June 24, 2025 • 48 mins
In this episode of Mind Your Own Karma, I sit down with author and professor Joan K. Peters, whose memoir Untangling dives deep into the layered, complex process of healing through psychoanalysis. Joan opens up about her own long-term journey in therapy, the power of dreamwork, and thesubconscious patterns that keep so many of us stuck.
We talk about what it really means to “untangle” the inner knots around love, money, and self-worth, and why healing often looks nothing like we expect.
Joan’s honesty, depth, and insight make this a must-listen for anyone who's ready to look beneath the surface.
What we cover in this episode:
- The difference between traditional therapy and psychoanalysis.
- How childhood perception shapes adult pain.
- Joan’s biggest “knots” and how she began to unravel them.
- Why healing is often messy—and why that’s okay.
- The slow unwinding process of real change.
- The power of telling your story.
- What to look for in a healing relationship.
- How logic and emotion can coexist in deep healing work.
More about Joan:
Joan K. Peters is a writer, professor emeritus, and the author of Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis. With a Ph.D. in comparative literature, Joan taught others how to analyze great stories—until she found herself living one of her own. She now resides in Ojai, California, with her husband, dogs, and afew chickens who’ve probably heard all the secrets.
Grab Joan’s book:
Website: https://www.untanglingjoan.com/
Untangling on Amazon: https://a.co/d/e736fXe
Want to explore your own healing journey through the body?
Check out my Somatic Mindful Guided Imagery sessions at https://www.somatichealingjourneys.com/
Have a unique healing modality you'd love to share on the show?
Email me at mindyourownkarma@gmail.com—I'd love to hear from you!
Find Melissa:
-Email Melissa here: mindyourownkarma@gmail.com
-Click here for the Mind Your Own Karma Website
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Remember: You might be just one listen away from a totallydifferent life.
#MindYourOwnKarma #KarmaCrew #UntanglingTrauma #PsychoanalysisHealing #SubconsciousHealing #HealingJourney #DreamworkTherapy #EmotionalHealing #TherapyTools #MentalHealthAwareness #DeepHealingWork #InnerKnots #UnravelThePast #TellYourStory
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Hey there, it's Melissa Brunetti.
And welcome to the Mind Your OwnKarma podcast.
Hey there Karma crew. Thanks for joining me for this
episode of Mind Your Own Karma. My guest today is Joan K Peters.
(00:24):
She isn't just a writer, she's abrave.
Excavator of the Soul. A professor emeritus with a PhD
in comparative literature from the University of Chicago, Joan
spent years teaching others to analyze great stories until she
found herself inside one of her own.
In Untangling, a memoir of psychoanalysis, she pulls back
(00:45):
the curtain on decades of therapy, dream work, and quiet
but profound trauma. It's a rare and raw look at what
it really takes to heal. She now lives in Ojai, CA with
her husband, some dogs and a fewchickens who've.
Probably heard all of it. It's time to RIP off the bandage
on Psychoanalysis with Joan K Peters.
(01:11):
We are welcoming Joan Peters to the show today.
Hi, Joan. Hi, nice to be here.
You. Yeah.
Nice to meet you finally. I'm super excited to dive into
psychoanalysis. I never really thought about how
it was different from traditional therapy.
So I'm super excited to learn that part and how it brought you
(01:31):
profound healing as well. But first, you wrote a book
called Untangling and you describe it as a memoir and a
journey through psychoanalysis. Talk about your journey, your
personal journey and seeking psychoanalysis.
Why did you seek that? You know, I didn't know what
psychoanalysis was and I had no particular interest, but it all
(01:56):
started for me with nightmares. And I had a really great life at
the time. I was 27, had pretty much
everything I wanted, a great partner, living in New York, a
great job. And yet I had these nightmares
that would wake me and I'd be screaming.
(02:17):
And it was the same nightmare over and over.
Slightly different version, but essentially people running after
me with a needle that they wouldinject into me and it would just
take all my strength and I couldn't fight them off and they
would destroy me. And that's when I would wake up
(02:37):
screaming and I really paid no attention.
I would just get up and go back to sleep.
But my partner said one day, youknow, people don't wake up
twice, three times a week screaming it with nightmares.
And it never occurred to me thatthere was something wrong.
I just thought if I could function.
(02:58):
And the day, I was fine. And I went to find a therapist
who turned out to be a psychoanalyst.
And we started out with regular therapy where I would just tell
her about my life and what I thought were my issues.
And we came back over and over to that dream.
(03:20):
And I think the dream work is very much a part of
psychoanalysis, not so much in therapy.
And I was. Very unaware of what?
Dreams were. About or what?
What my? Psyche was who even knew you had
a psyche and and in the process.Of it took about six months of
(03:47):
coming back to that dream. Over and over.
And the needles. And she would tell me to go ask
my mother about my early, early life as a child when my father
died when I was 2A. Long and difficult death.
From cancer, we. Did not have a lot.
Of money lived in a. Tiny little apartment and bingo.
(04:11):
One day she told me how she would give him morphine
injections and how she would fixthem in the kitchen and practice
before she went to actually plunge.
The needle into his arm and I was.
Too, I, I saw that, you know, 2 year olds.
(04:31):
I really understood it when I had a 2 year old and saw how
observant she was. And my mother had always said if
I asked her a question about my father's death, she'd say, oh,
you were children. You didn't know anything about
it. And I think that's very standard
fare in a lot of families. But obviously, children do know.
(04:54):
They take it all in. And it was in there in my body.
And I think that's how a lot of people experience what gets
pushed down and not and, and thrown into silence and even
into taboo. It was, you know, I was never to
ask any questions and I only didbecause my therapist sent me
(05:19):
two. And when we we determined that
these morphine injections were very much a part of my very
early life, she said to me, my therapist, one day, little by
little, we put the story together and she connected the
(05:40):
needles with the morphine injections and went back, made
me go back more questions. Well, he got his first diagnosis
when I was born. And so, as she said to me one
day, you were the Angel of deathin your family.
And I had always felt that my mother was somehow repulsed by
(06:03):
me. You know, she didn't want to
hold me and touch me and hug me.And she was closer to my brother
and I, I really had a sense thatsomething was wrong.
And this is sort of what, you know, we determined was going on
(06:24):
that I was feeling my mother's akind of repulsion.
I was feeling the terror of these needles.
And my analyst who at this pointit, it became psychoanalysis
because you can see how much deeper it went.
And she began to say you was. Were.
(06:45):
Were. Frightened of the needles, you
saw your father wasting away andassumed she was giving him
injections that were destroying him and that maybe she would
destroy you now. I didn't believe it.
It didn't make any sense to me. Why would she want to destroy
me? But after she told me that, six
(07:08):
months into this therapy, my nightmares stopped.
And as I say, that was the moment for me where I understood
what the unconscious was. And there's a whole world in
there and, and you need somebodywho can speak to that and help
(07:30):
you express that, which comes out through free association,
lying on a couch saying whatevercomes to mind.
And you have to surrender to this sort of irrational, strange
world that you find yourself in.But I was so amazed by the
(07:55):
relief of of not of understanding where are these
nightmares came from and what itwas all about that I, I had the
strength, it gave me the strength to pursue it and find
out more and more about my unconscious and the way it was
(08:15):
affecting my everyday life, you know, my decision making, all
kinds of things. And I think we all have some
version of that pattern where wedo things in our daily life and
we don't even understand why. And that's the why is in our
(08:37):
unconscious. You know, people think children
don't remember it. So, you know, how can it affect
you and how the perception of what you are taking in at that
age and how the perception of what's happening effects you
down the road? Maybe not exactly the truth of
(08:58):
what was happening 'cause I guess your mom was, you know,
trying to help him. But in your eyes, you know, the
perception of it was that she was hurting him because of what
you were seeing, how he he reacted and how that gets stored
as an adult, like in your dreamsand stuff.
