June 15, 2023 • 49 mins
Superstar performer Jewel reveals how she survived an abusive father, a mother who abandoned and betrayed her and found healing in the most profound ways.
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Guest Bio:
Jewel went from a girl who grew up with no running water on an Alaskan homestead, to a homeless teenager in San Diego, to an award winning, multi-platinum recording artist who released one of the best-selling debuts of all time. Through her career Jewel has sold over 30 million albums worldwide and has earned 26 nominations for such awards as the GRAMMYs, American Music Awards, MTV Awards, VH1 Awards, Billboard Music Awards, and Country Music Awards, winning eight times. Jewel has been featured on the cover of TIME Magazine, Rolling Stone, has performed on Saturday Night Live, at the Super Bowl and the NBA Finals, for the Pope and the President of the United States. Her music has spanned a wide-range of genres with top hits in Folk, Pop, Club, Country, Standards, Children’s and Holiday music. Jewel’s new studio album Freewheelin’ Woman, via her own Words Matter Media is out now.
Jewel decided to move out at the young age of 15 due to an abusive household. While suffering from debilitating panic attacks, an eating disorder, depression and significant trauma, Jewel became homeless by the age of 18 and developed agoraphobia, the fear of leaving one’s home. During that time, she looked into her own inner world and reflected on her experiences to develop a set of tools that rewired her habits and created new emotional patterns. After learning meditation and innovating her own practices, Jewel was able to heal symptoms of her depression and go from surviving to thriving. She co-founded the Inspiring Children Foundation to deliver life-saving tools to at-risk youth in Las Vegas. After observing incredible outcomes for these youth, Jewel decided to commercialize her life’s work and build a scalable platform in the metaverse. She joins Innerworld as Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer to bring her 20+ years of experience to the platform.
Guest Information:
- Instagram: @jewel
- Twitter: @jeweljk
- YouTube: @jewel
- Website: https://jeweljk.com/
This podcast should not be used as a substitute for medical or mental health advice. Individuals are advised to seek independent medical advice, counseling, and/or therapy from a healthcare professional with respect to any medical condition, mental health issue, or health inquiry, including matters discussed on this podcast.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Superstar performer Jewel soul Stirring Music is the soundtrack of
a generation. Her debut album is one of the best
selling in history and went twelve times platinum. She sung
at the Super Bowl, the White House, and for the Pope,
but her path to success was wrought with trauma. Jewel
(00:21):
grew up in Alaska without running water, was raised by
a physically abusive father, and abandoned by her mother, all
before the age of eight. She left home at fifteen
and was homeless by eighteen. Against all odds, Jewel rose
to stardom, yet was dealt another devastating blow when she
discovered her mother stole millions of her hard earned money.
(00:44):
On this special episode of Navigating Narcissism, the One and Only,
Jewel reveals the most challenging parts of her healing, the
revelation that still makes her tear up, and the fascinating
techniques she's used to help her emotional recovery. From Red
(01:05):
Table Talk Podcasts and iHeartMedia, I'm Doctor Rominy and this
is Navigating Narcissism. This podcast should not be used as
a substitute for medical or mental health advice. Individuals are
advised to seek independent medical advice, counseling, and or therapy
(01:26):
from a healthcare professional with respect to any medical condition,
mental health issue, or health inquiry, including matters discussed on
this podcast. This episode discusses abuse, which may be triggering
to some people. The views and opinions expressed are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
(01:49):
and do not represent the opinions of Red Table Talk productions, iHeartMedia,
or their employees. Jule, I have been following your journey
for several years. Your experience is the kind that hits
you like a bolt of lightning and stays with you.
You have so much to offer the survivor community, so
(02:12):
thank you so much for joining me. I was really
struck by your unique upbringing. Your family had a long
history of homesteading in Alaska. You grew up on hundreds
of acres without running water. Can you give us a
little insight into your childhood.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, so there's a good and a dark side, I
think to my family history.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
I was raised on that homestead by my dad. My
daily life was varied. We did move a lot, but
a lot.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Of my childhood was on the homestead, and I think
that that exposure to nature. Actually, my dad once said
we were given the illness and the cure, and I
think that's very true. My dad has eight siblings and
they had such a again amazing childhood but also kind
of horrific. And I think the reason none of them
have committed suicide. None of them are drug addicts. And
(02:58):
don't get me wrong, but it's kind of striking that
you could have eight kids raised in this environment and
that none of them went darker. Is I think a
real testament to the land and how the land, for
me personally at least, taught me to be human.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
So let's talk about your dad then, because I've had
the privilege of reading your book. Everyone should read jules book,
by the way, And I know that he experienced abuse
growing up and then some of that cycle continued to
a certain degree. Can you talk a little bit about
your father, because it's a complicated story with your dad.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
My father's childhood was psychologically, physically and emotionally abusive. I
didn't know that though, of course, growing up, and so
all I knew was my dad. I know my mom
left at eight suddenly I was being raised by my father.
My father went from like a Mormon like classic Mormon
dad to drinking, smoking and hitting me pretty much overnight.
(03:52):
So my mom left. I had no idea why. I
didn't know actually she left. I just assumed my dad
took us. And my dad suddenly hitting us, yelling, drinking,
and smoking.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
So that was a radical shift.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
And it was, you know, obviously having your world turned
upside down and we started singing a bars to make
a living.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Growing up in bars was not easy.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
I would have men put dimes in my hand and say,
you know, call me when you're sixteen. You're going to
be great to fuck when you're older. And so I
just grew up in a wild environment. But I'm dyslexic,
and for some reason, I think that causes me to
see patterns, and I'm very visual. And what I was
seeing was pain. I had a front row seat to pain.
I was in pain. It was the most salient feature
(04:32):
in my life. And what I was seeing in the
bars and what I was seeing in my dad, I
was like, oh my gosh, we're all in pain. And
I was watching how people dealt with it over the years.
I saw drug use, I saw rage, I saw sex,
I saw illicit behavior, and I think I had just
been learning about oysters in school and that oysters have
an irritant like a bit of sand and they make
(04:53):
a pearl. And I was like, I have this irritant,
I have this pain, but I'm not making a pearl.
None of us are making pearl. Why don't we make
pearls out of this instead? Like the visual I saw
was this hurt, this wound, and people would layer all
these things to avoid it and to try.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
And bury it.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
But by the end of it, they were consumed in
a mountain of other distractions that caused more pain. And
for anybody to face that after so many decades was
quite difficult. You had to deal with all this crap
you've done and inflicted more pain on yourself basically just
to go ahead and deal with this. And so to me,
like I remember saying, pain, you know what do I
do with pain? I remember writing down, and I remember
(05:33):
the quickest way is through, and to kind of promise
myself that I would try and deal with my pain,
just out of a matter of practicality. But I didn't
always know how to handle it, and so I tried
to look to things that gave me relief. Writing gave
me relief. It was very obvious that it did, didn't
take it away, but something about moving toward it helped.
And I learned about the buffalo from I don't know
(05:55):
when I was like ten or something, and it was
they're the only animal that moved to the heart of
the storm, and that the quickest way again is through.
And that's what gave me this role model of writing.
For whatever reason, moved me toward my pain, and for
whatever reason, that relieved the pain a little bit. It
just made it slightly manageable. And for the pain I
couldn't figure out what to do with that, I called
(06:16):
putting a pin in it. Now you would call it
just compartmentalized. I would just put a pin in it
until I could learn what to do with it later.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
So your dad had been abused by his father. You'd
say that if things didn't go his way or you
woke him up, you'd have might gotten hit. And there's
one poignant story that really stuck with me is that
he hit you and your brother. You had to walk
eight miles to school because you missed the bus with
bloody noses in the cold Alaska weather, and then he
(06:43):
came to school with your lunches almost looking ashamed and
that something awoke in you that you're saying, I want
to explain this to him. I want to connect the dots,
which only enraged him again. And just that sequence, Jewel
captured the trauma bond in sheer perfection. That probably three
four our sequence. He wakes up, he gets frustrated, he
(07:03):
takes it out on you and your brother physically, he comes,
he brings the lunch. Oh maybe it sounds so bad,
I could forget that. That's it. That sequence is the
trauma bonded relationship, and it's an almost impossible cycle to
break out of.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Yeah, And there was also what we would call gaslighting
when I sat down with them on the couch and
I was like, oh my god, I think I see
a pattern and I kind of see what happened, and
I see what's leading to this maybe for him, and
how it's affecting me, and I probably remind him of
my mom. And I was so excited to share that
with him. And I think that having a young girl,
you know, try and explain your psychology not attractive to people.
(07:40):
And he talked to me out of my truth and
I didn't know better. I got confused. And that was
one of the most traumatic. That more than being hit,
was much more damaging to me because I went from
feeling with certainty that I was seeing things correctly to
(08:01):
doubting my own internal voice. And that was a bitch
to recover from. Like I get chills talking about it.
That took decades for me to figure out how to
reinstate my own internal compass because I began getting It's
funny now we have this term gaslight, but I began
getting gas lit by both of my parents to where
(08:22):
my own truth and my own ability to navigate became
quite obscured and caused a lot of pain for many.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Decades, which is really what the legacy of this is.
The bruises, the scratches, the wounds they do heal on
our memory conveniently pushes that out, but that emotional loss
of losing your sense of knowing what reality basically, it
can take a lifetime to heal from. How did you
continue to cope with your home life as you grew up?
Speaker 3 (08:48):
I did move out at fifteen.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
I decided that it was just better to leave my
dad than stay in this like intense arguing, fighting, physical
dynamic and just go out.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
On my own.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
I knew that statistically doing that was quite dangerous, but
I wanted to cut my losses. And that's kind of
how I've always been, is like, can I do something different?
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Can I do better? How will I succeed?
