What is Codependency? With Priscilla Gilman

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Lots of people use the term codependency, but what is
it If you've ever felt responsible for the happiness of
another person or an incessant need to fix people's problems
so you can be loved. Stay tuned on this episode
of Navigating Narcissism. I am welcoming gifted author doctor Priscilla Gilman,

(00:25):
whose beautiful memoir The Critic's Daughter is a roadmap of
what she calls her codependent journey. Though her childhood appeared
happy from the outside, Priscilla was tasked with her family's
emotional burdens from a very young age. At the age
of nine, she took on the impossible responsibility of her

(00:46):
dad's well being after he told her he would have
taken his life if not for her and her sister.
Priscilla's journey is an important reminder we never know what's
happening behind closed door of what may look like the
most loving families, and ultimately, none of us can be

(01:07):
responsible for another person's happiness or sadness. From Red 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

(01:29):
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.
This episode discusses suicidal ideation, which may be triggering to

(01:51):
some people. The views and opinions expressed are solely those
of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
and do not represent the opinions of Red Table Talk productions, iHeartMedia,
or their employees. Priscilla Gillman, Welcome to Navigating Narcissism. It

(02:11):
is such a pleasure to have you. I've had the
exquisite pleasure of reading your book, The Critic's Daughter. What
I really love about it is there is a subtlety
and a relatability to it. Because this show, as you know, Priscilla,
is called Navigating Narcissism, right, But that's a very, very

(02:32):
vast umbrella. And I think one of the hardest things
about any kind of story about a family and what
happens with parents. Yes, yes, it's not black and white,
and when people find themselves in the gray, they often
don't know how to see what went wrong. But also,
most importantly, how all of that shaped them. For anyone

(02:56):
who doesn't know you and hasn't read the book, can
can you tell us who your parents are?

Speaker 2 (03:02):
So, my father, Richard Gilman, was a professor at the
Yale School of Drama for thirty years. He was the
drama critic for Newsweek in the sixties. He was a
literary editor of The New Republic in the sixties, the
theater critic for The Nation in the eighties, the President
of pen America but didn't even have a BA. So
a self made, self taught person. And my mother, Lynnezbud,

(03:24):
who is still alive, is a very prominent literary agent.
Her clients when I was a child included Tony Morrison,
Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Michael Crichton, and Rice Now,
Robert Caro, Jimmy Carter, a whole host of incredible writers
and people.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
As I read your book, Going to be honest, I
envied you, you know, because I had a very different
experience of these kinds of parental relationships and certainly of
early childhood. But there was an envy. And here you
were sort of hanging out with, you know, people that
are my personal heroes Tony Morrison, Joan Didion, the kinds
of people who are giving you dolls, so you know

(04:00):
you were playing make believe with your father. I think
the thing that struck me, though, most about the story
of your father is how attentive he was. He would
watch you perform, He was interested in what you did.
He asked you questions about yourself. He took delight in
what you were learning about. Most kids never would get
a parent ever in their lives to be interested in

(04:23):
sitting down and watching them do a play that doesn't
happen to them once in their childhood, right, and that
happened to you almost every day in the same breath.
There was this remarkable strictness about what you especially small children,
what you ate, the kinds of media you watched, you
know everything, the music you listened to. So could you

(04:44):
paint a picture of the complexity of who your father was,
especially when you were a young child.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
I love how you started Dr Romeny by talking about
shades of Gray. And I had one reader say to me,
You've written a book about human beings and all their
complexity and all their messiness in a world that wants
to look at things in terms of black and white,
and my father was this massive contradictions, which is part

(05:13):
of what made him so fascinating and so compelling. He
was exceptionally attentive to me and my younger sister. I
have a sister who's fourteen months younger. My best friends
still really invested in our imaginative play, would ask us
questions about what our dolls or our Paddington's were doing
that day, would come in and watch. We would have
auditions for doll and stuffed animal productions of Westside Story

(05:35):
or Oklahoma, and he would come in and assess them,
and he would read to us for hours on end,
and he was just clearly in love with our world.
He was invested in us as children, but also in
the realm of childhood per se. He took genuine enjoyment.
He would sit down and watch Esme Street and Zoom
and you know, all these shows Doctor Rothin, watch Mister Rogers.

(06:00):
But you're so right that he was very strict. We
were not allowed to watch any television except PBS, and
you did not allow us to listen to any pop music.
When Greece came out, you probably remember this. All my
friends at school were going to see Greece, they had
their grease cast albums. We were not allowed to listen
to that. My father did support me in reading, like
the Hardy Boys series and the Nancy Drew series, but

(06:22):
a lot of other sort of popular mass market stuff
we would never be allowed to have, like Sweet Valley
High or Babysitters Club or anything like that.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
What I hear though, was it was a childhood and
at least in the broad strokes. Yeah, it was safe,
it was predictable, it was comforting. You were seen, you
were heard, you were valued. Yes, when did things start
to change?

Speaker 2 (06:50):
So the fishers that I saw, these slight fishers almost imperceptible.
I agree with you. My father, I could tell was
prone to depression from writer's block. He smoked compulsively. I
could sense when he needed a cigarette. He started to
get irritable, He had a temper, he would get angry,

(07:10):
and it was rare, and I always felt that I
was the one who was best able to coax him
out of a bad mood dr rominy, and so from
a very young age, I felt that my role in
the family. My sister was a little bit more difficult.
She didn't sleep through the night. She would have temper tantrums,
and my role always in the family unit was to

(07:32):
be the good girl, the cheerful girl, the smiling girl,
the helpful one, the one who steadied everybody else. And
then I also always sensed that my parents didn't love
each other the way married couples in movies or books
that I was reading, or even some of my friend's
parents loved each other. There was no physical affection between them.

(07:56):
My father always seemed to crave my mother's good opinion.
My mother seemed a little distant from my father. She
was very warm with me and my sister, but not
with my father. My father was a very funny person,
but he never made her laugh the way he made
other people laugh. So I started thinking, something just doesn't
feel right. But we would ask them again and again

(08:16):
are you going to get divorced? If they would have
a fight, or we would hear about a family friend
getting divorced, and they would always say, we will never
ever get divorced. And then, as you know, vidd but
it took a long time. So when I was ten,
in the fall of nineteen eighty, my mother announced that

(08:37):
she was ending the marriage. And it was a night
in October I will never forget. Vividly, sitting in my room,
I heard my parents talking in the kitchen. I couldn't
really hear the words, and I'm writing in my journal.
I have a holly hobby journal, and I have the
puppy that we've just gotten, and that was another source
of stress because my mother didn't want a dog. So

(08:59):
I was thinking, oh, are they fighting about the dog?
That my mother is not happy that we have this
puppy now. And then my mother summoned to me and
my sister into the kitchen and my father had left,
and she announced to us that my parents were going
to do what they called a trial separation. My sister
immediately gets very upset, and I try to stay calm,
and I'm digging my nails into my tights to keep

(09:19):
from crying. And I knew that it wasn't a trial separation.
I knew this was false comfort that was being given
to us, that this was not an experiment, that there
was something definitive, and my mother looked at peace in
a way that I had never seen her before.

Speaker 1 (09:38):
I want to ask you a few questions about that
entire sequence you said. I dug my fingers into my tights.
To keep from crying. What would have happened if you
did cry and they saw you cry.

