When It's Time to Grow - It's Time to Go

SYK 131-Diann Final

MUSIC

Diann [00:00:03] How do they manage to remain in a straight line in all these different areas of their life for so many years? And I always thought there was something wrong with me that I was not able to do that. I mean, I've had remarriages, I've had two religions, I've had four careers. And I got a lot of feedback that, you know, I'm I lack commitment. I lack, you know, discipline, you know, whatever. It took me a lot of years to realize my path is the path of continuous personal evolution. And because I now embrace and accept that path, the hardest part about it, why it took me so long to finally acknowledge it and just work with it, is because I outgrow things every so often. It may be five years, it may be 25 years, but I inevitably reach a point could be with a relationship, a career, a hobby, a friend group, a lifestyle where I've outgrown it. It now feels constricting, constraining. I think of it like a tight pair of shoes. I can still walk, but it's painful every step of the way.

MUSIC

Brian [00:01:10] You might be able to tell by her intro that today's conversation with Diane could go a variety of directions. And you're right. Two of her many careers are therapist and podcaster. That's how I met her. The latter, not the former. Though I may want to make a follow up appointment for a few therapy sessions based on how much I enjoyed our conversation. Diane shares her story of growing up in an abusive, dysfunctional home of an uneducated mother, absentee father and seven adopted kids, none of whom were ever told they were adopted. We talk about cultural conditioning, post-traumatic growth, profane Buddhism, the pain and importance of personal growth, and not getting stuck in your own story. This will definitely be an episode you'll want to share with friends.

MUSIC

Brian [00:01:55] So you ready for this?

Diann [00:01:58] I actually. I think I know you enough from watching your tick tock. Oh, geez. Then I'll never get to know. It's kind of cringeworthy, but I'll tell you what, because you can't really script this much and you don't have a lot of time. And so I think you're a curious human. I'm a curious human. You can't really overprepare when you're curious. You mean you just show up and see what happens? That's right. I'm here.

Brian [00:02:21] Yeah, it's unscripted. So. But you did mention you had a couple of ideas that you wanted to talk about. You're like, Oh, okay, that's what it's about. Then we should definitely talk. And I know your head kind of clued into a couple of things about adoption, and I don't know what other things, but I know that was one of them that you're like, Yeah, that's something we could talk about for a bit, though.

Diann [00:02:38] Well, I'm I'm going to let you lead because I'm a very dominant person, so I have a tendency to try to lead too much. So it's really kind of nice for me to be on the other side and just follow someone else's lead. Okay. It's not a slow dance. You can always mute me, right?

Brian [00:02:53] Well, I may. You may be disappointed because I don't lead much in here. This is a very open conversation, and I usually start with what's on your mind. So. So I'm going to start with you. With what were the things that that went through your mind when you thought about my podcast and what it was about, about deconstruction and different things like that? What were the things that made you say, we need to talk?

Diann [00:03:13] I would say the first half of my adult life, I thought I was learning things and I was learning okay. But what I didn't realize was that I was sort of absorbing the cultural conditioning. Okay. And then the second half of my adult life, I've been trying to unlearn things very conscious.

Brian [00:03:27] Interesting. Because I.

Diann [00:03:29] Was interested.

Brian [00:03:30] I would say mine had been almost the opposite. Hmm. So that might be a little different because I would say I was learning things about the world and I would say just the last five years, I'm like, Why don't you learn some things about yourself? And that's been huge for me.

Diann [00:03:44] You do know I was a shrink, right?

Brian [00:03:46] Yes. Then my wife is a therapist as well, so.

Diann [00:03:49] Okay. So then, you know, I mean, when I when I wrote my letter to grad school at UCLA decided I was going to go give up a successful career in medical sales, go back to school and become a clinical social worker. You have to write a letter like why should we pick you as opposed to another candidate? And I started it like this. Growing up as an adopted child in a hugely dysfunctional, chaotic, unpredictable and violent household, I became an astute observer of human behavior from a very early age. And that's true. And it's also good storytelling. However, I had to pay attention to other people, their behaviors, why they did, the things they did, and how to keep myself safe hadn't long before anyone really should have to think about those things. So I think that may be partly why our journeys may be reversed. I had to study myself as a child so I knew what behaviors in me would lead to problems and which ones would keep me safe. Otherwise, I probably could have been a normal, carefree kid. I'd like to think. Yeah.

Brian [00:04:50] When you say lead to problems, you mean problems in your environment or actual problems like walking off the cliff?

Diann [00:04:55] No. Well, okay. I have to put a couple things into context, Brian. One is that they found out that I am gifted in the fourth grade. Okay. So that means that apparently I have a high IQ, but I also have some specific learning disabilities. So there are things that are above normal range and there are things that are distinctly below normal range, but they're all sort of thrown in there together. And then I got diagnosed with ADHD just six years ago. Okay, so there's like a big gap between, okay, this is what kind of kid we're dealing with. And then many, many years later, me realizing there's a lot more to the package. Why is this important? I think because given the instability of my childhood home and needing to appear as perfect as I possibly could, but I wouldn't get abused so I wouldn't get sent away like the other kids did, led me to become an expert in masking and what I call passing for normal. So a big part of these last few years of my life have been me kind of excavating myself from all of those masks so that I can actually start to show up as the person I really am, which is pretty different than the person that I needed to be.

