Sometimes, You Can’t Go Home Again

[Jaunty Guitar Music]

Mike: Welcome, everybody. This is Avoiding the Addiction Affliction, brought to you by Westwords Consulting and the Kenosha County Substance Abuse Coalition. I'm Mike McGowan.

Mike: We all speak the language we were taught as children growing up. Some people, like my guest today, speak more than one language. We know what we are taught. And what we learn.

Mike: Well, what if the language you learned as a child is one of abuse and ridicule? Unfortunately, there are millions of children being brought up in neglectful and abusive homes. We're going to talk about that today with our guest, Dr. Ghazeleh Bailey. Ghazeleh is a certified therapist, couple therapist, supervisor, and trainer with a PhD in psychology.

Mike: She is based in Berlin, Germany and has a unique multicultural background and approach she uses to help people overcome childhood and generational trauma. Her work and research is focused on the healing power of emotion transformation and self compassion. Welcome, Ghazeleh.

Ghazeleh: Thank you, Mike, for having me.

Mike: I'm so pleased that you could join us. It's morning here and afternoon there, so it works out just fine. And it looks like sunny there, and it's also, looks like it's gonna be a sunny day here.

Ghazeleh: Absolutely. Yes, we are lucky to have sun in Berlin. It rarely happens.

Mike: Ghazeleh, I wanted to start with something I heard you say.

Mike: When children grow into adults and choose to distance themselves from their families, they are oftentimes shamed by others. It's your mom, it's your family. And you've, I heard you say, people rarely ask, what did they do to you?

Ghazeleh: Absolutely, Mike. Unfortunately, this is something that is not acknowledged by so many people, you know, the society, friends, family, no one really acknowledges how painful and hard it is to actually come to terms to having to make that difficult decision, right?

Ghazeleh: Who wants to go no contact and distance themselves from the family? Right? Who wants that? We hear what because we want to feel loved and connected, right? Who wants to spend Christmas alone? Or, you know, I have clients who grieve about the loss of the parents who are alive and it was such a difficult decision to make, but when you start this process of healing, you come also to terms and acknowledging and realizing how harmful some relationships are for you in your life.

Ghazeleh: And sometimes these people who are harmful are unfortunately your parents or grandparents or brothers or sisters, right? And so, for so many people who struggle with childhood emotional neglect, growing up with emotionally mature parents or dysfunctional families, it's already hard enough to set boundaries and know what they want and say what they want.

Ghazeleh: So, you know, they work hard to come to terms with knowing what they want, feeling what's good for them, feeling what's not good for them. So when they make that decision, it costs so much courage and it's so brave and it's so hard and painful. And then when they feel ashamed of having to distance themselves, it can be really, really lonely then because you feel like I've done all this work and now I'm being judged, right?

Ghazeleh: And it also has a lot to do with different kinds of cultures, Mike, because, you know. In traditional cultures, clients of my say clients, because some of my clients, you know, I work with hundreds... I feel like sometimes I have 10 different kinds of cultures here in a day. So some people from traditional cultures, they have also much more responsibilities towards families such as sending money back home, right? And I had just a client who paid the heart surgery for his sister in Pakistan. So, you know, when you have those kinds of responsibilities and you come to terms to distance yourself, it's even harder. And then in traditional cultures, it's even, you know, kind of not getting any kind of understanding because people are like, how can you do this to your family, right?

Ghazeleh: But more in individualistic cultures like the German one or the American one where it's more about and you know I live my life and it's more about the individual. It's more common that these things happen, right? But unfortunately, it's not acknowledged the way it should be in our society.

Mike: Well, and if you decide to distance yourself, normally people, when they go through a difficult time, their support system are the people who are closest to them.

Mike: Well, you're also then distancing yourself from your born into support system. So where do you find support?

Ghazeleh: Yeah. Well, you know, Mike, unfortunately not all parents are a support system, you know.

Mike: (laugh) We know.

Ghazeleh: From dysfunctional families, your parents are not your, or you know, your caregivers are not your support system and you feel like kind of not accepted, not supported, not acknowledged, not appreciated, and you feel deeply lonely in the world.

Ghazeleh: So you have to create your own support system. And sometimes we don't even know what a support system is. So we don't even know how to create a healthy support system. So we reach out and to people who are in the end are not good for us because we long for that connection. You know, we all want to belong to a certain group of people.