Speaker 2 (09:50):
That's such a great question. I never cried as a kid.
It was kind of legendary in the family that I
was the baby who never cried and my sister was
a baby who cried. And I, you know, I think
that my father suffered from untreated clinical depression, for sure,
and I was blessed. I was lucky that I had
this naturally kind of optimistic, buoyant temperament. But I also

(10:13):
think that I leaned into that and I was cast
in the role of the happy one who doesn't cry,
who makes other people feel better. And I think that
if I had cried in that moment, it would have
disconcerted my mom and my sister, and my sister would
have cried more if I had started to cry. But

(10:35):
it's just it's so interesting. I don't know. I wouldn't
have been able to go and comfort my dad, which
is what I did next.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
Now you've taken to another interesting place. And this is
something we often see in any family system. Right, children
do get cast into roles based on their temperaments, right, Yes,
And that child with the easy temperament the well sleeping,
not crying, optimistic, constantly cheerful child. They perceive that that

(11:01):
is a very valued role, like that's a good part
to have landed in this play called this family, and
so it's a safe role. To cry would have been
to violate that role. But even as we're talking here,
you can see the danger of that role, right, because
now what's being rewarded is emotional constraint number one, exactly,

(11:25):
And number two is that your value comes from displacing
your emotion in favor of a caregiving role and not
inconveniencing anyone. Right, And no one ever sat you down,
Priscilla and said, hey, Priscilla, we need you to not

(11:45):
cry and not inconvenience us. It was a perception, but
these roles can give a child a sense of place
and safety and your temperament work. Now, I want to
go to this next piece here, which is I knew
that I didn't want my sister to cry. More so,
you felt responsible for your sister's emotion. I can understand

(12:06):
that siblings feel that. However, your father a grown man,
you really were trying to protect him. Can you talk
about your role as you're the protector of your father's
emotion and frankly, your father, and when did that role
kick in for you.

Speaker 2 (12:23):
It's so interesting parallel to my sense of being completely
seen and safe and accepted and loved from my true
and best self by my father. I always felt that
my father's well being, his emotional wellbeing, even his physical wellbeing,
was precarious. And I always worried about the smoking from

(12:43):
a very young age. And he would drink, not excessively,
but he would have to have his drink every day
at a certain time when his moods started to potentially
go south. And I talk in the book about becoming
a football fan to give my father company. I wrote
a letter to a football player when I was nine
years old, after we had seen the Giants lose and

(13:05):
the football player, Harry Carson, had his head in his
hands and looked like he was sobbing on the sidelines,
and I wrote a letter and I said, don't be sad.
You're a wonderful player and a wonderful man. We'll all
be happy again. And I realize now that I was
writing this to Harry Carson, but I was also writing
this to my father, and this was a year before

(13:27):
the separation. But I was already sensing my father is
somebody who's prone to sadness, prone to depression.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
And I also want to call you out on something
else here, Priscilla. It was a word usage you adduced. Okay,
said doctor Robiney. Moment here when we're calling you out
the doctor roy Okay. So you know that letter you
wrote to the football player really hit me hard. And
in fact, if I remember correctly, he'd even sent you
a photo of him or something that you hung over
your bed and he.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
Said, God bless you always old fifty three.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yes, but what you wrote to you said you mustn't
be sad.

Speaker 2 (14:03):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
So that's very different, weighing in much more heavily trying
to kind of run the emotional sort of show. And
you were very invested in this man's emotional state. You
didn't even know him, but I do think he was
a representation of your father, someone who was He played
for the Giants. The love of the Giants was something
that was really shared between you and your dad in

(14:26):
many ways, an interest you took on to facilitate a
greater closeness with your father. And that's something we will
see with children who come from environments where they do
sort of take emotional responsibility for their parents. They start
to cultivate interests that are in line with what their
parents like. They'll take up a sport their parent likes,
they will read books their parent likes. In this case,

(14:48):
you watched sports the way your father likes, and it
really created a lifelong sort of point of connection. It
was a wonderful thing, but once again, you were chasing
what mattered to him.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Maybe I was perceiving a big shock, a big sadness
is about to come, and I'm going to get you
through this. We're going to solder through this, and I'm
going to make sure that we get out on the
other side and we're happy. I didn't focus on how
these things affected me because I was so plugged into

(15:22):
Oh my gosh, Clary. My sister, she's more vulnerable, she's little.
I have to protect her. I don't want her to
upset my parents more by crying, because her crying would
upset them. And then my mother, you know, she sort
of ends the scene and says he's going to be
here for a few more months, and you know, it's
not happening immediately, and she takes my sister off to bed,

(15:42):
and I saw my father with his shoulder shaking from
the back, walking down the hall, and I went after him,
and I thought, I have to because what's going to
happen if I don't. And I walk into his office
and I kept thinking, he's about to be expelled from
this he's about to be literally expelled from this apartment,

(16:03):
literally expelled from this office, and he's about to lose
our family. And he was crying, and he beckoned me
to him, and I had not seen him cry very
often at all, and he was crying and he said,
I don't want this, but I don't want to lose
our family. And he was crying and crying and crying,
and I snuffed up my tears. I remember just like

(16:23):
aggressively trying to keep the tears from coming out and
snuffing them up because I thought that that would make
it worse for him.

Speaker 1 (16:31):
I mean, that's an incredibly powerful moment and powerful awareness.
To think of how young you were. You said you
were around ten. I believe right ten, fifth grade, fifth grade,
ten years old. You're getting a piece of news which
is catastrophic for a child to hear, especially a child
who actually was really content in her family's space. Yes,
and you are entirely focused on your father's well being,

(16:55):
what he's about to lose, watching the heaviness of his
hunched over back, picked up on all those physical cues.
How did you manage, Priscilla, the juxtaposition between your father's
absolute sense of despair and defeat that day you saw
all that he was going to lose, and what you
saw as your mom's sense of relief. I don't want

(17:18):
to quite say happiness, but you definitely saw your mother
felt like she put a weight down and felt lighter,
and your father took on the weight of the world.
How did you, at ten years old, negotiate that difference,
that tension.

Speaker 2 (17:32):
My mother obviously huge trailblazer in publishing in a major career,
and was not around as much when I was little
as my father was, and was not invested in childhood
and playing with children in the way that my father was.
But I always felt very protective of my mother. I
sensed at a young age that she was a woman
in a man's world. She was going out to work,

(17:52):
and she was under a lot of pressure. My father
was very supportive of her in that and always told
us girls like don't make too much noise. She needs
to work. He was very ahead of his time in
being totally comfortable with the woman's power and going out
in the world and working. And my mother was tired
a lot, she was stressed a lot. And so I
felt happy in a weird way that my mom seemed

(18:14):
relieved and she seemed less tired, and she seemed better
to me. And I didn't want to make her feel
guilty about this decision that she had made, because I
could see that she had needed to make it. I
just sensed it. There was something about her body language
that told me this is something that she had been

(18:35):
wanting to do for a while, and this is something
she needed to do to save herself in some way.