Speaker 2 (09:14):
And so, rather than kind of fixating on anger for
my dad, which I had a lot of anger, I
decided to put all of my resources into going what
makes me think I can move out at fifteen and
not become a drug addict or a prostitute, because that's
statistically what I should be destined to. And so I
knew I had this genetic inheritance. I'd been learning about
(09:35):
it in school. You know, we had a genetic inheritance
that could give us a predisposition to diabetes.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
Or heart disease.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
But I saw this like an emotional inheritance. It was
habits and emotional languaging that I was inheriting, and it
was going to give me a predisposition to abuse, addiction, all.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Kinds of things.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
And so what I realized I was up against was
learning a new emotional language. And at least that felt
like a clear objective. You know, I knew like I
could go to school to learn Spanish, but there was
nowhere to learn a new emotional language. But at least
knowing what I was up against felt like a clear objective,
and so I went my own way. I didn't think
i'd ever see him again. I didn't honestly care. Maybe
(10:18):
if I ever saw him again. I felt like what
I was up against was such a monumental and dangerous
proposition that I just had to put on my resources
to that.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
How is your relationship with your father today?
Speaker 2 (10:32):
So my dad and I do have a good relationship. Now,
all I can say is I didn't try and heal them.
I didn't try and save them, not that I think
it's bad. You know, each their own. I didn't know
how to, and I just tried to focus on saving
my own life. Basically, my dad in his sixties late
sixties got sober and he wanted to figure out how
(10:55):
to heal.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
On his own.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
I think, especially when my son was born, my dad
really wanted to be involved, and he asked my permission,
and you know, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
He's nice.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Not a lot of people get i'm sorry. My dad
did say I'm sorry, but it doesn't mean you get
a relationship back. Changed behavior earns back relationships, and so
you have to trust yourself and your real sight, and
that really comes through healing. I had to trust my
ability to perceive my dad for who and where he
(11:24):
was now, and behavior is everything. His behavior was different
and it didn't come back to a relationship overnight, but
through consistent changed behavior, I felt like it was worth
having a relationship. I felt like it was not only
safe for my son, but even beneficial. And so that's
why my dad and I have a relationship. We met
as two adults that had healed a lot, and that's
(11:47):
a gift I certainly didn't think i'd be given in
my life, but a lot of that is owed to
my dad and ode to my own healing.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
You said something is so so important here, Juel, which
has changed behavior is what changes relationships. I'm sorry. Is nice,
but that's not how you can actually move into another
phase of your relationship. And I'm so so happy for
you that you and your father have been able to
achieve that that your son will reap the benefits of
your father's healing. It's not the norm, and I think
(12:14):
that foul forever question do I reconnect? Do I not reconnect?
Is this going to set me back? But as you
put it that process of healing for you had to
be you. This wasn't about I have to heal for
my dad because of my dad, to convert my dad.
But Jewel's going to go out and heal. And you
said both of your parents gaslight? Did you? And I
(12:35):
want to go back to talking. You said, your mom,
I put a pin in that jewel, and I'm coming
back using your metaphor? Is that your mother left at
eight years old? You know, when I close my eyes
and I think of what eight is and my own daughters,
it's so young. And she left you at eight, which
is unfathomable to either of us as parents, Right, anyone
(12:57):
who's a parent, can you talk that and what that
entire relationship with your mother looked like?
Speaker 2 (13:03):
It's hard to describe. My dad's kind of a much
more cut and dry case. Being hit hurts, it feels wrong,
it looks wrong. A guy that yells and gets angry
is an easy villain to identify. I don't think my
dad's a villain, but it's easy to identify that My
mom was subtle and the abuse was a very different type.
(13:26):
And it appeared as love, and it appeared as gentleness
and appeared as safety, and it was perfectly set up
by the fact that the volatility of my dad made
this contrast of this calm, quiet woman who never yelled,
who always said the right things, who said she loved me,
who said I was incredible. I mean, you just you
(13:47):
run to that, not knowing that you're consuming poison. You know,
when I look at both my parents. There's a great
book called Traumatic Narcissism by Daniel Shaw.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
It's my really hell me. Isn't it wonderful coreage?
Speaker 1 (14:02):
I mean, it is literally under my pillow. I've read
it so many times.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Is brilliant, It's wonderful work.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
And I want to make a really strong caveat I
am not diagnosing my parents. I've just read books that
helped me understand my own personal experience. One of the
most interesting things he said is when you're raised by
a traumatic narcissist, you either become one or you.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Get married to one.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Basically, I just sort of say that as a bit
of perspective, because what my mom did I consider to
be incredibly difficult and damaging. What I'm about to say
about my mom is so inflammatory, it's easy to make
her into this huge villain at the same time, I
feel like somebody who was raised in an impossible circumstance
by people who were raised in impossible and circumstances by
(14:45):
people who were raised in impossible circumstances. But my mom
is a complex psychological study. She's a very different animal
than my dad, you know. So I went from this
dad that hurts me, to hitchhiking to Anchorage to see
my mom as a ten year old, to her saying,
you know, you're so powerful. All people are so powerful.
Our minds are so powerful. We only used ten percent
(15:07):
of our mind. I mean, imagine what all the other
brain can do. I wonder, like, I bet we're powerful
enough to turn this light on and off with our mind.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
I mean maybe. And I was like, wow, that's cool
thing to think about.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
And she's like, why don't you sit here and like
stare at that light bulb and you see if it's possible.
She's like, I really believe in you, which felt so good.
And I sat there on the floor and I stared
at a light bulb for four hours and I felt loved,
and I felt seen, and I felt safe. And what
I didn't see is that I was being babysat by
(15:41):
a light bulb, okay, by mom that didn't really want
to see me. So that's just a kind of good
tiny image into maybe the nature of our relationship and
how that evolved to ultimately being something that became incredibly
psychologically damaging that I had to reckon with much later.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
It is interesting you brought up the topic of narcissism.
I always tell everyone narcissism in and of itself. Jewele
is not a diagnostic term. It's a description of a
personality style. So I can tell you I'm introverted. It's
not diagnostic. It's simply so who I am, how I
go through the world. The word does not have a
good connotation, but it's just merely a personality style that
(16:27):
puts a person off and at odds with other people.
It's very selfish. They put their needs ahead of other people.
It's not well suited to parenting because of that. It's
a concept I've talked about called multiple truths. Multiple things
can be true of one person at a time. My
mother made me feel special. My mother was fascinating. My
mother believed in this power of the mind. My mother
(16:47):
abandoned me. You know, there's a list of things your
mom did your list of things your dad did, and
all of those things coexist, and so can you walk
us through how that relationship then unfolded for you as
you now went through adolescence and her presence in your life,
and then as you emerged into adulthood.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yeah, you know, there's my perspective at the time, which
my mom was a saint to my dad was a
bad guy. So real, binary, real, black and white. I
realized with time much later that there was nothing wrong
with me. I did what I was built to do.
I attached to my mother. I was wired to do it,
and so there was nothing wrong with me. There was
(17:27):
something wrong with my mom's ability to attach. And so
with hindsight you see the fault there that there was
a tremendous wound for both my parents. And this isn't
permission for them having hurt me. And I think where
healing gets difficult for a lot of people is we
don't always know how to hold space and say the
truth is, these were hurt people. The truth is also
(17:51):
it's not okay to hurt me.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
That's a difficult duality for people to inhabit. People tend
to want to throw the baby out with the bath water,
or make people all bad or all evil, and that
isn't true. Hurt people, hurt people, and how we choose
to hurt people because of our hurt has a lot
to do with our own hurt and tools and lack thereof.
I have a line in one of my songs called
(18:14):
Goodbye Alice in Wonderland where my love was turned against
me like a knife. I loved my mom, and I
had a tremendous wound, a need right, this gaping hunger that, unexamined,
informed not only my worldview but all of my choices
and decisions. So this wound was actually causing me to
(18:38):
be a puppet, and my hands were moving and my
actions were all being orchestrated by my wounds, by my hurt,
by my need for love, and I didn't see it.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
I didn't see the strings.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
That were my own wounding, my own desperate need for love.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
This is a beautifully crafted metaphor, the likes of which
could have only come from such a gifted songwriter and poet.
Jewel makes a brilliant point here. Our core wounds often
guide us into treacherous situations and keep us stuck in
unhealthy ones when those wounds aren't explored and addressed, we
(19:22):
can drift into unhealthy relationships and find it nearly impossible
to cut the strings and free ourselves. We will be
right back with this conversation.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
This is the thing that causes you to be attracted
to crappy, you know, relationships. This is the thing that
causes us to make poor choices. Something my mom did,
and she figured out how to manipulate me in a
very masterful and very subtle ways, because my need for
valid my need for love, my need for her approval
(20:03):
was so great that it was kind of like a
great martial artist that learns to use your own force
and turn it against you.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
So she ended up becoming a co manager and a manager.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
In her best selling memoir Never Broken, Jewel writes that
she soon felt as though she couldn't make any decisions
without her mother. She was manipulated into believing that all
of her success was because of her mom.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
My mom had to do very little to get me
to do more and more of what she wanted. My
own need for love, my own need to have a mom,
the overwhelming hurt and abandonment, and all those things got
used in a way that was sophisticated, very sophisticated, and
kept me coming back to her. You know, she has
(20:54):
a position and the perspective that is valuable because I
don't trust my own perspective. That made a really dangerous
dynamic that I never saw that constantly was looking like,
this woman is a great guide, a great wisdom, great council,
great spiritual person, and many many.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
People believed that about her as well.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
And it led to a really you know, dangerous thing,
like when I got discovered while I was homeless at eighteen,
and I remember calling her and saying, you wouldn't believe it.
Labels are coming, and she was like, oh, my darling,
let me come down and help you. That must be
really overwhelming. You know, if I could go back one moment,
you know, and have a do over, it might have
been like, let's wait on that.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
Let's let me see if I can figure this out.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Long story short, I woke up at thirty four and
had to come to terms with the fact that I
had no money and that my mom wasn't who I.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
Thought she was.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Jule has said that while she was on the road touring,
working around the clock, her mother was reaping the benefits
living a lavish lifestyle with a full staff tending to
her every whim. In all, Jewel has estimated her mother
embezzled about one hundred million dollars. How did you cope
(22:09):
with that betrayal?
