We Won't Treat You Like Family (Season 1)

Welcome to episode one of The Stuck Stops Here,

Your source for humor and healing.

This is LW No Lie and I'm here with Tammy Recita-Atman.

What say you Tammy?

I'm a virgin podcaster,

So be gentle with me.

As far as my book goes,

I started writing the day after I decided to not kill myself.

So yeah,

It was kind of scary,

But we're going to find the humor in it,

So grab yourself a beer and let the healing begin.

Today,

We are talking about unhealed and unaddressed emotional damage caused by generations going back and never dealing with all the pain that they have due to a poor upbringing.

So you're talking about toxic family.

Toxic family.

Generational dysfunction.

Yes.

I started doing some research and mine goes back over a hundred years when you start to look into your history and you only start to do that when you decide to wake up,

That you don't really like where you're at and you're sick of blaming everybody else.

At that point,

You're going to start to look at why,

How come,

What can be different,

How can I be different,

How can I be better,

Because being stuck where you're at is no longer acceptable.

So you were able to look back a hundred years in your family generation?

I did.

The day after I decided to proceed with living,

I.

.

.

And may I say I'm glad you did.

Thank you,

Thank you.

You might be the only one.

I started searching the internet and that's a very common thing for people to do when they start to wake up,

Is search the internet.

What were some of your search words?

Disfunction,

Suicidal thoughts,

Depression,

Anxiety,

Parenting.

I wish I could remember the exact phrases I used,

But it was definitely on those lines.

Did a lot of things come up with those subjects?

Oh yeah,

Including vomit.

When I started realizing how many times I was verbally assaulted and then as my parents were verbally assaulted,

Yeah,

You get a little nauseous.

Wow.

Yeah.

Trust me,

I am not alone.

So we're back.

Recently,

A movie came out about Elton John called Rocket Man.

You mentioned something about that,

Tammy,

You wanted to tell me.

So what was fascinating to me is he was 25 years old,

Doing what he loved and making millions of dollars at it.

And he was addicted to drugs because he could never,

Ever get over his father's rejection.

So the point being is as successful as we may be,

As many overachievers can support,

If you have been rejected by your parents from a very young age,

Nothing will cure it until you are aware of it and distance yourself from it by saying they were incapable,

I am not the flawed one.

True.

You almost have to learn how to love yourself and give yourself what your parents didn't give you.

Yeah.

I call it unlearning and relearning,

As well as all the experts will call it reparenting.

Yeah.

What about the healing of the inner child?

The inner child is a great subject,

Inner child,

Inner critic.

So when you are zero,

Four months,

Nine months,

One,

Two,

Your whole world is your parents.

And if they are not paying attention to you,

Dismissive,

Angry,

Tense,

Any of those things that make you feel like you are not good enough,

Then you will grow up with a big hole in your soul as a result of that.

And it goes beyond,

You know,

Even if you had all your physical needs met,

I mean,

Again,

We'll go back to Elton John.

He was fed,

He was clothed,

They paid for his panel lessons.

It didn't matter.

It didn't matter.

All he needed was love.

He needed his father to hug him.

And until you distant yourself from that need,

And one of the important steps to take for that is grieve the loss of people who are still alive.

That's really the big step to take because they are never going to give you what you need,

So you have to give you what you need.

That only begins by mourning that loss.

Because nobody really wants to face the fact that they're unlovable or that their parents,

You know,

The people that brought you into this world don't give a shit about you.

Why would you give a shit about you?

That's true.

So you don't feel loved.

So why are you saying to actually distance yourself to the point where you are estranged from your parents?

Excellent question.

I could kiss you.

There's two different things.

There are two different things.

That's called low contact and no contact.

Low contact has another name called gray rock,

The gray rock method.

Gray rock method is described as if you were holding a gray rock or looking at a gray rock,

It doesn't do anything.

You don't react to it.

It doesn't react to you.

That's the whole disengagement.

And that would be used in low contact.

Or I've been using it in low contact.

I want to try to speak only for me.

I use it is no matter what they do,

No matter how they try to pull the strings or verbal manipulations or the silent treatment,

It no longer means anything.

And that's where they can't hurt you.

And that's where the power lies.

Some people have to go no contact because it's so toxic that being in their presence or what happens,

The situations that arise out of being with them is so awful.

It's not worth it.

Some people would say that they would suffer just so they wouldn't be alone.

They'd say,

Well,

I'd rather have them than nobody.

But do you think that's worth it in your case?

Well,

You could be alone or you could be around people that make you feel lonely.

Your choice.

Now,

You wrote this book,

The Stuck Stops Here that you just published.