Speaker 1 (18:41):
So that's a remarkable and I'm like, I'm drawing out
that remarkable amount of empathy for a ten year old child.
Most adults could not engage in the balance circumspection and
would maybe even not balance. You were making allowances for
everyone's different position, your mother's relief, your father's despair, your

(19:05):
sister's anguish. The only emotion that wasn't being accounted for
was yours. But you were simultaneously able to literally make
that adjustment. Don't want mom to feel guilty because I
can see that she's okay, want dad to feel okay.
In adults, we would view that as quite a skill, right,

(19:25):
and in fact that's actually a shrink skill. But the
difference between a shrink and what you were doing is
a shrinks an adult who went to school for many
years and is objective. They're not in that family. Most
ten year olds would be enraged, upset, devastated and run
to their room and cry and would not give a

(19:45):
damn about the mental state of either of their parents.
And what you did was literally the opposite. You became
so invested in your father's emotional world and well being,
especially at the point that the trial separation and subse
divorce happened. Was he equally plugged into your emotional world

(20:07):
and equally aware of your emotional world and responsive to it.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
I don't think he was in those couple of months
after this night where my mother breaks the devastating news
my father has moved out. I don't know where he's living.
We're not told he doesn't have an upsteady apartment where
we can come over for sleepovers. We're only seeing him
for these like rushed lunches and dinners on the Upper
West Side. And then my mother goes to California on

(20:32):
business and my father is allowed to come back and
stay in the apartment for a few days. And he
got upset with my sister one night when she was
crying and we were playing a game. She spilled some
apple juice on the monopoly board and started to cry,
and he got mad and he yelled, and then I
went to find him and he was apologizing, essentially for

(20:53):
getting angry, and which he always did. And that's the
thing about my dad. He had a temper, but he
knew he had a temper. He didn't justify it. He
felt very guilty about it. And he said to me,
you know that I love you girls more than anything
in the world. And I said, of course, Daddy, of course,
And he said, sometimes I think I'd kill myself if
it wasn't for you girls. And that was like a

(21:15):
moment where it just was imprinted on me that my
father's survival is my responsibility and I'm going to do
everything it takes to make sure that he stays alive.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
My conversation will continue after this break.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
And you know, when we would have these lunches and
dinners with him. He would get irritable. Sometimes he would
rush us through our meals. He was struggling financially, so
he would make us split a dish at a restaurant,
and my sister would say, but I'm hungry, that's not
enough food, and I would kick her to try to
get her to be quiet. And once I would see
him in McDonald's taking the packets of salt and sugar

(22:02):
and ketchup and putting them in his bag, and I thought,
this is really alarming, Like he doesn't have enough money
to buy these things on his own. He's taking them
from the restaurant. And he never asked us how are
you handling the split or anything like that. Neither of
my parents ever said how do you feel about this?
And we were not to talk about our feelings about

(22:25):
my dad not being there, so it just didn't come up.
And my parents didn't. You know, this was nineteen eighty
nineteen eighty one, Cramer versus Kramer generation. You know, there
just wasn't any discourse about how to talk about divorce.
Very few of my friends at school had parents who
had split up. I felt ashamed, so I just didn't
talk about it.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
It was a different time. But you're a mom, all right,
I'm a mom. Yeah, And when do you think about
the fact that your parents split up, father goes elsewhere,
everything has changed and nobody is checking in on you
and your sister. How do you feel about that now?

Speaker 2 (23:02):
It is completely shocking to me. Like when I looked
back at this, my kids are now, they're so old.
I am divorced from their father. I did my divorce
completely differently. We nested for a few years, we have
joint custody. We're good friends. You know. My parents had
the most bitter, most vicious divorce that was extended over

(23:22):
many years as they fought over money and they could
hardly bear to be in the same room with each other.
I did it completely differently. But one thing, when I
looked back my agent, she said to me, I really
want you to realize how little you were, Yes, and thinking, wow,
I was so little.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
Okay, so I want to build a nine nine years old.
I was around nine ten years old that your father,
in the midst of his despair, said to you, if
it wasn't for you and your sister, I would kill myself.
You're a mother, you know what nine looks like from
a parental perspective, I know you love your dad, I

(24:04):
really do, and I get it after hearing the childhood
you have I get it. But when you look at
that now, that utterance one line, if it weren't for
you and your sister, I would kill myself. You're nine.
How do you feel about that now? And more importantly,
how did that shape you from that point forward?

Speaker 2 (24:22):
You know, I still look at it with empathy in
the sense that it was a moment where he was
just completely broken.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
I heard that he had been momentarily inserted back into
the home while my mother was away, and he was
in that space, the same room that she had made
the announcement two months earlier. I think he felt so
overwhelmed with shame and guilt about having gotten angry at Claire.
He probably felt, this is my one chance to be
with him, and I screwed it up because I got upset.

(24:54):
And I get that, and I think he felt under
an enormous amount of pressure, and in that moment he
broke and he said something that he should not have
said to me, but he was lost. I just looked
at his face and there was just anguish scoring his face,
and he just blurted it out. And in general he
was pretty disciplined around the split, Like he never spoke

(25:15):
negatively about my mother ever, he never said a single
negative word about her to me. But you know, in
terms of how it shaped me, he shaped me to
have this kind of pattern, especially in romantic relationships, to
completely subordinate my own needs and my own feelings, even
in service of somebody who needed boostering, bolstering support. It

(25:41):
made me actually positively attracted to people who were struggling,
who were depressed, who struggled with substance abews, some of
them in their past, because it felt familiar to me.
And you know, I write about this moment where I'm
dating somebody and we were having a conversation where it

(26:02):
became a parent that there were some real incompatibilities between us,
and I said, well, maybe you know, this just isn't
going to work, maybe we're not right for each other.
And this man tried to kill himself in front of me.
He tried to jump out a window. He also grabbed
a knife and waved it in the air and said,
why don't you just take this and stab me with it,
because that's what you've just done and it felt like

(26:28):
completely surreal, but at the same time there was a
weird element of familiarity in it. Yeah, yeah, you know,
it was like I'm important to people. I you know,
they need.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
Me, they need you, right, and you have a function.
I mean I think listen, you have people sometimes say
there's chemistry, I have chemistry with someone. Chemistry really is
that sense of ancient familiarity, and if it's unprocessed, right,
so if nobody fully processes hey, this was the pattern
with your dad, there is this risk. The challenge for

(26:57):
you is even as you climbed into adulthood, you retained
a very collaborative, loving, supportive relationship with your father, right exactly.

Speaker 2 (27:08):
Yep, that's precisely right.

Speaker 1 (27:10):
And so you were in a very very sort of
unique situation. You know. Philosophically, I will say is as
a parent, I think I got about sixty five percent
of it right and thirty five percent wrong. Your parents
really didn't do it right. They did a lot right,
especially your father. Well, the piece that they didn't get
right was unloading inappropriate emotional stuff on you and your

(27:30):
sister and placing you in a role like not catching themselves.
Your father should have never said that, however, Priscilla, and
this is where I'm saying it's gray. I have tremendous
resonance with what you said about I had an empathy.
This was a man, an adult man, in tremendous despair.

(27:51):
He loved his daughters more than anything, and he was
letting that despair show. He shouldn't have. We know that
in terms of chapter he shouldn't have, but he's a
human being, and lives get changed over spilled glasses of
apple juice, because that's the stuff that pushes us over
the edge. Now, I want to go back to something

(28:13):
because this affected me a lot. Being in the McDonald's
restaurant and your father sort of hoarding the salts and
the peppers and the ketchups. I found that to be
an incredibly poignant, unsettling, painful scene of a daughter seeing
her titan of a father, so respected, so valued, reduced

(28:33):
to having to hoard these kinds of condiments. That there's
such a complex set of emotions that I was trying
to climb in there. I know you said, oh my gosh,
I know he's really struggling financially, but can you connect
back to other feelings you had at that moment, because
that was a lot to see.