Speaker 2 (22:11):
I've had some very powerful moments in my life. Moving
out at fifteen was powerful. I learned skills that changed
my life forever. Moving out into my car because I
wouldn't have sex with a boss, I decided to live
in my car instead. My car got stolen and so
I was homeless for a year. That was a powerful moment.
(22:33):
These are these moments where you either break or you
go I fucking I have this. I'm going to figure
this out. And this was another one, this moment of
I think I was thirty three, thirty four, at whatever
age I was, this was either going to break me irrevocably,
or I was going to figure it out. I never
did therapy. I'm not saying that as a heroic gesture.
(22:56):
I just didn't have access when I was young, and
when I was thirty four, I definitely would have had access.
I had money, but I had been brainwashed. I had
been so psychologically abused that I didn't want anybody to
have any access to my mind or my thoughts, or
(23:18):
have any influence. I needed to figure out how to
restore my own sense of how to navigate my life.
And I was taken down to.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
A nub.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
I was dismantled psychologically, and I played a big part
in it. I kept saying yes, and I kept taking
apart pieces of myself.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
I participated, and I didn't know what was me and
what was her.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
And I do know that I actively engaged in tricking myself.
I do know there was this voice in me yelling
and kept suppressing it.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
And I get why. I'm not trying to be hard
on myself.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
I cannot tell you how many times I've heard this
from survivors, this idea of tricking yourself. How did you
begin to unwind that and work through that?
Speaker 2 (24:15):
I came out of this with so many tools I'd
love to talk about. I think the first thing I
had to come to terms with is the truth wins.
I willfully tricked myself about my mom. I wanted to
believe she loved me. I wanted to believe she loved
me so much. But I did make myself a promise
that the truth wins, and that I would dedicate myself
(24:38):
to seeing the truth, no matter how painful it was,
being willing to see the truth. And that's what I wrote.
Good by Alice in Wonderland. You know, one of the
last lines is, these are not tears in my eyes.
It's me finally learning what's good in my life and
what isn't. Basically me learning to identify poison for the
first time in my life, and I correctly identify it.
(25:00):
So I began to trust my body. My body was
giving me experiences, and I could talk myself out of
my body's experience.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Yes, with my mind.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
You said, you and your dad have a good relationship.
Now what about you and your mom? What has happened there?
Because that was a much a different kind of betrayal.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
You know, what happened with my dad was kind of
just a surprise, mind you. I don't expect him to
be somebody he's not. I love my dad and I'm
proud of him, and we are closed. But I don't
think his and my relationship are probably what dad daughter
relationships are like. We're two adults that we have a
(25:40):
lot to offer each other. But you know, my dad
isn't somebody at call for advice. When I'm hurt, my
dad isn't somebody at call, and that's okay. So I
just do kind of want to accept my dad for
where he's at, and I make sure I get my
needs met and what my needs are. So I'm not
looking for my dad to be that guy. You know.
(26:00):
I accept him where he's at and it's healthy and
there's nothing harmful about it. Oh, but I'm not coming
to it from a place of like these wounds, still
hoping that I get that thing from him. I figure
out how to get those needs met. And the world
is full of ways to meet.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Those needs, and that's the good news.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
So my mom, the last time I saw her was
two thousand and three. It was in a lawyer's office.
It's a scene that I describe in the book. She said,
you know, I'm just so glad that I get to
go back to just being.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
Your mom now.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
And I knew in that moment when she said that,
that i'd never see her again, or I didn't think
I would, and I haven't.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
I haven't seen my mom since that day. She never
reached out.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
She did write me a letter when I was pregnant
that said, you know, I'm always here, to forgive you
whenever you're ready.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
This classic gaslighting and manipulation technique is something I've heard
from survivors time and again. It offers zero consideration for
how the letter will affect the emotional well being of
the recipient, and in this instance, shows us how distorted
(27:05):
forgiveness can get. People who betray us often twist reality
to make us think we owe them an apology. Sometimes
these moments can be used as a tool to confirm
what we know to be true, as Jewel did, but
it never stops being flabbergasting and often destabilizing.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
You know, what I did might seem extreme to people.
There are all kinds of ways to deal with this.
This is just mine. I always caught my losses, like
when I felt like it became between death and staying
with somebody. It took me way too long to leave
it fully. And my job was just to learn how
to heal. And it was a real thing to heal
(27:51):
from the most rebellious thing you can do.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
It is it is figure out how to be happy.
It is. It is, yeah, And I had.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
My work cutout for me. It was going to take
all my all, my intellect, all my everything to figure
out how the hell to recover because I wanted to
be happy. I wanted to be able to love and
have trust and resilience, and that was such a monumental
thing that I didn't have time. Now I did have anger.
(28:19):
I did so much shaft to work through. But I
realized one day there was a story called the Allegory
of the Golden Statue. A village had a golden statue.
They heard a warring tribe was coming. They quickly covered
the statue in layers of mud to obscure its value.
The war came, the war wind there was devastation for generations.
They didn't even think about the statue. Generations went by.
(28:42):
There was a child playing at the feet of the
statue after a rainstorm, and he saw this little chip
revealing there was pure gold underneath this what people had
thought was a valueless statue. And for some reason, this
image struck me. I canceled a tour, I quit everything
to see how I can I'd heal psychologically from what
had happened with my mom. I was at a ranch
(29:04):
in Texas, just figure out what do I do, and
had this image come back to me, and it suddenly
hit me, I'm not broken. I just need to do
a loving archaeological dig back to who I am. I
had been covered with layers of mud and spit and
bruises and psychological programming to where I didn't know me
(29:27):
from other but I was existing purely I believed. I
choose to believe that I'm not broken. There's not something
wrong with me, There's something right with me. And I
had to get in touch with what was right with me.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
That is quite profound. How were you able to do that?
Speaker 2 (29:44):
I looked at that kind of like nature versus nurture.
My nature was the gold statue, and it existed. I
had just been obscured through decades of trauma, and so
I decided to use my body and my experience as
ruth and to trust it and to not talk myself
out of my experience with my thoughts. And so that
(30:06):
led me to realizing that my anxiety isn't my enemy,
it's my ally. And this was probably one of the
bigger things that I learned during that time. What if
my anxiety wasn't this enemy that I needed to suppress
and talk myself out of and disassociate from. What if
it was something for me to listen to What made
me think of it was food poisoning. You know, if
(30:27):
you eat bad fish, you throw up, and you learn
don't eat bad fish again.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
You shouldn't get mad at throwing up.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
You should think throwing up because it was your body's
way of saying you consumed something that made you sick.
It makes me so tender I tear up. Anxiety was
my best alarm system, letting me know I was consuming
something that didn't agree with my nature. And that's how
I began to deprogram myself. I had thousands of thoughts
(30:54):
that were false. I had thousands of beliefs that were false.
I had thousands of guilts and shames and decades of
stuff that I was trying to figure out how to
sort through. And I realized my anxiety was my compass.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
In a weird way.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
It's just one point on a compass. But when I
had a thought and it made me anxious, I would
stop and I would write down what was I thinking, feeling,
or doing, and I would just move on. And then
when I was consumed with more anxiety, I would write
what was I just thinking, feeling, or doing. And what
I realized is those were thoughts, feelings, and actions that
didn't agree with me, and was I willing to stop
(31:32):
consuming them and see if I became less anxious. And
so that's one of the first steps I took in
learning how to deprogram myself, learning how to instill a
compass in me, learning how to curate my thoughts and
replace them with thoughts that did agree with me, like
a soothing medicine. Almost, you know, these are decades. I'm
talking about it all up.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah, it's not something you're going to do in a week.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
But there's an axiom called the wicked teacher, and it
says you become that which you resent. Yes, And that's
the most powerful sentence when you look at what your
choices are. If you've been betrayed, it's a fork in
the road, you know, But choosing willfully in that one moment, No,
I'm going to go right. I want to learn how
to love and trust and heal. And so every time
(32:18):
I would be consumed with regret, resentment, just say what,
that's a coping mechanism. It's a it's the left road,
and I want to take the right road because I
have enough to do on the right road.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
I have enough to work on.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Right I think a lot of people out of there
is a family betrayal that persists. A pattern of behavior
that persists is people do feel anger. And one thing
I do let people know is you feel as you feel.
And the thing you need to trust about feeling is
to never over identify with feeling. There is no right
or wrong feeling, to have you have the feeling you have,
and to never judge how you feel, because that's the
(32:54):
internalized judgment a person has always carried on.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Yeah, and I want to touch on anger because choosing
to go right doesn't mean you stop being angry.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
It took me decades. I'm sure to process.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
The anger and I will have reserves for life. Probably
for me, what I learned about anger is right, I
should have been angry for what happened to me. That's
a sign of health. Anger is typically a sign of health.
I think of it like a gunpowder blast. It's quick,
(33:29):
and it's intense, and it should create a tremendous amount
of energy in your body to take an action. Yes,
And so for me it was like, I'm angry, What
am I going to do with it?
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (33:42):
And by constantly focusing on okay, what am I going
to do with this anger. My anger lets me know
that a boundary has been crossed, or that I crossed
my own boundary, or that I compromised, or that I
got compromised.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
It's very powerful. It's a good tool.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
You know, I'm very angry at my mom. And then
you have a choice, you know, will I fester? Right?
Because hey, many nights did I stay up with circular thoughts? Resenting, angry,
locked in and it is a poison, and it was
my own mind. What am I now going to do?
Now I have a lot of energy my body. I
would typically spiral in shame. I would lock into regret.
(34:20):
I would go into self loathing. I would lock into
just mind boggling resentment for my mom and realizing those
were all choices I was making, and could I do
something else with this energy? Could I do something else
with this anger? And so I do just want to
highlight that, Yeah, it isn't like this kind of mental
(34:41):
like I'm just gonna choose not to be angry and forgive.
It is not like that. It's a dirty business business.
