formulation
of a romantic there has to be one in which
(43:03):
that version of the romantic needs as well.
Speaker 4 (43:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:08):
Yeah, that really resonates with me a lot. You're right.
It's always easier for me to, you know, to help
someone like you said, the damsel and distress, that attraction
to that, to wanting to make someone else's life better
and help someone else.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
And when you start to heal this, maybe your definition
of romance won't be that anybody needs to get rescued.
That you both have needs and wants and you can
support each other, which is different from rescuing someone. So
you want to be in a mutually supportive relationship and
(43:52):
that can become your new definition of romance.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
Yeah, that's what I want to find, somebody that I'll
feel like they have my back and that they will
support me as much as I'm willing to support them.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
So, Jordan, we have some advice for you, and we
have five tasks that we'd like you to do this week,
and that might sound like a lot, but they're all
very connected and interrelated. So I'm going to start with
the first one. And the first one has to do
with your brothers, and it's that all of you grew
up in the same household, but like many siblings, had
(44:35):
different experiences of growing up in the same household, and
nobody talked about it because in your household, your parents
weren't even talking to each other, so you didn't have
a lot of modeling for how to talk about what
was going on and the effect that this was having
on all of you. And it sounds like you and
your brothers have become much closer over the last few years,
and one of your brothers even invited you to go
(44:56):
stay with him after the marriage split up. And so
I think it's a good time right now to have
an opening for all of you to be able to
communicate with each other differently. And you can say to
your brothers, I really appreciate how supportive you've been as
I've gone through this divorce. And one of the things
(45:18):
that I'm realizing is that there might be a connection
between how we grew up and the way that we
behave in our relationships. And I think it would be
really helpful if we could talk with each other more
openly about what it was like to grow up the
way that we did and really support each other around that.
And I want to tell you a little bit about
(45:39):
what it was like for me. Is that Okay, if
I do that and just start there and see what
happens when you open up to your brothers, and maybe
they'll open up to you too, so that there isn't
this silence around what it was like to grow up
in this very aggressively silent household. Meaning there was all
(45:59):
of this Russian in notes and in body language, but
it was silent, which makes it all the more confusing.
So that's the first task. We want you to start
that conversation with your brothers.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Here's the second task, Jordan. You said earlier that you
have a problematic relationship with food, and it sounds like
you use food to soothe your feelings, and one of
the things we'd like you to do this week is
to find a local overeater's anonymous group support group that
(46:30):
you can join, because we think it would be really
useful for you to talk about two people who have
a similar experience and who are very understanding that relationship
with food and how it impacts you, and to find
alternative coping mechanisms to deal with your feelings rather than eating.
(46:52):
Would also give you the support we think you need,
so we would like you to do that this week.
Some of these groups might be virtual, some might be
in person, and see what's going on in your area
and find one.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
The next thing we'd like you to do is we
were really struck by how much research you put in
to finding the perfect therapist for your wife. At the
time you did all this research, she wanted a woman,
she wanted someone who was Muslim, she wanted something very specific,
and you said you researched for weeks trying to find
(47:24):
the right therapist for her. We want you to do
that for yourself, but not for weeks this week. Maybe
it's the person you have already seen, or maybe you
want to look into seeing someone else, but we want
you to spend the time and the effort that you
put into finding a therapist for someone else to finding
the right therapist for you and then make the appointment.
(47:45):
So here's the fourth task. You said that you've been
ghosted at this point and you really don't have any
way to process with her what happened in this marriage,
and so we want you to do some processing. You'll
do some through therapy, you'll do some through these other tasks.
We want you to do some tangible processing yourself. And
(48:05):
sometimes when we write things down, we get a lot
of clarity. And what we'd like you to do here
is write down three moments in the marriage where you
worked so hard to help her, but you needed help
and you didn't help yourself. If you could do this over,
how would you in those three moments help yourself? Knowing
(48:29):
what you know now, we'd like you to be very
specific about I would do this because I was so
focused on her that I didn't think about the help
that I needed in that moment. But here's what I
would do now to help myself. It might be I
would set this boundary, or I would go take a walk,
or I would take some breaths or I would talk
to somebody about it, I would say this to her instead,
(48:50):
I would try less hard to regulate her feelings, and
I would work harder to regulate mine. Could be any
of those or anything you come up with. And then
with that, we'd like you to write down why you're
relieved not to be in that situation anymore, and why
you're excited about using whatever it is that you would
(49:10):
be doing to help yourself in your next relationship so
that it's a healthier one.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
One last piece of advice, Jordan, we were really struck
by how bright you became, and I mean bright as
in light coming from you when you spoke about acting
and performing. We think that's a big part of you,
that that's an essential part of your identity that has
(49:37):
not gotten any expression since perhaps middle school or whenever
that was that you stopped and transitioned to football. And
when something gives you joy in life, it has to
be a thing that you can express on a regular
basis because it's a part of you. So we'd like
you to find some way to do that where you are.
(49:58):
It can be it can be a theater, it can
be a class, it can be anything. But we'd like
you to find something, even if it's an hour a
week that you can join. It will bring you around
people who you'll connect with for that reason, and you'd
like to see that back in your life. So, Jordan,
how does all that sound to you?
Speaker 3 (50:18):
Know you said that five tests seems like a lot,
but those are all perfect for me to get started
and get the ball rolling. You might think that I'm
most excited about the theater, the acting part, which I am,
but I'm most excited to talk to my brothers about
all this.
Speaker 1 (50:35):
Well, we look forward to hearing how your week goes
with these five tasks. We're very excited for you to
try them.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
I'm excited too.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
We look forward to hearing back from you.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
Thank you so much, you guys.
Speaker 2 (50:53):
This habit Jordan has, and a lot of people have,
of defaulting to the other person's fings and needs in
lieu of their own is a difficult habit to break.
So I hope he can work on it, because right
now it happens very automatically. We ask him about his feelings,
he goes to explain what's going on with the other person.
(51:15):
I think he understood the principle, which is great. It's
going to take mindfulness on his part to catch himself.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
Yeah, and that pattern has even seeped into his definition
of romance, that for him, the romantic thing is I
will save somebody else. Because for him, love meant something
very specific. It was if I could help my parents reconnect,
that would be how I would show my love. And
(51:43):
so his idea of love is about taking care of
other people. But he doesn't understand that it needs to
be reciprocal, that people need to support him just as
much as he supports them, and that it's not about
saving someone, it's about supporting someone. And I don't think
he knows the difference yet. He was trying to save
(52:04):
this person who had so much trauma that she had
not worked out and was bringing into the relationship in
all kinds of really destructive ways. So I hope that
these tasks will start to set him on a path
where he starts to recognize those differences.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
And I think it would also help him to really
practice identifying his feelings and naming them, because right now,
he gets flooded, he gets numb, He really has a
hard time knowing what he's feeling. So I hope going
to the support group and I hope doing the other
things we ask him to do will help him to
start differentiate and identify when he's having strong feelings, to
(52:44):
identify them, to talk about them, to get validation for them.
That would be really great for him if he could
do that as well.
Speaker 1 (52:51):
And I love that he said of all the tasks
that we probably assumed that it was the theater one
that he would enjoy the most, but he was actually
most looking forward to talking to his brothers and that
gave me so much hope that he really wants to
start having these conversations and opening up. So I'm really
excited to see how this week goes for him.
Speaker 2 (53:14):
You listening to dea Therapists. We'll be back after a.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
Short break, So gad we heard back from Jordan, and
let's hear how his week went.
Speaker 4 (53:36):
The first task was to speak with my brothers.
Speaker 5 (53:41):
This was the task I was most excited for, and unfortunately,
this is the task that I wasn't able to do,
mainly because I'm not with both of them right now,
and I would like to do this in person with them.
Speaker 4 (53:57):
I'm telling myself that, but maybe.
Speaker 5 (53:59):
I'm reluctant to have that very very important talk with them.
The second task being to find an overeators anonymous meeting.
Speaker 4 (54:09):
That was a success. I was able to.
Speaker 5 (54:11):
Find there are several meetings that are offered in my city.