Speaker 2 (28:54):
That was a lot, And you know, and I remember also,
even as I'm seeing it, and I'm feeling this pang
of wow, he's even worse off than I thought, and
this is alarming. I'm thinking to myself, I can't let
him see that I noticed, because I don't want him
to know that I see him in all of his

(29:18):
struggle and shame. Remember the only time that we got
together as a family of four after my parents put up,
and we go to this musical on Broadway for my
sister's birthday and she's turning ten, and I noticed that
my father is crying during a love song in the show.
And even as I'm feeling tears coming into my eyes
because I'm like, it makes me very sad to see

(29:40):
my father so sad, I'm thinking, I cannot let my
father know that I saw this. And I'm rustling my
program to make a noise to cover the noise of
my father's crying so that my mother doesn't notice it.
And you know, I like that you use the word titan.
He was a titan. He was a cultural titan. He

(30:02):
was in the literary and theatrical world, of my childhood.
He was revered by everybody, and all of a sudden,
this titan, this majestic figure who was sort of on
the mountaintop with his critical pronouncements, was reduced to tipping
over the bin and putting the salt in there, or
being reduced to helpless tears during a song in a musical.

(30:24):
And even as I noticed it, and I felt these
were signs of how far he had fallen. And he
was on the pedestal for me, and also in the
culture and in the restaurant that night before we went
to the theater, my mom and my sister and I
were already there and he arrived and he's rushing to
the table and he's late, and he misses the chair

(30:45):
and he falls on the floor in the restaurant, and
it was just this feeling of oh, no, oh, no, oh, no, oh,
my gosh, get up, you know, as quickly as you can.
And my mom looking at him, and I could see
with just a kind of contempt, and I'm just like, Okay, everybody,
how many Shirley Temples are me? And you're allowed to
get you know, what are we going to order? Oh,

(31:06):
let's talk about the show and sort of trying to
assuage these feelings of anxiety that everybody around me has,
including the waiter, my sister. I'm sort of managing everybody's
feelings and quickly pivoting from my own feeling of unease too.
I'm going to go into that role of fixing, solving,

(31:29):
rescuing all of that stuff.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
How did you manage your mom's contempt because it was undisguised.
That is a very difficult emotion for a child to decode.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
It really was. And it was funny because the contrast
between how adored and revered my father was by everybody
in our orbit and my mother's lack of reverence for him,
it was very disconcerting and I didn't know how to
handle it, and I couldn't figure it out. I didn't
understand and why my mother didn't love and respect and

(32:03):
adore my father the way everybody else seemed to. But
you know, we haven't gotten to this yet. But after
my parents let up, my father said so in appropriate things,
my mother said some inappropriate things, and she so I
found a letter that my father had written to his
first wife brother's mother, in which he asked her to
essentially dominate him sexually. And this was when I was

(32:26):
ten years old, and today we would say my father
had BDSM tendencies. We didn't really know how to talk
about it then, especially for a man who wanted to
be dominated. I think there was a lot of shame
and guilt around it. And I was so confused by
this letter that I went to my mom and I said, Mommy,
I found this letter and I described it to her,
and then the floodgates opened and she started telling me,

(32:49):
I've been hiding this kind of stuff from you girls
for years. He has these pornography magazines that he was
hiding in the cushions of the sofa that you were
playing on, and I was always afraid you were going
to find them. And then my mom said to me,
you know, your father had a lot of affairs during
her marriage, and some of them were with his graduate students.
And I give her a lot of credit in the

(33:11):
sense that she didn't rant and rave and demonize him
in saying this. She said she was very explicit about it.
She said, he's not a womanizer, he's not a don Juan.
I couldn't give him what he wanted, and so he
went elsewhere, and so I'm trying to decode what this means,
and I'm like, okay, you mean you didn't want to
get on top of him and whip him or do

(33:32):
whatever it was that he wanted. So I kind of
got it. It was the same thing where I had
empathy for her and I was like, oh my gosh,
But I still didn't understand why she had married my
father if they were so sexually incompatible.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
PRIs Solla, how old were you when you found that
letter and then talked to your mother and then she
let you know that he had had multiple affairs and
all this other stuff. How old were you at that time?

Speaker 2 (33:57):
Ten years old?

Speaker 1 (33:57):
Okay, all right? Do you think that wasn't a propriate chair,
Absolutely no, it really wasn't. And it's interesting you're even
soft pedaling it now. Well, she wasn't saying he was
a womaniser. In no universe we occupy would ever have
been okay for a child to have been handed that
emotional burden to carry. It was interesting to me that

(34:19):
she did unburden herself. The only word I could use
at that point was I was frustrated when I read that, Like,
why are you doing this to this child? She cannot
hear this right, And so it's so fascinating because for
how much you were seen as a child, let me
watch you do your plays with your stuffed animals and
watch you perform, and all that you weren't seen, You

(34:42):
were simultaneously seen and not seen, which in a way
is almost more confusing, because the vast majority of kids
who aren't seen are simply not seen. Not only is
nobody plugged into their feelings, they're also not watching them
do the plays and this, and that they're just not seen.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
Yeah, yeah, it was so confusing. It was so confusing,
And I felt so much love and affirmation from both
of my parents and so much recognition of who I
truly was. But at the same time, when I discovered
this idea later in life of the parentified child and
the child who sort of turned into it was interesting.

(35:20):
I like the word that you use, that she was
unburdening herself, that she had been carrying this for years,
and that it must have been really hard for her
to watch me and Claire romping around with my father,
cavorting around and playing these games, and she knows right
under the cushions of that sofa, there's a pornography magazine
that we might find, or we think of my father

(35:42):
as this kind of innocent, magical being that really he
has this kind of double life. When he goes up
to Yale, he's with the students, and I think that
was frustrating to write.

Speaker 1 (35:52):
There's a pivotal moment when your mother reads to you
a passage from the Alice Miller book Drama of the
Gifted Child, and she has an epipot. Can you read
that passage to us?

Speaker 2 (36:03):
This was one of the few things that I couldn't
pin down exactly when it happened, but it was in
nineteen eighty one or nineteen eighty two, soon after its publication,
my mother read Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child.
She devoured the book, discussed it endlessly with her friends,
and scribbled notes in the margins. One evening, she urgently

(36:25):
called me into her bedroom and told me she needed
to share it with me. It explains so much about
your father, she said, and about his relationship with you
and Claire. It will help you understand why his love
for you isn't real. I was stunned, but I stayed
calm and attentive, not betraying at all. How that last

(36:46):
sentence had lacerated me. She showed me a passage, And
this is from the Alice Miller book. The grandiose person
is never really free, first because he is excessively dependent
on admiration from others, and second because his self respect
is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.

(37:08):
And then my mom says, this is your father. It's
why I felt so drained with him. I could never
give him enough praise, and Claire refused to cater to him,
so he rejected her, I thought to myself, But he
didn't reject Claire. She tried his patience, he yelled at
her on occasion. He definitely favored me, but did he

(37:29):
reject her. Never.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
When she said that to you, what did you take
away from that?

Speaker 2 (37:34):
That my mother really didn't get it. That's what I
took away from at that. My mother was slotting me
and Claire into these roles where I was my father's favorite.
Claire was rejected. To use the terms that you started
our conversation with, she was looking at it in black
and white. She wasn't looking at the shades of gray.
She wasn't seeing that my father affirmed and validated Claire

(37:59):
and meant just not as much as he did me,
And that's not good and you don't want to do
that with kids. But it wasn't a rejection. But even
as I was sort of like, you're so wrong, you
don't get this, I'm thinking to myself, I understand why
she's doing this. It's sort of a similar thing to
what I was describing with my father when he was

(38:20):
so anguished about the I love what you said so
much about spilled apple juice changes lives. So Alice Miller
is the drug gifted child changed a lot of lives
in the early eighties. And you know, and I was
thinking to myself, my mom is trying to make sense
of her relationship with my father. She's grasping, She's why

(38:41):
did I feel so drained? I don't get it. Oh,
he needed me to affirm him constantly. And I think
also she was trying to lessen her guilt about breaking
up the family.