Ghazeleh: We all want to feel like a part of something. And so if I don't feel a part, maybe I can get lost in religion, you know, in some religious groups or in some other, you know, groups that are just, you know, I don't know, just not good for me, right? Because I long for that connection and the support.

Ghazeleh: Evolutionary mind. We're not meant to be alone in this world. We couldn't survive alone in this world, right? You have to belong to a group to survive.

Mike: What are some signs growing up that your parents were bullies?

Ghazeleh: That's so many, you know? Unfortunately, parenthood is really, really hard, and if I say that now, parents might think like, Oh my gosh, I'm gonna do everything wrong.

Ghazeleh: Okay? But as a mother, I know how hard it is, and every minute you think like, Was this right? Was this wrong? Right? But there's some basics, right? Anything that could leave you feeling ashamed, make you feel like criticized, compared, kind of not appreciated, not accepted for who you are, left you feeling lonely, not good enough, worthless, or even in fear, is a bully.

Ghazeleh: The parent that gives you a silence treatment when you did something wrong, that's a bully. The parent that compares the siblings, that's a bully. The parent that comes home drunk and, you know, shouts at you, it's a bully. If you have to take on responsibilities that were not meant to be for you, and you get ashamed for that, that's a bully.

Ghazeleh: If you feel like I, you know, constantly have to prove myself, every little mistake is going to be criticized. That's a bully, right? So it's a broad range of attitudes and behavior, but if you cut it down, it has a lot to do with, I mean, what we, what do we want? I mean, Gabor Maté's work is based on that, right?

Ghazeleh: We all long for authentic love and connection. So what does the child want? Am I loved for who I am? Am I loved authentically? And if that has been crashed. Through, you know, parental attitudes and behaviors, or the way they've been talked to these children. That's a kind of bully, right? And I use specifically the word bully in my videos.

Ghazeleh: Because you emphasize, you know, the pain in it. You know what it's like to be bullied at school. I was bullied in elementary school. I still feel the pain, right? So you know what it's like. You want to belong to a peer group. And then, you know, you don't kind of, you're not allowed to play in a soccer game, or you know, nobody talks to you, and you're all alone, and feel like you don't belong, and you ask yourself, what's wrong with me?

Ghazeleh: Right? It's the same in the family. It's the same feeling of being bullied that leaves you feeling what's wrong with me, and leaves you feeling painfully lonely in the world.

Mike: You know, if I'm speaking in English, right? And I took five years of Spanish in high school and college, but I can't speak it because I didn't hang around with people who spoke Spanish.

Mike: And you just alluded to something like that, is if you're growing up in an abusive environment, do you then automatically gravitate towards abusive relationships because it's what you know?

Ghazeleh: Well, that's what a lot of people experience, right? Because you don't know what a healthy relationship is. And you don't know what, what's normal or not, you know, you use this example.

Ghazeleh: And I like that because I work a lot with experts in Berlin and they come from all over the world. And some of them come, for example, from Asian countries where people don't talk so much about yeah, kind of emotions or like, you know, they don't show vulnerability and they come to Berlin and then people are very vulnerable all of a sudden, or talk about their feelings.

Ghazeleh: They get confused and then they ask themselves, so what did I miss? And then you ask yourself what's normal and then you question it, right? Or in some societies still, hitting children is part of yeah, part of how you raise children. It's normalized. But then they move to other countries and it's not normal.

Ghazeleh: So, you know, you don't know what's normal. As long as you grew up in a family that normalized certain behaviors that are maybe criminal even and not normal, right? And so you grew up with this feeling of, okay, my worth depends on, you know, my achievements or, you know, if I want something, I have to cry or I have to get really angry because that's how it worked in my family.

Ghazeleh: And that's how you enter right? But also Mike, when we grew up in dysfunctional families. Or let's say we all have unmet childhood needs and we take those unmet childhood needs into our adult relationships, especially our romantic relationships, right? And so the question of, do you love me for who I am?

Ghazeleh: Am I safe with you? Am I acknowledged and appreciated? Am I worthy your love? We take those questions with us. But if we haven't learned how to be vulnerable, how to speak from our feelings, how to say like, you know what, when you withdraw, it leaves me feeling lonely, right? And rather than speaking from that place, we say then, you selfish or we start criticizing our partner or we start to pursue them and, you know, kind of pinpoint their mistakes because we learned that's the way, you know, you get attention, right? (chuckle)

Ghazeleh: And so, unfortunately, when we grew up with emotionally immature parents. We also didn't feel safe to be vulnerable because no one helped us to understand the inner world, right? Give our feelings names, give our needs names. So we don't know how to speak from the heart. We don't know how to express our feelings, the needs, and the relationship.