Brian [00:06:06] I got a couple of questions. Which way do you want to go with this? I want to know, how were you different than who you thought you were earlier? And we can come back to that if you want. We put a pin in that. But I also want to know about your your upbringing and why that was so difficult and that specific situation that may have caused that. And yeah.

Diann [00:06:23] I think it'll make more sense if we go with door number two. Okay, awesome. But I'm I'm going to need you to put the pin in it because part of my ADHD is I'll go, Oh yeah, that's a great idea. We should talk about that and then completely forget it until maybe tomorrow and go, Oh, Brian, we forgot. So I'm counting on you for that. So I had a very bizarre childhood. I, I've never met anyone in all the years that I was a psychotherapist and, and a human being before and since that that had anything even remotely like. I did. I'm sure there are others, but this is the only family like ours that I am aware of, and this is how I would describe it. My mom and dad got married because at that point in time it was the thing you were expected to do. I don't think either one of them actually wanted to or intentionally chose each other. So my dad was an aerospace engineer, very intelligent, but extremely introverted. We've known engineers. It's not so unusual, but extremely, extremely introverted. He also had kind of a traumatic childhood because he was one of three children, he was the third of three, and his mom passed away during childbirth. So I had two older sisters and he was the only boy. I think he might have been a surprise pregnancy to add to it. And then Mom died. So Dad then became a single parent at a at a time when a man with three kids, including a baby, would have been like a fish out of water. The two sisters lost their mother, and my dad grew up without a mother, so the dad quickly married someone else. The stepmother apparently had her issues. So my dad's goal was to get up, get out of the house early every day, do well in school, get an education, and then get the H out of this household as soon as I'm old enough to do so. My mom had a similar story. She had a little bit of a crazy family and she just wanted to get out of the house. She didn't take the path of education. She's actually a sixth grade dropout, and that's why my name is spelled in an unusual way. Not because it's clever, because she literally did not know how to spell. So here's a very smart guy who doesn't really have a lot of solid foundation growing up and then a not such a smart person who has all kinds of mental issues. They get together, they try to make a family. Somehow their first baby dies at one day of life. And here's where things get really crazy. Instead of saying, Oh, my goodness, we've just had a traumatic loss. I mean, infant loss is probably one of the hardest things for a person to go through. But instead of saying, okay, we need to grieve, we need to get some help from our minister, from our friend group, from each other. She signs herself out of the hospital, literally goes the same day to an adoption agency, presents herself as someone who's unable to have children and fills out an adoption application. And my dad goes along with it. So it's a bit of a crazy setup. But when you're trying to heal a traumatic loss in a dysfunctional way, it doesn't really scratch the itch. So that was the first child that got adopted. I was the fact then there was a child born, then there was another adoption, then another adoption, then another adoption. And when things got to like Bulbul house, there were ten kids in our family and this is not a foster home, by the way. These are legally adopted kids. None of us was told we were adopted. There were two biological in the Met and I kind of was the first one to figure it out because I'm kind of looking around going, Hang on a second. You know, like I'm five foot ten and blond hair and blue eyes. My mom is five foot two and has brown hair and brown eyes. And we got every other kind of kid in the lineup here. But this is at a point in time when people didn't speak about adoption openly the way many people do now. It was considered super shameful in the fifties and sixties. If you were adopted, that meant that your biological, you know, you were an oops or a teen pregnancy, whatever. And then your adoptive parents were also shamed because it was assumed that they had some fertility problem, which was considered shameful at that point in time. So kids were not told they were adopted and they didn't have a lot of the screenings that they have in place. So if you wanted a kid and you can afford to get yourself into that situation privately, you didn't have to pass a mental health screening. You didn't have to pass any kind of things. Like now you can even get a foster child in your home until you go through a very rigorous screening. But back then, this was before the pill. This is before legalized abortion. Unwanted pregnancies were plentiful. And so I kind of got swept into that family along those lines. So growing up in the family, you got a dad who's never there. Because if you know anything about aerospace, this was in the aerospace heyday and my dad was working long hours, six days a week minimum. And when he was home, Brian, he was literally I used to refer to him as the phantom father. This man could sit there in his armchair, quietly reading a newspaper while my mother could be beating one or more kids with an electrical cord or a coat hanger. And man, it was like he was so checked out that like, oh, she's, you know, she's crazy and he's no help. So you're on your own, girl. I think I've painted the picture for you. Right.

Brian [00:11:34] So quick question. What age did you realize that that wasn't normal? Because I know a lot of kids. Would they just grow up whatever the house they're in? How ever crazy it is. Well, that's just the way it is everywhere. You just don't know that.