They have phone in meetings and I still may may
do that, but there are several meetings throughout the week
in the city that I live in, and that'll be very,
very helpful. The third task was to put in that
(54:31):
amount of time to find myself a therapist, that same
amount of time that I put in for somebody else.
I did decide to go back to the therapist.
Speaker 4 (54:40):
That I have gone to in the past.
Speaker 5 (54:42):
I feel like just because I did that, you know,
onboarding with them and definitely gave that therapist all the
information about me, I want to give her a shot again.
So I have scheduled a virtual appointment Thursday, and that
is going to be very beneficial. Task number four was
(55:06):
to write down three moments in the marriage where the
focus and all my energy was on her and I
didn't care for myself. It was tough to relive some
of those moments, but again it was very beneficial and
the fact that I do know what I.
Speaker 6 (55:23):
Would do differently this time, First and foremost, taking care
of my body, not overeating, not going to food when
I felt that abuse, and also going to the gym.
Speaker 5 (55:34):
You know, just taking care of my body in general
would help take care of my mind, which would help
take care of my everyday life. I think in general
though during those moments, would be just to walk away
give myself space. I needed space too. That is a
big revelation for me, is that I needed to walk
(55:56):
away to give myself space.
Speaker 4 (55:58):
So not trying to force being in the.
Speaker 7 (56:01):
Moment, just it's okay to step away for a while
and allow her to be called. And then lastly, the
biggest news is finding that it's outlet, that performance outlet,
whether it's stand up comedy or whether it's joining the
community to play. I reached out to a very very
old close friend of mine that does theater in the
(56:22):
city that I live, and we are meeting the day.
Speaker 5 (56:26):
That I get back in town. It was therapeutic just
to speak with her about theater over the phone.
Speaker 4 (56:32):
Very very excited about that.
Speaker 5 (56:34):
And yeah, I know that there's things that I still
need to do and still need to work on and accomplish,
and I look forward to doing that.
Speaker 4 (56:42):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (56:47):
We gave Jordan a lot to do and I think
he did some of it, and he struggled with some
of it. And one of the first things we ask
him to do is speak to his brothers. He did
mention towards the end of our session with him that
he's with one of his brothers now staying with him him.
It's possible he wanted to wait to be in person
with both of his brothers, but it seems to me
that he could have had that conversation that that's a
(57:08):
conversation he might be avoiding.
Speaker 1 (57:10):
Yeah, and I like that he had some insight into
the fact that he might be avoiding that. He said,
you know, I'm not really sure whether I'm just saying
that I need to be in person with them or
whether I'm really avoiding something. So I'm glad that he's
really considering that, because he does tend to avoid things,
and I'm glad he's starting to recognize that so that
he can get out of that pattern. And I think
something similar happened with the OA meeting. He said he
(57:32):
had success with that, so I thought that he was
going to say that he had been to a meeting.
He said that he hasn't been to a meeting yet,
but he is going to attend, So I really hope
that he does go ahead and attend the meeting. It
sounded like you put a lot of effort into researching that,
so I think that he is motivated. I just think
(57:52):
it's kind of getting over the hump of doing the
thing that trips him up. So let's hope that he
does go soon to one of those meanings. I think
it would be really beneficial for him.
Speaker 2 (58:02):
I agree with you, and I think another place he
didn't quite do enough work was with the therapist. We
had said to him, Wow, you spent so much time
researching a therapist for your wife. You really went to
town and find the right person for her. Spend that
same amount of time finding the right person for you.
And I'm glad he decided he's going back to his
(58:24):
previous therapist if he's comfortable there. But I do think
he wasn't putting in the work to find the right
person for himself as much as he did for his wife.
Speaker 1 (58:32):
Yeah, it seems like you put so much effort into
her healing and he hasn't put as much effort into
his own. I'm really glad that he decided to go
back to therapy. I just hope that as he goes
back to therapy, that he really sits with himself and says,
is this the right match for me? And if it's not,
if he could discuss that with his therapist and even
(58:52):
have that conversation to find out, why is this not
feeling right for me? Maybe it's a therapist, maybe it's not.
But it would be great for him to really be
able to have that conversation and say, I'm not sure
if I'm getting my needs met. That would be such
an important moment for him.
Speaker 2 (59:09):
I agree. And the task we gave him about going
back to three difficult moments in his marriage and rewriting
them in the sense of what he would do differently. Again,
I think there was avoidance there. He went to higher
level ideas of walk away or take care of myself
in terms of my gym and my eating. But that's
(59:31):
different than knowing what to do in the moment standing
up for yourself. And I was hoping that he would
find moments he could literally revisit that specific moment. What
do you say that, I'm not sure he's figured out
how to do yet.
Speaker 1 (59:44):
Yeah, Well, if Jordan is listening to this, I hope
what he'll do is he'll revisit some of those really
really difficult moments and maybe they're just too traumatic for
him to revisit quite yet. But when he gets there,
when he feels comfortable, I hope that he'll revisit some
of those moments that he shared with us in the
session and say, if I could redo that moment, here's
what I would do now, knowing what I know now
(01:00:07):
about exactly what he said, I need space too. Now
he was talking about walking away, but he needed to
take up space because she was taking up all the space.
So I hope you can look at those specific moments
that he talked about with us and say, here's what
I would do differently if I were to take up
space too in that relationship.
Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
Exactly, and even articulate specifically, this is what I would
say to her in that moment. Really put yourself there
and articulate the sentences.
Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
Yeah. And I was really excited though about his excitement
with getting back in touch with the creative side of himself.
He really did everything with that task where he reached
out to the friend. They talked about theater. They have
a meeting setup. They're going to talk about local opportunities.
She's going to help kind of guide him. And I
think that support is really important. That you have someone
(01:00:55):
who really wants to encourage your passion, and so here
he has someone who says, oh wow, I really want
to help you find a way to express this part
of yourself that's really important to you.
Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
In general, I was thinking about comfort zones with Jordan
and the idea that we try to stay within our
comfort zone. But I want people to understand we might
be comfortable with very specific kinds of discomfort, but I
think it's when you're trying to stretch that zone, leaning
into the kinds of conversations like with your brothers or
how the redo with your ex wife that you really
(01:01:29):
haven't had before. Help Jordan, if you're listening, you can
try and expand your comfort zone, go to the things
that make you uncomfortable, you're not used to, and that's
where the real growth can be for you.
Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
And I think that's really hard to do, which is
why I think that Jordan was so brave to reach
out to us to say I want to change, I
want things to be different, and to share with us
all of the things that he did share with us.
I really commend him for that, and I'm so excited
to see what he can do when he really does
stretch himself in the way that you described.
Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
So do I, because this is someone who's been through
a lot. He's actually a strong person. He has a
lot of determination, he has a lot of insight and
self reflection. So I really think he'll be able to
convert those going forward and to challenge himself because I
think he has a ton of potential.
Speaker 1 (01:02:19):
You know, when we have sessions with people, we really
get to know them quite well in a short amount
of time, and I got this sense of Jordan as
this incredibly loving person. And what I want for him
is I want him to be in a loving relationship
where it's reciprocal and he gets back what he gives.
And so I hope that if he's listening to this,
(01:02:41):
he understands that the work that we gave him is
all in the service of helping him to get to
a place where he can find that.
Speaker 2 (01:02:51):
Next week, we're checking in with Jennifer, who caught her
fiance flirting with an next girlfriend on Instagram, to hear
how she's doing one year later.
Speaker 8 (01:03:00):
I trust him we're in a good place I'd be
lying if I said I'm one hundred percent trusting. But
we have set ourselves on a good path with a therapy,
and I believe we have the communication tools through that
to keep us solid.
Speaker 1 (01:03:15):
If you're enjoying our podcast, don't forget to subscribe for
free so that you don't miss any episodes, and please
help support Dear Therapists by telling your friends about it
and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews really
help people to find the show.
Speaker 2 (01:03:29):
If you have a dilemma you'd like to discuss with us,
email us at Lauri and Guy at iHeartMedia dot com.