Correct.

And in the book,

Which I read,

You tell a lot of personal stories about your upbringing,

About your life.

I do.

And you have many,

Many subjects that you cover in this concept.

Tell me some of them.

Great question.

So,

One of the things that I address,

And I address everything in the book based on resources that I used and my interpretation of those resources and how I applied them to my own life.

So,

I'm speaking for myself.

One of the things I mention is what's called the deification of parents.

Deification is a very fancy word for making godlike.

And when you have honor thy mother and father,

Well entrenched in our culture,

The thought of ever questioning them is nonexistent.

It just doesn't happen.

So,

When you have parents and grandparents or family history of personality disorders,

And I'll get into personality disorders at some point,

But they're very rarely curable and they're very toxic,

They exploit that concept of deification and the fact that they're gods and holier than now to their advantage,

To browbeat kids into submission.

Again,

None of this is physical.

My experience was not physical.

It's not physical.

It's emotional.

It's spiritual.

And it's familial.

You play by the rules that they set,

Regardless of whether they are healthy or they work for you.

Why would they do something like that?

It's a sense of control over their environment that they didn't have as their own children,

As kids.

They were treated the same way.

So I actually have some empathy for them.

They are responsible for fixing themselves just as much as they're responsible for passing on the pain.

It's always a choice.

And sometimes,

A lot of times,

People don't hit rock bottom that would warrant a change,

That incentivizes a change.

What happens is they're just chronically miserable and it's comfortable.

It's almost what they know.

And so to give up that chronic misery is almost like giving up a form of identity for them.

So what happened to you when you discovered that your parents were not the gods you thought they were?

Initially,

I was pretty angry because when you truly wake up and gain awareness,

Based on all the things that I've read,

Your first reaction is,

Holy shit,

I was really robbed.

I did not have a good childhood.

I did not have any fun.

I look back and I just only remember misery,

Stress,

Pain,

Anxiety.

And I didn't get to be a kid.

And I think when you approach,

If you choose to wake up and become aware and you realize that you have a lost childhood,

That kind of sucks.

Do you think that happens to a lot of people?

I will tell you that everything that I've researched,

All the websites and the books that I've read,

There are thousands and thousands of people.

The books I've read,

I look at the reviews,

Hundreds and hundreds of reviews of people are reading this book.

And because,

An example,

Narcissistic personality disorder,

People don't think that's part of being a narcissist.

You've never done anything wrong.

They don't go in to a therapist and say,

Look,

I've done something wrong.

Oh,

They don't think there's anything wrong with them.

So you can never actually quantify how much of the population has narcissistic personality disorder.

And the only way to eradicate it is awareness.

Because if you are raised with narcissistic parents,

You generally turn out to be a narcissist yourself or severely codependent.

And severely codependent,

In the short explanation,

Is a self-love deficit disorder.

And that phrase comes from Ross Rosenberg,

Who has written books and run seminars,

Fantastic source of information.

That's Ross Rosenberg.

He renamed itself love deficit disorder because that's kind of what codependency is.

You are hypervigilant to your surroundings.

Is it safe?

Because you're surrounded by people who have rage issues.

And so your whole goal is to avoid instigating a rage or a fight.

So you're essentially living in fear.

Yep.

All the time.

You say codependent,

I mean,

I understand that term quite well.

I think it's just the feeling of living for the sake of somebody else.

You never get to be yourself or follow your beliefs or what you want to do in life.

You're so caught up in making that other person happy and making sure that they are happy with you.

Very accurate,

100% accurate.

But it's not even just other person.

It's everybody you encounter personally and professionally.

Because you were taught at zero,

Nine months,

Two years old and five years old,

That that was the reason for your existence.

So why would you know to do anything different?

You repeat what you don't repair.

This is LW No Lie.

And I'm talking with Tammy Recita-Atman.

This is our first episode of our podcast called The Stuck Stops Here.

So Tammy,

We're talking about family dysfunction.

What do you want to say about emotional abuse?

Great question.

One of the things that sticks with me pretty deeply is the fact that with emotional abuse,

There's no scars.

There's no bruises to point to you saying this is what's happening.

So you can't prove it.

You can't prove it.

You're not going to call child welfare saying,

My mom just said I sucked again.

You can't do anything about it.

But the emotional abuse is any harsh non-physical abuse.

Silent treatment,

Hyper criticism,

Verbal forms of rejection,

Overt and covert,

Hostility.

All those types of behaviors send a message that you're not important.

How traumatizing and damaging is that to a kid?

What that does is they spend their whole lives proving or trying to prove that they are important.