Diann [00:11:45] It's such a good question and I'm so glad you asked and because I don't know exactly how, but relatively early on. I thought, this can't be normal. This can't be normal. I couldn't tell you what age it was, but I somehow sensed that the unpredictability of her behavior was not normal. And, you know, there a story that I've told a couple of times because it really stands out for me. A lot of people ask me why I'm so direct and so honest, and it's probably genetic. But I will say that growing up and being expected to lie for my adoptive mother, being expected to maintain her stories at school in the neighborhood because she didn't want to be questioned about things. And even I had the task of standing in stores, department stores, supermarkets while she would shoplift or change the price tags on things. Because this was when you still had stickers and things and then stand there. While she would vehemently deny that she changed the sticker if anybody called out and demand to see the manager and all this. And I'm thinking, you know, I remember thinking I saw her change the sticker. I saw it. But, you know, when it's so pervasive, you know, to your point, you do kind of question your own mind and your own reality. I think when I first found out I was adopted at the age of nine from the neighbors, I took that to mean that something was wrong with me, that I was not as good as other people, I was not as good as other kids, that I had a fundamental flaw and that I needed to make very sure that I overcompensated for that in every way possible so that I could at least pass for being good enough. But I knew that things that were going on at my home were not normal, in part because I was not allowed to have friends over. I was never allowed to answer the door. No one ever came to our house and maybe I. Ten years old, I got invited over to other kids houses.

Brian [00:13:46] Yeah.

Diann [00:13:46] You make friends? I would go and play. Yeah, I would go and play and have fun. But when it reached the point where the other kids mom would say, You've been over here every day for the last two weeks. I think it's time that you and my kid go play at your house for a change. And then I'd have to drop that rent because nobody came in our house. And I remember thinking, I've been in enough other kids houses to know this is not the norm. So that that helped me kind of piece together that my own sense that I don't think this is not that I didn't think we might have deserved it because anybody who abuses their kids usually tells them it's their fault. So I remember hearing that so often, thinking that, you know, if we are we are probably doing something to deserve this. But at the same time, it seemed excessive and disproportionate based on the other kids families I was around. I wish I knew what age. But you know, when you have this kind of childhood, a lot of things are very hazy later on because the the brain, the brain's impact of trauma on them.

Brian [00:14:46] Yeah. Yeah. It's one way to just handle it, right? Survival, indeed. So when you found you were adopted, did you think or were you told that the other kids were adopted? Do or did you just think it was just you or was that what? It finally all clicked and you're like, Oh, that's why nobody here matches.

Diann [00:15:01] Or it kind of was a, you know, a process of putting together different pieces over time. But as I said, I was nine years old. I had never even heard the word, never heard the word adopted, didn't know what it meant. And part of my ADHD is that I have a really poor memory. I've always had a poor memory. So here I am going over to a friend's house. I knock on the door after school and ask if my friend can come out and play. The mother steps outside the house, closes the door behind her and says, You need to go home and not come back. And of course, instantly I'm thinking, What did I do? What did I do? What they do.

Brian [00:15:34] Your fault.

Diann [00:15:35] You know, of course. And I said, What did I do? She said, It's not what you did, it's what you are now. My brain is like, I don't even know where to look. I don't even know where to scan. I don't even know what to try to figure out. And I said, What am I? And she got you don't know. Wouldn't be asking if I did. This is a very uncomfortable conversation with an adult. And you know that the most amazing thing and I've come to appreciate this over time, is that most people under that kind of pressure, their mind goes blank. You literally can't think because you're scared. But for some reason, I think because of how my brain adapted to the family I grew up in, my curiosity still peek through and I'm trying to make sense of the situation. I believe that human beings are meaning making machines, and I'm literally trying to make sense of what she's just told me. I haven't done anything wrong. It's what I am. What am I? I don't know. Well, if I don't know, then how can I know what it is? And how can I stop it or prevent it or change it? So I said, No, I don't know. Tell me. She says, You're adopted. That doesn't help me. I don't know what that means. And so I said, I don't know what that means. Now she's getting really frustrated with me. She just wants me to be gone. She says, okay, it's like this. Your parents are not. Your real parents. Your real parents didn't want you, and they gave you a stranger. You cannot play with my daughter today or ever again. You need to go home and not come back. I thought, Oh, geez. Well, this sounds really serious because I don't trust my memory to close the door in my face. And I walked home the whole way home. I'm saying, adopted, adopted, adopted, adopted. Because I didn't want to get home and then didn't remember the words like.

Brian [00:17:17] It means something.

Diann [00:17:18] The big word, it was this I will never forget this day because it was so. It was pivotal. So I go home, I come in the house. I'm late, though. My mom says, Where you been? And I told her and I said, Why didn't you tell me I'm adopted now? You know, I didn't I didn't lead up to it. And I've always been told I'm very blunt. And I was even blunt then, and I and I didn't even to even dealing with a crazy person I didn't like lead up to it. And I just blurted it out, you know, and I said, Why didn't you tell me I'm a dog? She freaked out and says, Who told you that I'm going to kill them? And I thought, Oh, shit, yeah. Really?

Brian [00:17:54] That's a high possibility, by the way.

Diann [00:17:56] Yes. From what I've seen, from what I've seen, this is this is entirely possible, but it's like, okay, so you've just validated it. It's not a.

Brian [00:18:03] Lie is really bad.