Our executive producer is Noel Brown. We're produced and edited
by Josh Fisher. Additional editing support by Helena Rosen, John
Washington and Zachary Fisher. Our interns are Ben Bernstein, Emily
(01:03:51):
Gutierrez and Silva Lifton. And special thanks to our podcast
Fairy Godmother Katie Curic. You can't wait to see you
at our next session. Theotherapist is a production of iHeartRadio
fischevod
I'm Laurie Gottlieb. I'm the author of Maybe You Should
Talk to Someone, and I write the Dear Therapist advice
column for the Atlantic.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
And I'm Guy Wench. I'm the author of Emotional First Aid,
and I write the Dear Guy advice column for Ted.
And this is Dear Therapists.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Each week we invite you into a real session where
we help people confront their biggest problems and then give
them actionable advice and hear about the changes they've made
in their lives.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
So sit back and welcome to today's session. This week,
we're in session with Jordan, who wants to understand how
seeing his parents dysfunctional relationship as a child might have
contributed to his own marriage ending after only two years.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
There were red flags that I ignore. Here's this beautiful
woman that I get along with extremely well, and we
just seem perfect for each other, and we moved in
with each other, and it was within a couple months
I started to realize, second, this just doesn't seem normal.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
First a quick note, Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only.
It does not constitute medical or psychological advice and is
not a substitute for professional healthcare advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let iHeartMedia
use it in part orn full, and we may edit
it for length and clarity. In the sessions you'll hear,
all names have been changed for the privacy of our guests.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Hey Lourie, Hey guy. So who have we invited to
speak with us today?
Speaker 1 (01:30):
So today we have someone who is trying to figure
out why his marriage failed, and it goes like this,
Dear therapists. I came across your response to a letter
regarding someone who became a parentified child, and it completely
resonated with me. I am at the beginning stages of
understanding what went wrong with my marriage and the root
causes of it failing. My partner has experienced her own trauma,
(01:54):
but I'm now starting to look in the mirror and
would like to understand what my parents toxic, resentful and
use of relationship has done to myself and my brothers.
I hope you can help, Jordan.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
I'm always glad to hear that people are curious about
what's going on in their relationships and what's the legacy
of their childhood that they're carrying with them and Jordan
is clearly curious. It's one of those better late than
ever situations because the marriage is now over, but I
hope we'll be able to help him take some lessons
into his next relationship.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
I think when marriages don't work, the tendency can be
to blame the other person. And I like here he's saying, yeah,
my partner had some issues, but I really want to
look at my issues and figure out my role in this.
So let's go talk to him and see what we
can help him with. You're listening to Dear Therapists for
my Heart Radio. We'll be back after a short break.
(02:56):
I'm Lori Gottlieb, and.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
I'm Guy Wench and this Deatherapists. Hi Jordan, Hi Louri,
welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
Thank you so much for having me you guys, I
appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
You're very welcome. Julden, we wanted to hear a little
bit about your marriage, how you met, how it went,
what went wrong, so we can get a sense of
what happened here.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yeah, my ex wife and I met actually on zoom
because we both work for a school, me being a teacher,
her being a teaching assistant for a different class. And
we met over COVID. We just started talking and we
got close very very fast. We got married for religious
reasons so she and her daughter could move in with me,
So we kind of expedited things. I could go as
(03:41):
far as saying it it was rushed in some regards,
but that is how we met and grew close to
each other.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
And can I ask, just for context, how old are
both of you and how old is her daughter?
Speaker 3 (03:51):
I am thirty three, she is thirty one, and her
daughter is five.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
So this was a relatively short marriage, and I'm wondering
at what point things started to not seem as great
as they had been at the beginning.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Yeah, you know, Laurie, looking back on things, there were
red flags that I I ignored because not to give you
a full full backstory if I can really quick, but
leading up to meeting her, I had lost one hundred
and forty five pounds and I was sky high as
far as my confidence and just ability to approach her.
(04:29):
So I think she got the confidence from me, and
it was, you know, attractive to her and everything like that.
But once we started to get to know each other
even more, some of the deeper, deeper seated family things
with her started to come out, and I was blind
to it because I'm like, here's this beautiful woman that
I get along with extremely well, and we just seem
(04:52):
perfect for each other. And we moved in with each other,
and it was within a couple months I started to realiz,
wait a second, this just doesn't seem normal.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
What were some of the red flags that you noticed
before she moved in.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
One of the first things she told me is that
she said it in a joking way. She said out
daddy issues. So along with saying that, she would talk
about men quite a bit and get pretty specific about it.
And she told me, this is three weeks into talking,
that I was the first man that she's only speaking
with me that she in the past had spoken to
(05:28):
four or five six men at a time. She was
just getting through her previous divorce, So that was a
big red flag that she wasn't telling me too many
specifics about why she got her first divorce to begin with.
And she would speak about men and sexual encounters with
men quite frequently. Even someone that we used to work with,
(05:48):
this man who didn't know anything about me. He kept
messaging her and then she would say, I don't want
to get fired if I tell him to stop talking
to me. I said, well, if you're not welcoming those messages,
you can tell him that. And she didn't for a while,
and that always felt a little uneasy for me too.
It's you could put a stop to that if you
(06:09):
want to.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
You know, Jordan, you're saying that she will tell you
about sexual encounters with other men. There's a coworker who's
texting her repeatedly and she doesn't want to tell them
to stop. How did you feel about her telling you
these stories about sexual encounters? Did it make you uncomfortable?
And did you let her know if it did?
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, it made me very uncomfortable, and I did tell her,
And honestly, she played it off as disclosing all this
information to me as a good thing, like I'm open
to telling you all these things. I'm open to sharing
all these things with you, like, oh, I should feel
good about it. And I told her I would like
you to put a stop to that. And she always
had a way of still making me feel okay about
(06:52):
it at the beginning, until things just started to kind
of spiral downward.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
How did she make you feel okay about it? Because
you chose to move in together. So all this was
going on, you felt uncomfortable. She wasn't really respecting your
request to monitor some of these things that maybe were
not appropriate to share with you, and you decided to
(07:16):
move in together. What was happening that made you feel like, oh, well,
that's okay. I don't really have to pay too much
attention to these things that make me uncomfortable.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
It was interesting. She would almost sprague about you know,
these men messaging her, and then she would show me like, see,
I blocked him right away, and she said, I never
have done this before anytime I've ever spoken to a man.
I'm always speaking to another man, even in her previous marriage.
That's another red flag is that she confessed to me
(07:46):
that she cheated on her ex husband several times.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
What I'm asking is, given all of the red flags,
what made you feel comfortable enough to move in with her?
Speaker 3 (07:56):
I guess as time went on, we went a few
months of not having any incidents like that. I want companionship,
I want love. I showed her and her daughter tremendous
love and care and support, and I think it was
a classic case of just ignoring some of those things
(08:17):
and just wanting it, almost trying to force it and
manifest that companionship and partnership that I've always wanted.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Jordan, you said that right before this you had lost
one hundred and forty pounds. What was your romantic life
like before you met your ex wife and was it
affected by your weight?
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Yeah, so this is much deeper rooted. I clearly have
an unhealthy relationship with food. I was bigger in my
whole life in two thousand and nine to twenty eleven.
I lost one hundred and fifty five pounds then, and
I moved to Saint Louis to teach in public schools.
Down there. I was just totally engulfed in my work,
(09:02):
and I gained it all back and more. When I
first lost all that weight, I was dating quite a
bit and a couple serious relationships back then. I was
still looking for that partner, but emotionally just wasn't mature
enough in my early twenties, and that depression that I
fell into gaining the weight back, and my romantic life
was non existent until I lost the weight again.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Jorldren, your romantic life was not existent because you were
making efforts to try and meet women, but not being successful,
or because you withdrew for making those efforts.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Withdrew, I gained all the weight back, and I just
my confidence was at an all time low and I
didn't feel worthy. I didn't feel like I was myself.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
And how long did that period last of feeling unworthy?