It is a dirty, gritty business. And that for somebody
that never knew how to love herself, that never knew
how to champion myself. It was a process of learning
that self love was not staying up at night and
(35:01):
doing that to myself, but saying, okay, but what am
I going to do tomorrow that builds my life instead
of tears it down. So I hope that explains that
whole thing. It can sound like I was so heroic,
of like I just chose, I chose to go right.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
It isn't like that you.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Were heroic and you were angry and you chose to
go right. All of those things are true. Again, the
multiple truths. I have to say though, that scene with
your mom, the two thousand and three one in the
lawyer's office, it was absolutely chilling because here your mother
has completely financially abused you, financially betrayed you. It hits
even harder because of where you came from, where there
wasn't enough. You really struggled financially, your family struggled financially,
(35:39):
to have all that worked and just passion and everything
you did for to at least a financial part of
it to have gone away. Then for your mother to
pivot and say, I guess I have to go back
to just being your mother, which is really code for
I guess that means I'm going to leave again? Was
I mean it should personally? And shook me to my core.
(36:00):
My question then becomes, all of this is very complicated
relationship you had with your mother. How has this impacted
your process as a mother yourself?
Speaker 2 (36:13):
I love being a mom, so much to say about it.
I highly recommend doing as much healing as you can
before having a child, if you have that luxury or
the option. If you didn't know you had stuff to
heal from, it's okay. I believe that as I heal
in front of my child, it's a healing for him. Yeah.
(36:33):
And I can tell my son it's okay to make mistakes.
But if I don't think it's okay for me to
make mistakes, I'm sending a mixed message to my son. Yeah.
Admitting you still need to heal even as a parent
is admitting you're going to make mistakes and finding a
(36:54):
way to hold some grace for yourself and realizing that
just modeling when I'm make mistakes for my son and I.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
Come clean as it were. Yah that I'm going like,
you know what, I was really impatient.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
I was so patient. Oh my gosh, I'm impatient. Like
I think I'm gonna go for a walk. I gotta
go figure this out. He knows I'm impatient. Why would
I fool all of us that I'm not obviously not
over involving him in my process or overly adulting my process,
but just giving a voice to the truth, showing a
process of how I handle it that emotions are. My
(37:31):
son has big feelings, you know, no shocker, He's like
my kid. What do we do with intense feelings? How
do we manage them? Sometimes we catch him quick, sometimes
we don't notice him till a little too late. I
love healing. I believe I'll be healing for the rest
of my life. I believe I'll be learning and growing
the rest of my life. And I hope my son
has an appetite for that. So it's the only way
(37:53):
for him to kind of see the messiness as we
do it. I am glad I healed a ton prior.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
My conversation will continue after this break.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
The other thing I realized is again I kind of
talk about this nature and nurture, but because the way
I loved my mom, I took refuge in that in
a weird way, and it was that to remind myself
constantly that I knew how to love.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Yes, it was intact.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
And I had to really trust that and not see
that as a negative with my son, but to embrace
that I was intact. I knew how to love, and
I could trust that nature in me. You know, having
a newborn is very scary. You don't innately know how
to breastfeed. It's not as intuitive as you all think.
So it kind of threw me and it was very dumb.
(38:52):
I watched somehow a panda with a baby, and I
was like, I have this in me. I have to
trust I have this in me, even though I wasn't nurtured.
I have to trust in my bones this ability to
navigate this and keep and I had to have faith
in that, and I had to keep fighting my way
back to that love.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
And it's worked out well.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
It has worked out. And not only have you done
that for your son, you're doing it for the world.
And so I really want you to talk about your platform,
Inner World, because it's an amazing resource. I know it's
going to help so many people, Jules, So can you
explain what it is?
Speaker 3 (39:27):
Thank You?
Speaker 2 (39:28):
In Our World is a mental health platform that's virtual
so you can use your iPad or your iPhone. You
can even use like VR goggles if you want, and
you come into a virtual community where it.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Is completely safe.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
There are no trolls, there is no bullying, there is
incredible moderation, and you can participate in a community where
people are just hanging around like a campfire or these
really logically calm settings and just find connection, which have
tremendous network effects, right it helps. Connection alone is wildly curative.
(40:09):
Or you can actually attend classes in a peer to
peer setting that are led by guides that are trained
nice and we have over one hundred classes a week.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
Groups, Yeah, are already like we really scaled up the classes.
They're specific around living with anxiety, living with chronic illness,
living with depression, being a support person for somebody with
an illness, living with agoraphobia, or you know, extreme social anxiety.
You'll find, you know a lot of people even go
(40:40):
to classes they don't think they need, just because you
learn so much. It's all based on behavioral tools. So
these are not therapists, these are not PhDs. These are
lay people that have been trained to lead classes. There
is a ton still of oversight and moderation. If you
know somebody is for some reason having an acute trigger
and having acute suicide ideation, were not equipped for that,
(41:02):
and so they can be removed to a private room
and then helped, because that's not what our platform is.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
But you'll learn tools.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
So let's say you go to a social anxiety meeting
you don't like going out. We had a woman that
hadn't left home in four years. She was in weekly therapy,
and we taught her a tool it's called solving ahead.
You write down what you want to do. She wanted
to go to the grocery store. You say, what's the
worst case scenario? She wrote out her worst case scenario.
What's your plan? I will call this person. I'm going
(41:31):
to take my phone with me so I can stay
on inner world is what she wanted. She had that
support system live. And then now let's say, what's the
best case scenario. Not that we get to control the outcome,
but how could we influence it where maybe the best
case scenario happens. What's your plan to kind of help
influences to hopefully have a good outcome. And then what's
the most likely case scenario? It's usually somewhere in the middle,
(41:55):
and then armed with that, people learn this behavioral tool.
And I think in four months of our platform, she
went out not only the grocery shop, but she ended
up going to a concert.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
With Biplos's fantastic.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
And her therapist started coming into our settings because she
was like, oh my gosh, like how did my client?
Speaker 3 (42:11):
What tool was that? So that's what we do. You
sign up.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
It's a free platform but has a premium subscription, so
more access to more meetings and more supports is as
little as eight dollars a month. We wanted access for all.
We wanted this highly affordable because to me, the idea
that people don't have access to these tools is unforgivable
and we need to make them very readily available.
Speaker 1 (42:32):
Well, I think it's an amazing resource. It is you
also infusing what your process has been, like you said,
so so complicated, but always plugged into healing, that no
matter what our backstories are, we're not defined by them,
and if anything, they can really foster resilience. You talk
about this idea that just because something bends doesn't mean
(42:52):
that it breaks, and you're really a living monument to
that idea that we can bend without breaking, even though
we don't believe that. I'm so glad I had the
opportunity to talk to you and get to know you
and learn your story because I think it and I
know it informed what I share with survivors of really
difficult historical intergenerational cycles and stories and their families, and
(43:16):
how to understand that you can always find your autonomy,
your sense of who you are, and go and actually
live into that full sense of you, but that there's
going to always be some echoes of it. Like you said,
some our wounds can cause us to be a puppet.
What you showed us is that the marionette strings can
be cut and that we can move forward. But it
(43:37):
is a journey. And so again we're not only blessed
with your music and the world, Jewle, I can say
even more so now with your journey and your commitment
to healing not just for yourself but for everyone in
the world. So thank you, so much, Thank.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
You so much, Thanks for what you do and giving
a thoughtful place to yeah discuss really complicated.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
Very nuanced, very difficult things.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
And again I would just emphasize, like it's not always
black and white, it's a world of grace, And for me,
my healing has been about what can I do? What
can I do better today? Do I want to be happy?
Am I going to be accountable for it? And if
you are willing to do that, you know. I always
tell people they're like, healing is so hard and it's
(44:20):
so painful, and.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
It is, it is real work.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
But being dysfunctional is very painful and a lot of work.
It's just familiar and there's no light at the end
of that tunnel. So learning a new way, learning a
new habit, learning a new way to think is so
painful and hard. But at least there is a light
potentially at the end of that tunnel. So why not
take that? Ben?
Speaker 1 (44:40):
I love it again. Thank you, thank you, thank you
so much. Here are my takeaways from my conversation with Jewel. First,
she talks about this idea of emotional inheritance and emotional language.
When we think about inheritance and genetics of our psychology,
we often think about psychological vulnerabilities or genetic vulnerabilities for
(45:04):
mental illness, but this is something very different and very
important for survivors. We learn to speak emotion the way
we observe and are taught in childhood. We may have
permission to express a range of emotion, or we may
be taught to use displacing emotional language, or we may
(45:28):
find ourselves completely silenced emotionally. Rage may be a frequently
accessed to emotion, and sadness may be shamed. Growth and
evolution past the limited emotional languages we are given in
childhood often requires major work and shifts, especially for people
whose emotional vocabularies were limited. Our emotional inheritances are intergenerational
(45:54):
and reflect the traumas, losses, joys, and grief of generations past,
and become the foundation of our emotional languages. In our
next takeaway, Jewel said that changed behavior is what earns
back relationships. So many people in invalidating relationships are waiting
(46:15):
for the I am sorry that rarely comes, and that
when it does come, folks may go all in again.
But what Jewel shares here is actually a fundamental truth
to hold onto in a narcissistic relationship as well. Even
if you do get an apology, it's not enough. There
(46:36):
must be behavior change, sustained and accountable behavior change any less,
and we can all but guarantee that the old patterns
are going to return again for our next takeaway. While
Jewel did endure multiple hardships and losses in childhood, that
(46:57):
one of the worst was the theft of her inner
compass through being gaslighted by both of her parents, and
she highlights a particular situation when she connected the dots
quite accurately and was told she was patently wrong. The
loss of that compass means we are navigating without a
(47:18):
compass as we emerge into adulthood and can leave us
doubting our intuition and our perceptions. In this next takeaway,
Jewel brought up an off sided line hurt people hurt people, Yes,
they do, But Jewel's follow up line is key, hurt people,
(47:40):
hurt people, but it's not okay to hurt me. The
hurt people's spin often ends up feeling like a justification
or an excuse, and while we can hold empathy for
folks who have been hurt, it is not a free
pass to keep hurting. But sadly many people can view
it that way. Or this next takeaway, she shared two
(48:03):
key tools that were instrumental in her healing, being willing
to see the truth and identify poison and to listen
to her anxiety. She viewed anxiety as a signal, which
is an astute observation. Our anxiety can teach us about
ourselves and how to take care of ourselves. However, that
(48:24):
process of being willing to see the truth that takes
a while. It is about pulling out of the shadow
of trauma, bonding and enablers and see it. And to
see the truth can also be a lonely place because
most people don't. And in our last takeaway, Jewel calls
healing rebellion and that could not be more true. The invalidating, confusing, toxic,
(48:52):
or narcissistic relationships can only persist if we do not heal,
and when we start healing, these were relationships also change.