Speaker 1 (38:53):
Well, here's the thing that passage you read from Alice Miller,
which Alice Miller in many ways is taking on narcissism
in that book. If any of you haven't read The
Drama of the gifted child. Who are listening to this,
it's a classic. The grandiose person is never really free,
excessively dependent on admiration from others. His self respect is
dependent on qualities and achievements and functions that can suddenly fail.

(39:16):
That's a description of a narcissist exactly. That's as good
a definition as I've read. But your mother was actually
accusing your father of being narcissistic. And then she goes
on citing from the same book that your father loved
you and your sister for your false selves, which, like
you said, was a total misread because from your subjective experience,

(39:39):
you do not believe you were loved for your false self.
You believe that you were truly seen and heard, and
that it's very possible that he was leaning on your
mother for different needs to different kinds of validation gratification.
That's what we would expect a parent to a parent
would relate differently than a parent to a child. And

(40:00):
I think something people grapple with, how can somebody be
a great parent but not such a great spouse. I'm like,
because they're entirely different roles. I mean, I've seen and
I've seen it go the other way, where people are
actually fantastic spouses and they are absolutely abysmal parents.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
Yes, I've seen that too, I've seen.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
You know what I'm saying. They are different roles, and
some people are great people are their job and their
terrible parents and their great spouses. You said, one thing
she shared with you is that your father had affairs,
and in an interesting way, I wasn't even hearing that
your mom was hurt by them. It was as though
it was almost as though she was almost detached from
the intimate part of their relationship, but almost that this

(40:41):
is an impropriety, this is not what you do. And
we see all of that now, exactly, but exactly, and
I've said this over and over again, infidelity does not
a narcissist make. It's a different question. And in your parents' case,
it wasn't even as though it was sort of a
sexual competition thing. It was more of a speaking to
his character thing and bringing him down in those eyes.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
I was just loving what you were saying about the
affairs and how she wasn't personally injured by them at all.

Speaker 1 (41:10):
No, No, and that I found fascinating because it was
a different relationship with it and like I said, I
think one of the reflexive things that people will often
say is my spouse, partner, husband, wife, whomever had an affair,
they're narcissistic. And that's when I usually say, slow down,
I need more. I understand they did something that hurts you,

(41:30):
that betrayed trust, that you've used questionable, that showed bad judgment.
I can agree with all of that. However, I'm not
jumping to that next place until we fully understand the
depth and the holistic look on this person's personality. But
I don't disagree with you. And I think one thing
we're struggling with at this sort of time and history
is everybody's using the word to describe anyone they have

(41:52):
a problem with. And I think you're right. It also
helps people feel more steadfast in their decision to distance
from someone, to separate from some And she's like, ah,
he was just a narcissistic, grandiose, admiration seeking guy. Didn't
I make the right decision? And maybe she could do
that with her friends. My point is that people go

(42:12):
through their processes. Sure, but she was doing it with
her kids, and that's what a lot of sallenges. Now
you had said that you'd found a diary entry that
you found from middle school that you wrote. Could you
read what you wrote? Because I think that that was
something that was so telling that you not only experienced this,
but actually took the time to write it down.

Speaker 2 (42:33):
I know, and I found this in twenty seventeen. I
found it in a bin that was in my mother's basement.
So it's a page from my diary, and it's titled
things not to do when I'm with Daddy. Number one,
don't cry. Number two, don't complain, number three, don't be difficult.

(42:55):
Number four, don't tell him anything but good news. Number five,
I don't mention mommy. Number six, don't expect him to
be the daddy of old.

Speaker 1 (43:08):
So when you found that, how did it feel reading
that back as an adult?

Speaker 2 (43:14):
I started crying as I started reading it, and it
almost felt this might sound strange, but I felt like
I was reading instructions that I was giving my middle
school self about how to cope and contend with my father.
But I was also reading instructions that I've lived by,
maybe subconsciously or implicitly, for much of my life. Don't complain,

(43:35):
don't cry, boost people's moods, be the positive one, lower
your expectations, all of those things. And it was a
moment where I just thought, Wow, all of this stuff
that I've been working on in therapy and meditation, it's
all right here in this list. It's like a diagnosis.

Speaker 1 (43:54):
Why do you think you wrote it down?

Speaker 2 (43:56):
I think probably it was an attempt to codify and
give some structure to these feelings that I was having,
and it made it feel more like an assignment. I
almost now. It didn't occur to me until you asked
that question. It almost occurs to me now that it

(44:18):
was a way of giving myself an assignment and making
sure that I got an A on the assignment that
I did as well as I could possibly do.

Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah, as an assignment, and it's also a form of control,
right to be in a circumstance at this you feel
deeply out of control, and so taking some of that
because this, to me, it reflects tremendous emotional labor that
you had to bring to every single relationship you were in.
You were all the legs of the table. You know,

(44:48):
without you, this thing couldn't stand. So but it brings
it a certain level of control that comes when we
write it down it's right there. It's like a policies
and procedures manual. Yes, you know, for how to conduct
yourself in that relationship. But it's also quite heartbreaking. If
all someone did was see this one list, it would

(45:08):
be very easy to go to a place of, oh
my gosh, this father must be a monster, and this
poor young girl is having to be so careful. What
is so revelatory about your story is your father was
anything but. He was anything but he was an incredibly attentive, doting,
loving father and an incredibly flawed in some ways adult

(45:29):
man who was struggling with some real mental health crises
and had been in a marriage that simply didn't work right.
None of those are mortal sins. People make mistakes, they
marry the wrong people, and they have kids with them,
and they love their kids, and they have affairs and
they do all that. That's the messiness of being a
grown up, right, But no one had to take away

(45:53):
that he was as honestly as devoted and doting a
father as I think I've ever read about. And if
your dad's worst moments were yelling over a glass of
apple juice on a monopoly board and then rapidly apologizing.
You know, again, the vast majority of kids who get
yelled at by a parent never ever will hear an apology,
not then, and not even as adults. So again, this

(46:16):
list in isolation is something very different than this list
in context, because this list, to me is sort of
the working model of a child who was headed towards codependency.
Oh yeah, okay, So the family system you were born

(46:36):
into really almost set you up for that. You came
into the world with a temperament, and your temperament was
agreeable and a brilliant and cheerful and optimistic, and then
you were assigned these two parents who not only created
you but shaped you. And you had a loving, attentive, playful,

(46:58):
doting father. You had a successful, driven, equally titan s
as your father, you know, in the sense that she
was also a titan as you got closer to ten
years of age and you saw some of the early rumblings,
I need to make sure everyone's happy. And then when
your father really hit that point of despair, it became

(47:21):
a bit of your full time job. That's what you
had to do. That's where that comes from. So you
definitely now have that sort of codependency architecture, elevating the
emotional needs and emotional worlds of other people around you
above your own, and making psychological sacrifices to ensure the