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Six seven years, so.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
That's a long time. Did you think to maybe try
and date regardless, not have to wait to lose the weight,
but bring yourself into the data world and see what happens,
or you didn't even want to take that risk.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
It's not even that I didn't want to take that risk,
is that I just knew that I wasn't going to
find the right partner. In the state that I was in,
I felt like I was a prisoner in my own body,
you know, because my whole childhood I was always bigger,
so to get used to that, and there were coping
things that I would deal with by being funny. Growing up,
I was the bigger guy, so I was being funny.
(10:26):
And then when I lost the weight and I got
down to a very healthy weight, I got a tension
that I had never gotten before. There was no effort
on my part because I wasn't myself. I didn't feel
like myself.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
You mentioned depression, and you said you felt like you
were a prisoner in your own body, But what about
a prisoner in your own mind? What was going on there?
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Yeah? I was a prisoner in my own body and
my own mind. I never acknowledged the fact that I
was depressed. I gained two hundred pounds in that time period.
I can only chalk that up to depression.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
The time. You didn't make the connection between the eating
behavior and the mood. How you were sort of self
medicating with food.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
No, no, I didn't.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
So what made you start against something must have affected
your mood. Do you remember what it was?
Speaker 3 (11:15):
I was dating someone and we had broken up after
almost a year, so I'm not sure if that's pinpointed
it or if it was partly that I was overworking myself.
I felt a responsibility to have a successful career and
be seen as successful amongst my brothers and in my family.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
When did you start to realize that maybe there was
depression going on, that maybe the link between the weight
gain and mood was a really strong one.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
The program that I was teaching through down in Saint Louis,
there was a big group of us that started at
the same time, all around the same age. It was
almost like being in college again. It's a two year commitment,
So for those first two years you kind of had
a family down there, and then third year, more people
left to go to med school in law school. And
as the years went on, more and more people started
(12:05):
to leave, and I was alone, and I was coping
with how much I was working with eating, and it
just started to spiral downward even more. And I would
say probably my fourth or fifth year down there, I
just started to feel like there was just no way
that anybody could get themselves to lose one hundred and
fifty pounds twice in their life.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
What was the motivation this last time to lose the weight?
Because you did lose it recently, right before you met
the person that you married.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
You know, when you're ready, you know. In August of
twenty twenty, when I started, I was fed up with
the body I was in. I felt trapped. I couldn't
do things with my body or my mind that I
know that I'm capable of doing. And I was able
to lose one hundred and forty five pounds in eight months,
like incredibly fast, because that's how disciplined.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
I can be Did your ex wife know about this
struggle that you've had with confidence and depression and how
the weight is played into that. In other words, she
was sharing a lot with you in the beginning. Were
you sharing some of your vulnerabilities with her?
Speaker 3 (13:11):
Absolutely? That was one of the biggest attractions to hers,
is how hard I was working and how much weight
I had lost. You know, I'll never forget when I
first shared my before pictures with her and she was
just in awe of what I was able to do.
So she absolutely knew about both instances in two thousand
and nine and more recently in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
But did you actually share with her, I have struggled
in my life with depression.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
I don't believe I said those exact words. I had
told her a lot about my years in Saint Louis,
and I know that she knew of my struggles down there.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Jordan, tell us a little bit about what happened once
your ex wife moved in with you.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yeah, So when she and her daughter moved in, like
I was on cloud nine. I have this instinct of
just to protect and care her ethnicity as Arab, and
she valued parts of it. Where the man is the provider,
the man is the protector, and everything like that, and
I took that role on one hundred percent. At the
(14:13):
same time, all the things that she had told me
about her exes in the past, they are disrespectful to me,
they don't help around the house. So I did the opposite.
I was always helping around the house. I was putting
forth a lot of effort to be that ideal husband
that she had always looked for.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Jordan, you said in your letter that you want to
look at what your contribution might have been to the marriage.
Ending mentioned some things that she did that you didn't love,
some history that she had that concerned you. Can you
tell us perhaps some of the things that you think
you personally might have contributed that might have been problematic
(14:50):
in the marriage.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Yeah, there's no shortage of me self reflecting and thinking
about like that. That's just the way that I I'm like, wow,
like what went wrong? When did it go wrong? Where
did it go wrong? And I don't see the things
that I did as as necessarily things that should abruptly
(15:16):
end a marriage the way that it did.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
How did it abruptly end?
Speaker 3 (15:20):
It was kind of on course to end for a
few months. I will say this, she grew more and
more unstable.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
What does that mean? She grew unstable? What did that
look like?
Speaker 3 (15:31):
Right before she moved in, she shared something with me
that she hadn't shared before, and she said, in my
late teens and early twenties, I had seen several doctors,
and those doctors recommended that I take medication for my
anxiety and depression. And she was living at home with
her three brothers, her dad, and her stepmother, and in
(15:53):
that culture, he says, it's very frowned upon to seek
help through therapy, to seek medicaid. Her dad found her
medication and made a big deal out of it and
threw it away. Her anxiety and depression stems from being
the person who found her mother deceased at fourteen years old.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
It was a suicide.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
You know.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
That's interesting because when she worked up the curse to
see a doctor again in February or March of this year,
I was in the room with her, and she had
said things to the doctor that I'd never heard her
say before. One of them was that she realized that
her mom probably did commit suicide because of the abuse
by the hands of her father. For an entire year
(16:37):
leading up to her mother's death. She remembers almost having
to call police every week, and the one night that
her and her brother next youngest brother was ten, and
she described it to me as her being, you know,
in a zombie like state. But she had seen that
tons and tons of times before, and she had a
(17:01):
discussion with her brother should recall the police. Her dad
was not in the house at the time, and they
both agreed, no, no, she'll snap out of it. And
she didn't snap out of it.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
So you're saying that you saw her mental health take
a bit of a slip at some point in the marriage.
You knew that she had been to psychiatrist, that she
had been on medication. Clearly there was a history of
trauma as well. When you saw that change in her
behavior or her mood, did you address it with her,
(17:31):
did you suggest she might need to see a psychiatrist again?
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Yeah. I just kept seeing episodes happening more frequently, and
her taking her anger, frustration and stress out on myself
and her daughter, and it just became more and more
irrational and unreasonable. I did bring up to her like, hey,
maybe you should seek help, to see a therapist. That
she would get more angry at me whenever I would
(17:55):
bring it up.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
She refused to do that.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Then, yeah, she told me October she said, I think
there's something wrong with me. I think I need to
see somebody. She said, you know, can you find a
therapist for me? And I said absolutely. I spent a
whole month trying to find the perfect therapist. I said, baby,
you want a woman, right, So I was researching for
(18:21):
women therapists where we lived. Well, I narrative searched down
to Muslim women therapists. She said, oh my god, that
would be perfect. Someone might know what I've been through.
I found someone finally, and she started in late October,
and oh my gosh. She never took it serious. She
had four sessions. She went to three of them. She
(18:44):
was lay for two of them. But she always told
me that she did feel a little bit better after
she spoke with them, but she had it made up
in her mind that it wasn't going to work.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Did she explore medication at all? Since my father had
taken away her medication when she was younger, but that
seemed important.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
No, she didn't. Children.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
You were telling us about the incident that goes the
end of the marriage. What was that incident?
Speaker 3 (19:10):
She actually faked a positive COVID test to be able
to get out of work, and because her daughter was
also exposed to her COVID using air quotes, she had
to miss school as well. All three of us were
at the same school, me being a teacher, her being assistant,
and her daughter being in preschool. I stayed home with
(19:31):
her daughter and she was at school, and she was
texting me throughout the day. She said, I can't tell
you guys how much I miss the two of you.
I can't wait to get home. Our policies at that
school were if you are vaccinated, you only have to
be out for five days, and since her daughter isn't vaccinated,
(19:51):
she had to be out for ten days. So I
stayed on two days with her daughter. So this is
the second day now where she didn't call until you
almost an hour after school. So when she called, I answered,
and I said, what took you so long to get
out of school. The intention was not to question her
or anything like that. I was genuinely wondering, oh, was
(20:13):
there a meeting after school. She had a very strong
reaction to me, saying then she said with expletives, how insecure,
blah blah blah, and and I was just so taken
it back by what she was saying that I was
just why are you saying this? But she said, let
(20:35):
me talk to my daughter. Let me talk to my daughter.