Ghazeleh: And then we get lost in, yeah, certain patterns that are not good for us. And we need to learn that in order to finally be in healthy relationships.

Mike: Is that part of what you talk about as being the emotion transformation?

Ghazeleh: Yeah, yeah, a little bit. You know, I work as an emotion focused couple therapist and an emotion focused therapy individual therapist.

Ghazeleh: And what we do in emotion focused individual therapy is we have this theory that there are certain maladaptive emotions that we carry from our childhood into our adulthood, such as maladaptive loneliness. It's the kind of sense of feeling you're not alone, but you always feel lonely, right? Or maladaptive shame because you were criticized as a child a lot.

Ghazeleh: Or maladaptive fear because you grew up with a violent parent, right? And you're constantly on alert. So we help people to transform those feelings, those lingering feelings that define their attitude, their behavior. to transform those feelings into more adaptive, helpful emotions. And we know now that adaptive, helpful emotions are adaptive anger, healthy anger and self compassion.

Ghazeleh: So we have clients to change those painful feelings that kind of define their behaviors and relationships into more adaptive emotions, such as like, you know, so many people don't know what healthy anger is. They were never allowed to be angry, right? (chuckle) Or if you didn't receive compassion, you don't know how to have compassion for yourself.

Ghazeleh: And we help clients to transform those old feelings into more into adaptive anger or self compassion, depending on, you know, what the client needed and missed and didn't have. And so in couples therapy, those maladaptive emotions, we get triggered with them, right? If I have this lingering feeling of always being lonely in the world, I feel lonely in my relationships, right?

Ghazeleh: So when my partner wants time for himself or herself, I feel immediately deprived or rejected or not wanted, right? Or when I feel ashamed and unworthy, I never feel acknowledged and appreciated. And then we get triggered and then we react. So in order to be in healthy relationships, I need also a lot of self awareness and a lot of tolerance for my own feelings. So I can sit with them and say like, okay, this is what's happening right now. This is this old feeling that is coming up. And now I can see myself reacting to this and to stop, pause, you know, it's in the pause where the freedom is right to pause for a moment and then speak from that place and say, okay, this is how I feel and this is what I need and I can reach out from that place to my partner. And I help couples to navigate from that vulnerable place rather than getting lost in criticism and, you know, avoidance and withdrawing.

Mike: I love that. And it seems like that would be terrific if Person A comes together with Person B. But if I'm trying to make that change and I try to do that with my family of origin, man, they work overtime to not change. Do you think?

Ghazeleh: Yes. And, you know, one of the also most difficult parts in healing is the acknowledgement that our parents, our family is not going to change.

Mike: (laugh)

Ghazeleh: Accept that, right? This acceptance and letting go of that yearning for them to finally see you, to finally acknowledge you, to finally accept you, right? To let go of that. And then see what kind of a relationship can I have with them if I let go of that need and where can I get my need met partially by myself, partially by other people in my life, right?

Ghazeleh: But this yearning, Mike, is one of the reasons people go back to dysfunctional family patterns. Because we all yearn for that love, for that connection, for that acceptance by our parents. So we yearn and go back and we yearn we get, then we get rejected and we feel disappointed, right? And then the more we feel disappointed, the more we feel frustrated and angry and then we react from that anger.

Ghazeleh: But finding that peace within us means also God, as much as I want this, I will never get this, but this can be also very peaceful to let go and grieve what you deserve to have, but you will never have, and then rebuild a new relationship with your parents.

Mike: Based on what you can get.

Ghazeleh: Absolutely. And based on what you can't get.

Ghazeleh: Yes. Totally. You know, knowing, you know, some clients say, Okay, I can talk about topic A, B, C with my parents, but I can never talk about my emotions. Well, then talk about A, B, C and talk about your emotions with someone else. I always like to have this exercise, this image of saying goodbye to the desired image of a parent, right?

Ghazeleh: And then see, like, if I let go of that desired image of mine that I would like my parent to be, what kind of relationship can I have? It's the same in our romantic relationships, Mike. You probably know as good as I know what it's like if you want to change your partner. I mean, most couples come here because they want to change their partner, right? (laugh)

Mike: Yep.