(47:44):
well being and care of those around you ahead of
your own, holding back on your own needs, holding back
on expressing your own emotion. That's codependency right as it's
typically defined. So how did that affect you as you
now take this sort of codependency architecture that's been built

(48:04):
in you. How did that show up as you moved
through adolescents and adulthood.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
I think it showed up mostly in my romantic relationships,
but it did a little bit in the sense that
the career choices that I made. I'd wanted to be
an actress. I'd wanted to be a singer. My parents
didn't want me to do that, and I was obedient,
and I gave it up when I got to Yale
as an undergraduate, and I went straight into the PhD
program in English literature, even though I had a lot
of doubts about academia and I wasn't sure if I

(48:30):
wanted to be a professor. So it did shape me
in that sense that I made my decisions about what
my career was going to be based on what would
make my parents happy, and in particular, what would unite them,
because I would hear them talking about, Oh, she won
this prize, and oh she's doing so well, and isn't
that great, and they would be pleasant with each other
around that. So I absolutely directed my life trajectory in

(48:53):
a way that would make each of them happy as
individuals and unite them in a certain kind of happiness.
Terms of romantic relationships, my marriage to my boy's father,
he's a classic example of somebody who is an exceptional
father was not the best romantic partner for me. I've
always been especially drawn to men who are vulnerable in

(49:15):
some way, and men who either struggle with depression or
they've had a kind of history of substance abuse in
the past. And I was drawn to men who had
suffered and who had struggled, And I think there were
a lot of good aspects to being drawn to people
like that. I was drawn to people who were emotionally

(49:36):
complicated and were able to go deep with me, and
I wanted that. But my ex husband, my boy's father,
when I met him, his father had died six months
earlier of MS at fifty four, his mother had staged
four breast cancer. He was taking care of his mother.
He was very, very introverted. We met in the LPHD program,

(49:57):
and I'm more drawn to him because I feel this
feels familiar. I can be the light giver in this
relationship and this poor, valuable, worthy human being who has
suffered so much. I'm going to bring joy and light
into his life. And all of his relatives would say
versions of oh, the lights back in his eyes, and

(50:19):
you've brought you know, little Rico back to us, you know,
and it felt incredible, and you know, we didn't work out.
My older son is autistic, and we dealt with that
crisis in very different ways, and he was very emotionally
closed off and not really able to be there for
me in the way that I was for him. So
it's a version of this issue right where I'm tending

(50:40):
to him and I'm not getting enough in return. And
then after my father died, I was even more drawn
to people who were going through crises, struggling, suffering. If
a man would text me a song like here Comes
My Girl by Tom Petty or Mellow My Mind by
Neil Young, which is all about how the woman is

(51:00):
able to mellow the men and you know, make him happy.
That would be catnip, you know. I was, oh, my gosh,
this feels familiar, this feels like love. I had a
therapist one say to me, do you think that you're
trying to save these men because you couldn't save your father? Okay,
because my father died of lung cancer. He died of addiction.

(51:21):
I mean, he was addicted. He died of his addiction.

Speaker 1 (51:25):
How did you respond to the therapist connecting the dots
in that way?

Speaker 2 (51:28):
At first, I was just incredulous. I was like, I
don't see that at all. And I remember she said
something like I was describing one of these rogues to
her in a therapy session and I was saying, I
don't know if I should stay with him, and she said,
you don't need to be with him in order to
hold on to your father. And that was another insight
in the same session. And I did date one very

(51:51):
flagrant narcissist during this time period, and I did suffer.
And that's how I first discovered you. And when I
was researching codependency in nursissy on the internet, that was
really dangerous because you know, I think if you're a giver,
if you put your own need in second, if you
are somebody who's used to being in that role of

(52:12):
boosting and bolstering and booing someone, narcissists are drawn to that.
You know what. I've got on a lot of dates
with narcissess, but I've learned to recognize the science.

Speaker 1 (52:21):
And one thing I've said is that you know, it's
not even so much the drawn as the stuck right, Like,
you know something, the fly might be flying around and
minding its own business and then gets caught in the web.
It's just stuck in the web. That's the problem. I
don't think that the fly is like, hey, Spider's web's
very similar to what happens here is that people who

(52:43):
are codependent and who are willing to push down their
emotional needs to fully prop up someone else, other people
become projects.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
You know.

Speaker 1 (52:51):
The ego gratification for the codependent person comes from maintaining
that relationship and fully serving those needs, which will also
allows the codependent person to feel in control at some
level too. Yes, the narcissistic person sticks around for two reasons.
One is that they're still getting a steady source of
supply and secondly, even when they become disinterested in the

(53:14):
person but still want them around because you want some supply,
So like why you keep extra toilet paper in the
cabinet because you need some. You what you need, what
you need when you need it. Right, is that they
know that the codependent person's not going to leave right
and believe it or not, a narcissistic people have more
abandonment crises than you would think. I think we often
think of them as they're the ones abandoning everyone else,

(53:37):
not at all. People who are narcissistic have a lot
of what we call rejection sensitivity, and that can elevate
to this level of abandonment and fear of abandonment. It's
different than sort of the fragile fear of abandonment we
can see elsewhere. It's more of a I need to
stay in control and if somebody else gets up and leaves, well,
then that means I'm not in control, and that fractures

(53:57):
that ego that a narcissistic person has. So it's a
little tricky because I think that the codependency framework isn't
a perfect map on to what happens in narcissistic relationships.
But I think it definitely is very consistent with about
half of it, which is the only way a relationship
with a narcissistic person works is if you completely surrender

(54:21):
your needs to that relationship, that you put them first,
that you make attending to their emotions first, You in
essence sacrifice yourself and that's how the relationship sort of sustains.
We will be right back with this conversation. Where your

(54:44):
story was so illuminating is that I see the origin
of your codependency. You were commendeared, intentionally or not, by
two parents into serving an emotional function that you were
not yet equipped to serve. Here's what's really interesting about you, Priscilla.

(55:05):
I don't think you ever believed that love was contingent
on you serving their emotional needs. I don't I truly
believe you felt loved right, But for you it was more.
I am responsible for this really important system and the
people within this system to function. That's my responsibility. But

(55:27):
what your story reminds me is that we often write
a far more shattered and damaged narrative around codependency, which
your story actually isn't.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
Yes, yes, I could not agree with you morea and
it was something that perplexed me and confused me as
I was reading the literature, because I was like, but
I did feel seen, I did feel affirmed, they did
feel loved. That doesn't negate the fact that they were
putting a burden, an emotional burden on me. Friend once
said to me, you know, in a way, they were
kind of turning you into their emotional support.

Speaker 1 (56:01):
That's exactly what they were doing. That's exactly what they
were doing, an emotional support animal. You were being handed
the emotional luggage cart and saying push. Your parents weren't
sadistically rubbing their hands together and saying how can we
mess up these kids? Or you know, none of that.
And again, your mom's story is significant to me that
in the seventies and when her career came up, it

(56:25):
was much more unheard of for a woman to have
a career at her level. There were no templates, there
were no peers for her, and there were probably people
sort of still giving her the side eye, and again
they still do in twenty twenty three. It's very easy
to view your mother through a very villainized lens, But
when we bring in that context of the impossibility of

(56:46):
what she was trying to pull off. You really had
to create some jagged edges around you as a woman
to be able to survive in that world. And I
think that that may very well have bled into marriage
and family. And clearly your parents' marriage was not what
either of them thought that they had signed up for.