Diann [00:18:04] It's true. It's very bad. And if you're going to kill the person who told me, I literally ran down the hall and to the bathroom, closed and locked the door. My family says I didn't come out for several hours and when I came out, I was changed. I cannot tell you what happened in my brain during those hours, but what I do know is that I made a conscious decision to become the best little overachiever you ever met. And for many years, I think I was holding the title. I just decided I'm not going to give anybody any reason to find fault with me. So I'm going to appear perfect in every way and hide any evidence that it's not so. And I really set out to attempt that for a very long time.

Brian [00:18:46] So I'm assuming on the short term that manifested itself in good grades, friendly to everyone long term, what did that mean short term?

Diann [00:18:55] You're absolutely right. Really good grades, teacher's pet, people pleaser. But I also couldn't be popular. I couldn't really make genuine friendships with anyone. Anyone, really. Because at some point you have to reciprocate. At some point they want to know things about you. They want to come to your house. They want to meet your brothers and sisters. They want to swim in your pool. They want to play with your dog. They want to. And I knew once it got to that point, I would have to basically ghost to them before this was even a word. So I kind of became a person who shape shifted and learned how to fit in but not belong, learned how to sort of adopt the characteristics of the people I was around so that I didn't stand out like a sore thumb. And I am a quick learner and a quick daddy probably would have been pretty good actor, but I couldn't really ever allow myself to do two things one be genuinely known and to genuinely attach because it could only start a friendship or relationship of any kind to a certain depth. And then I was always the limiting factor. I was always the one who it's kind of like, Come here. Okay, that's close enough. So people started to tell me as I got into my teens and into my early adult years that I was very warm, that I was funny, that I was charming, that I was fun to be around. Smart, good problem solver, you know, creative, good sense of humor. But that I always seemed really guarded. I would speak openly about myself, but I wouldn't genuinely trust people and those who were around me enough, long enough kind of started to notice that. And it was sort of like you're you're blowing your cover. But by then it had really woven itself into my personality and I didn't know how to not be that. Yeah.

Brian [00:20:44] Did you ever tell anyone you were adopted or was that something that you just kind of always anything that came close to that, you just avoided it? Just I'll have that off at the pass.

Diann [00:20:52] I usually avoided it growing up because that meant, you know, shaming the rest of my family. But, you know, the other part of the story of the childhood is that kids started running away and kids started disappearing. So this is the part that I mean, when people say you had ten kids in your family, okay, there are some families that adopt a whole bunch of kids and maybe they have a reality show. Our family adopted a bunch of kids and then the number started shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. Now, there was never any announcement that anybody was about to be adopted. You would literally come home from school and there would be a baby in your mom's arm. And it was always a baby because she kind of wanted to grow her own. She knew when to deal with, quote unquote, someone else's problem. So it was like she thought, a baby is like a blank slate and they will become whoever I want them to be. I'm narrating what I imagine might have gone on in her head. And so once the kid got to an age where their their genetics, their personality, their temperament, their strengths and limitations were really showing. She could no longer fantasize that she could shape them into whatever it is she wanted. Then the process of like blaming the kid and being abusive to the kid and shaming the kid and humiliating and ridiculing the kid and rejecting the kid. And then literally one day that kid wasn't there anymore. Like, I remember the thought in my mind. I wonder who's. I wonder who's the next to go? Because I knew somebody would be. It's like musical chairs. And I was determined I was going to have a seat at the table. But this is the worst part of the attachment issue, is that I couldn't attach to my own siblings because if they were a kid who was getting in trouble at school, having bad grades, running around with boys, you know, I had a brother that went to juvenile hall for quite a while. Once they drew enough negative attention to themself, I knew they were Mark. They had a bull's eye on them. There was no way I was going to do anything to help that kid or even be associated with them, because that made me a trauma.

Brian [00:22:55] What's your.

Diann [00:22:56] Risk? Yeah. But I'm deeply ashamed of this. Even though I understand I've had plenty.

Brian [00:23:02] Of therapy for a child.

Diann [00:23:03] Like I was a kid, too.

Brian [00:23:06] You're not ready to handle those kinds of issues.

Diann [00:23:08] I couldn't save myself and save anyone else. However, I'm absolutely certain that what you might call survivor guilt absolutely led me to the career path that I later chose.

Brian [00:23:20] So you mentioned you were the second oldest.

Diann [00:23:23] Well, there was the baby that died and then the baby that she adopted right immediately after. Then I came and and then and this is what's so funny about not no, nobody realizing, you know, how to how to put the whole adoption puzzle together. I was told, but I wasn't allowed to talk about it because I didn't want my mom to kill anybody. But then and I've never been strong in math, but at some point I realized, hang on a minute, my brother is only six months younger than me. So I think whatever age it is that they do the sex talk in elementary school and you learn that their pregnancy is nine month long. And then sometime after that I'm like, Wait a minute, I was born and then my brother was born six months later. That's impossible. Like, why not? And you know what? Believe it or not, you never, ever figured that out. I had to tell him when we were both well into our adult. Wow. Isn't that bizarre?

Brian [00:24:19] Kind of crazy.