Healing is not an overnight, dramatic experience. It is thousands
of micro changes that bring you closer to your sense
of self and when you do that, you change the rules,
(49:13):
the structure of these relationships and the entire system. You
probably never thought of yourself as a rebel, but each
time you disengage or don't take the bait, that is
exactly what you are
Superstar performer Jewel soul Stirring Music is the soundtrack of
a generation. Her debut album is one of the best
selling in history and went twelve times platinum. She sung
at the Super Bowl, the White House, and for the Pope,
but her path to success was wrought with trauma. Jewel
(00:21):
grew up in Alaska without running water, was raised by
a physically abusive father, and abandoned by her mother, all
before the age of eight. She left home at fifteen
and was homeless by eighteen. Against all odds, Jewel rose
to stardom, yet was dealt another devastating blow when she
discovered her mother stole millions of her hard earned money.
(00:44):
On this special episode of Navigating Narcissism, the One and Only,
Jewel reveals the most challenging parts of her healing, the
revelation that still makes her tear up, and the fascinating
techniques she's used to help her emotional recovery. From Red
(01:05):
Table Talk Podcasts and iHeartMedia, I'm Doctor Rominy and this
is Navigating Narcissism. This podcast should not be used as
a substitute for medical or mental health advice. Individuals are
advised to seek independent medical advice, counseling, and or therapy
(01:26):
from a healthcare professional with respect to any medical condition,
mental health issue, or health inquiry, including matters discussed on
this podcast. This episode discusses abuse, which may be triggering
to some people. The views and opinions expressed are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
(01:49):
and do not represent the opinions of Red Table Talk productions, iHeartMedia,
or their employees. Jule, I have been following your journey
for several years. Your experience is the kind that hits
you like a bolt of lightning and stays with you.
You have so much to offer the survivor community, so
(02:12):
thank you so much for joining me. I was really
struck by your unique upbringing. Your family had a long
history of homesteading in Alaska. You grew up on hundreds
of acres without running water. Can you give us a
little insight into your childhood.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, so there's a good and a dark side, I
think to my family history.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
I was raised on that homestead by my dad. My
daily life was varied. We did move a lot, but
a lot.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Of my childhood was on the homestead, and I think
that that exposure to nature. Actually, my dad once said
we were given the illness and the cure, and I
think that's very true. My dad has eight siblings and
they had such a again amazing childhood but also kind
of horrific. And I think the reason none of them
have committed suicide. None of them are drug addicts. And
(02:58):
don't get me wrong, but it's kind of striking that
you could have eight kids raised in this environment and
that none of them went darker. Is I think a
real testament to the land and how the land, for
me personally at least, taught me to be human.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
So let's talk about your dad then, because I've had
the privilege of reading your book. Everyone should read jules book,
by the way, And I know that he experienced abuse
growing up and then some of that cycle continued to
a certain degree. Can you talk a little bit about
your father, because it's a complicated story with your dad.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
My father's childhood was psychologically, physically and emotionally abusive. I
didn't know that though, of course, growing up, and so
all I knew was my dad. I know my mom
left at eight suddenly I was being raised by my father.
My father went from like a Mormon like classic Mormon
dad to drinking, smoking and hitting me pretty much overnight.
(03:52):
So my mom left. I had no idea why. I
didn't know actually she left. I just assumed my dad
took us. And my dad suddenly hitting us, yelling, drinking,
and smoking.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
So that was a radical shift.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
And it was, you know, obviously having your world turned
upside down and we started singing a bars to make
a living.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Growing up in bars was not easy.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
I would have men put dimes in my hand and say,
you know, call me when you're sixteen. You're going to
be great to fuck when you're older. And so I
just grew up in a wild environment. But I'm dyslexic,
and for some reason, I think that causes me to
see patterns, and I'm very visual. And what I was
seeing was pain. I had a front row seat to pain.
I was in pain. It was the most salient feature
(04:32):
in my life. And what I was seeing in the
bars and what I was seeing in my dad, I
was like, oh my gosh, we're all in pain. And
I was watching how people dealt with it over the years.
I saw drug use, I saw rage, I saw sex,
I saw illicit behavior, and I think I had just
been learning about oysters in school and that oysters have
an irritant like a bit of sand and they make
(04:53):
a pearl. And I was like, I have this irritant,
I have this pain, but I'm not making a pearl.
None of us are making pearl. Why don't we make
pearls out of this instead? Like the visual I saw
was this hurt, this wound, and people would layer all
these things to avoid it and to try.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
And bury it.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
But by the end of it, they were consumed in
a mountain of other distractions that caused more pain. And
for anybody to face that after so many decades was
quite difficult. You had to deal with all this crap
you've done and inflicted more pain on yourself basically just
to go ahead and deal with this. And so to me,
like I remember saying, pain, you know what do I
do with pain? I remember writing down, and I remember
(05:33):
the quickest way is through, and to kind of promise
myself that I would try and deal with my pain,
just out of a matter of practicality. But I didn't
always know how to handle it, and so I tried
to look to things that gave me relief. Writing gave
me relief. It was very obvious that it did, didn't
take it away, but something about moving toward it helped.
And I learned about the buffalo from I don't know
(05:55):
when I was like ten or something, and it was
they're the only animal that moved to the heart of
the storm, and that the quickest way again is through.
And that's what gave me this role model of writing.
For whatever reason, moved me toward my pain, and for
whatever reason, that relieved the pain a little bit. It
just made it slightly manageable. And for the pain I
couldn't figure out what to do with that, I called
(06:16):
putting a pin in it. Now you would call it
just compartmentalized. I would just put a pin in it
until I could learn what to do with it later.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
So your dad had been abused by his father. You'd
say that if things didn't go his way or you
woke him up, you'd have might gotten hit. And there's
one poignant story that really stuck with me is that
he hit you and your brother. You had to walk
eight miles to school because you missed the bus with
bloody noses in the cold Alaska weather, and then he
(06:43):
came to school with your lunches almost looking ashamed and
that something awoke in you that you're saying, I want
to explain this to him. I want to connect the dots,
which only enraged him again. And just that sequence, Jewel
captured the trauma bond in sheer perfection. That probably three
four our sequence. He wakes up, he gets frustrated, he
(07:03):
takes it out on you and your brother physically, he comes,
he brings the lunch. Oh maybe it sounds so bad,
I could forget that. That's it. That sequence is the
trauma bonded relationship, and it's an almost impossible cycle to
break out of.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Yeah, And there was also what we would call gaslighting
when I sat down with them on the couch and
I was like, oh my god, I think I see
a pattern and I kind of see what happened, and
I see what's leading to this maybe for him, and
how it's affecting me, and I probably remind him of
my mom. And I was so excited to share that
with him. And I think that having a young girl,
you know, try and explain your psychology not attractive to people.
(07:40):
And he talked to me out of my truth and
I didn't know better. I got confused. And that was
one of the most traumatic. That more than being hit,
was much more damaging to me because I went from
feeling with certainty that I was seeing things correctly to
(08:01):
doubting my own internal voice. And that was a bitch
to recover from. Like I get chills talking about it.
That took decades for me to figure out how to
reinstate my own internal compass because I began getting It's
funny now we have this term gaslight, but I began
getting gas lit by both of my parents to where
(08:22):
my own truth and my own ability to navigate became
quite obscured and caused a lot of pain for many.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Decades, which is really what the legacy of this is.
The bruises, the scratches, the wounds they do heal on
our memory conveniently pushes that out, but that emotional loss
of losing your sense of knowing what reality basically, it
can take a lifetime to heal from. How did you
continue to cope with your home life as you grew up?
Speaker 3 (08:48):
I did move out at fifteen.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
I decided that it was just better to leave my
dad than stay in this like intense arguing, fighting, physical
dynamic and just go out.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
On my own.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
I knew that statistically doing that was quite dangerous, but
I wanted to cut my losses. And that's kind of
how I've always been, is like, can I do something different?
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Can I do better? How will I succeed?
Speaker 2 (09:14):
And so, rather than kind of fixating on anger for
my dad, which I had a lot of anger, I
decided to put all of my resources into going what
makes me think I can move out at fifteen and
not become a drug addict or a prostitute, because that's
statistically what I should be destined to. And so I
knew I had this genetic inheritance. I'd been learning about
(09:35):
it in school. You know, we had a genetic inheritance
that could give us a predisposition to diabetes.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
Or heart disease.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
But I saw this like an emotional inheritance. It was
habits and emotional languaging that I was inheriting, and it
was going to give me a predisposition to abuse, addiction, all.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Kinds of things.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
And so what I realized I was up against was
learning a new emotional language. And at least that felt
like a clear objective. You know, I knew like I
could go to school to learn Spanish, but there was
nowhere to learn a new emotional language. But at least
knowing what I was up against felt like a clear objective,
and so I went my own way. I didn't think
i'd ever see him again. I didn't honestly care. Maybe
(10:18):
if I ever saw him again. I felt like what
I was up against was such a monumental and dangerous
proposition that I just had to put on my resources
to that.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
How is your relationship with your father today?
Speaker 2 (10:32):
So my dad and I do have a good relationship. Now,
all I can say is I didn't try and heal them.