And I said, I'll give her the phone. Just tell me,
why are you so upset right now? Give the phone
to my daughter. I said, I'll give her the phone
in two minutes. Just tell me what's wrong. She hung up.
She called the police, and she told the police officer
that I wasn't giving the phone to her daughter fast enough.
(20:58):
She called back again and I did give her the phone,
but it was already too late. So she arrived home.
I didn't know at that time that she had called
the police and she ran in. You could just tell
that there was this such a strong response. I know
that she's very protective of her daughter. She had shown
(21:18):
very very strong signs of protection over her daughter, and
she attributes that to the loss of her mother and
the irrational fear of her passing away and her daughter
growing up without a mother as well.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Can you tell us what happened when she arrived, She.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Ran in, she picked up her daughter, and it was
maybe within a minute or two, a police car arrived
in the back of the house and I looked at her.
I said, did you call the police? And she very
proudly said yes. I said, why did you call the police?
She said, you weren't giving the phone to her fast enough.
I was speechless. I went outside to speak with the
(21:58):
police officer and I gave him a little bit of
a backstory that she had just started this new medication
about six weeks prior to that. After the officer spoke
with her as well, he brought me back out and
nothing came of it. He just said, hey, one of
you should leave the house to cool off. Well, she
moved out. Her and her daughter moved out.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
You're talking so much about her trauma, and what I'm hearing, Jordan,
is your trauma. But you're not talking about your trauma.
You're talking about her trauma. Every time we are trying
to understand more about you, you go into an explanation
for her trauma and what she experienced and why she
(22:40):
might have acted in the way that she acted. I
think that having the police called on you after all
of the other trauma that had happened in this relationship
is extremely traumatic, especially because you had been trying to
help in the various ways that you knew. How wow,
(23:01):
and you get the police called on you. How did
you feel after the police officer left and how did
you communicate that to her?
Speaker 3 (23:12):
I felt numb, like I had been for a while.
And you know, you're right, Laurie, That's all that I
ever did was make excuses for because I just I
kept on wanting to figure it out. I connected with
her and felt her pain so much when she always
(23:35):
talked about her experiences in her childhood. I always had
this need to want to help her because I saw
how much pain she was always in, and she directed
that pain towards me and her daughter.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
You get so oriented towards trying to understand the why
of her that you do not look at what's going
on with you. And it's similar with the feelings you
had about the weight loss and the weight gain. There
wasn't an exploration of what was going on inside you,
inside your own heart, with your own feelings, and you're very,
(24:15):
very oriented towards the other people's feelings, but at the
expense of looking at your own.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
And you know, I've done a tremendous amount of thinking,
and I was able to understand where a lot of
my trauma comes from. And one of her biggest things
about me was that she said that I over communicate,
I talk too much. And I told her at the
(24:42):
beginning of our relationship that my childhood, with the way
that my parents were, is the exact reason why I
want to talk about issues between her and I my
entire life. Even to this day, my parents live under
the same household and they do not speak to each other.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Can you tell us a little bit more about what
was going on for you growing up where you also
had your own trauma.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
Yeah. There's four boys, and I'm the second to youngest.
My youngest brother has Down syndrome, and he is the
absolute the love of my life and he always will be.
He's the center of all of our universe. He is
the reason that my mom and dad stayed together. I
(25:30):
give a lot of credit to my parents for coming together,
as ironic as those words are, because they were together
in the house physically. I can count on one hand
the amount of days that I've seen my mother and
father speak to each other. The only positive memory that
I have is I was nine years old and it
(25:54):
was at a wedding, and I remember looking over and
seeing my mom and dad slow down together, and I
remember that being so weird to.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
See You're tearing up as you described that. Can you
talk a little bit more about what it felt like
to see them together like that?
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Over the years, I've actually asked myself was that even real?
Or did I make that up in my head because
I wanted to see it so much, you know, So.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
The tears just now were feeling what that.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
I feel like I never saw the love that I
should have seen between my mom and dad that I
saw them in movies growing up. I saw them in
some of my friend's parents, and I just saw tension
and hostility.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
So the tears were sadness and loss.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Yeah, the tears were also for you as a nine
year old boy who was aware that there's oldest tension
and distance between his parents and sees one grief tender moment,
and the way you characterize it now was it was weird.
But I think probably at nine it was weird on
(27:09):
the one hand to see your parents embrace in that
way when you're not used to seeing it, But there
must have been something that felt really good about it,
maybe even.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
Hopeful without a doubt. You hit it on the head.
I feel like that moment, in a lot of ways,
really transformed me into hopeless romantic. I. You know, my
brothers would make fun of me, you know, in high
school because I you know, the girlfriend that I had
in high school, I was just so over the top
with how romantic and how thoughtful I was towards her,
(27:42):
because I feel like I was maybe trying to make
up for what I didn't see my entire life, and
I still am to this day.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
You characterized in your letter the relationship with your parents
as abusive and toxic. Can you tell us what you
meant by that?
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Individually? My mother and father are two of the best
people I've ever met in my life. How supportive they
are of all of us boys, They're just tremendous. But
to each other, it's extremely toxic to this day.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
What did it look like between them when you say
between them it was toxic and abusive.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
I'll go back to early childhood. First. My two older
brothers were superstar athletes, had a lot of success, and
they spent a lot of time with my dad, and
I feel like I went on a different path because
when my two older brothers were spending time with my dad.
I spent time with my mom. So my brothers were wrestling,
playing football and my mom. You know, I took tap
(28:43):
dancing class and was auditioning for commercials because I wanted
to be in plays and movies. And it was just
very different from my two older brothers, who I love
and look up to so much. But I felt there
was already that division between I mean, my two older
brothers with my dad, and then it was me with
(29:04):
my mom that has sprinkled into our adulthood. I've always
been the middle ground with my family, and I've always
been the one that has tried to help the situation,
and it always seemed to not work because there's forty
five years of disdain and tension.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
So you were trying to kind of save their marriage
as the nine year old who saw them embrace, and
that was the hope. But tell us what you actually
saw between them. What you're describing as a lot of distance.
They slept in separate rooms, they didn't really talk with
each other. Is that what you're referring to or is
there more how.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
They communicate to each other nonverbally. So my mom writes
notes to him. And I was home in May when
I was going through what I was going through, and
I looked down at my dad's area or whatever, and
he has one of the notes sitting on the desk
and it just capital letters, and you could tell it
was scribbled really hard, the word clown. And that made
(30:06):
me so angry. It's like, why do you have to
be like that towards each other?
Speaker 1 (30:11):
You know, so you didn't see them screaming at each
other from a very young age. You saw them writing
notes to each.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Other, total silent treatment.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
You never saw your parents speak to each other, so
what would happen at meal time? They would speak only
to the kids, but you never saw them interact with
each other.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
There was a lot of fighting through us. Jordan, tell
your mom this, Jordan, tell your dad this. I want
to say, you know, I was saved by my age
because I feel like my two older brothers got the
worst part of the deal.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
I'm hearing you describe your childhood, and again the focus
is significantly on what was happening with your brother, with
your mom, with your dad, between the two of them,
and I'm not hearing enough about you, and I want
to ask you you're describing you have two older brothers
who are your dad's boys in a way because he
(31:06):
was involved in their athletics and training them, they hung
out with him. And then the two younger brothers, there's you,
and there's your younger brother who has down syndrome, who
are not hanging out with Dad, who are not the
athletic ones. And I'm curious about how that felt for
you to be one of these four boys where this
seems to be some kind of division down the middle
(31:27):
there that the two older boys are the athletic stars
with Dad, and the two younger boys are staying home
with mum. And I'd like to know whether you felt
that division and how that felt for you.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
Yeah, that's spout on. That's exactly how I felt. I
never felt validated by my dad. You know, we've gotten
so much closer over the years, but that's because I
over compensated with not being a successful athlete with being
a successful teacher and coach where I wanted to impress
them that way. I didn't play football as early as
(32:03):
young as my two older brothers. I waited until middle school,
and I never came close as good as those two were.