Diann [00:24:20] But we had kids. We had different mixed race kids. And I should say my adoptive mother was extremely racist. And so, you know, most babies kind of looked sort of neutral. You know, like you can't really tell how they're going to look, what their hair color or texture is going to look like with their eye colors. But she always treated the kids worse, who appeared to be mixed race. And not surprisingly, those were some of the kids that got sent away and some of the kids that ran away. I became the oldest child by default when the sister older than me ran away at the age of 12.

Brian [00:24:52] Well. Hmm. And then you started seeing the of the ones younger than you start to leave. Yep. Get sent away and run away.

Diann [00:24:59] You know, and I. There's not too many people that know this story. Now, thanks to your podcast, tell me more. But I've done my work on this, and I think it is it's a bizarre story, but I do think it's an important one because I it captures some of the themes that I think all adoptive people grow up with, which is on some level, you know, your circumstances are different and people all have ideas about how you're supposed to feel as a not adoptee. You're supposed to feel lucky. You're supposed to feel chosen. You're supposed to feel that you were given a second chance. You're supposed to feel. And if you choose to seek out your biological, that is an insult to the people that adopted you. I did eventually seek out my body at age 35.

Brian [00:25:48] And what prompted that?

Diann [00:25:49] Well, growing up in a family where all the kids were, sometimes I jokingly say we were a mixed bag of nuts. But we we were all a bunch of kids that were just sort of thrown together and stayed together for a little while and then started some started jumping out of the bag. And, you know, that's that. But I got married. I had a kid, I got divorced, I got married again. I had to market by the time I had three kids, two boys and a girl, I became a believer in genetic because I guess when you grow up in a family like mine, you may notice in other people's families that, Oh, that kid looks like the mom, and that kid looks like the dad. And this two kids look like they're kind of a blend. How interesting. But I didn't grow up looking like anybody and nobody else looked like me and they didn't look like each other. So I literally didn't have that frame of reference in my mind. So when I got married and had kids and I not only started seeing physical but personality traits of either myself or their dads, I was like, Whoa, this stuff is real. Which which now seems silly and foolish for me to say this, but honest. The goodness here I was. I was a woman in my twenties and then early thirties. And I'm raising these kids and thinking, wow, if these kids are a reflection of me, who am I a reflection of? And I never really. It's not that I didn't think about it and I did think about it, but I just thought this is too risky. And then I was in the hospital with my daughter. I developed a medical complication about halfway through the third pregnancy. Had to be hospitalized for a while. I'd never watched daytime TV before because I'd always been a working person. And there was the Oprah show, and she's interviewing someone from an organization called the Adoptees Liberation Movement of America. And the woman is saying, I found my birth mother. And, you know, it was like falling in love happily ever after. And I thought, Wow, I wonder if that could happen for me. I write down the number and I immediately call the people, pay the fee, and in two weeks I had a name, a number and an address.

Brian [00:27:50] Wow. And so this was before DNA tests or anything else. So, yeah, they had to go file all the paperwork. Somebody.

Diann [00:27:56] Yeah, because there's were a whole group of people out there, like an underground network of people who have jobs in the post office and the Social Security Administration and other. They have opportunities to tap into government databases. These people, I'm sure it's not part of their job description. I don't want to get anyone in trouble. But they somehow found out that person who gave birth to me gave me up for adoption. I mean, to be clear, at the time I was born, the names of my adoptive parents were the names on my birth certificate. There would have been no way for me to find out who my biological mother was if it hadn't been for this organization. So I'm very grateful. They gave me the name and I did a little research. I wrote her a letter and you know, over a year and a half period of time, she played cat and mouse with me, realized at some point she wasn't going to shake me. So she agreed to a meeting and I met her. Okay. And by then I was in my second marriage and had three kids. I felt like I'm in a stable place in my life, though even if she turns out to be a total which are another crazy lady, I'm no worse off than I already am. So I'm going to get, you know.

Brian [00:29:02] Right? I mean, at.

Diann [00:29:03] Least I know.

Brian [00:29:04] And how did that relationship go? It's just one and done. Are you close or you just kind of somewhere between you know.

Diann [00:29:12] I, I met her she basically told me that it's a sign of mental illness that I even think it's important that we should meet that she told me that I didn't come from her, but through her and my brain immediately goes, You mean like ups? And I didn't I didn't say it. I've been very impulsive verbally in my life, but I was able to suppress, you know, curb my enthusiasm, as you say at that point. But she just is telling me, you know, are part of a period of my life that I no longer think about. We have nothing to say to one another. The only reason I'm allowing this meeting is because you just wouldn't let it go. You need to let it go. And I thought, okay, thanks for nothing. No, actually, I am grateful for that meeting. And yes, I am still an idealistic person, believe it or not, I really still am. And it always used to bother me that I am because I thought all you do is set yourself up for pain and disappointment. But I think now I choose to think that with all the things I've been through in this life, the fact that I am still idealistic, that's wonderful. And it probably has kept me going and at times when other people might collapse. But she said, There's nothing here for you. We have nothing to say to each other. You need to leave it alone. And I said, All right, I'm happy to do that, but would you mind giving me my medical history? Because I think I do have a right to know what I need to be concerned about, what I'm passing on to my children that I don't even know. And she promised she would send it and she never did. Though I did realize and I have siblings on my dad's side and a sibling on my mom's side. But after that meeting with her and a few letters afterwards that I realized she is dead serious. She wants me to.