I didn't try and save them, not that I think
it's bad. You know, each their own. I didn't know
how to, and I just tried to focus on saving
my own life. Basically, my dad in his sixties late
sixties got sober and he wanted to figure out how
(10:55):
to heal.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
On his own.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
I think, especially when my son was born, my dad
really wanted to be involved, and he asked my permission,
and you know, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
He's nice.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Not a lot of people get i'm sorry. My dad
did say I'm sorry, but it doesn't mean you get
a relationship back. Changed behavior earns back relationships, and so
you have to trust yourself and your real sight, and
that really comes through healing. I had to trust my
ability to perceive my dad for who and where he
(11:24):
was now, and behavior is everything. His behavior was different
and it didn't come back to a relationship overnight, but
through consistent changed behavior, I felt like it was worth
having a relationship. I felt like it was not only
safe for my son, but even beneficial. And so that's
why my dad and I have a relationship. We met
as two adults that had healed a lot, and that's
(11:47):
a gift I certainly didn't think i'd be given in
my life, but a lot of that is owed to
my dad and ode to my own healing.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
You said something is so so important here, Juel, which
has changed behavior is what changes relationships. I'm sorry. Is nice,
but that's not how you can actually move into another
phase of your relationship. And I'm so so happy for
you that you and your father have been able to
achieve that that your son will reap the benefits of
your father's healing. It's not the norm, and I think
(12:14):
that foul forever question do I reconnect? Do I not reconnect?
Is this going to set me back? But as you
put it that process of healing for you had to
be you. This wasn't about I have to heal for
my dad because of my dad, to convert my dad.
But Jewel's going to go out and heal. And you
said both of your parents gaslight? Did you? And I
(12:35):
want to go back to talking. You said, your mom,
I put a pin in that jewel, and I'm coming
back using your metaphor? Is that your mother left at
eight years old? You know, when I close my eyes
and I think of what eight is and my own daughters,
it's so young. And she left you at eight, which
is unfathomable to either of us as parents, Right, anyone
(12:57):
who's a parent, can you talk that and what that
entire relationship with your mother looked like?
Speaker 2 (13:03):
It's hard to describe. My dad's kind of a much
more cut and dry case. Being hit hurts, it feels wrong,
it looks wrong. A guy that yells and gets angry
is an easy villain to identify. I don't think my
dad's a villain, but it's easy to identify that My
mom was subtle and the abuse was a very different type.
(13:26):
And it appeared as love, and it appeared as gentleness
and appeared as safety, and it was perfectly set up
by the fact that the volatility of my dad made
this contrast of this calm, quiet woman who never yelled,
who always said the right things, who said she loved me,
who said I was incredible. I mean, you just you
(13:47):
run to that, not knowing that you're consuming poison. You know,
when I look at both my parents. There's a great
book called Traumatic Narcissism by Daniel Shaw.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
It's my really hell me. Isn't it wonderful coreage?
Speaker 1 (14:02):
I mean, it is literally under my pillow. I've read
it so many times.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Is brilliant, It's wonderful work.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
And I want to make a really strong caveat I
am not diagnosing my parents. I've just read books that
helped me understand my own personal experience. One of the
most interesting things he said is when you're raised by
a traumatic narcissist, you either become one or you.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Get married to one.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Basically, I just sort of say that as a bit
of perspective, because what my mom did I consider to
be incredibly difficult and damaging. What I'm about to say
about my mom is so inflammatory, it's easy to make
her into this huge villain at the same time, I
feel like somebody who was raised in an impossible circumstance
by people who were raised in impossible and circumstances by
(14:45):
people who were raised in impossible circumstances. But my mom
is a complex psychological study. She's a very different animal
than my dad, you know. So I went from this
dad that hurts me, to hitchhiking to Anchorage to see
my mom as a ten year old, to her saying,
you know, you're so powerful. All people are so powerful.
Our minds are so powerful. We only used ten percent
(15:07):
of our mind. I mean, imagine what all the other
brain can do. I wonder, like, I bet we're powerful
enough to turn this light on and off with our mind.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
I mean maybe. And I was like, wow, that's cool
thing to think about.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
And she's like, why don't you sit here and like
stare at that light bulb and you see if it's possible.
She's like, I really believe in you, which felt so good.
And I sat there on the floor and I stared
at a light bulb for four hours and I felt loved,
and I felt seen, and I felt safe. And what
I didn't see is that I was being babysat by
(15:41):
a light bulb, okay, by mom that didn't really want
to see me. So that's just a kind of good
tiny image into maybe the nature of our relationship and
how that evolved to ultimately being something that became incredibly
psychologically damaging that I had to reckon with much later.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
It is interesting you brought up the topic of narcissism.
I always tell everyone narcissism in and of itself. Jewele
is not a diagnostic term. It's a description of a
personality style. So I can tell you I'm introverted. It's
not diagnostic. It's simply so who I am, how I
go through the world. The word does not have a
good connotation, but it's just merely a personality style that
(16:27):
puts a person off and at odds with other people.
It's very selfish. They put their needs ahead of other people.
It's not well suited to parenting because of that. It's
a concept I've talked about called multiple truths. Multiple things
can be true of one person at a time. My
mother made me feel special. My mother was fascinating. My
mother believed in this power of the mind. My mother
(16:47):
abandoned me. You know, there's a list of things your
mom did your list of things your dad did, and
all of those things coexist, and so can you walk
us through how that relationship then unfolded for you as
you now went through adolescence and her presence in your life,
and then as you emerged into adulthood.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yeah, you know, there's my perspective at the time, which
my mom was a saint to my dad was a
bad guy. So real, binary, real, black and white. I
realized with time much later that there was nothing wrong
with me. I did what I was built to do.
I attached to my mother. I was wired to do it,
and so there was nothing wrong with me. There was
(17:27):
something wrong with my mom's ability to attach. And so
with hindsight you see the fault there that there was
a tremendous wound for both my parents. And this isn't
permission for them having hurt me. And I think where
healing gets difficult for a lot of people is we
don't always know how to hold space and say the
truth is, these were hurt people. The truth is also
(17:51):
it's not okay to hurt me.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
That's a difficult duality for people to inhabit. People tend
to want to throw the baby out with the bath water,
or make people all bad or all evil, and that
isn't true. Hurt people, hurt people, and how we choose
to hurt people because of our hurt has a lot
to do with our own hurt and tools and lack thereof.
I have a line in one of my songs called
(18:14):
Goodbye Alice in Wonderland where my love was turned against
me like a knife. I loved my mom, and I
had a tremendous wound, a need right, this gaping hunger that, unexamined,
informed not only my worldview but all of my choices
and decisions. So this wound was actually causing me to
(18:38):
be a puppet, and my hands were moving and my
actions were all being orchestrated by my wounds, by my hurt,
by my need for love, and I didn't see it.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
I didn't see the strings.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
That were my own wounding, my own desperate need for love.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
This is a beautifully crafted metaphor, the likes of which
could have only come from such a gifted songwriter and poet.
Jewel makes a brilliant point here. Our core wounds often
guide us into treacherous situations and keep us stuck in
unhealthy ones when those wounds aren't explored and addressed, we
(19:22):
can drift into unhealthy relationships and find it nearly impossible
to cut the strings and free ourselves. We will be
right back with this conversation.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
This is the thing that causes you to be attracted
to crappy, you know, relationships. This is the thing that
causes us to make poor choices. Something my mom did,
and she figured out how to manipulate me in a
very masterful and very subtle ways, because my need for
valid my need for love, my need for her approval
(20:03):
was so great that it was kind of like a
great martial artist that learns to use your own force
and turn it against you.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
So she ended up becoming a co manager and a manager.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
In her best selling memoir Never Broken, Jewel writes that
she soon felt as though she couldn't make any decisions
without her mother. She was manipulated into believing that all
of her success was because of her mom.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
My mom had to do very little to get me
to do more and more of what she wanted. My
own need for love, my own need to have a mom,
the overwhelming hurt and abandonment, and all those things got
used in a way that was sophisticated, very sophisticated, and
kept me coming back to her. You know, she has
(20:54):
a position and the perspective that is valuable because I
don't trust my own perspective. That made a really dangerous
dynamic that I never saw that constantly was looking like,
this woman is a great guide, a great wisdom, great council,
great spiritual person, and many many.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
People believed that about her as well.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
And it led to a really you know, dangerous thing,
like when I got discovered while I was homeless at eighteen,
and I remember calling her and saying, you wouldn't believe it.
Labels are coming, and she was like, oh, my darling,
let me come down and help you. That must be
really overwhelming. You know, if I could go back one moment,
you know, and have a do over, it might have
been like, let's wait on that.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
Let's let me see if I can figure this out.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Long story short, I woke up at thirty four and
had to come to terms with the fact that I
had no money and that my mom wasn't who I.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
Thought she was.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Jule has said that while she was on the road touring,
working around the clock, her mother was reaping the benefits
living a lavish lifestyle with a full staff tending to
her every whim. In all, Jewel has estimated her mother
embezzled about one hundred million dollars. How did you cope
(22:09):
with that betrayal?
Speaker 2 (22:11):
I've had some very powerful moments in my life. Moving
out at fifteen was powerful. I learned skills that changed
my life forever. Moving out into my car because I
wouldn't have sex with a boss, I decided to live
in my car instead. My car got stolen and so
I was homeless for a year. That was a powerful moment.
(22:33):
These are these moments where you either break or you
go I fucking I have this. I'm going to figure
this out. And this was another one, this moment of
I think I was thirty three, thirty four, at whatever
age I was, this was either going to break me irrevocably,
or I was going to figure it out. I never
did therapy. I'm not saying that as a heroic gesture.
(22:56):
I just didn't have access when I was young, and
when I was thirty four, I definitely would have had access.
I had money, but I had been brainwashed. I had
been so psychologically abused that I didn't want anybody to
have any access to my mind or my thoughts, or
(23:18):
have any influence. I needed to figure out how to
restore my own sense of how to navigate my life.
And I was taken down to.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
A nub.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
I was dismantled psychologically, and I played a big part
in it. I kept saying yes, and I kept taking
apart pieces of myself.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
I participated, and I didn't know what was me and
what was her.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
And I do know that I actively engaged in tricking myself.