That's just so interesting. What is the difference between
traditional therapy and psychoanalysis in a nutshell for
(09:21):
those of us that don't know? This is an example of it where
you in in therapy, you work out your problems, you become aware
of patterns and you try and use your conscious understanding of
these patterns. Let's say you choose the wrong
boyfriends all the time where you have terrible difficulties
(09:44):
with work and failure and whatever these patterns are and
you don't know why they're happening you, you get a lot of
help and support or your confidence and so on.
But it probably for me, for example, I had tried therapy
throughout my life a couple of times different times.
(10:07):
At one point, for example, I washaving difficulty with my
teenage daughter who doesn't andand I wanted help and when I was
discussing it with the therapistwho was very behavior oriented,
if you do this, she'll react this way and you'll get a better
(10:28):
outcome if you do this. But I kept coming back to my own
mother and how it related to howmy mother treated me and she did
not want to go there. She said leave that aside.
Let's just talk about how you can make your relationship
better. And I think analysis goes into
(10:52):
the past and really invites you to go as deep as you can go, if
that's where the answers are. For me, they were.
So in that situation, for example, underneath my
difficulties with my daughter and the and the way I would
behave with her, what I had to understand is it was coming from
(11:15):
a deep seated fear that she. Wouldn't love me anymore.
If I was strict with her. Or.
Set those boundaries or expectedsomething specific of her.
And I, I couldn't do it. I was I was operating out of
the. Fear I didn't even know I had
until I explored the. Fact that I had.
(11:38):
Always been afraid. My mother wouldn't love me.
Going. Back to that sense of.
Her feeling repulsed by me and also.
That she was just a very aloof woman who wasn't warm and cozy
and affectionate and that. I had.
Projected that on to my daughterand once I understood that and
(11:58):
my analyst. Said to me children.
Love their parents. Why wouldn't she love you?
You know that again. It was one of those Eureka
moments. I didn't.
I never. Thought of that.
I was always just in my own tangled world of fear that she,
(12:21):
other people wouldn't love me. And I could never, I could never
assume that people would love meback.
So that's analysis. It takes you into that deeper
level of the psyche really operating all the time.
And you know, you don't see it well if people have not been
(12:44):
traumatized. Then maybe they don't need.
To go that deep therapy. May be just fine, but for me it.
Wasn't I was too tangled up and I had to.
Kind of go down in there to findthe answers, yeah.
How was that with your background as being a professor
and kind of, you know, left brained, trying to access that
(13:09):
imaginary world, that inner world, how was that difficult to
do? So difficult.
And you hit the nail on the head.
I had kind of hidden in my intellectual world because that
didn't feel so bad to me. I didn't have to confront the
fears that people wouldn't love me or anything.
(13:31):
I just, you know, I was, I was very focused on work and on
achievement. And I also approached other
people in a very intellectual way.
I was so afraid that they wouldn't love me back, or that I
was afraid of really knowing howmuch I loved the people.
(13:54):
I loved that I kept people at a distance.
And again, that was my pattern. I didn't know I was doing that.
I only experienced them as not being close with me, but really
I was keeping them away. And one of the things that
happens in psychoanalysis that does not happen in therapy is
(14:17):
transference. And what happened with my
analyst is I began to keep her at a distance and and as she
began to point out, I wouldn't every time she got tried to get
close to me or express affectionfor me, I would say you, you
(14:37):
hardly know me. You know, we don't know each
other. I'm paying you for this.
I just wanted her to help me interpret dreams and and get on
with it. And, and that's in that
relationship. Gradually I saw how I kept the
world away from me and then feltit as the world staying away
(15:02):
from me instead of me doing it. So that's again, that's the
level of analysis the the psychewith dream work, free
association, that's how you findit and with your relationship
with your analyst. And again, that's different from
therapy where it's not focused on your relationship with your
(15:26):
analyst, it's focused on, you know, the analysts supportive
you, which is pretty consistent.So it it, it, it's a different
thing that's going on. How long do you think it kind of
took you to get to that breakthrough where you kind of
were trusting the process more? You know my analyst, actually I
(15:50):
quote it in the book, she said to me.
It's taken you 2 years to see meas someone who wants to help you
and care about you. You, you just kept me at, you
know, at Bay. I, I, I would reject her
offerings of care and love. And you know, the way I saw it,
(16:15):
we were two people working on mypsyche.
You know, we were, we were a little team of, of I wanted her
interpretations, not her emotions.
But the truth is, of course I wanted her emotions.
We want people to like us. We want people to care, to be
engaged. We and we gradually become
(16:38):
engaged with them. You know we're we're humans are
are made for love. You know they're made for
connection. We're.
Born with it, yeah. I think because you kept going
back, obviously you were wantingthat and but not trusting it
sounds like. Well, I'm not even acknowledging
(16:59):
it until, you know, it was two years in and I, I just fell into
the understanding. I had a vacation.
I just took a vacation. I wanted to go on a trip to
Alaska. I was gone for two months and I
panicked. I needed her.
(17:19):
I don't know. It was the first.
That's how it happened. It was the first time I
acknowledged how much I cared about her, needed to be near
her, with her, hear her. And that was two years in.
That's how long it took. Yeah, that's amazing.
So you've said that healing isn't always comfortable or
(17:40):
pretty. What was the most surprising or
even messy part of your healing journey that you feel like
others kind of avoid or don't want to talk about?
You know, the hardest part was what I just told you.
I mean, for me, this was something I avoided all my life.
It was so painful to me to see who I was inside as somebody who
(18:06):
was very dependent on another person.
Now this stranger who I was paying, suddenly she was so
important to me. I felt needy and vulnerable.
And I had to go through all the fears that she wouldn't be there
for me, that she'd leave me, that she'd go away, that she
(18:30):
would say, I can't work with youanymore.
And all of those things were horribly painful to me.
And I had always sort of been able to avoid them in my life by
my intellectual distances. But I, I acted them out so over
(18:51):
and over, I would find myself having all kinds of emotions
about my friends. You know, that my fear that they
weren't going to be there the next time I called or if they
didn't call me back quickly enough, they don't love me
anymore. So I was experiencing it, but
(19:12):
not really acknowledging it. So I couldn't work on it.
But once I began and I began to allow myself to have all the
feelings I had for my analyst, it was kind of torture.
I, I really had never, I, I never, I never allowed myself to
(19:36):
feel that way towards my mother.That's really the central point,
because my mother was not an affectionate person.
She was not reassuring so so I Inever dared to need her in those
ways. And what was coming out was the
(19:57):
part of me I had rejected because it was too dangerous as
a child to feel those feelings. And I think, again, a lot of
people have areas of their life that they can't acknowledge or
don't understand. You know, such as, for example,
(20:17):
I mean, of a common kind of likewomen who maybe choose the wrong
partners and they wonder how is that happening?
There's something in their lives, their early lives that
it, you know, is they're not understanding.
They're it's their psyche is in control.
And something back there seemed to go over and over and over
(20:43):
trying to get love from, let's say, a man or a partner that
never works out, you know, wheredid that patterning begin?
How did it get planted in the psyche?
What's? Making that behavior happen and.
Those are very painful things torecognize.
That's why. That's why you don't.
You're not aware of them. Yeah.
(21:04):
How scary was it to try and be vulnerable in relationships and
what did that look like as you, you know, went through maybe
with your husband or your daughter?
Well, oddly enough, in my life, my husband was my one safe
person. I always knew we'd be there for
(21:24):
each other. I never worried he'd leave me.
He was my analyst even said he was the one person I trusted
unconditionally. Why?
I'm not sure, but I think it's because the one person in my
life who I trusted in my soul was my older brother.
And he was a model for me of I knew he loved me.
(21:51):
He would laugh at my jokes. He would, he would protect me.