Brian [00:30:54] There is nothing here.

Diann [00:30:55] Fuck off, just go away. So I thought, okay, I'm. I'm not one for trying to convert someone to my way of thinking when they're adamant that it's no sale. So I let it go. And it's really interesting because my husband at that time and my current husband have both questioned, why didn't you continue to pursue or why didn't you try to meet your dad? Or Why didn't you try to meet your siblings? And I thought, I think I have enough evidence here to convince me I'm not going to find anything any healthier, any better than what I've already been through. So what I need to concentrate on is those three kids are my family and the past is past.

Brian [00:31:36] Coming to those realizations for me, incredibly painful and scarring, but also enlightening as well. Like, okay, that's a battle I don't need to continue to wage that. I don't need to. What if that forever now this is what it is. I can deal with that. I can internalize that and process that. But at least now I reached out. You know, it's like, okay, that's what that is. Closed that chapter. That's not the only chapter I do. Right.

Diann [00:31:57] I agree. And I have learned that I'm the kind of person who does better with the truth, however painful it may be. My brain doesn't like an open loop, so when I have a question, I always say my brain is like the research librarian. I don't know the answer, but let me go into the stacks and find it for you. Like, if I have a question, I don't know the answer. I keep searching and searching and searching. And in a prolonged state of searching for information, for acknowledgment or healing, you are in a state of extended limbo such that it's like, I can't I can't relax until I know the whole story. That can take years of your life, decades even. And at the end of the day, you might be extremely hurt, disappointed, offended, humiliated, shocked by what you find out. I think at some point I just thought, I'm going to trust my instincts because my instincts, after all, are what got me through my childhood. And I'm going to lean on that. I think I know enough to know I don't need to know more. But I've known people. I mean, I was a therapist for a lot of years. I have known people who cannot let go of the family. They wanted to have the family. They thought they should have the family they thought they did have and continued to experience pain and suffering because they couldn't let it.

Brian [00:33:19] Go to fix something that was never going to be there, never going to be what they needed it.

Diann [00:33:24] Never.

Brian [00:33:25] So what did you learn about parenting that you had to learn the hard way? Not a whole lot of great role, role modeling to learn from growing up. And now you've got kids of your own. And what are there any particular instances that you're just like? I have. I have no way. Didn't know that was a thing or I didn't know how to handle that. Or did you in yourself anything that the Dr. Spock book, did you take classes? Did you just kind of wing it like the rest of us and just kind of like, hey, you learn when you need to learn?

Diann [00:33:52] But, well, because I was a perfectionist, because I was an overachiever. I had this notion that I have to do this right. And and somehow or other, I had the audacity to think I just would like if I put my mind to it, I would do a good job. I think I may have believed that the fact there were my biological children, that maybe it would be natural or whatever. One of my children had a lot of problems growing up my first, and that was very, very challenging. But I would say that what really helped me a lot is shortly after I began my parenting journey, I wandered into a church and we are going to talk about deconstructing that, I'm sure. But I grew up without any kind of religion. I, I also grew up without aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. It was just us and our crazy household cut off from the rest of the world, though I didn't have any other sense of family and I didn't have a sense of family in my actual family either.

Brian [00:34:55] I want to change a conversation, but did you ever reach out in that direction? Find out about your grandparents or aunts and uncles? Or did that just never?

Diann [00:35:02] Both of my parents were cut off from their family. My dad was pretty much evicted from his family because it was like, well, you killed mom, so be gone. And he never like he left home at 18 and never looked back. And my mom continued to be involved somewhat with her family, but the relationships were not healthy and there was very little involvement. And at one point, her mom, her parents were divorced, her mom remarried. The man that her mom remarried also had a daughter from a previous married marriage. That daughter ended up having a couple of kids, as they say, out of wedlock. Nobody says that anymore. But at the time, that was what was that? And then she wanted to give her kids up to social services because apparently she wanted to marry someone else or they were too expensive or inconvenient or whatever. And so my mom said, I'll take them, of course. Right. And so then we got to at once and for the first time in my life, it wasn't a baby. One of them was very, very young, and the other one was the school age kid. And we had those kids for probably two years. And in the meantime, the woman went through, I guess, rehab or some sort of program and decided, okay, I've got my life together, I want my kids back. And because her mother sided with her husband and her stepdaughter, that the kids should be returned to their mother. All communication was cut off after that.

Brian [00:36:25] So they just went away again?