Ghazeleh: Sometimes, when we accept our partner, It's hard to accept because I know if I accept my partner, then that means also maybe I need to acknowledge my partner can't give me what I need, right? And then that means maybe that means this relationship is not going to work out, right? Or we need to really go and get help, or we need to find other ways to be with each other.

Ghazeleh: And so acceptance means also comes often with grieving, right? Because you need to let go of something maybe you can't get.

Mike: Well, and it also means if I, if you can't give me everything I need, and we're both aware of that, then it's okay for me to look for what I need in other relationships, which can be really threatening to the other person as well.

Ghazeleh: Yes, absolutely. Yes, totally. That's also, you mean other person in the romantic relationship now? Or, yeah, I mean, that's a threat for the relationship, right? But it means also maybe, how can I give it to myself? Or how can I work with my partner? And, you know, they're different kinds of needs. Some needs are essential, right?

Ghazeleh: Such as like the need for safety or the need to really feel loved, connected, seen, right? Some needs are negotiable. Some needs it's okay if my partner can give me what I need and then I can maybe go and see like if I have friends or, you know, family members or coworkers or something like that. Right. But if my essential needs are not met.

Ghazeleh: That's a problem. And so, if my essential needs are not met, that's maybe me, that's the moment maybe I reach out to an affair, right? Because it's essential. You want to feel special, you want to feel loved, you want to feel you matter to your partner. But couples therapy can, especially EFT, couples therapy helps a lot to accept our partners who they are because you know, it's rarely that you find a relationship and the partner can really give you and meet all of your needs and give you what you need in all levels.

Ghazeleh: It's impossible, right? So we need to also learn how to nurture our own needs and how to accept them. Our partners can't be there for us the way we need them in certain moments because we're human beings.

Mike: You know, I'm thinking if, as people begin to change, it's amazing how people that know nothing about what's going on have an opinion about it.

Mike: You know, we, we have a lot of public figures people who live in the public who make a decision, I'm thinking right now, this sounds terrible, of the British royal family, right? Prince Harry for his own health. Let's he defines it moves away. Well, man, is he thrown under the bus? I had double decker since we're talking about British. And people weigh in and they know nothing about what's happened in that family?

Mike: We just had a thing in America where somebody won a major award and thanked everybody except their father. And she was thrown under the bus. You know, oh, she didn't thank her father. Well, we don't ask why.

Ghazeleh: Absolutely. Absolutely. But I'm asking, what must the father have done that in such a special moment of a life of a person, that person doesn't thank the father, right?

Ghazeleh: How painful must that be not to thank your father in that moment? What have you gone through? Right? That you have to make that horrible, hard, difficult, painful decision not to thank him in that moment, right? How much have you suffered to take, to make that decision, right? And so, no one asks that because, you know, there is this myth.

Ghazeleh: It's your family, so you have to love your family, you have to be thankful to your family, but this myth is killing people's healing, right? Because they go back to family patterns that are not good for them, such as, you know, they, you know, when you struggle with addiction. It's not good when you go back to a system that caused you addictive behaviors, right?

Ghazeleh: It's kind of like, you know, when you burned out at a workplace and you know that work is not good for you, right? But you continue doing that work and you go back to that workplace, you're not taking care of yourself. Right? It's the same. When you get burned out in your family, and it's not, nothing else is really working, and they're not changing, then you have to take care of yourself, and you have to set healthy boundaries.

Ghazeleh: It's hard and painful it is, and I wish the society would acknowledge that these decisions are really, really difficult. No one does this decision in an easy way.

Mike: And even healthy boundaries, then, can be painful to set.

Ghazeleh: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Especially because, you know, sometimes boundaries are seen as selfish.

Ghazeleh: Or like, you know, self indulging. It's the same with this, you know, people, many people don't really see self compassion as something positive. They might see self compassion as something selfish, right? Or self indulging. But self compassion and, you know, adaptive anger that comes with healthy boundaries are crucial for ways of taking care of ourselves.

Mike: You know, it's stunningly fascinating. The phrase I use with people all the time is, don't look for ice cream in the closet. We don't keep it there. You used the workplace example before. I'm amazed at the number of people who look for appreciation from boss who's never shown it to anybody and is unlikely to show it in the near future.