He would, I, I mean, he would. If anybody had tried to hurt me
on the streets of New York or whatever where I grew up, he
would have come to my defense ina second.
He was always trying to teach methings.
He tried to make me ready for the world.
(22:13):
And when he went off to college,he would bring me home books.
You read this, he would say. And I really felt loved by him.
And so I think I automatically trusted a man who in many ways
resembled him, who I chose someone who was that rock solid,
(22:36):
decent person who was very loving to women.
So I think that's why I trusted him.
So it didn't act out there, but the vulnerability I, I was able
to bring that home and admit much more than I had ever done
(22:57):
before. Why I behaved when I felt hurt,
what was upsetting me. And I saw how in our
relationship, I had been very controlling because I was
actually trying to control my psyche and all of these
emotions. But the only way I knew to do
(23:19):
that was to control my environment, my life.
So I had to choose all of our vacations.
I had to choose how we set up the household.
I had to choose how we raised our daughter and the
vulnerability came through with a marvelous lifting of that
control and he was right there ready for it and grateful for
(23:44):
it. He was an easygoing, He was, he
is an easygoing guy. So he let that happen, the
control. And I was always very respectful
of him and his needs. But this was a a, a wonderful
change in our relationship when I was able to let go of a lot of
my fears. I didn't have to hold on to to
(24:07):
my life so tightly. And it's it's such a pleasure to
live without those kinds of anxieties.
So yeah, that was a big a big plus.
Yeah, I was going to say it sounds very freeing, but scary
too at the same time, I mean. It was so scary.
I had never lived without the strictures and controls and
(24:31):
compulsions. I'm one of those, you know, very
obsessive compulsive people. Everything has to be because
that's, I didn't have outside reassurances for my parents.
I mean, they always told me you could, you know, do anything you
want, be anything you want, but they couldn't really help me.
(24:52):
And I was out there on my own more than I, more than I was
really capable of. And so I had to kind of try and
exert all these controls in my life because I was really scared
underneath that I wasn't prepared or wasn't ready.
And now I can see how life flows.
(25:14):
But the scary part of coming, coming to know the vulnerability
that's inside you, that's very frightening.
When it started to pour out of me in analysis and, and it, it
did so over a period of years, Ihad to, I, I mean, I had to have
(25:38):
all kinds of transitional objects, you know, like little,
little kids, toddlers have theirteddy bears.
I had versions of teddy bears. I would have I would have music
that I would listen to obsessively that would calm me
when I was having these these just incredible upsets about how
(26:01):
vulnerable I felt like I couldn't stand it feeling I, I,
you know, I had really not allowed myself to feel that way.
I was tough and I expected toughness of the people around
me and with my students. For example, I used to be known
as a really tough professor. You know, you had your papers in
(26:22):
on time, you came to glass prepared you.
I was really, and I saw it as having high expectations of my
students. But really what happened was.
More and more. I began to see if I allowed
them, if I, if I was incredibly trusting of them and let them if
(26:46):
they had to get a late paper in.No problem.
Tell me all about it. What happened in your life?
I became this very maternal loving teacher and I got even
better results than being a kindof military professor.
So that's how it it affected my life and the and the lives of
(27:07):
the people around me. Yeah, so you were talking about
how tough it got and you had some coping mechanisms.
What kept you from what kept yougoing?
What kept you from quitting in those hard moments?
Yeah. For one thing, I had an analyst
who was warm and caring and really smart in her
(27:31):
interpretations of my life, and that was so illuminating.
It was so enlightening that you come back from for more.
Even though it's scary, you kindof know, or at least I knew,
that health was right there and that even if it was hard, there
(27:53):
was something in that consultingroom that was nourishing me in a
way that I had never been nourished and was untangling me.
That's why I named my book Untangling.
And the relief was great. Yeah.
How would if someone how would someone know if they're ready
for psychoanalysis or going deeper?
(28:17):
I think the way that they know there are a, there are a few
very concrete things if you begin work with therapy.
I mean, there are many therapists who are also trained
as an, as analysts and they, their practice may be mostly
just therapy with maybe two or three analysis.
(28:39):
They're called people who were in analysis because it's very
demanding of the therapist. So there are many people who do
both. But if you're in therapy and you
have a kind of frustration the way I did with a therapist, who
isn't allowing you to go into a place where you think you need
(29:00):
to go in order to understand howyou're relating to your child or
how you're relating to your partner.
Or that there's something that you know, or, or, or just that
they're not investigating this fear that's underneath you or
the nature of the depression that you feel.
(29:24):
And you, you, you kind of know that there's something missing.
That's, that's one thing. Another thing is if the
therapist isn't helping you to resolve your problems, they may
be too tangled up to use that word again for mere therapy.
And again, you know, there are, are there a lot of analysts who
(29:50):
not only do analysis, but who can, if they can't do it with
you in the institutes where theytrain analysts, there are
training analysts, young analysts in training who you can
work with for. A much lower price than someone
(30:13):
who has many, many years of experience.
And my first analyst was exactlythat.
She was. I was 27, she probably was 30.
And she had a tape. Recorder and taped all my.
Sessions because she had to. Discuss them with her
supervisor. But it was. $25 a session and
(30:35):
that's what I could afford. So it worked and and so that's
something to consider if you want to look into.
This and it depends on how much you feel.
You're missing in your life. You know.
How how maybe how anxious you feel and you.
(30:56):
You don't. Think you need to feel that way
or? For me.
I would fall, I would. I had a wonderful life and yet I
would fall into these depressions very easily if
something went wrong. And that doesn't happen anymore.
And I think if people are not getting making progress with
(31:17):
those kinds of issues, it may beworth looking into a more
detailed kind of therapy. Yeah, I do somatic therapy.
I have a practice here in town and this resonates a lot with
what I do as well. A lot of the things that you're
(31:38):
saying and how exactly the the people I'm looking for or that
are right have already tried other modalities.
That's right, EMDR or, you know,talk therapy.
And they just feel like there's still something there.
There's still something there, so.
Yeah. And to your point, my analyst at
(31:59):
a certain point sent me to somatic therapy.
But you do want to try other modalities when when the one
that you're using doesn't address a particular problem.
I love when there's some collaboration with your team.
That's right that your. Team, your person doesn't think,
(32:19):
oh, I'm, I'm going to fix you, you know, I got this.
When they realize that maybe this is out of my scope and
they're able to, you know, send you to somebody else, that's
when you know you have a good therapist.
That's that's very true. And by the way, she sent me to
EMDR before somatic, which and the EMDR just didn't speak to me
at all. And you know, she's, she's very,
(32:43):
you know, let's, let's experiment here.
Let's see how to solve this problem.
Yeah, that's awesome. I always say everybody has their
own healing combination. That's right.
Combination changes as you evolve and grow.
And you know, you can, you can grow out of a certain modality
or like you said, it might not fit or feel right for you, but
(33:04):
it's out there. So keep looking.
Just keep looking. So you talk about the power of
telling our stories, even the painful ones.
Why do you think that's so important?
I think it goes back to the first question you asked me and
the silence that so many families have about what really
(33:26):
is going on or has gone on in their lives.
And I think we. As as children carry that
silence with us and telling our stories is a.
Way of breaking that very painful silence and normalizing
(33:47):
what's happened to you I I I spoke with one woman for
example, who she and her sister would go to find their father
who was drinking in a whatever aa bar with his friends all the
time and they would drag him home for dinner and he was drunk
(34:11):
and. The two of them learned to never
even speak. About what they were.
Doing at 8 years old, being sentby the mother.
And how that? Affected them and I think you
learn that they. Learned that their mother.
Was too upset by this, she was so trying.
To have a normal family. And she didn't, you know, her
(34:34):
way of handling it like my mother was, let's never mention
it again. So I had a father who died when
I was two. We never spoke his name again.