(57:07):
Mercifully yielded to wonderful daughters, so you know, got them
something very important. I think there was different agendas. Your
father really wanted family and hearth and home and the
soft place to land. Your mother's head was someplace else,
and that happens.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
One of the kind of beautiful healing moments for me
as I go through my experience with my mother is
that I find out later on my mother tells me
that she was never in love with my father, and
that she told him that before they got married, and
she had had her heart shattered by her first great love,
the writer Donald Bartheamey, who was her client. And my
mother said to me, and he was depressive too. She

(57:44):
was obviously attracted to people like that. That Don barthelmy
revered my father intellectually, and that she was holding on
to him in a way through being with my father.
And she picked my father because my father has a
son from his first marriage. She met my father for
the first time with his son and instantly thought, this

(58:05):
is an incredible father. This is a good person to
have children with, and we can have a great family together.
Our values, our ideals about art and literature and the
world are aligned. I respect his mind. I think he's
brilliant and it worked until it didn't.

Speaker 1 (58:23):
Yeah, and I think you know, in some ways, your
mom made an interesting choice in choosing a good father
to be a partner. Where she misplayed the hand was
knowing she had chosen a good father, being aware he
was a good father that when the marriage fell apart,
it's a shame she didn't navigate that part better. Yeah, Ultimately,

(58:44):
I think it does come to a good place, but
it would have saved a lot of heartache. So you
identify as codependent, You totally own up to it, Priscilla,
how are you coping with this being codependent today? Do
you still feel responsible for other people's happiness?

Speaker 2 (59:02):
Much much less? I would say I'm a recovering codependent.
I'm a recovering perfectionist. You know so many of the
ways that my life has unfolded writing two memoirs where
I tell the truth about hard and difficult things, and
I share my struggle and I share my sadness. That

(59:23):
in and of itself is moving beyond codependency in the
sense that if you're writing a memoir, you're writing about
real people, you're writing about people in your family, You're
taking a risk that you're going to upset people. And
also as a doctor, going from academia where you have
to write quote unquote objectively and you never put the

(59:44):
eye into it, to writing in a more vulnerable way
on the page and sharing my own story, that in
and of itself is I think healing from codependency. Right,
I'm not getting the A anymore. I'm not in academia
and jumping through the hoops and getting the gold stars
and getting the tenure truck because I taught at Yale
on the tenure track and I taught at Faster for
four years. And I love teaching and I still teach,

(01:00:05):
but I didn't want to be in that system anymore.
And I catch myself. I think meditation helps me a lot.
I think being a meditation teacher, I'm a loving kindness
meditation teacher as well as a mindfulness meditation teacher. So
reminding myself to be kind. And you know, my sister
still helps me. Like I'll say, oh, Mom was in
a bad mood or something, and she'll say, you don't
have to worry about it. She'll be Okay. I still do.

(01:00:28):
One of the therapists that I worked with on codependency
emphasize the strengths that codependence bring. Right, that you're very empathic,
that you're very tuned into people use the word preternatural.
When I'm teaching. I'm able to sense what people need,
how they need to be taught, maybe differently or dressed differently.

Speaker 1 (01:00:47):
I love that. What do you think, though, as you've
gone through your process of healing from codependency, other than
writing two memoirs, one does work best for you? And
as you said, I'm in recovery, I'm a recovered codependent.
What was that recovery process? You know, if somebody is
listening to this saying I'm codependent, what works? What works?

Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
Books? I'm looking at them. I have my microphone stacked
on Melody Beaties books. I watched endless videos from people
that I really trusted, and that's how I found you meditation, mindfulness.
I went to some Code of meetings. I did when
I was first in recovery right.

Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
And so for people listening, CODA is Code Dependence Anonymous,
which is a twelve step program focused on people recovering
from codependency.

Speaker 2 (01:01:30):
And I think that for me because it was particularly
manifesting in a negative way in the realm of my
dating life, I started dating very mindfully. Stan Tapken is
a guy who I really like, who has good stuff
on attachment and really taking my time and going slow.
It used to be something like I got engaged to

(01:01:51):
my kid's father after four months and I was the
kind of urson like get into something. It was like, oh,
it was amazing and living with that chemistry and I
love what you s in the beginning about chemistry with
the narcissists that I described, I had the most intense
chemistry I've ever had on any date. On the first date,
it was like crazy chemistry. I've learned to be skeptical
of that. I've learned to ask the right questions when

(01:02:12):
I'm dating to not get sucked in by what now
I know to call love bombing. Thanks to you, you know,
it's not just warm and affection, it's love bombing. To
make myself stronger, so that I can't be manipulated.

Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
How did becoming a mom affect your healing process?

Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
You know, both of my children have special needs. So
my older son was given the autism diagnosis when he
was twelve, but had all sorts of speech motor issues.
Would get the autism diagnosis at three now, but it
was two thousand and two and we didn't know as much.
My younger son was for family dyslexic and dysgraphic. They
both struggle with OCD, and I think the caretaking stuff

(01:02:52):
and the advocacy stuff and the empathy stuff was fantastic
for these kids, right, I knew how to do it,
but I think it also gave me a lot more
empathy for little Priscilla because seeing their vulnerability and seeing
them at nine, them at ten, them at eleven, and thinking,
I cannot imagine ever seeing anything remotely close to what

(01:03:15):
my parents said to me to my children, right, It's
just unfathomable to me. So that was healing too.

Speaker 1 (01:03:24):
I love that, And I really love how you talked
about codependency interestingly has its gifts. I think that is
such a beautiful, beautiful framing of that, and I think
it's cultural. I think that we pathologize emotion, we pathologize need,
But codependency when a person can get themselves out of

(01:03:45):
the vortex of exhausting themselves in the name of other people,
what you uncover under that is a tremendous empathy, a
self awareness and well yeah I know self awareness, but
more than that, an awareness of others compassion. It's really
about channeling those gifts, if you will, of codependency, because

(01:04:05):
I think what happens is it gets co opted into
something that's actually harmful in the hands of a person
in the wrong relationship. You know. I do want to
say that people listening to this are often tuning in
to hear about more of the narcissistic abuse stuff, but
many of those folks are saying, well, I also want
to hear the codependency piece. So you know, Priscilla, today,
you gave us an opportunity to have that important conversation.

(01:04:29):
You know, there are some differences in that. I think
with narcissistic abuse, there's a lot of overlap. I think
a lot of people who experience narcissistic abuse, especially when
it's legacy narcissistic abuse, meaning that it originated in childhood.
There we see a lot of the codependency stuff because
it's survivalist, right. It was a safety need to be

(01:04:50):
able to cater to the emotions and the needs of
others and to surrender one's own needs so they can
make sure that they maintain safety and get their attachment
needs met. However, there's a lot of people out there,
many people listening, who they encountered their first major narcissistic
relationship in adulthood, and so in those cases, it's actually

(01:05:11):
not codependency, and it becomes narcissistic abuse and the fallout
of narcissistic abuse, which is absolutely chaotic confusion, whereas codependency
it's almost built into the emotional DNA. And so for
folks listening to this, there are differences. There's also a
lot of overlap, and it's also quite conceivable people have
the separate phenomenon of narcissistic abuse made worse because they

(01:05:35):
already have a codependence style. And that sounds like that's
what happened to you.

Speaker 2 (01:05:39):
That is absolutely what happened to me.

Speaker 1 (01:05:41):
Yes, yes, yes, I also have to say that I
was getting frustrated with your mom and your memoir because
she really had left you feeling as though dad's love
for you with some sort of narcissistic projection or some
loving of your false self. But she did come around,
and if you could just sort of maybe that would
be a good place to end what she shared.