I mean, they were all state athletes. I even played
football in college for two years. I was half decent myself,
and I never felt like I got that approval from
my dad.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Did you feel that you were getting validated from your
mom for your talent in theater and the things that
were interesting to you?
Speaker 4 (32:28):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (32:29):
Yeah, you know, because she's the one that got me
into that stuff and I had an interest in it,
and she did everything she could to do that for me.
Speaker 2 (32:39):
Sounds like something that was very meaningful and special to you,
that you really enjoyed, that you've brought out perhaps the
best of you, that you felt confident and and good at.
So I'd like to hear us a little bit about
how the career out of it went.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
It was short lived in my elementary years, where I
auditioned for a couple of commercials and then had one
of the auditions out was spotted by a talent agent
to join this like acting modeling school, and it was
very expensive to do that for a summer, and I
do recall my dad not being in support of it
because of how much money it costs, and my mom
(33:15):
went ahead with it and supporting me through that. And
then after that I did plays in middle school and stuff.
But as I got older, I just felt more pressure
to play football, and I kind of let that dream
die because I just felt like with my last name
in the city that I grew up in, I got
to play football.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
It's unfortunate in the sense that it sounds like you
had a lot of joy and that you had to
give up this joy in middle school because of the
pressures to play football and be yet another one of
the successful family football players, and that you gave up
something that was very valuable for you to do that.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Yeah, I feel like maybe a little piece of my
childhood died.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
I want to go back to where things ended with
your marriage. So that happened a few months ago. Are
you both teaching at the same school, and what has
happened for you since then? As you're trying to make
sense of your role in the marriage.
Speaker 3 (34:17):
She was not hired back, if you will, but she
has essentially ghosted me. She would always speak of how,
almost boastfully, that she would talk to a man for
two three months in ghost them, and she has essentially
done that to me.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
There's this saying we marry our unfinished business and for you,
as the little boy who wanted to save his parents' marriage,
who wanted things to work out for them, who wanted
them to have love and closeness and connection, and took
on this role of I need to save this. And
(34:55):
then you have, from her perspective, someone who told you
quite clearly, I want someone to take care of me.
I didn't have that. I wasn't protected by my father,
and my mother died by suicide because of my father's abuse,
and we felt helpless, and he threw away my medication.
I need, as she said early on to you, she
(35:18):
had daddy issues. I need someone to take care of me.
So in a way you are a perfect dysfunctional match,
because the puzzle pieces fit together again in not a
healthy way. You want to save someone, she wants to
be saved. Those are your childhood wounds, and boom you
(35:38):
found each other, and oh that feels so delicious and
good until you start to realize maybe this isn't going
to be the way to heal my childhood wounds. In fact,
maybe this is going to throw salt on my childhood
wounds and re traumatize me again. And I think that's
the realization that you have when you wrote to us
(36:01):
that I want to look in the mirror, you said,
because I don't want to bring my needs as a
child to the expectations of what my partner can or
can't do for me. I want to come whole and
as an adult, as someone who has these wounds but
(36:23):
who can work through that. And so I wonder, have
you started going to therapy? Have you tried talking to
somebody about these unprocessed feelings from childhood that still live
very very deeply inside of you.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
Yeah. I attempted a couple of years ago, both in
person one session and just didn't get good vibes, and
then virtually with another a couple of years ago and
didn't like that. But then more recently the spring I
did and went a handful of times and stopped going.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Can I ask why you stopped, I honestly.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Don't know the answer to that. One of my brothers
is living out of the country right now. I had
the opportunity to just live with him, you know, for
a while, and really kind of remove myself from the
situation and work on myself. I felt like that was
a good opportunity.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
I have a theory, and my theory is this, when
you're in therapy, the focus is on you, and it's
on your feelings and it's on your experience. And most
of what you've told us today has been about how
other people feel. And many of the times that we
try to bring it back to you, you took us
(37:38):
somewhere else. And I think that's because it's hard for
you to stay there, that you have this idea that
if you feel uncomfortable, if you feel the pain of
that little boy, that it's going to be overwhelming. The
way it truly was when you were younger, you couldn't
let yourself go there because it would be too painful.
(37:59):
You didn't have the support that you didn't have anyone
to go to. You didn't have anyone to comfort you
or to help you make sense of what was going on,
and how unsafe it feels when you're younger to see
parents who can't communicate with each other, who are hostile
toward each other, to see this division, and to see
other families and say, I don't understand this. And also,
(38:21):
you love your brother with down syndrome, your younger brother,
so much, but when there is a child in the
family who has these challenges, it takes up a lot
of emotional space in the family. So sometimes the other
kids who seem just fine, they don't get a lot
of attention in that way because everybody's so focused and
(38:41):
you're nodding, so I can see that was the experience that,
of course your younger brother's going to get a lot
of attention because he had more needs in some ways,
But that doesn't mean that the other three of you
didn't have a lot of needs too that may not
have been as visible as your younger brother's needs. And
(39:02):
so there's a lot of pain around that that felt
unbearable as a child. But now you go to therapy
and the focus is going to be on you, and
maybe that feels a little much like, oh I don't
deserve or I can't handle what might come up. And
I want to suggest along with this theory that if
(39:26):
you start to feel that in therapy, that you can
say to the therapist, Wow, I'm feeling really overwhelmed right now,
can we slow down? And so I want to ask
you right now, what has it been like for you
today talking with us, when we've sometimes interrupted you, when
you've gone off to other places, when we've tried to
(39:47):
direct you back to yourself, when we've asked you to
sit a little bit in some of your own feelings.
How has that felt to you? What has that been like?
Speaker 3 (39:57):
It's hard to describe. I don't I don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
That's the numbness that I think you were describing before.
Numbness isn't the absence of feelings. Numbness is a sense
of being overwhelmed by too many feelings. And I think
I can tell from your face and your body language
that you're having so many feelings right now, and I
just want you to be aware of that. It's not
that you don't feel, it's that you feel a lot,
(40:23):
and it's going to be really helpful for you to
become acquainted with what you are feeling.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
You're right, Judren, that's important, and for multiple reasons. One
of them is you wrote to us because you're interested
in having a better relationship next time. You describe yourself
as a romantic and you are very much a romantic,
but you have a very specific version of that in
(40:52):
your head, and it's related to your childhood. In your childhood,
you had a brother with special needs. You had to
pay parents with special needs as it were, because they
had such a conflictual marriage, and you were very occupied
with understanding what's going on with everyone around you, trying
(41:13):
to help them as much as possible. And that is
the romance that you sought out, the rescue the damsel
in distress who came out of this bad childhood, bad marriage,
was in a difficult situation, had a daughter needed to
get married right away. Turned out there were all these
red flags, and you were in that role of I
(41:36):
will rescue her, and that will be the most romantic
thing of all, because if I can rescue her and
rescue her means somehow making her traumas go away or
not impact her in the presence, so she can be
more present with me and we can live this love
story that I didn't see in my parents, but I
know is out there because I've done enough theater to
(41:57):
know that love stories like that are out there. And
that's what you gravitate toward. You feel much more comfortable
rescuing than you do needing rescue, and you need rescue.
You wrote to us for that reason. You have all
these needs and feelings and history that you have a
(42:18):
hard time getting in touch with. You get flooded and
then you get numb, and you're going to have a
very hard time setting limits and maintaining them, stating your needs,
setting expectations, doing all the thing you would need to
do in another relationship, and you are more likely to
go for another rescue in which your needs and feelings
can be put aside in the service of others. But
(42:41):
you were deprived of that attention in your childhood. It
wasn't something that you didn't need. It's something you didn't
get and you're going to prevent yourself from getting it
now unless you can change that. And within your formulation
of a romantic there has to be one in which
(43:03):
that version of the romantic needs as well.
Speaker 4 (43:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:08):
Yeah, that really resonates with me a lot. You're right.
It's always easier for me to, you know, to help
someone like you said, the damsel and distress, that attraction
to that, to wanting to make someone else's life better
and help someone else.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
And when you start to heal this, maybe your definition
of romance won't be that anybody needs to get rescued.