We never saw a picture, never mentioned.
It didn't happen. And I think that so many.
People when they begin to. Tell their story.
(34:55):
The relief is tremendous becauseyou're saying what couldn't be
said and got had to be expressed.
Through your body or through? Destructive behaviors or your
own addictions or or whatever itis and suddenly you put it into
words and you realize how many other people have had the same
(35:19):
situation. In this case, the two sisters
were able to talk about it. My brother and I can talk about
it, and it's only really since Iwrote this book and he read it
that we have been talking with each other in a certain sense
(35:40):
non-stop. It's given us permission to
really talk about what happened to us.
Not to blame. It's not the blame game.
It's to say that really affectedus.
That was really hard. And to.
Remember together what the details.
Were. If you have someone.
(36:02):
Who you can? Tell about it or to share it
with who was there as well, a sibling or a neighbor?
Or a best friend. From childhood, it it it has it
has an incredible healing effect.
Yeah, definitely. That whole validation and the
(36:25):
freedom to speak of things that you don't think that you're
supposed to talk about. That's right.
It's like, wait, we're not supposed to talk about that.
I know I felt that way when I started diving into the adoptee
community. I found some Facebook groups and
I was like, oh, this will be fun.
I'll join an adoptee group. And then I was like, they're,
they're bringing up all kinds ofstuff.
(36:46):
And I'm like supposed to talk about that.
What are we doing here, you know?
But then it was so freeing for me to be able to explore how do
I feel about that too? So that opened up a lot for me.
And that's why I had done two years of the podcast talking to
adoptees after that, I'm like, we need to, we need to educate
the world. Like we need to.
(37:07):
There's adoptees out there that feel totally alone, like we need
to tell them that because we allfelt that way.
We felt like we were the only ones adopted, you know?
Yeah. So I was like.
We need to put. That into the world.
Yeah, that's it, That's it. And how has that changed your
life? Just to be able to talk.
About in in so many ways, so many ways.
I mean, I couldn't even, I can'teven start.
(37:30):
But part of that was doing my somatic therapy, you know, that
I was doing for myself. And that brought up a lot of
stuff, a lot of healing between my birth mother and how I felt
about her relinquishing me in the 1st place.
And 'cause I, we always had kindof a tumultuous relationship
(37:53):
where she would keep rejecting me and then come back and say
sorry. And then, you know, so I was
getting rejected kind of over and over and over again by her
without realizing that the trauma that she went through and
that she was operating from her lived experience.
And once I realized that, it changed everything for me, you
(38:16):
know? But, you know, I wouldn't have
done therapy. I wouldn't have.
I wouldn't have gotten that deep.
I wouldn't have gone that deep. Yeah.
But you bring up such an important point, which is once
you start exploring it, it givesyou more compassion for other
people, even people who hurt you.
Yeah. You see.
You see them as the victims of their circumstances.
(38:41):
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
It turns it from. It's my fault.
That's right. That's not my fault.
It's. Just.
From their lived experience. And that's so freeing, so
freeing. What did you find in your
relationship with your analyst? What did you value most about
(39:02):
that relationship? I valued her, her warmth, her
caring, and her intelligence. And by warmth and caring, what
is so striking for a patient in that relationship is that you
can act out. I mean, I could get mad at her.
(39:24):
I could withdraw from her all ofmy usual, you know, tools for,
for distancing and, and, and allof that.
And she would remain consistent.And I had not had that.
I wouldn't have dared to behave in that way as a child.
(39:49):
I couldn't do that. I mean, I would have meltdowns,
but they would be about, I don'tknow, you know, like, why don't
I comb my hair differently, you know, from my mother?
And then I'd yell at my mother. It it was not the real subjects.
We weren't talking about what really hurt us or upset us.
(40:12):
And with my analyst, she would hold on, stay with me if I got
angry or whatever until we unpacked it, as she would say.
And then? It was a revelation about what
was underneath this particular emotional withdrawal or anger or
(40:32):
upset, whatever it was. And I think that that was magic
to me. That was the healing that
somebody could be non reactive. She didn't let me push her away.
She didn't let me. She if I withdrew from her, she
(40:54):
was there when I came back. And that in itself you, you
learn that people can relate in a very loving way like that.
Right. Has your understanding of trauma
evolved since writing the book even?
Yes, enormously. I went at the beginning, I think
(41:16):
I thought, I think I thought I know that trauma to me was being
locked in a basement or being beaten by your alcoholic
stepfather or, you know, something awful.
And what I learned is it can be very ordinary.
My parents were, were good parents in many ways.
(41:37):
They bought us Christmas presents.
They I always had clean laundry in my drawers.
If something was really wrong, they were right there, you know,
medically or whatever. But they weren't warm and loving
in the way that I know. I tried to parent.
(41:59):
They just didn't have it. They were people who whose own
lives were very difficult in many ways, and they just didn't
have the the luxury of raising children that way.
And what I learned is that not having that kind of warmth and
tenderness and reassurance, is it self trauma to have a parent
(42:26):
who's depressed or withdrawn or unable to spontaneously respond
to your joy as a child? I think that's trauma.
And my mother was dealing with adying and dead husband at age 26
(42:46):
with two little children. You know, maybe she wasn't ready
for the joys of parenting and she had a terrible financial
burden on her hands. So, you know, I understand that
that's trauma and it really shaped my life without my
(43:08):
knowing it. You know, I thought everything's
fine. My mother married somebody else.
We moved on, as she said, and you just get on with it like she
did. That's how she had to deal.
So, you know, just get tough. She would got to be tough.
(43:30):
So if your healing journey had amessage for someone who's
struggling or feeling tangled, what would that message be?
The message would be a way of putting it is turn the light on
yourself and ask go back to thatchildhood and say how did that
(43:51):
affect me? And start to trust what you find
in looking at your family experience as a child, really,
really paying some attention to how did that affect me?
How did it make me feel? What even if it, even if you
(44:11):
think it's, it's wrong that you were, you know, maybe your
parents told you that you were too needy, you know, to just
stop it. You know, stop asking for
things, stop asking for more hugs or whatever to go back
there. How did that make you feel?
If your parent was very had highexpectations and you had to have
(44:37):
A's on your report card and joinevery team and be good at
whatever sport, how did that make you feel?
And you'll find you'll be able to untangle so much on your,
even on your own. Even on your own.
Yeah, that's a great place to start.
(44:57):
And I have that in my practice as well.
I have my clients write a list of what did your childhood tell
you about yourself? What did you learn about your or
what? What labels did you put on
yourself? You know those are.
Great, those are. Absolutely.
And it's and it and again, that's like, those are those
(45:18):
programs that are running in thebackground that you don't even
know are running and you put it down on paper and see it.
And it's just like, whoa, I didn't even think about that or
that that it should be affectingme anymore.
That's right. That and that's that's so
important. I think it should I've grown up.
I shouldn't be affected by that.You are.
(45:39):
Yeah, you know, it happened whenI was two years old.
Why? Yeah, but the psyche does not
forget. The body does not forget.
It does not. If, yeah, if you wanna, if you
wanna be free, I think you have to take a good look at your
psyche. Mm, hmm.
Well, where can we find you and your book and anything else
(46:01):
that's going on with you? Where can we find you?
So first thing is my book is on Amazon and Barnes and Nobles and
you can buy it there. It's in Kindle and and book
form. And also I have a website with
all kinds of with interviews andand essays I've done and and so
(46:22):
on. I also have a blog that I do for
Psychology Today and I have done2 blogs already but you can find
me at untanglingjoan.com That's my website and it's got all the
information. There.
Yeah, we will have that in the show notes.
Thanks so much for coming on today.
(46:43):
I totally enjoyed this conversation.
And again, just thank you for being vulnerable and writing
about your story and like we. Were saying how?
Important it is to tell our stories so that others feel
validated and not so alone. It's so, so important.