I do know there was this voice in me yelling
and kept suppressing it.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
And I get why. I'm not trying to be hard
on myself.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
I cannot tell you how many times I've heard this
from survivors, this idea of tricking yourself. How did you
begin to unwind that and work through that?
Speaker 2 (24:15):
I came out of this with so many tools I'd
love to talk about. I think the first thing I
had to come to terms with is the truth wins.
I willfully tricked myself about my mom. I wanted to
believe she loved me. I wanted to believe she loved
me so much. But I did make myself a promise
that the truth wins, and that I would dedicate myself
(24:38):
to seeing the truth, no matter how painful it was,
being willing to see the truth. And that's what I wrote.
Good by Alice in Wonderland. You know, one of the
last lines is, these are not tears in my eyes.
It's me finally learning what's good in my life and
what isn't. Basically me learning to identify poison for the
first time in my life, and I correctly identify it.
(25:00):
So I began to trust my body. My body was
giving me experiences, and I could talk myself out of
my body's experience.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Yes, with my mind.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
You said, you and your dad have a good relationship.
Now what about you and your mom? What has happened there?
Because that was a much a different kind of betrayal.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
You know, what happened with my dad was kind of
just a surprise, mind you. I don't expect him to
be somebody he's not. I love my dad and I'm
proud of him, and we are closed. But I don't
think his and my relationship are probably what dad daughter
relationships are like. We're two adults that we have a
(25:40):
lot to offer each other. But you know, my dad
isn't somebody at call for advice. When I'm hurt, my
dad isn't somebody at call, and that's okay. So I
just do kind of want to accept my dad for
where he's at, and I make sure I get my
needs met and what my needs are. So I'm not
looking for my dad to be that guy. You know.
(26:00):
I accept him where he's at and it's healthy and
there's nothing harmful about it. Oh, but I'm not coming
to it from a place of like these wounds, still
hoping that I get that thing from him. I figure
out how to get those needs met. And the world
is full of ways to meet.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Those needs, and that's the good news.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
So my mom, the last time I saw her was
two thousand and three. It was in a lawyer's office.
It's a scene that I describe in the book. She said,
you know, I'm just so glad that I get to
go back to just being.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
Your mom now.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
And I knew in that moment when she said that,
that i'd never see her again, or I didn't think
I would, and I haven't.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
I haven't seen my mom since that day. She never
reached out.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
She did write me a letter when I was pregnant
that said, you know, I'm always here, to forgive you
whenever you're ready.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
This classic gaslighting and manipulation technique is something I've heard
from survivors time and again. It offers zero consideration for
how the letter will affect the emotional well being of
the recipient, and in this instance, shows us how distorted
(27:05):
forgiveness can get. People who betray us often twist reality
to make us think we owe them an apology. Sometimes
these moments can be used as a tool to confirm
what we know to be true, as Jewel did, but
it never stops being flabbergasting and often destabilizing.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
You know, what I did might seem extreme to people.
There are all kinds of ways to deal with this.
This is just mine. I always caught my losses, like
when I felt like it became between death and staying
with somebody. It took me way too long to leave
it fully. And my job was just to learn how
to heal. And it was a real thing to heal
(27:51):
from the most rebellious thing you can do.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
It is it is figure out how to be happy.
It is. It is, yeah, And I had.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
My work cutout for me. It was going to take
all my all, my intellect, all my everything to figure
out how the hell to recover because I wanted to
be happy. I wanted to be able to love and
have trust and resilience, and that was such a monumental
thing that I didn't have time. Now I did have anger.
(28:19):
I did so much shaft to work through. But I
realized one day there was a story called the Allegory
of the Golden Statue. A village had a golden statue.
They heard a warring tribe was coming. They quickly covered
the statue in layers of mud to obscure its value.
The war came, the war wind there was devastation for generations.
They didn't even think about the statue. Generations went by.
(28:42):
There was a child playing at the feet of the
statue after a rainstorm, and he saw this little chip
revealing there was pure gold underneath this what people had
thought was a valueless statue. And for some reason, this
image struck me. I canceled a tour, I quit everything
to see how I can I'd heal psychologically from what
had happened with my mom. I was at a ranch
(29:04):
in Texas, just figure out what do I do, and
had this image come back to me, and it suddenly
hit me, I'm not broken. I just need to do
a loving archaeological dig back to who I am. I
had been covered with layers of mud and spit and
bruises and psychological programming to where I didn't know me
(29:27):
from other but I was existing purely I believed. I
choose to believe that I'm not broken. There's not something
wrong with me, There's something right with me. And I
had to get in touch with what was right with me.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
That is quite profound. How were you able to do that?
Speaker 2 (29:44):
I looked at that kind of like nature versus nurture.
My nature was the gold statue, and it existed. I
had just been obscured through decades of trauma, and so
I decided to use my body and my experience as
ruth and to trust it and to not talk myself
out of my experience with my thoughts. And so that
(30:06):
led me to realizing that my anxiety isn't my enemy,
it's my ally. And this was probably one of the
bigger things that I learned during that time. What if
my anxiety wasn't this enemy that I needed to suppress
and talk myself out of and disassociate from. What if
it was something for me to listen to What made
me think of it was food poisoning. You know, if
(30:27):
you eat bad fish, you throw up, and you learn
don't eat bad fish again.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
You shouldn't get mad at throwing up.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
You should think throwing up because it was your body's
way of saying you consumed something that made you sick.
It makes me so tender I tear up. Anxiety was
my best alarm system, letting me know I was consuming
something that didn't agree with my nature. And that's how
I began to deprogram myself. I had thousands of thoughts
(30:54):
that were false. I had thousands of beliefs that were false.
I had thousands of guilts and shames and decades of
stuff that I was trying to figure out how to
sort through. And I realized my anxiety was my compass.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
In a weird way.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
It's just one point on a compass. But when I
had a thought and it made me anxious, I would
stop and I would write down what was I thinking, feeling,
or doing, and I would just move on. And then
when I was consumed with more anxiety, I would write
what was I just thinking, feeling, or doing. And what
I realized is those were thoughts, feelings, and actions that
didn't agree with me, and was I willing to stop
(31:32):
consuming them and see if I became less anxious. And
so that's one of the first steps I took in
learning how to deprogram myself, learning how to instill a
compass in me, learning how to curate my thoughts and
replace them with thoughts that did agree with me, like
a soothing medicine. Almost, you know, these are decades. I'm
talking about it all up.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah, it's not something you're going to do in a week.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
But there's an axiom called the wicked teacher, and it
says you become that which you resent. Yes, And that's
the most powerful sentence when you look at what your
choices are. If you've been betrayed, it's a fork in
the road, you know, But choosing willfully in that one moment, No,
I'm going to go right. I want to learn how
to love and trust and heal. And so every time
(32:18):
I would be consumed with regret, resentment, just say what,
that's a coping mechanism. It's a it's the left road,
and I want to take the right road because I
have enough to do on the right road.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
I have enough to work on.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Right I think a lot of people out of there
is a family betrayal that persists. A pattern of behavior
that persists is people do feel anger. And one thing
I do let people know is you feel as you feel.
And the thing you need to trust about feeling is
to never over identify with feeling. There is no right
or wrong feeling, to have you have the feeling you have,
and to never judge how you feel, because that's the
(32:54):
internalized judgment a person has always carried on.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Yeah, and I want to touch on anger because choosing
to go right doesn't mean you stop being angry.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
It took me decades. I'm sure to process.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
The anger and I will have reserves for life. Probably
for me, what I learned about anger is right, I
should have been angry for what happened to me. That's
a sign of health. Anger is typically a sign of health.
I think of it like a gunpowder blast. It's quick,
(33:29):
and it's intense, and it should create a tremendous amount
of energy in your body to take an action. Yes,
And so for me it was like, I'm angry, What
am I going to do with it?
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (33:42):
And by constantly focusing on okay, what am I going
to do with this anger. My anger lets me know
that a boundary has been crossed, or that I crossed
my own boundary, or that I compromised, or that I
got compromised.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
It's very powerful. It's a good tool.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
You know, I'm very angry at my mom. And then
you have a choice, you know, will I fester? Right?
Because hey, many nights did I stay up with circular thoughts? Resenting, angry,
locked in and it is a poison, and it was
my own mind. What am I now going to do?
Now I have a lot of energy my body. I
would typically spiral in shame. I would lock into regret.
(34:20):
I would go into self loathing. I would lock into
just mind boggling resentment for my mom and realizing those
were all choices I was making, and could I do
something else with this energy? Could I do something else
with this anger? And so I do just want to
highlight that, Yeah, it isn't like this kind of mental
(34:41):
like I'm just gonna choose not to be angry and forgive.
It is not like that. It's a dirty business business.
It is a dirty, gritty business. And that for somebody
that never knew how to love herself, that never knew
how to champion myself. It was a process of learning
that self love was not staying up at night and
(35:01):
doing that to myself, but saying, okay, but what am
I going to do tomorrow that builds my life instead
of tears it down. So I hope that explains that
whole thing. It can sound like I was so heroic,
of like I just chose, I chose to go right.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
It isn't like that you.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Were heroic and you were angry and you chose to
go right. All of those things are true. Again, the
multiple truths. I have to say though, that scene with
your mom, the two thousand and three one in the
lawyer's office, it was absolutely chilling because here your mother
has completely financially abused you, financially betrayed you. It hits
even harder because of where you came from, where there
wasn't enough. You really struggled financially, your family struggled financially,
(35:39):
to have all that worked and just passion and everything
you did for to at least a financial part of
it to have gone away. Then for your mother to
pivot and say, I guess I have to go back
to just being your mother, which is really code for
I guess that means I'm going to leave again? Was
I mean it should personally? And shook me to my core.
(36:00):
My question then becomes, all of this is very complicated
relationship you had with your mother. How has this impacted
your process as a mother yourself?