That you both have needs and wants and you can
support each other, which is different from rescuing someone. So
you want to be in a mutually supportive relationship and
(43:52):
that can become your new definition of romance.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
Yeah, that's what I want to find, somebody that I'll
feel like they have my back and that they will
support me as much as I'm willing to support them.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
So, Jordan, we have some advice for you, and we
have five tasks that we'd like you to do this week,
and that might sound like a lot, but they're all
very connected and interrelated. So I'm going to start with
the first one. And the first one has to do
with your brothers, and it's that all of you grew
up in the same household, but like many siblings, had
(44:35):
different experiences of growing up in the same household, and
nobody talked about it because in your household, your parents
weren't even talking to each other, so you didn't have
a lot of modeling for how to talk about what
was going on and the effect that this was having
on all of you. And it sounds like you and
your brothers have become much closer over the last few years,
and one of your brothers even invited you to go
(44:56):
stay with him after the marriage split up. And so
I think it's a good time right now to have
an opening for all of you to be able to
communicate with each other differently. And you can say to
your brothers, I really appreciate how supportive you've been as
I've gone through this divorce. And one of the things
(45:18):
that I'm realizing is that there might be a connection
between how we grew up and the way that we
behave in our relationships. And I think it would be
really helpful if we could talk with each other more
openly about what it was like to grow up the
way that we did and really support each other around that.
And I want to tell you a little bit about
(45:39):
what it was like for me. Is that Okay, if
I do that and just start there and see what
happens when you open up to your brothers, and maybe
they'll open up to you too, so that there isn't
this silence around what it was like to grow up
in this very aggressively silent household. Meaning there was all
(45:59):
of this Russian in notes and in body language, but
it was silent, which makes it all the more confusing.
So that's the first task. We want you to start
that conversation with your brothers.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Here's the second task, Jordan. You said earlier that you
have a problematic relationship with food, and it sounds like
you use food to soothe your feelings, and one of
the things we'd like you to do this week is
to find a local overeater's anonymous group support group that
(46:30):
you can join, because we think it would be really
useful for you to talk about two people who have
a similar experience and who are very understanding that relationship
with food and how it impacts you, and to find
alternative coping mechanisms to deal with your feelings rather than eating.
(46:52):
Would also give you the support we think you need,
so we would like you to do that this week.
Some of these groups might be virtual, some might be
in person, and see what's going on in your area
and find one.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
The next thing we'd like you to do is we
were really struck by how much research you put in
to finding the perfect therapist for your wife. At the
time you did all this research, she wanted a woman,
she wanted someone who was Muslim, she wanted something very specific,
and you said you researched for weeks trying to find
(47:24):
the right therapist for her. We want you to do
that for yourself, but not for weeks this week. Maybe
it's the person you have already seen, or maybe you
want to look into seeing someone else, but we want
you to spend the time and the effort that you
put into finding a therapist for someone else to finding
the right therapist for you and then make the appointment.
(47:45):
So here's the fourth task. You said that you've been
ghosted at this point and you really don't have any
way to process with her what happened in this marriage,
and so we want you to do some processing. You'll
do some through therapy, you'll do some through these other tasks.
We want you to do some tangible processing yourself. And
(48:05):
sometimes when we write things down, we get a lot
of clarity. And what we'd like you to do here
is write down three moments in the marriage where you
worked so hard to help her, but you needed help
and you didn't help yourself. If you could do this over,
how would you in those three moments help yourself? Knowing
(48:29):
what you know now, we'd like you to be very
specific about I would do this because I was so
focused on her that I didn't think about the help
that I needed in that moment. But here's what I
would do now to help myself. It might be I
would set this boundary, or I would go take a walk,
or I would take some breaths or I would talk
to somebody about it, I would say this to her instead,
(48:50):
I would try less hard to regulate her feelings, and
I would work harder to regulate mine. Could be any
of those or anything you come up with. And then
with that, we'd like you to write down why you're
relieved not to be in that situation anymore, and why
you're excited about using whatever it is that you would
(49:10):
be doing to help yourself in your next relationship so
that it's a healthier one.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
One last piece of advice, Jordan, we were really struck
by how bright you became, and I mean bright as
in light coming from you when you spoke about acting
and performing. We think that's a big part of you,
that that's an essential part of your identity that has
(49:37):
not gotten any expression since perhaps middle school or whenever
that was that you stopped and transitioned to football. And
when something gives you joy in life, it has to
be a thing that you can express on a regular
basis because it's a part of you. So we'd like
you to find some way to do that where you are.
(49:58):
It can be it can be a theater, it can
be a class, it can be anything. But we'd like
you to find something, even if it's an hour a
week that you can join. It will bring you around
people who you'll connect with for that reason, and you'd
like to see that back in your life. So, Jordan,
how does all that sound to you?
Speaker 3 (50:18):
Know you said that five tests seems like a lot,
but those are all perfect for me to get started
and get the ball rolling. You might think that I'm
most excited about the theater, the acting part, which I am,
but I'm most excited to talk to my brothers about
all this.
Speaker 1 (50:35):
Well, we look forward to hearing how your week goes
with these five tasks. We're very excited for you to
try them.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
I'm excited too.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
We look forward to hearing back from you.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
Thank you so much, you guys.
Speaker 2 (50:53):
This habit Jordan has, and a lot of people have,
of defaulting to the other person's fings and needs in
lieu of their own is a difficult habit to break.
So I hope he can work on it, because right
now it happens very automatically. We ask him about his feelings,
he goes to explain what's going on with the other person.
(51:15):
I think he understood the principle, which is great. It's
going to take mindfulness on his part to catch himself.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
Yeah, and that pattern has even seeped into his definition
of romance, that for him, the romantic thing is I
will save somebody else. Because for him, love meant something
very specific. It was if I could help my parents reconnect,
that would be how I would show my love. And
(51:43):
so his idea of love is about taking care of
other people. But he doesn't understand that it needs to
be reciprocal, that people need to support him just as
much as he supports them, and that it's not about
saving someone, it's about supporting someone. And I don't think
he knows the difference yet. He was trying to save
(52:04):
this person who had so much trauma that she had
not worked out and was bringing into the relationship in
all kinds of really destructive ways. So I hope that
these tasks will start to set him on a path
where he starts to recognize those differences.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
And I think it would also help him to really
practice identifying his feelings and naming them, because right now,
he gets flooded, he gets numb, He really has a
hard time knowing what he's feeling. So I hope going
to the support group and I hope doing the other
things we ask him to do will help him to
start differentiate and identify when he's having strong feelings, to
(52:44):
identify them, to talk about them, to get validation for them.
That would be really great for him if he could
do that as well.
Speaker 1 (52:51):
And I love that he said of all the tasks
that we probably assumed that it was the theater one
that he would enjoy the most, but he was actually
most looking forward to talking to his brothers and that
gave me so much hope that he really wants to
start having these conversations and opening up. So I'm really
excited to see how this week goes for him.
Speaker 2 (53:14):
You listening to dea Therapists. We'll be back after a.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
Short break, So gad we heard back from Jordan, and
let's hear how his week went.
Speaker 4 (53:36):
The first task was to speak with my brothers.
Speaker 5 (53:41):
This was the task I was most excited for, and unfortunately,
this is the task that I wasn't able to do,
mainly because I'm not with both of them right now,
and I would like to do this in person with them.
Speaker 4 (53:57):
I'm telling myself that, but maybe.
Speaker 5 (53:59):
I'm reluctant to have that very very important talk with them.
The second task being to find an overeators anonymous meeting.
Speaker 4 (54:09):
That was a success. I was able to.
Speaker 5 (54:11):
Find there are several meetings that are offered in my city.
They have phone in meetings and I still may may
do that, but there are several meetings throughout the week
in the city that I live in, and that'll be very,
very helpful. The third task was to put in that
(54:31):
amount of time to find myself a therapist, that same
amount of time that I put in for somebody else.
I did decide to go back to the therapist.
Speaker 4 (54:40):
That I have gone to in the past.