Thank you so much for coming on today.
(47:03):
And thank you so much for havingme.
I enjoyed this conversation too.Thank you, I absolutely loved
this conversation. With Joan.
I hope. Something she shared really
landed with you, maybe even gaveyou a little hope that the knots
that you're feeling right now can be untangled.
It might take time. But it is possible.
(47:26):
The links to Joan and her book are in the show notes.
And hey, if you're ready to explore your own healing journey
in a deeper way, especially through the body, I'd love to
support you with the somatic work that I do.
You can always find me at Somatic Healing Journeys.
Dot com. There's more info there about
how we can work together. Also, if you are someone who has
(47:50):
a unique or out-of-the-box healing modality and think you'd
be a good fit for the show, I would love to hear from you.
Just shoot me an e-mail at mindyourownkarma@gmail.com.
Let me know what you do and how it helps people.
And let's get you on the. Podcast.
All right, Karma crew. Until next time.
(48:10):
Take what you need and leave what you don't.
And always remember to mind yourown.
Karma. I'll see you next time.
Hey there, it's Melissa Brunetti.
And welcome to the Mind Your OwnKarma podcast.
Hey there Karma crew. Thanks for joining me for this
episode of Mind Your Own Karma. My guest today is Joan K Peters.
(00:24):
She isn't just a writer, she's abrave.
Excavator of the Soul. A professor emeritus with a PhD
in comparative literature from the University of Chicago, Joan
spent years teaching others to analyze great stories until she
found herself inside one of her own.
In Untangling, a memoir of psychoanalysis, she pulls back
(00:45):
the curtain on decades of therapy, dream work, and quiet
but profound trauma. It's a rare and raw look at what
it really takes to heal. She now lives in Ojai, CA with
her husband, some dogs and a fewchickens who've.
Probably heard all of it. It's time to RIP off the bandage
on Psychoanalysis with Joan K Peters.
(01:11):
We are welcoming Joan Peters to the show today.
Hi, Joan. Hi, nice to be here.
You. Yeah.
Nice to meet you finally. I'm super excited to dive into
psychoanalysis. I never really thought about how
it was different from traditional therapy.
So I'm super excited to learn that part and how it brought you
(01:31):
profound healing as well. But first, you wrote a book
called Untangling and you describe it as a memoir and a
journey through psychoanalysis. Talk about your journey, your
personal journey and seeking psychoanalysis.
Why did you seek that? You know, I didn't know what
psychoanalysis was and I had no particular interest, but it all
(01:56):
started for me with nightmares. And I had a really great life at
the time. I was 27, had pretty much
everything I wanted, a great partner, living in New York, a
great job. And yet I had these nightmares
that would wake me and I'd be screaming.
(02:17):
And it was the same nightmare over and over.
Slightly different version, but essentially people running after
me with a needle that they wouldinject into me and it would just
take all my strength and I couldn't fight them off and they
would destroy me. And that's when I would wake up
(02:37):
screaming and I really paid no attention.
I would just get up and go back to sleep.
But my partner said one day, youknow, people don't wake up
twice, three times a week screaming it with nightmares.
And it never occurred to me thatthere was something wrong.
I just thought if I could function.
(02:58):
And the day, I was fine. And I went to find a therapist
who turned out to be a psychoanalyst.
And we started out with regular therapy where I would just tell
her about my life and what I thought were my issues.
And we came back over and over to that dream.
(03:20):
And I think the dream work is very much a part of
psychoanalysis, not so much in therapy.
And I was. Very unaware of what?
Dreams were. About or what?
What my? Psyche was who even knew you had
a psyche and and in the process.Of it took about six months of
(03:47):
coming back to that dream. Over and over.
And the needles. And she would tell me to go ask
my mother about my early, early life as a child when my father
died when I was 2A. Long and difficult death.
From cancer, we. Did not have a lot.
Of money lived in a. Tiny little apartment and bingo.
(04:11):
One day she told me how she would give him morphine
injections and how she would fixthem in the kitchen and practice
before she went to actually plunge.
The needle into his arm and I was.
Too, I, I saw that, you know, 2 year olds.
(04:31):
I really understood it when I had a 2 year old and saw how
observant she was. And my mother had always said if
I asked her a question about my father's death, she'd say, oh,
you were children. You didn't know anything about
it. And I think that's very standard
fare in a lot of families. But obviously, children do know.
(04:54):
They take it all in. And it was in there in my body.
And I think that's how a lot of people experience what gets
pushed down and not and, and thrown into silence and even
into taboo. It was, you know, I was never to
ask any questions and I only didbecause my therapist sent me
(05:19):
two. And when we we determined that
these morphine injections were very much a part of my very
early life, she said to me, my therapist, one day, little by
little, we put the story together and she connected the
(05:40):
needles with the morphine injections and went back, made
me go back more questions. Well, he got his first diagnosis
when I was born. And so, as she said to me one
day, you were the Angel of deathin your family.
And I had always felt that my mother was somehow repulsed by
(06:03):
me. You know, she didn't want to
hold me and touch me and hug me.And she was closer to my brother
and I, I really had a sense thatsomething was wrong.
And this is sort of what, you know, we determined was going on
(06:24):
that I was feeling my mother's akind of repulsion.
I was feeling the terror of these needles.
And my analyst who at this pointit, it became psychoanalysis
because you can see how much deeper it went.
And she began to say you was. Were.
(06:45):
Were. Frightened of the needles, you
saw your father wasting away andassumed she was giving him
injections that were destroying him and that maybe she would
destroy you now. I didn't believe it.
It didn't make any sense to me. Why would she want to destroy
me? But after she told me that, six
(07:08):
months into this therapy, my nightmares stopped.
And as I say, that was the moment for me where I understood
what the unconscious was. And there's a whole world in
there and, and you need somebodywho can speak to that and help
(07:30):
you express that, which comes out through free association,
lying on a couch saying whatevercomes to mind.
And you have to surrender to this sort of irrational, strange
world that you find yourself in.But I was so amazed by the
(07:55):
relief of of not of understanding where are these
nightmares came from and what itwas all about that I, I had the
strength, it gave me the strength to pursue it and find
out more and more about my unconscious and the way it was
(08:15):
affecting my everyday life, you know, my decision making, all
kinds of things. And I think we all have some
version of that pattern where wedo things in our daily life and
we don't even understand why. And that's the why is in our
(08:37):
unconscious. You know, people think children
don't remember it. So, you know, how can it affect
you and how the perception of what you are taking in at that
age and how the perception of what's happening effects you
down the road? Maybe not exactly the truth of
(08:58):
what was happening 'cause I guess your mom was, you know,
trying to help him. But in your eyes, you know, the
perception of it was that she was hurting him because of what
you were seeing, how he he reacted and how that gets stored
as an adult, like in your dreamsand stuff.
That's just so interesting. What is the difference between
traditional therapy and psychoanalysis in a nutshell for
(09:21):
those of us that don't know? This is an example of it where
you in in therapy, you work out your problems, you become aware
of patterns and you try and use your conscious understanding of
these patterns. Let's say you choose the wrong
boyfriends all the time where you have terrible difficulties
(09:44):
with work and failure and whatever these patterns are and
you don't know why they're happening you, you get a lot of
help and support or your confidence and so on.
But it probably for me, for example, I had tried therapy
throughout my life a couple of times different times.
(10:07):
At one point, for example, I washaving difficulty with my
teenage daughter who doesn't andand I wanted help and when I was
discussing it with the therapistwho was very behavior oriented,
if you do this, she'll react this way and you'll get a better
(10:28):
outcome if you do this. But I kept coming back to my own
mother and how it related to howmy mother treated me and she did
not want to go there. She said leave that aside.
Let's just talk about how you can make your relationship
better. And I think analysis goes into
(10:52):
the past and really invites you to go as deep as you can go, if
that's where the answers are. For me, they were.