Diann [00:36:26] Yeah, they went away again. And so my sense of family is obviously very distorted. And you would think that someone like me wouldn't want to have kid like at all, but somehow I did. And so around that time I did have enough self-awareness to realize I don't know anything about a healthy family. I've maybe had a glimpse into what might be a healthy family at different friends house. But I don't really know, like day to day how to raise a healthy family. And though I wandered into a church and literally it's so cringe worthy now, I literally I didn't even know who was in charge. I didn't know what to ask for. I was out for a run and I ran past the church and I said, You know what? I think this would be a good idea. And I literally ran in so embarrassing. I literally ran in and said, Cannot the ladies look in me up and down? I got my tank top and my shorts on and thinking how inappropriate, you know, I didn't even know it with an okay, you know, that's how little I knew. So I said, can I speak to who's in charge? And she looked at me like, What? You know, I said, uh, she said, Do you mean the Reverend? Yeah. Yeah, the reverend picked that one. That. That church. Him. Yeah, that's the person. And she said, May I tell them who do you have an appointment? I'm like, No, I was just running by, she says. Obviously, I was literally just running by. Anyway, that began really a 20 year chapter of my life where I literally ran into a church and didn't leave for 20 years. And I really will tell you, even though I came to a point where I realized I no longer ascribe to the beliefs of this group of people, however, they gave me and my family 20 years of stability, security and some sense of normalcy because there were rules and there were limits and there was teaching about right and wrong and how to be a good person and a good parent. And I definitely benefited and.

Brian [00:38:30] Community and support.

Diann [00:38:31] Yeah.

Brian [00:38:32] Fellowship in lieu of family we have we have. Yes that that's that's big. Yeah.

Diann [00:38:37] It was a good deal. Hey, it was a very good deal. And I mean I'm being facetious now, but I will say that it it provided something that I somehow knew I needed and and I received it. And I think my, my kids benefited from, from it to a great deal because it would have been a total crapshoot otherwise. Really, I would have had no clue what.

Brian [00:38:57] Yeah, well, it's just hard without some type of supporting system. Right. And no family on either side and any of that. That's, it's very and I know a lot of people do that. And the religion isn't the answer for everybody, but it's just it's just very difficult. You get involved in schools or communities or neighborhood or whatever, but that is just that's just huge. And the kids all have something in common with their friends kids. You know, they're all the reason to get together and get to know each other and build those relationships and have people over to your house. For crying out loud.

Diann [00:39:25] People need a sense of belonging. And something I have come to learn is there is a difference between fitting in and belonging. Brené Brown talks about love private. Isn't she wonderful?

Brian [00:39:38] Fantastic.

Diann [00:39:39] Fitting in means you do what it takes to look like you're supposed to be there. And I know how to do that very well. Belonging means come as you are and you are 100% acceptable as you are. That that I didn't have an experience.

Brian [00:39:53] Yeah. I work with a group that works with with teens that are dealing with issues, primarily foster kids and a lot of trauma informed going on there. But the group is designed around you're not only welcome, but this was designed for you. There's a there's a big difference between those two. And it's subtle and it's nice to feel welcome. But to know that this was for specifically for me is makes a big difference.

Diann [00:40:19] The conversation becomes something from yeah, we can. Yeah, come on, we'll make room for you. Yeah, very sure.

Brian [00:40:27] Come on in.

Diann [00:40:27] What we have set, set the table for you. You are the honored guest. Yes. Get on.

Brian [00:40:33] Anyway. That's right. Yeah. Everyone else is here in the same way and they all have those similar experiences. And so when you're around somebody that doesn't have that same experience, you're like, well, first of all, they have no idea what my life is like. And second of all, even if I explained it to them, which would be incredibly painful, they still wouldn't be able to get it. But when you get to people that have had similar backgrounds and you get them together, they never need to talk about it. They just know that they know. And that is huge, right? And that happens in a lot of different groups. But it's like you said, it's important to belong.

Diann [00:41:04] It truly is. And you know, anybody who's worked I've worked with a lot of foster kids in the past. And, you know, the hefty bag. Yeah, everybody knows the hefty bag. Right. You know, you get kicked out of a foster home or group home placement. They throw all your stuff in a hefty bag and you are on your way. And, you know, it's excruciating.

Brian [00:41:22] They they talk about the unknown car driveway, like coming home.

Diann [00:41:25] It's like, oh.

Brian [00:41:26] That's for me.

Diann [00:41:27] But you steal yourself against that. Like, I. I came to understand that kids were going to leave our household. Brothers and sister were going to disappear. There would be no warning. There would be no explanation. You'd literally come home and there'd be one last chair around the dining room table. You'd go down the hall and look in their room and all of their stuff would be removed. It would be like they. Never existed. That is actually so terrifying.

Brian [00:41:56] That's a Stephen King novel. I mean, honestly.

Diann [00:41:58] That dude, the first time I told somebody this, they were like, Oh, my God, you have to write a book. And I said, Nobody would. First of all, I'd have to relive it if I did. So I don't know about that. And to I don't think anyone believe it. And I just came to think of it as musical chairs. I just kind of shut off my feelings. And I was determined. I just need to make it to 18 and high school graduation so I can leave and not be forced out.

Brian [00:42:24] And is that what happened? 18 and.

Diann [00:42:26] Gone. Okay. Yeah.

Brian [00:42:28] After UCLA or.