Speaker 5 (54:42):
I feel like just because I did that, you know,
onboarding with them and definitely gave that therapist all the
information about me, I want to give her a shot again.
So I have scheduled a virtual appointment Thursday, and that
is going to be very beneficial. Task number four was
(55:06):
to write down three moments in the marriage where the
focus and all my energy was on her and I
didn't care for myself. It was tough to relive some
of those moments, but again it was very beneficial and
the fact that I do know what I.
Speaker 6 (55:23):
Would do differently this time, First and foremost, taking care
of my body, not overeating, not going to food when
I felt that abuse, and also going to the gym.
Speaker 5 (55:34):
You know, just taking care of my body in general
would help take care of my mind, which would help
take care of my everyday life. I think in general
though during those moments, would be just to walk away
give myself space. I needed space too. That is a
big revelation for me, is that I needed to walk
(55:56):
away to give myself space.
Speaker 4 (55:58):
So not trying to force being in the.
Speaker 7 (56:01):
Moment, just it's okay to step away for a while
and allow her to be called. And then lastly, the
biggest news is finding that it's outlet, that performance outlet,
whether it's stand up comedy or whether it's joining the
community to play. I reached out to a very very
old close friend of mine that does theater in the
(56:22):
city that I live, and we are meeting the day.
Speaker 5 (56:26):
That I get back in town. It was therapeutic just
to speak with her about theater over the phone.
Speaker 4 (56:32):
Very very excited about that.
Speaker 5 (56:34):
And yeah, I know that there's things that I still
need to do and still need to work on and accomplish,
and I look forward to doing that.
Speaker 4 (56:42):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (56:47):
We gave Jordan a lot to do and I think
he did some of it, and he struggled with some
of it. And one of the first things we ask
him to do is speak to his brothers. He did
mention towards the end of our session with him that
he's with one of his brothers now staying with him him.
It's possible he wanted to wait to be in person
with both of his brothers, but it seems to me
that he could have had that conversation that that's a
(57:08):
conversation he might be avoiding.
Speaker 1 (57:10):
Yeah, and I like that he had some insight into
the fact that he might be avoiding that. He said,
you know, I'm not really sure whether I'm just saying
that I need to be in person with them or
whether I'm really avoiding something. So I'm glad that he's
really considering that, because he does tend to avoid things,
and I'm glad he's starting to recognize that so that
he can get out of that pattern. And I think
something similar happened with the OA meeting. He said he
(57:32):
had success with that, so I thought that he was
going to say that he had been to a meeting.
He said that he hasn't been to a meeting yet,
but he is going to attend, So I really hope
that he does go ahead and attend the meeting. It
sounded like you put a lot of effort into researching that,
so I think that he is motivated. I just think
(57:52):
it's kind of getting over the hump of doing the
thing that trips him up. So let's hope that he
does go soon to one of those meanings. I think
it would be really beneficial for him.
Speaker 2 (58:02):
I agree with you, and I think another place he
didn't quite do enough work was with the therapist. We
had said to him, Wow, you spent so much time
researching a therapist for your wife. You really went to
town and find the right person for her. Spend that
same amount of time finding the right person for you.
And I'm glad he decided he's going back to his
(58:24):
previous therapist if he's comfortable there. But I do think
he wasn't putting in the work to find the right
person for himself as much as he did for his wife.
Speaker 1 (58:32):
Yeah, it seems like you put so much effort into
her healing and he hasn't put as much effort into
his own. I'm really glad that he decided to go
back to therapy. I just hope that as he goes
back to therapy, that he really sits with himself and says,
is this the right match for me? And if it's not,
if he could discuss that with his therapist and even
(58:52):
have that conversation to find out, why is this not
feeling right for me? Maybe it's a therapist, maybe it's not.
But it would be great for him to really be
able to have that conversation and say, I'm not sure
if I'm getting my needs met. That would be such
an important moment for him.
Speaker 2 (59:09):
I agree. And the task we gave him about going
back to three difficult moments in his marriage and rewriting
them in the sense of what he would do differently. Again,
I think there was avoidance there. He went to higher
level ideas of walk away or take care of myself
in terms of my gym and my eating. But that's
(59:31):
different than knowing what to do in the moment standing
up for yourself. And I was hoping that he would
find moments he could literally revisit that specific moment. What
do you say that, I'm not sure he's figured out
how to do yet.
Speaker 1 (59:44):
Yeah, Well, if Jordan is listening to this, I hope
what he'll do is he'll revisit some of those really
really difficult moments and maybe they're just too traumatic for
him to revisit quite yet. But when he gets there,
when he feels comfortable, I hope that he'll revisit some
of those moments that he shared with us in the
session and say, if I could redo that moment, here's
what I would do now, knowing what I know now
(01:00:07):
about exactly what he said, I need space too. Now
he was talking about walking away, but he needed to
take up space because she was taking up all the space.
So I hope you can look at those specific moments
that he talked about with us and say, here's what
I would do differently if I were to take up
space too in that relationship.
Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
Exactly, and even articulate specifically, this is what I would
say to her in that moment. Really put yourself there
and articulate the sentences.
Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
Yeah. And I was really excited though about his excitement
with getting back in touch with the creative side of himself.
He really did everything with that task where he reached
out to the friend. They talked about theater. They have
a meeting setup. They're going to talk about local opportunities.
She's going to help kind of guide him. And I
think that support is really important. That you have someone
(01:00:55):
who really wants to encourage your passion, and so here
he has someone who says, oh wow, I really want
to help you find a way to express this part
of yourself that's really important to you.
Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
In general, I was thinking about comfort zones with Jordan
and the idea that we try to stay within our
comfort zone. But I want people to understand we might
be comfortable with very specific kinds of discomfort, but I
think it's when you're trying to stretch that zone, leaning
into the kinds of conversations like with your brothers or
how the redo with your ex wife that you really
(01:01:29):
haven't had before. Help Jordan, if you're listening, you can
try and expand your comfort zone, go to the things
that make you uncomfortable, you're not used to, and that's
where the real growth can be for you.
Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
And I think that's really hard to do, which is
why I think that Jordan was so brave to reach
out to us to say I want to change, I
want things to be different, and to share with us
all of the things that he did share with us.
I really commend him for that, and I'm so excited
to see what he can do when he really does
stretch himself in the way that you described.
Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
So do I, because this is someone who's been through
a lot. He's actually a strong person. He has a
lot of determination, he has a lot of insight and
self reflection. So I really think he'll be able to
convert those going forward and to challenge himself because I
think he has a ton of potential.
Speaker 1 (01:02:19):
You know, when we have sessions with people, we really
get to know them quite well in a short amount
of time, and I got this sense of Jordan as
this incredibly loving person. And what I want for him
is I want him to be in a loving relationship
where it's reciprocal and he gets back what he gives.
And so I hope that if he's listening to this,
(01:02:41):
he understands that the work that we gave him is
all in the service of helping him to get to
a place where he can find that.
Speaker 2 (01:02:51):
Next week, we're checking in with Jennifer, who caught her
fiance flirting with an next girlfriend on Instagram, to hear
how she's doing one year later.
Speaker 8 (01:03:00):
I trust him we're in a good place I'd be
lying if I said I'm one hundred percent trusting. But
we have set ourselves on a good path with a therapy,
and I believe we have the communication tools through that
to keep us solid.
Speaker 1 (01:03:15):
If you're enjoying our podcast, don't forget to subscribe for
free so that you don't miss any episodes, and please
help support Dear Therapists by telling your friends about it
and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Your reviews really
help people to find the show.
Speaker 2 (01:03:29):
If you have a dilemma you'd like to discuss with us,
email us at Lauri and Guy at iHeartMedia dot com.
Our executive producer is Noel Brown. We're produced and edited
by Josh Fisher. Additional editing support by Helena Rosen, John
Washington and Zachary Fisher. Our interns are Ben Bernstein, Emily
(01:03:51):
Gutierrez and Silva Lifton. And special thanks to our podcast
Fairy Godmother Katie Curic. You can't wait to see you
at our next session. Theotherapist is a production of iHeartRadio
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