So in that situation, for example, underneath my
difficulties with my daughter and the and the way I would
behave with her, what I had to understand is it was coming from
(11:15):
a deep seated fear that she. Wouldn't love me anymore.
If I was strict with her. Or.
Set those boundaries or expectedsomething specific of her.
And I, I couldn't do it. I was I was operating out of
the. Fear I didn't even know I had
until I explored the. Fact that I had.
(11:38):
Always been afraid. My mother wouldn't love me.
Going. Back to that sense of.
Her feeling repulsed by me and also.
That she was just a very aloof woman who wasn't warm and cozy
and affectionate and that. I had.
Projected that on to my daughterand once I understood that and
(11:58):
my analyst. Said to me children.
Love their parents. Why wouldn't she love you?
You know that again. It was one of those Eureka
moments. I didn't.
I never. Thought of that.
I was always just in my own tangled world of fear that she,
(12:21):
other people wouldn't love me. And I could never, I could never
assume that people would love meback.
So that's analysis. It takes you into that deeper
level of the psyche really operating all the time.
And you know, you don't see it well if people have not been
(12:44):
traumatized. Then maybe they don't need.
To go that deep therapy. May be just fine, but for me it.
Wasn't I was too tangled up and I had to.
Kind of go down in there to findthe answers, yeah.
How was that with your background as being a professor
and kind of, you know, left brained, trying to access that
(13:09):
imaginary world, that inner world, how was that difficult to
do? So difficult.
And you hit the nail on the head.
I had kind of hidden in my intellectual world because that
didn't feel so bad to me. I didn't have to confront the
fears that people wouldn't love me or anything.
(13:31):
I just, you know, I was, I was very focused on work and on
achievement. And I also approached other
people in a very intellectual way.
I was so afraid that they wouldn't love me back, or that I
was afraid of really knowing howmuch I loved the people.
(13:54):
I loved that I kept people at a distance.
And again, that was my pattern. I didn't know I was doing that.
I only experienced them as not being close with me, but really
I was keeping them away. And one of the things that
happens in psychoanalysis that does not happen in therapy is
(14:17):
transference. And what happened with my
analyst is I began to keep her at a distance and and as she
began to point out, I wouldn't every time she got tried to get
close to me or express affectionfor me, I would say you, you
(14:37):
hardly know me. You know, we don't know each
other. I'm paying you for this.
I just wanted her to help me interpret dreams and and get on
with it. And, and that's in that
relationship. Gradually I saw how I kept the
world away from me and then feltit as the world staying away
(15:02):
from me instead of me doing it. So that's again, that's the
level of analysis the the psychewith dream work, free
association, that's how you findit and with your relationship
with your analyst. And again, that's different from
therapy where it's not focused on your relationship with your
(15:26):
analyst, it's focused on, you know, the analysts supportive
you, which is pretty consistent.So it it, it, it's a different
thing that's going on. How long do you think it kind of
took you to get to that breakthrough where you kind of
were trusting the process more? You know my analyst, actually I
(15:50):
quote it in the book, she said to me.
It's taken you 2 years to see meas someone who wants to help you
and care about you. You, you just kept me at, you
know, at Bay. I, I, I would reject her
offerings of care and love. And you know, the way I saw it,
(16:15):
we were two people working on mypsyche.
You know, we were, we were a little team of, of I wanted her
interpretations, not her emotions.
But the truth is, of course I wanted her emotions.
We want people to like us. We want people to care, to be
engaged. We and we gradually become
(16:38):
engaged with them. You know we're we're humans are
are made for love. You know they're made for
connection. We're.
Born with it, yeah. I think because you kept going
back, obviously you were wantingthat and but not trusting it
sounds like. Well, I'm not even acknowledging
(16:59):
it until, you know, it was two years in and I, I just fell into
the understanding. I had a vacation.
I just took a vacation. I wanted to go on a trip to
Alaska. I was gone for two months and I
panicked. I needed her.
(17:19):
I don't know. It was the first.
That's how it happened. It was the first time I
acknowledged how much I cared about her, needed to be near
her, with her, hear her. And that was two years in.
That's how long it took. Yeah, that's amazing.
So you've said that healing isn't always comfortable or
(17:40):
pretty. What was the most surprising or
even messy part of your healing journey that you feel like
others kind of avoid or don't want to talk about?
You know, the hardest part was what I just told you.
I mean, for me, this was something I avoided all my life.
It was so painful to me to see who I was inside as somebody who
(18:06):
was very dependent on another person.
Now this stranger who I was paying, suddenly she was so
important to me. I felt needy and vulnerable.
And I had to go through all the fears that she wouldn't be there
for me, that she'd leave me, that she'd go away, that she
(18:30):
would say, I can't work with youanymore.
And all of those things were horribly painful to me.
And I had always sort of been able to avoid them in my life by
my intellectual distances. But I, I acted them out so over
(18:51):
and over, I would find myself having all kinds of emotions
about my friends. You know, that my fear that they
weren't going to be there the next time I called or if they
didn't call me back quickly enough, they don't love me
anymore. So I was experiencing it, but
(19:12):
not really acknowledging it. So I couldn't work on it.
But once I began and I began to allow myself to have all the
feelings I had for my analyst, it was kind of torture.
I, I really had never, I, I never, I never allowed myself to
(19:36):
feel that way towards my mother.That's really the central point,
because my mother was not an affectionate person.
She was not reassuring so so I Inever dared to need her in those
ways. And what was coming out was the
(19:57):
part of me I had rejected because it was too dangerous as
a child to feel those feelings. And I think, again, a lot of
people have areas of their life that they can't acknowledge or
don't understand. You know, such as, for example,
(20:17):
I mean, of a common kind of likewomen who maybe choose the wrong
partners and they wonder how is that happening?
There's something in their lives, their early lives that
it, you know, is they're not understanding.
They're it's their psyche is in control.
And something back there seemed to go over and over and over
(20:43):
trying to get love from, let's say, a man or a partner that
never works out, you know, wheredid that patterning begin?
How did it get planted in the psyche?
What's? Making that behavior happen and.
Those are very painful things torecognize.
That's why. That's why you don't.
You're not aware of them. Yeah.
(21:04):
How scary was it to try and be vulnerable in relationships and
what did that look like as you, you know, went through maybe
with your husband or your daughter?
Well, oddly enough, in my life, my husband was my one safe
person. I always knew we'd be there for
(21:24):
each other. I never worried he'd leave me.
He was my analyst even said he was the one person I trusted
unconditionally. Why?
I'm not sure, but I think it's because the one person in my
life who I trusted in my soul was my older brother.
And he was a model for me of I knew he loved me.
(21:51):
He would laugh at my jokes. He would, he would protect me.
He would, I, I mean, he would. If anybody had tried to hurt me
on the streets of New York or whatever where I grew up, he
would have come to my defense ina second.
He was always trying to teach methings.
He tried to make me ready for the world.
(22:13):
And when he went off to college,he would bring me home books.
You read this, he would say. And I really felt loved by him.
And so I think I automatically trusted a man who in many ways
resembled him, who I chose someone who was that rock solid,
(22:36):
decent person who was very loving to women.
So I think that's why I trusted him.
So it didn't act out there, but the vulnerability I, I was able
to bring that home and admit much more than I had ever done
(22:57):
before. Why I behaved when I felt hurt,
what was upsetting me. And I saw how in our
relationship, I had been very controlling because I was
actually trying to control my psyche and all of these
emotions. But the only way I knew to do
(23:19):
that was to control my environment, my life.
So I had to choose all of our vacations.
I had to choose how we set up the household.