They have a right to exist.

So even though no one's ever laid a hand on them,

There is an invisible scar inside every single kid that was basically told that in one way or another that he or she is not worth it.

And they think it's their fault.

Exactly.

Because you must be doing something wrong.

If these godlike parents keep disapproving of everything you're doing or dismissing of everything you're doing or criticizing everything you're doing,

They must be right.

Is that why you felt like,

I mean,

All joking aside,

Like you felt like you wanted to kill yourself?

So great question.

I was severely codependent.

So I'm going to repeat,

Codependency is an unhealthy dependence on external success,

External validation.

So I'm not trying to minimize drug abuse,

But my drug of choice was achieving something,

A trophy,

A business,

Something.

It was an addiction that I could show people,

See,

I have value.

I am not a piece of shit.

So you equated success with being valid,

Let's say.

And I use the term success loosely,

But it's something,

Oh,

If I won a road race or my fitness class I taught was packed or anything that was visible,

I call it a trophy disorder.

Destination addiction.

That's Dr.

Robert Holden coined that phrase.

Destination addiction is,

Okay,

If I do this,

Then I'll be happy.

If I go here,

I'll be happy.

If I buy this,

I'll be happy.

If I achieve this,

I'll be happy.

So what it is is happiness is always in the next place.

It's never where you're at.

And that's part of being codependent and that's part of being told that you are not important.

Or you'll never be good enough.

Never be good enough,

Ever.

That's devastating.

It is.

It is.

There are millions of people with beautiful homes,

A nice car,

Closet full of clothes that feel that way.

That are miserable.

That are absolutely miserable.

It's not about money or being skinny or achieving the things you think you need to achieve in life.

You have to find that inner love for yourself and inner happiness.

See on external events or situations or things to make you happy.

It's like filling a bottomless pit.

It's never going to work.

I found that out the hard way.

So what prompted you to write the book,

The Stuck Stops Here?

I started writing as a healing,

As part of my healing journey.

Always writing about the things that I learned,

What I thought about the things I was reading and how that applied to my upbringing and how I ended up where I was at.

One of the things that always was,

That still kind of confuses me is how well I could compartmentalize.

I could play two roles.

I would be the absolute parent to my daughters that I was not.

But the minute that I wasn't parenting them,

This whole other side of me took over.

So that's where we talked about re-parenting yourself.

Parenting my daughters the way I wasn't while simultaneously trying to re-parent myself was a pretty overwhelming task.

I'm sure it was probably confusing.

And I was just burdened with self-neglect,

Misguided passions.

And I was always role playing.

And I made a huge mistake as a result of this destination addiction.

And I partnered with somebody in a business venture that I should have never done.

The reason why I should have never done it,

Everyone makes mistakes.

I've made a trillion mistakes reading my book.

I call it the Meryl Streep of fuck-ups.

If I had an Academy Award for every mistake I made,

I'd be Meryl Streep.

But this particular one,

This partner did not live up to the business agreement.

And it ended up destroying me.

It was a toxic relationship.

It was,

Yes,

I now know that my former business partner is a malignant narcissist,

Which is a pretty terrible person.

Pretty terrible person if you start reading it.

If only you would have known that before you went into business with him.

Or been able to recognize it.

If,

Again,

It comes to self-awareness,

If you know yourself,

You won't make these mistakes.

I keep reading all these books,

These women who are on second marriages and third marriages and have strained relationship with their children and they don't know how or why they got there.

And it really is just a slave to these emotional patterns that have been passed down from generation to generation.

So do they blame everybody else instead of just looking inward?

Oh,

Absolutely.

If I didn't achieve something or have any kind of event,

It could have been business related,

Fitness related,

Social related,

Anything.

If it wasn't the outcome I expected,

I got very angry and I blamed everybody else because if you got in my way of this bizarre goal that I had,

Then you're the reason that I'm unhappy.

The goal was supposed to make you valid in the eyes of your parents.

So if somebody got in the way of it,

You were going to fight them on it.

It's valid in the eyes of my parents,

Valid when I look in the mirror.

So there's no peace when I looked in the mirror.

There was,

What am I doing next?

How can I fix this?

It's the hamster wheel.

And the only way for me to get off that hamster wheel was to hit rock bottom.

Wow.

And is that when you realize that you have a book here that might help other people?

When I wrote the,

As I started to write,

The book slowly started to come together saying,

Well,

If I can present this in a way,

I wrote the book in two voices since I was playing two roles most of my life,

Is the way I viewed experiences as they happened to me up until that very dark day that I thought I was going to end everything.

And then the second half of the book talks about what I learned and how it applied the realistic way of looking at what happened to me.