Ghazeleh: And what do they do? They work hard. Right? They work hard and they work hard and they work hard and they work hard because they yearn for that, right? But that yearning is the same one that you want to have it from your mother or your father. So, you know, this acceptance, Mike, not only works for family, but, you know, accepting that somebody can give you what you need works for all our relationships.

Ghazeleh: It can be very peaceful.

Mike: I know this is a lifetime task, but how do I know when I'm finally close and I'm on the right track? What does recovery look like?

Ghazeleh: That's a really, really good question. Because recovery can be so individual, right? There is not one path that works for everyone.

Ghazeleh: But we know, meanwhile, through research that certain aspects of recovery are very common and helpful for most people. And one of those aspects is, for example, when my painful past emotional experiences such as, you know, the maladaptive shame and the loneliness and fear don't define me so much anymore, right?

Ghazeleh: And in order for them to transform and change, first, I need to be aware of it. So first of all, having self awareness for my emotional world, right? And then tolerating my feelings, trying to really, you know, be, be with it, know how to regulate myself, finding, you know, a distance to it so I don't get flooded and overwhelmed, right?

Ghazeleh: Grounding techniques are very important for trauma, for example. But also it means that I need to also get in touch with my emotions and all sorts of emotions. And sometimes I learn to stop myself or block myself from feeling any kind of feeling, right? And when I allow myself to be with that feeling, then it helps me to understand what I need.

Ghazeleh: And when I know what I need, then I know how to navigate through the world and , do I need to set boundaries, right? And where not, and how do I do that actually? How do I speak from my needs and feelings? And then I also need to find how to be compassionate to myself and how to nurture.

Ghazeleh: And how to find, you know, kindness and care for myself and how to acknowledge myself as part of a human being. And so we know, meanwhile, that what's crucial for healing is the connection to my emotional world, because we all have this emotional compass, Mike. And if I've learned to not listen to that and only be my head, I navigate against my compass.

Ghazeleh: And that's the place where I often don't know what I want professionally. I feel lost. I feel like I'm jumping from workplace to the other, from relationship to the other, and I never feel really nurtured and fulfilled. But if I learn to listen to my emotional compass, even if it's painful, and listen to the path it's giving me, then I really know what I need, and I know what I need to do to get there, right?

Ghazeleh: And so we know, meanwhile, that these aspects of getting in touch with our emotional world tells us what we need, and then we know how to take action. Understanding how I stop myself from feeling, for example, through drinking, or, you know, shopping, or working. Or I stop breathing and I swallow it down, or, you know, there are many ways that we stop feeling.

Ghazeleh: And so once I'm aware of this and I can tolerate my feelings and listen to them and attune to them, I've done a big part of recovery and a big part of work. And, you know, with my clients who suffer with addiction, for example, most of them carry a deep feeling of unworthiness. And so when I really work with our inner critical voice, and you know, we need to be aware of how we talk to ourselves.

Ghazeleh: So self awareness means also be aware of inner dialogues. Then often it comes to, well, no one cares about you. You know, so it doesn't matter if you're here or not. So let's go and drink, right? And so that kind of work is incredibly important. How do I talk to myself? What do I feel? And then get in touch with, you know, my healthy kind of way of setting boundaries and expressing my anger and being compassionate to myself.

Ghazeleh: And finally, slowly learning how to take care of myself and nurture myself in a way that, you know, yeah, I need to be kind of, yeah, in healthy relationships and then the world.

Mike: Outstanding. What a great way for me to start my day. It's terrific. You all know from listening that we're going to put links to Dr. Bailey's website where she's got some great stuff. And also we'll do your YouTube channel. What I like about your YouTube channel, Ghazeleh, is that they're very short. You're very I could listen to you forever, but they're very short and to the point. I listened to one that was, I think, a minute and 14 seconds long that was the five types of dysfunctional families.

Mike: And I'm like, how is she going to cover that in a minute, in a minute 14, and you did. (laugh)

Ghazeleh: Mike, I had to learn to speak fast. (laugh)

Mike: Without any poause in there, but it was, it's great. So for those of you listening well, first of all, thank you Ghazeleh. I know I'm going to ask you to be on again. If you're kind enough to do so, I really enjoyed this.

Mike: And for those of you listening, please listen in next time. And until then stay safe and get to know yourself and be good to yourself.