I had to choose how we raised our daughter and the
vulnerability came through with a marvelous lifting of that
control and he was right there ready for it and grateful for
(23:44):
it. He was an easygoing, He was, he
is an easygoing guy. So he let that happen, the
control. And I was always very respectful
of him and his needs. But this was a a, a wonderful
change in our relationship when I was able to let go of a lot of
my fears. I didn't have to hold on to to
(24:07):
my life so tightly. And it's it's such a pleasure to
live without those kinds of anxieties.
So yeah, that was a big a big plus.
Yeah, I was going to say it sounds very freeing, but scary
too at the same time, I mean. It was so scary.
I had never lived without the strictures and controls and
(24:31):
compulsions. I'm one of those, you know, very
obsessive compulsive people. Everything has to be because
that's, I didn't have outside reassurances for my parents.
I mean, they always told me you could, you know, do anything you
want, be anything you want, but they couldn't really help me.
(24:52):
And I was out there on my own more than I, more than I was
really capable of. And so I had to kind of try and
exert all these controls in my life because I was really scared
underneath that I wasn't prepared or wasn't ready.
And now I can see how life flows.
(25:14):
But the scary part of coming, coming to know the vulnerability
that's inside you, that's very frightening.
When it started to pour out of me in analysis and, and it, it
did so over a period of years, Ihad to, I, I mean, I had to have
(25:38):
all kinds of transitional objects, you know, like little,
little kids, toddlers have theirteddy bears.
I had versions of teddy bears. I would have I would have music
that I would listen to obsessively that would calm me
when I was having these these just incredible upsets about how
(26:01):
vulnerable I felt like I couldn't stand it feeling I, I,
you know, I had really not allowed myself to feel that way.
I was tough and I expected toughness of the people around
me and with my students. For example, I used to be known
as a really tough professor. You know, you had your papers in
(26:22):
on time, you came to glass prepared you.
I was really, and I saw it as having high expectations of my
students. But really what happened was.
More and more. I began to see if I allowed
them, if I, if I was incredibly trusting of them and let them if
(26:46):
they had to get a late paper in.No problem.
Tell me all about it. What happened in your life?
I became this very maternal loving teacher and I got even
better results than being a kindof military professor.
So that's how it it affected my life and the and the lives of
(27:07):
the people around me. Yeah, so you were talking about
how tough it got and you had some coping mechanisms.
What kept you from what kept yougoing?
What kept you from quitting in those hard moments?
Yeah. For one thing, I had an analyst
who was warm and caring and really smart in her
(27:31):
interpretations of my life, and that was so illuminating.
It was so enlightening that you come back from for more.
Even though it's scary, you kindof know, or at least I knew,
that health was right there and that even if it was hard, there
(27:53):
was something in that consultingroom that was nourishing me in a
way that I had never been nourished and was untangling me.
That's why I named my book Untangling.
And the relief was great. Yeah.
How would if someone how would someone know if they're ready
for psychoanalysis or going deeper?
(28:17):
I think the way that they know there are a, there are a few
very concrete things if you begin work with therapy.
I mean, there are many therapists who are also trained
as an, as analysts and they, their practice may be mostly
just therapy with maybe two or three analysis.
(28:39):
They're called people who were in analysis because it's very
demanding of the therapist. So there are many people who do
both. But if you're in therapy and you
have a kind of frustration the way I did with a therapist, who
isn't allowing you to go into a place where you think you need
(29:00):
to go in order to understand howyou're relating to your child or
how you're relating to your partner.
Or that there's something that you know, or, or, or just that
they're not investigating this fear that's underneath you or
the nature of the depression that you feel.
(29:24):
And you, you, you kind of know that there's something missing.
That's, that's one thing. Another thing is if the
therapist isn't helping you to resolve your problems, they may
be too tangled up to use that word again for mere therapy.
And again, you know, there are, are there a lot of analysts who
(29:50):
not only do analysis, but who can, if they can't do it with
you in the institutes where theytrain analysts, there are
training analysts, young analysts in training who you can
work with for. A much lower price than someone
(30:13):
who has many, many years of experience.
And my first analyst was exactlythat.
She was. I was 27, she probably was 30.
And she had a tape. Recorder and taped all my.
Sessions because she had to. Discuss them with her
supervisor. But it was. $25 a session and
(30:35):
that's what I could afford. So it worked and and so that's
something to consider if you want to look into.
This and it depends on how much you feel.
You're missing in your life. You know.
How how maybe how anxious you feel and you.
(30:56):
You don't. Think you need to feel that way
or? For me.
I would fall, I would. I had a wonderful life and yet I
would fall into these depressions very easily if
something went wrong. And that doesn't happen anymore.
And I think if people are not getting making progress with
(31:17):
those kinds of issues, it may beworth looking into a more
detailed kind of therapy. Yeah, I do somatic therapy.
I have a practice here in town and this resonates a lot with
what I do as well. A lot of the things that you're
(31:38):
saying and how exactly the the people I'm looking for or that
are right have already tried other modalities.
That's right, EMDR or, you know,talk therapy.
And they just feel like there's still something there.
There's still something there, so.
Yeah. And to your point, my analyst at
(31:59):
a certain point sent me to somatic therapy.
But you do want to try other modalities when when the one
that you're using doesn't address a particular problem.
I love when there's some collaboration with your team.
That's right that your. Team, your person doesn't think,
(32:19):
oh, I'm, I'm going to fix you, you know, I got this.
When they realize that maybe this is out of my scope and
they're able to, you know, send you to somebody else, that's
when you know you have a good therapist.
That's that's very true. And by the way, she sent me to
EMDR before somatic, which and the EMDR just didn't speak to me
at all. And you know, she's, she's very,
(32:43):
you know, let's, let's experiment here.
Let's see how to solve this problem.
Yeah, that's awesome. I always say everybody has their
own healing combination. That's right.
Combination changes as you evolve and grow.
And you know, you can, you can grow out of a certain modality
or like you said, it might not fit or feel right for you, but
(33:04):
it's out there. So keep looking.
Just keep looking. So you talk about the power of
telling our stories, even the painful ones.
Why do you think that's so important?
I think it goes back to the first question you asked me and
the silence that so many families have about what really
(33:26):
is going on or has gone on in their lives.
And I think we. As as children carry that
silence with us and telling our stories is a.
Way of breaking that very painful silence and normalizing
(33:47):
what's happened to you I I I spoke with one woman for
example, who she and her sister would go to find their father
who was drinking in a whatever aa bar with his friends all the
time and they would drag him home for dinner and he was drunk
(34:11):
and. The two of them learned to never
even speak. About what they were.
Doing at 8 years old, being sentby the mother.
And how that? Affected them and I think you
learn that they. Learned that their mother.
Was too upset by this, she was so trying.
To have a normal family. And she didn't, you know, her
(34:34):
way of handling it like my mother was, let's never mention
it again. So I had a father who died when
I was two. We never spoke his name again.
We never saw a picture, never mentioned.
It didn't happen. And I think that so many.
People when they begin to. Tell their story.
(34:55):
The relief is tremendous becauseyou're saying what couldn't be
said and got had to be expressed.
Through your body or through? Destructive behaviors or your
own addictions or or whatever itis and suddenly you put it into
words and you realize how many other people have had the same
(35:19):
situation. In this case, the two sisters
were able to talk about it. My brother and I can talk about
it, and it's only really since Iwrote this book and he read it
that we have been talking with each other in a certain sense
(35:40):
non-stop. It's given us permission to
really talk about what happened to us.
Not to blame. It's not the blame game.
It's to say that really affectedus.
That was really hard. And to.
Remember together what the details.
Were. If you have someone.
(36:02):
Who you can? Tell about it or to share it
with who was there as well, a sibling or a neighbor?
Or a best friend. From childhood, it it it has it
has an incredible healing effect.
Yeah, definitely. That whole validation and the
(36:25):
freedom to speak of things that you don't think that you're
supposed to talk about. That's right.
It's like, wait, we're not supposed to talk about that.