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
Yeah, in the process of writing the book, I actually
got up the courage and this, I guess is part
of my healing process from codependency and sharing my feelings
with her. And I confronted her, and I used that
word deliberately and advisedly. I confronted her and I said,
why did you reduce his love for me to narcissistic
projection in some way? And she immediately said, I was

(01:06:22):
completely wrong. I didn't understand what narcissism was. I had
felt exhausted taking care of him, and I didn't want
you to make the same mistake. And then I sent
her an email and I said, why did you marry
my father? I need to have him writing. And she
sent me this email where she affirmed, I'm not going
to quote it exactly correctly, but she said, you know,

(01:06:43):
I admired his brilliant mind, and he was an excellent father. Basically,
he was a kind and ethical man. And I remember
reading these words and I just started sobbing, and I
put my head down on this desk, and I was like,
these are the words that I was waiting to hear
for forty years. And it also confirmed for me that
I had been correct about my mom in the sense

(01:07:03):
that I knew that she was trying to protect me
with everything she was telling me. It was misguided, it
was wrong. You shouldn't ever tell those things to a
ten year old, but I still did feel that she
did it out of love and protectiveness for me, however
misguided it might have been.

Speaker 1 (01:07:19):
I'll be cynical and honest for a minute. Some listeners
might even say, well, is she rationalizing it? And that's
not actually how I see it. There's a difference between
rationalizing and making meaning and sense out of what happened
to you, And I'm hearing the meaning making and the
sense making, which is really important. I wish she had
told you this earlier. I think it would have set

(01:07:39):
you free in a very different way. But I think
for you to really hear that she knew that he
loved you and that he was a decent man, an
ethical man, was just it was a closing of a
circle for you. You knew that all along but that
you needed to understand some of that from her too.
That one of the greatest that can happen in our life,

(01:08:01):
and I don't think it can ever happen too late,
is a moment where we feel like our experience is
really seen and perceived. So you've got some.

Speaker 2 (01:08:10):
Yes, I really did. And even as I'm like depicting
my father in this book, you know he valued mystery
and I can't solve my father. I hope this is
useful to people who are listening. Right, You're never going
to get to a definitive mastery of your past or
your experience or these characters. The best you can do

(01:08:31):
is just sort of see them with all of their contradictions,
many contradictions, see the good, see the darker stuff, and
make sense of it. And always know that any human
being is going to exceed a label or a category
or a diagnosis.

Speaker 1 (01:08:49):
And it's interesting my final point. People are complicated and
if we communicate them right, someone's always going to have
a bone to pick, which means you did a great job.
So again, I can't tell you what a pleasure it was.
Priscilla is so grateful to you for this stunning book
and for your time, and just glad you're out in
the world. It just makes me happy to know those
people out there.

Speaker 2 (01:09:08):
Oh my gosh, I can't tell you how glad I
am the care of world. You've been such a blessing
to me and it's such an incredible honor.

Speaker 1 (01:09:16):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:09:17):
And this conversation I had high expectations, I have to say,
but like the succeeded them, right, that's like, oh my god,
you helped me.

Speaker 1 (01:09:25):
So take good care. All my best to you, my dear,
You're the best.

Speaker 2 (01:09:28):
Weank you too, so much. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:09:30):
Here are my takeaways from my conversation with Priscilla. In
my first takeaway, In many ways, Priscilla's story is a
primer on parenting, what to do and what not to do.
Her father, despite his flaws as a man, was my
Priscilla's recollection, a patient, empathic, engaged, and loving father celebrating

(01:09:56):
his daughter's talents, interests, and intellects. However, none of that
is enough to supersede a difficult marriage with her mother,
and while her parents did get some things right, her
story is a reminder that it is never appropriate to
burden a child with a parent's emotions, needs and despair.

(01:10:20):
Parenting is an active will, boundaries, and discipline, with parents
needing to find appropriate outlets for their emotions. Children are
far more perceptive than adults at emotional nuance because they
need to be perceptive to survive. Sadly, that can mean
a child can take on those unfairly shared emotional burdens

(01:10:43):
and devote their emotional bandwidth to appeasing and soothing their parents.
That's not how it's supposed to work. For our next takeaway,
what is codependency? Part of the problem is that there
really is not an agreed upon definition. The American Psychological
Association's Dictionary of Psychology defines it as the state of

(01:11:07):
being mutually reliant, for example, a relationship between two individuals
who are emotionally dependent on one another. It is definitely
morphed from there into something less mutual, and generally refers
to one person putting another person's emotional needs ahead of

(01:11:29):
their own and taking responsibility for the emotions of another person,
often to their own detriment. This term gets messy when
we talk about similar dynamics, such as those we see
in people going through narcissistic abuse, because in narcissistically abusive relationships,
people often take the blame for what is happening in

(01:11:51):
the relationship and slowly sacrifice their identities needs an emotional
expression to avoid the wrath and anger of the narcissistic person.
While people may be codependent in narcissistic relationships, the two
are not synonymous. In Priscilla's case, she acknowledges being codependent

(01:12:14):
within a system where she felt loved and did not
feel that she gave up her identity or sense of self,
Nor did she feel that she was conditionally loved and
that the emotional heavy lifting she did was to protect
her parents. In the case of a child with a
narcissistic parent, they have to construct a narrative in which

(01:12:34):
they are loved and then blame themselves for the parents
chronic anger and rage. The child believes they cannot be themselves,
but rather only be what the parent needs. There is
a lot of overlap between what happens in a narcissistic
relationship and codependency, and ultimately the way we manage these

(01:12:58):
relationships in therapy is similar, but the survival function of
taking on those emotional burdens in a narcissistic family system
are different than we see in some codependent families. For
this next takeaway, codependency assumes that the codependent person is

(01:13:20):
also experiencing a maladaptive condition themselves. The term codependency has
its roots in the nineteen forties alcoholism literature, which is
why I do not think it can always be applied
to people experiencing narcissistic abuse. Many people in narcissistic relationships

(01:13:41):
did not understand what they were dealing with do not
want to endure it, but for a variety of reasons
may be stuck, including culture, religion, financial necessity, genuine fear
of post separation abuse or fallout, or familial rejection, and
caregiving responsibilities. They are not deriving some secondary benefit and

(01:14:05):
instead our face with an impossible choice. Codependency does remain
a controversial term in the psychological literature, and while it
was a framework that resonated for Priscilla, does not necessarily
provide a framework for everyone in an emotionally imbalanced relationship.
In this next takeaway, Priscilla calls herself a recovering codependent

(01:14:30):
and shared a list of things that have helped her,
including books, videos, meditation, and mindfulness practices. Twelve step groups
such as Codependence Anonymous, and slowing way down in new relationships.
Many of these tools can be quite useful for survivors
of narcissistically abusive relationships as well. And for our last takeaway,

(01:14:54):
a piece of Priscilla's story that sticks with me was
when she said, we can never have mastery of the past,
and that may be one of the heaviest burdens and
greatest challenges for folks who have experienced complex childhoods, which
is most of us. It's like chasing a mirage, and

(01:15:15):
the attempt to fully make sense of the experience of
emotionally confusing childhood, whether or not you had a narcissistic parent,
can pull us out of our present and the opportunity
to be fully in the present moment as ourselves and

(01:15:36):
walk forward into healing

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Host

Dr. Ramini Durvasula

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}What is Codependency? With Priscilla Gilman