And there's thousands and thousands of people out there.

One of the resources is a life coach named Lisa A.

Romano.

She's fantastic.

She's called the Breakthrough Life Coach,

Lisa A.

Romano.

And she tells an amazing story about her recovery from being codependent.

Amazing.

So in her story,

She's published several books.

She has an amazing life coaching program.

Definitely if you don't want to do a therapist,

Check this out.

Check her out.

So her parents were not alcoholics,

But her grandparents were.

So her father was a narcissist.

Her mother was codependent.

And based on Lisa's story,

It was very common for children of alcoholics to become narcissists or codependent.

So they had horrible lives.

So she's talking about her grandparents speaking of alcoholics.

So when she first got therapy after divorcing,

I think she divorced a narcissist because she was severely codependent.

And when the therapist asked her,

Is there any alcoholism in their family?

She goes,

No,

Nobody drinks.

Parents didn't drink.

She didn't drink.

But she didn't know about her grandparents.

She did know.

But because they were alcoholics,

But nobody else was drinking,

There's no alcoholism.

But yet the effects remain.

So hence the generational dysfunction.

Yeah,

Exactly.

And there's a lot of similarities based on the resources I have read to having narcissistic parents and alcoholic parents.

A lot of the effects are the same,

Severe codependency being one of them.

Wow.

How were you able to trace back 100 years of the generations and find out all this information?

Who did you have to ask?

That's a good question.

I didn't ask anybody.

I just kept reading.

It was my own private hell that I wanted to climb out of.

And I didn't have any desire to ask anybody anything.

I wanted to do my own research.

And when I first discovered videos on narcissism,

Particularly narcissistic mothers and what happens to these daughters of narcissistic mothers,

And there's a million books out there,

In my book and on my website,

I have links to all the books that I've read and the resources.

And it was very helpful.

What's the website?

The StopsHere.

Com.

StopsHere.

Com.

Okay,

Go on.

And they talk about,

There's thousands and thousands of women on all of these websites that I've read,

Not just one.

Lisa A.

Romano,

I think,

Has 800,

000 followers.

And it's narcissism is a disease.

It's a disease.

And so,

I discovered that my mother was narcissistic.

And I know once I started looking at her family history in a different way,

Then I started to realize what caused that.

So she happens to be deaf.

So you throw physical challenge onto a narcissistic personality and you have quite a weapon.

So she doesn't like to say that she's deaf.

She's hearing impaired.

I get into that in my book as to why.

And she married her first husband,

My dad was a narcissist.

They got divorced because two narcissists,

Of course,

Would.

And then married an enabler.

And there's a lot that goes into narcissistic mothers and enabling fathers.

And they take the different forms and we'll get into that into another podcast.

But they take the,

Whether it's a passive role or an absentee role,

Where they're passive and they make excuses,

Oh,

That's just your mother.

Or they take a dismissive role where they'll always be out of the room so they don't even have to deal.

So basically,

You're being victimized twice by the narcissistic mother and the emotionally unconscious father.

Sounds like a vicious cycle.

Never ends.

Got back to that hamster wheel.

And what's crazy is how common it is.

And what happens is if you don't wake up and break these family patterns,

You're just going to keep passing them down.

So that's why I wrote the book.

Because if I can get some people to read my book and start looking at their life and their personality and their problems in a different way,

Awareness is everything.

Maybe they can reclaim their lives and reclaim their happiness and actually find a way to really love being alive.

I had a woman read my book and she told me that it changed her life.

She was getting ready to leave her husband.

And she realizes the role that she played in their unhappiness and decided to try fixing herself first.

You saved a marriage too.

For now anyway.

We'll see.

But at a bare minimum,

If she has some awareness,

She can parent her kids better so they don't go on to make the same mistake she did,

Even if that doesn't work out.

Speaking of family,

How does your husband and how do your kids feel about this new awakening?

Do they know what's been going on?

Do they see it?

They do.

I mean,

I'm so much more mellow and calm.

I don't yell.

I don't get angry anymore.

I mean,

I'm rational all the time.

And I say that because it was the complete antithesis of the way I used to be.

The reason why my daughters are not quite as scarred as I think they should have been is because I really did step out of that hyper anger mode with them.

Not as much as I should have.

And I did better with my youngest and my oldest.

And I apologize to my oldest all the time.

But sometimes,

You know,

Having kids also helps us discover things about ourselves and try to heal things about ourselves because we don't want our kids to be fucked up.

We want them to have great lives and to be happy.

I mean,

I vowed that I would raise my kids completely differently than the way I was raised.