I know I felt that way when I started diving into the adoptee
community. I found some Facebook groups and
I was like, oh, this will be fun.
I'll join an adoptee group. And then I was like, they're,
they're bringing up all kinds ofstuff.
(36:46):
And I'm like supposed to talk about that.
What are we doing here, you know?
But then it was so freeing for me to be able to explore how do
I feel about that too? So that opened up a lot for me.
And that's why I had done two years of the podcast talking to
adoptees after that, I'm like, we need to, we need to educate
the world. Like we need to.
(37:07):
There's adoptees out there that feel totally alone, like we need
to tell them that because we allfelt that way.
We felt like we were the only ones adopted, you know?
Yeah. So I was like.
We need to put. That into the world.
Yeah, that's it, That's it. And how has that changed your
life? Just to be able to talk.
About in in so many ways, so many ways.
I mean, I couldn't even, I can'teven start.
(37:30):
But part of that was doing my somatic therapy, you know, that
I was doing for myself. And that brought up a lot of
stuff, a lot of healing between my birth mother and how I felt
about her relinquishing me in the 1st place.
And 'cause I, we always had kindof a tumultuous relationship
(37:53):
where she would keep rejecting me and then come back and say
sorry. And then, you know, so I was
getting rejected kind of over and over and over again by her
without realizing that the trauma that she went through and
that she was operating from her lived experience.
And once I realized that, it changed everything for me, you
(38:16):
know? But, you know, I wouldn't have
done therapy. I wouldn't have.
I wouldn't have gotten that deep.
I wouldn't have gone that deep. Yeah.
But you bring up such an important point, which is once
you start exploring it, it givesyou more compassion for other
people, even people who hurt you.
Yeah. You see.
You see them as the victims of their circumstances.
(38:41):
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
It turns it from. It's my fault.
That's right. That's not my fault.
It's. Just.
From their lived experience. And that's so freeing, so
freeing. What did you find in your
relationship with your analyst? What did you value most about
(39:02):
that relationship? I valued her, her warmth, her
caring, and her intelligence. And by warmth and caring, what
is so striking for a patient in that relationship is that you
can act out. I mean, I could get mad at her.
(39:24):
I could withdraw from her all ofmy usual, you know, tools for,
for distancing and, and, and allof that.
And she would remain consistent.And I had not had that.
I wouldn't have dared to behave in that way as a child.
(39:49):
I couldn't do that. I mean, I would have meltdowns,
but they would be about, I don'tknow, you know, like, why don't
I comb my hair differently, you know, from my mother?
And then I'd yell at my mother. It it was not the real subjects.
We weren't talking about what really hurt us or upset us.
(40:12):
And with my analyst, she would hold on, stay with me if I got
angry or whatever until we unpacked it, as she would say.
And then? It was a revelation about what
was underneath this particular emotional withdrawal or anger or
(40:32):
upset, whatever it was. And I think that that was magic
to me. That was the healing that
somebody could be non reactive. She didn't let me push her away.
She didn't let me. She if I withdrew from her, she
(40:54):
was there when I came back. And that in itself you, you
learn that people can relate in a very loving way like that.
Right. Has your understanding of trauma
evolved since writing the book even?
Yes, enormously. I went at the beginning, I think
(41:16):
I thought, I think I thought I know that trauma to me was being
locked in a basement or being beaten by your alcoholic
stepfather or, you know, something awful.
And what I learned is it can be very ordinary.
My parents were, were good parents in many ways.
(41:37):
They bought us Christmas presents.
They I always had clean laundry in my drawers.
If something was really wrong, they were right there, you know,
medically or whatever. But they weren't warm and loving
in the way that I know. I tried to parent.
(41:59):
They just didn't have it. They were people who whose own
lives were very difficult in many ways, and they just didn't
have the the luxury of raising children that way.
And what I learned is that not having that kind of warmth and
tenderness and reassurance, is it self trauma to have a parent
(42:26):
who's depressed or withdrawn or unable to spontaneously respond
to your joy as a child? I think that's trauma.
And my mother was dealing with adying and dead husband at age 26
(42:46):
with two little children. You know, maybe she wasn't ready
for the joys of parenting and she had a terrible financial
burden on her hands. So, you know, I understand that
that's trauma and it really shaped my life without my
(43:08):
knowing it. You know, I thought everything's
fine. My mother married somebody else.
We moved on, as she said, and you just get on with it like she
did. That's how she had to deal.
So, you know, just get tough. She would got to be tough.
(43:30):
So if your healing journey had amessage for someone who's
struggling or feeling tangled, what would that message be?
The message would be a way of putting it is turn the light on
yourself and ask go back to thatchildhood and say how did that
(43:51):
affect me? And start to trust what you find
in looking at your family experience as a child, really,
really paying some attention to how did that affect me?
How did it make me feel? What even if it, even if you
(44:11):
think it's, it's wrong that you were, you know, maybe your
parents told you that you were too needy, you know, to just
stop it. You know, stop asking for
things, stop asking for more hugs or whatever to go back
there. How did that make you feel?
If your parent was very had highexpectations and you had to have
(44:37):
A's on your report card and joinevery team and be good at
whatever sport, how did that make you feel?
And you'll find you'll be able to untangle so much on your,
even on your own. Even on your own.
Yeah, that's a great place to start.
(44:57):
And I have that in my practice as well.
I have my clients write a list of what did your childhood tell
you about yourself? What did you learn about your or
what? What labels did you put on
yourself? You know those are.
Great, those are. Absolutely.
And it's and it and again, that's like, those are those
(45:18):
programs that are running in thebackground that you don't even
know are running and you put it down on paper and see it.
And it's just like, whoa, I didn't even think about that or
that that it should be affectingme anymore.
That's right. That and that's that's so
important. I think it should I've grown up.
I shouldn't be affected by that.You are.
(45:39):
Yeah, you know, it happened whenI was two years old.
Why? Yeah, but the psyche does not
forget. The body does not forget.
It does not. If, yeah, if you wanna, if you
wanna be free, I think you have to take a good look at your
psyche. Mm, hmm.
Well, where can we find you and your book and anything else
(46:01):
that's going on with you? Where can we find you?
So first thing is my book is on Amazon and Barnes and Nobles and
you can buy it there. It's in Kindle and and book
form. And also I have a website with
all kinds of with interviews andand essays I've done and and so
(46:22):
on. I also have a blog that I do for
Psychology Today and I have done2 blogs already but you can find
me at untanglingjoan.com That's my website and it's got all the
information. There.
Yeah, we will have that in the show notes.
Thanks so much for coming on today.
(46:43):
I totally enjoyed this conversation.
And again, just thank you for being vulnerable and writing
about your story and like we. Were saying how?
Important it is to tell our stories so that others feel
validated and not so alone. It's so, so important.
Thank you so much for coming on today.
(47:03):
And thank you so much for havingme.
I enjoyed this conversation too.Thank you, I absolutely loved
this conversation. With Joan.
I hope. Something she shared really
landed with you, maybe even gaveyou a little hope that the knots
that you're feeling right now can be untangled.
It might take time. But it is possible.
(47:26):
The links to Joan and her book are in the show notes.
And hey, if you're ready to explore your own healing journey
in a deeper way, especially through the body, I'd love to
support you with the somatic work that I do.
You can always find me at Somatic Healing Journeys.
Dot com. There's more info there about
how we can work together. Also, if you are someone who has
(47:50):
a unique or out-of-the-box healing modality and think you'd
be a good fit for the show, I would love to hear from you.
Just shoot me an e-mail at mindyourownkarma@gmail.com.
Let me know what you do and how it helps people.
And let's get you on the. Podcast.
All right, Karma crew. Until next time.
(48:10):
Take what you need and leave what you don't.
And always remember to mind yourown.
Karma. I'll see you next time.
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