Speaker 2 (36:13):
I love being a mom, so much to say about it.
I highly recommend doing as much healing as you can
before having a child, if you have that luxury or
the option. If you didn't know you had stuff to
heal from, it's okay. I believe that as I heal
in front of my child, it's a healing for him. Yeah.
(36:33):
And I can tell my son it's okay to make mistakes.
But if I don't think it's okay for me to
make mistakes, I'm sending a mixed message to my son. Yeah.
Admitting you still need to heal even as a parent
is admitting you're going to make mistakes and finding a
(36:54):
way to hold some grace for yourself and realizing that
just modeling when I'm make mistakes for my son and I.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
Come clean as it were. Yah that I'm going like,
you know what, I was really impatient.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
I was so patient. Oh my gosh, I'm impatient. Like
I think I'm gonna go for a walk. I gotta
go figure this out. He knows I'm impatient. Why would
I fool all of us that I'm not obviously not
over involving him in my process or overly adulting my process,
but just giving a voice to the truth, showing a
process of how I handle it that emotions are. My
(37:31):
son has big feelings, you know, no shocker, He's like
my kid. What do we do with intense feelings? How
do we manage them? Sometimes we catch him quick, sometimes
we don't notice him till a little too late. I
love healing. I believe I'll be healing for the rest
of my life. I believe I'll be learning and growing
the rest of my life. And I hope my son
has an appetite for that. So it's the only way
(37:53):
for him to kind of see the messiness as we
do it. I am glad I healed a ton prior.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
My conversation will continue after this break.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
The other thing I realized is again I kind of
talk about this nature and nurture, but because the way
I loved my mom, I took refuge in that in
a weird way, and it was that to remind myself
constantly that I knew how to love.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Yes, it was intact.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
And I had to really trust that and not see
that as a negative with my son, but to embrace
that I was intact. I knew how to love, and
I could trust that nature in me. You know, having
a newborn is very scary. You don't innately know how
to breastfeed. It's not as intuitive as you all think.
So it kind of threw me and it was very dumb.
(38:52):
I watched somehow a panda with a baby, and I
was like, I have this in me. I have to
trust I have this in me, even though I wasn't nurtured.
I have to trust in my bones this ability to
navigate this and keep and I had to have faith
in that, and I had to keep fighting my way
back to that love.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
And it's worked out well.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
It has worked out. And not only have you done
that for your son, you're doing it for the world.
And so I really want you to talk about your platform,
Inner World, because it's an amazing resource. I know it's
going to help so many people, Jules, So can you
explain what it is?
Speaker 3 (39:27):
Thank You?
Speaker 2 (39:28):
In Our World is a mental health platform that's virtual
so you can use your iPad or your iPhone. You
can even use like VR goggles if you want, and
you come into a virtual community where it.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Is completely safe.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
There are no trolls, there is no bullying, there is
incredible moderation, and you can participate in a community where
people are just hanging around like a campfire or these
really logically calm settings and just find connection, which have
tremendous network effects, right it helps. Connection alone is wildly curative.
(40:09):
Or you can actually attend classes in a peer to
peer setting that are led by guides that are trained
nice and we have over one hundred classes a week.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
Groups, Yeah, are already like we really scaled up the classes.
They're specific around living with anxiety, living with chronic illness,
living with depression, being a support person for somebody with
an illness, living with agoraphobia, or you know, extreme social anxiety.
You'll find, you know a lot of people even go
(40:40):
to classes they don't think they need, just because you
learn so much. It's all based on behavioral tools. So
these are not therapists, these are not PhDs. These are
lay people that have been trained to lead classes. There
is a ton still of oversight and moderation. If you
know somebody is for some reason having an acute trigger
and having acute suicide ideation, were not equipped for that,
(41:02):
and so they can be removed to a private room
and then helped, because that's not what our platform is.
Speaker 3 (41:08):
But you'll learn tools.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
So let's say you go to a social anxiety meeting
you don't like going out. We had a woman that
hadn't left home in four years. She was in weekly therapy,
and we taught her a tool it's called solving ahead.
You write down what you want to do. She wanted
to go to the grocery store. You say, what's the
worst case scenario? She wrote out her worst case scenario.
What's your plan? I will call this person. I'm going
(41:31):
to take my phone with me so I can stay
on inner world is what she wanted. She had that
support system live. And then now let's say, what's the
best case scenario. Not that we get to control the outcome,
but how could we influence it where maybe the best
case scenario happens. What's your plan to kind of help
influences to hopefully have a good outcome. And then what's
the most likely case scenario? It's usually somewhere in the middle,
(41:55):
and then armed with that, people learn this behavioral tool.
And I think in four months of our platform, she
went out not only the grocery shop, but she ended
up going to a concert.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
With Biplos's fantastic.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
And her therapist started coming into our settings because she
was like, oh my gosh, like how did my client?
Speaker 3 (42:11):
What tool was that? So that's what we do. You
sign up.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
It's a free platform but has a premium subscription, so
more access to more meetings and more supports is as
little as eight dollars a month. We wanted access for all.
We wanted this highly affordable because to me, the idea
that people don't have access to these tools is unforgivable
and we need to make them very readily available.
Speaker 1 (42:32):
Well, I think it's an amazing resource. It is you
also infusing what your process has been, like you said,
so so complicated, but always plugged into healing, that no
matter what our backstories are, we're not defined by them,
and if anything, they can really foster resilience. You talk
about this idea that just because something bends doesn't mean
(42:52):
that it breaks, and you're really a living monument to
that idea that we can bend without breaking, even though
we don't believe that. I'm so glad I had the
opportunity to talk to you and get to know you
and learn your story because I think it and I
know it informed what I share with survivors of really
difficult historical intergenerational cycles and stories and their families, and
(43:16):
how to understand that you can always find your autonomy,
your sense of who you are, and go and actually
live into that full sense of you, but that there's
going to always be some echoes of it. Like you said,
some our wounds can cause us to be a puppet.
What you showed us is that the marionette strings can
be cut and that we can move forward. But it
(43:37):
is a journey. And so again we're not only blessed
with your music and the world, Jewle, I can say
even more so now with your journey and your commitment
to healing not just for yourself but for everyone in
the world. So thank you, so much, Thank.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
You so much, Thanks for what you do and giving
a thoughtful place to yeah discuss really complicated.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
Very nuanced, very difficult things.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
And again I would just emphasize, like it's not always
black and white, it's a world of grace, And for me,
my healing has been about what can I do? What
can I do better today? Do I want to be happy?
Am I going to be accountable for it? And if
you are willing to do that, you know. I always
tell people they're like, healing is so hard and it's
(44:20):
so painful, and.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
It is, it is real work.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
But being dysfunctional is very painful and a lot of work.
It's just familiar and there's no light at the end
of that tunnel. So learning a new way, learning a
new habit, learning a new way to think is so
painful and hard. But at least there is a light
potentially at the end of that tunnel. So why not
take that? Ben?
Speaker 1 (44:40):
I love it again. Thank you, thank you, thank you
so much. Here are my takeaways from my conversation with Jewel. First,
she talks about this idea of emotional inheritance and emotional language.
When we think about inheritance and genetics of our psychology,
we often think about psychological vulnerabilities or genetic vulnerabilities for
(45:04):
mental illness, but this is something very different and very
important for survivors. We learn to speak emotion the way
we observe and are taught in childhood. We may have
permission to express a range of emotion, or we may
be taught to use displacing emotional language, or we may
(45:28):
find ourselves completely silenced emotionally. Rage may be a frequently
accessed to emotion, and sadness may be shamed. Growth and
evolution past the limited emotional languages we are given in
childhood often requires major work and shifts, especially for people
whose emotional vocabularies were limited. Our emotional inheritances are intergenerational
(45:54):
and reflect the traumas, losses, joys, and grief of generations past,
and become the foundation of our emotional languages. In our
next takeaway, Jewel said that changed behavior is what earns
back relationships. So many people in invalidating relationships are waiting
(46:15):
for the I am sorry that rarely comes, and that
when it does come, folks may go all in again.
But what Jewel shares here is actually a fundamental truth
to hold onto in a narcissistic relationship as well. Even
if you do get an apology, it's not enough. There
(46:36):
must be behavior change, sustained and accountable behavior change any less,
and we can all but guarantee that the old patterns
are going to return again for our next takeaway. While
Jewel did endure multiple hardships and losses in childhood, that
(46:57):
one of the worst was the theft of her inner
compass through being gaslighted by both of her parents, and
she highlights a particular situation when she connected the dots
quite accurately and was told she was patently wrong. The
loss of that compass means we are navigating without a
(47:18):
compass as we emerge into adulthood and can leave us
doubting our intuition and our perceptions. In this next takeaway,
Jewel brought up an off sided line hurt people hurt people, Yes,
they do, But Jewel's follow up line is key, hurt people,
(47:40):
hurt people, but it's not okay to hurt me. The
hurt people's spin often ends up feeling like a justification
or an excuse, and while we can hold empathy for
folks who have been hurt, it is not a free
pass to keep hurting. But sadly many people can view
it that way. Or this next takeaway, she shared two
(48:03):
key tools that were instrumental in her healing, being willing
to see the truth and identify poison and to listen
to her anxiety. She viewed anxiety as a signal, which
is an astute observation. Our anxiety can teach us about
ourselves and how to take care of ourselves. However, that
(48:24):
process of being willing to see the truth that takes
a while. It is about pulling out of the shadow
of trauma, bonding and enablers and see it. And to
see the truth can also be a lonely place because
most people don't. And in our last takeaway, Jewel calls
healing rebellion and that could not be more true. The invalidating, confusing, toxic,
(48:52):
or narcissistic relationships can only persist if we do not heal,
and when we start healing, these were relationships also change.
Healing is not an overnight, dramatic experience. It is thousands
of micro changes that bring you closer to your sense
of self and when you do that, you change the rules,
(49:13):
the structure of these relationships and the entire system. You
probably never thought of yourself as a rebel, but each
time you disengage or don't take the bait, that is
exactly what you are
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