You know,

Much less overprotective and giving them some freedom and trusting them.

And it's been great.

Yes,

They're quite successful.

They're both in the medical field.

Can I make an appointment?

I'm not feeling so good.

Too soon.

Too soon.

So,

Yes,

I mean,

My daughters definitely,

I always said,

It's your life.

You have to know if something doesn't feel right,

Use that little voice.

It's not right.

And don't do something to,

You know,

One of the things I tried to raise them,

Simple is getting good grades.

Don't do it because I'm going to get angry.

Do it because you have pride in yourself and that you want to always do your very best.

It's got nothing to do with me.

I'm going to,

You know,

I'm going to get old no matter what.

You know,

I'm going to get more wrinkles no matter what.

So it's your life.

But it's their life.

It's their life.

So it won't change my life if you do well,

But it will change yours.

So they definitely have a,

You know,

Very good work ethic and self-awareness instilled in them.

That's amazing.

For the,

Yes,

I mean,

My youngest definitely benefited from me mellowing out at a younger age,

But they come to me for things now and they seem to be doing okay.

That's great.

I work a lot with kids and parents sometimes ask me what can I do to support my kids or to make them happy or whatever.

And I always say support their choices because our kids aren't mini versions of ourselves.

Right?

They're their own people.

And if we support their choices in life,

Whatever those choices are,

You know,

Hopefully they're good choices.

But if we support the choices that they make,

Then they don't feel threatened.

They don't feel like they that they don't feel like we're fucking idiots.

Like they want to run away.

They feel like they want to tell us things and share with us and maybe get our advice or opinion on things and then we can share.

And that's a very good parent-child relationship.

Absolutely.

You know,

My high school,

My youngest came home.

She was having a bad day and she's yelling,

Yelling at me,

Yelling at the wall,

Yelling,

Stomping,

Stamping.

And you know,

It was during,

She must have had probably 12 exams,

You know,

It was legitimate.

And I didn't say anything.

I just sat there.

And she's like,

After,

You know,

Two or three minute terrain,

She's like,

Oh,

I feel better now.

She just needs to yell it out.

All right.

So but what a lot of times people think when they're externally based,

Why are you yelling at me?

Why?

She's not yelling at you.

Right.

She's venting.

It might,

She might not use the best words.

So let's say she chooses you suck.

Let's say she used terrible words.

I'm like,

You're having a bad day and you're starting to take it out on me.

I'd rather just talk when you're ready to discuss it without any name calling.

That's way better than don't you call me names.

Now everything's like on fire and you know.

Oh,

Because you didn't internalize it.

It wasn't about you.

Exactly.

I remember when one of my kids was like two years old,

She had a temper tantrum and she was stomping her feet on the floor and rolling around and crying.

And I just sat there and watched her until she was done and then she kept looking at me and I was like,

All right,

You're done.

And then she was.

Right.

As long as I wasn't in a supermarket.

No,

I don't like,

I didn't like to bring my kids to the supermarket when they were little.

Even now I don't like to bring them to the supermarket and they're in their twenties.

Well,

This has been great.

This is episode one of our show,

The Stuck Stops Here.

And we I'm LW Nolai and I'm talking with Tammy Recita-Atman and she has written a fantastic book called The Stuck Stops Here.

You can check it out on the Stuck Stops Here dot com.

It's actually on Amazon and it's on Amazon.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

I think you've heard of them.

It's fairly it's fairly reasonably priced.

Oh,

Very.

Yeah,

It's it's either one cup of Starbucks,

No,

Two cups of Starbucks coffee or four cups of Starbucks.

So instead of getting the acid reflux,

You can get the healing of Tammy's amazing book.

Exactly.

Awesome.

Let's hope you'll come back and check out episode two.

We don't even know what it's going to be yet.

Well,

How do I do for my Virgin podcast?

I think it did quite well.

This is also well,

This is my second podcast,

But this is my first podcast as a dialogue.

So I think we did pretty well.

I I'm giving me a high five.

I'll give you a high five.

I'll give you a high four and a half.

I'm just kidding.

That was us high five.

There we go.

All right.

There we go,

All right.

Talk to you soon,

Everybody.

Is this a fitter end or a bad new start?

Am I falling together or am I falling apart?

It hurts to be somewhere I don't belong.

Keep on keepin' on when the road gets long.

They push me down just to catch my fall.

Keep on keepin' on,

Hear what I have to call.

My wings were broken from towing at the bar.

Keep on leaving what is heavy behind.

Keep on keepin' on.

Is this a fitter end or a bad new start?

Keep on keepin' on when the road gets long.