Diann [00:42:29] Well, believe it or not, back in those days, you could get into UCLA. You could pledge a sorority. You can move into the sorority house. You could work 20 hours a week. And the UCLA student store, you could get a it was either a grant or scholarship or something based on my grades. So between my work study and the grant, I was able to go to college at UCLA and not go into debt now. It's a whole other deal now, but I was even able to go back to graduate school at UCLA 15 years later, and one of my professors nominated me for a Graduate Distinguished Scholar Award, which covered my grad school tuition. Awesome. And now my kids are like, Mom, shut up. Nobody wants to hear that. Like, No, that's because it was a different time. Brian I mean, all three of my kids, you know, I divorced when they were ten, 12 and 15. I did not get married again for over a decade. So I needed to make sure each of them had the opportunity to go to college. And because I was the head of household, no child support, three kids. It was a combination of community college while you work and state college while you work, and a broken down car that you just hope to God doesn't crap out because we ain't got the money for no repair. And, you know, it's it's what you do. They have really good, you know, work ethic. But I do think wouldn't it have been nice if they would have had the same kind of opportunity that I had to not have to struggle as much, you know? Yeah.

Brian [00:44:01] You know, it's interesting as a parent because you kind of wonder you do want certain things for them, but you also want to get out of their way and you're constantly sucking up. At least I'm constantly second guessing myself of which one I'm which mistake I'm making at which time. And I'm always wrong. I always feel like I'm making one mistake when I'm not and not realizing another one when I am kind of thing. It's just and they're different for every kid.

Diann [00:44:21] I think you have to accept that. And you asked me a few minutes ago, you know, kind of, you know, how did I figure out the parenting thing? I'll tell you, I put my kids through two divorces. The first marriage ended because my first husband didn't want kids. And I got pregnant, though I wasn't about to abort my child. So I became a single parent for the first time and married again pretty quickly. I had two more kids. I stayed in that marriage for 15 years and then got divorced again. The year I was 40, my kids were ten, 12 and 15 and I remained single until each of them was grown. And what I have since learned is, you know, all the books tell you that the first year after a family dissolution is the hard one. The first year, like your kids are probably going to have behavioral problems. Their their grades are going to suffer. They might revert in their behavior, they might regress. You might have mental health issues. But it was all sort of packaged up as though if you get through first year after a family comes apart, you're like home free. Many years later, someone published a book. I wish I could remember it off the top of my head where she did a longitudinal study of the Children of Divorce Year one year, five, year ten year 15, year 24. And that book helped me understand after the fact that my kids have been affected for life by virtue of the fact that we got divorce. They were obviously affected by the things that happened in the marriage that led up to the divorce as well. But this notion that, you know, you just give them a lot of love, a lot of security, you don't badmouth your ex in front of everybody is going to recalibrate and just find one year.

Brian [00:46:04] Later everybody's fine.

Diann [00:46:05] Yeah, that's kind of what I was going for. And so because of that and I wasn't delusional and I wasn't in denial, I was this was this was the conventional wisdom at the time. But I've realized two things that one, two of my kids are highly creative. And I think I was not well-suited to raising highly creative children, because while I believe I'm a creative person, I didn't have the luxury or the freedom to be a child. When I was a child, I had to kind of shut off anything that looked like indulgence or I had to become very serious very early on. So a lot of their creative impulses, you know, I didn't shut them down, but I didn't nurture them. I didn't foster them. I didn't understand that. A creative person. May have more difficulty making decisions, though. When my son, I lay out two outfits for him and say, Honey, you got to get ready for school. So you either wear the blue shirt in the brown pants or the red and blue striped shirt and the red pants. There's this two outfits. The whole thing is there. I don't know. I don't know. I think it would be, you know. And so I'm escalating the conversation. Please just pick one. It doesn't matter. They're both exactly the same outfit and different colors. You know, and and I understand now, because I've worked with a lot of creative people over the years, and I've also reconnected with my own creativity, which I really had to kind of disavow to get through my childhood, that I think I was more difficult for them than if I had understood better that they needed something different than what I was giving them. I've also come to understand in the last number of years that my daughter adores me and is intimidated by me. And so I'm so grateful that I honestly, I've been grateful for the pandemic because my husband and I moved out of California, we moved to Oregon. Then the pandemic came. I wasn't able to see my kids or visit my kids. They weren't able to come on a plane and visit me. So we started having weekly zoom calls, just the four of us. You know, we are still doing it every single week.

Brian [00:48:09] And that's awesome.

Diann [00:48:10] And we are now having the conversations where I'm able to really get to know them as an adult and kind of revisit some things where I'm recognizing, you know, I think the way I parent did you in this kind of situation wasn't really what you need it from me. I didn't have to be dragged into family therapy by adult children telling me that I have, you know, put them up for life. I I'm now at a point where I realize, you know, I did my best with with what I knew and what I could do at the time and considering where I came from better than most would expect. But each of you is different. And I did not understand clearly enough that I actually needed to be a different parent for each child. I didn't understand. Yeah, but now I do.

Brian [00:48:59] You're a therapist. You've talked with hundreds, if not thousands of people in similar situations who got that right?

Diann [00:49:05] Very, very few. Probably less than 1%.

Brian [00:49:07] You don't have the time, you don't have the resources, you don't have the knowledge, you don't have that. You're just not in a place where you can do it yourself. I mean, there are so many reasons. It's like the system is set up that way. So yeah, it's great that you acknowledge that and that you're you to try to rectify and work around it, work past it and build those relationships. But nobody gets it. Nobody bats a thousand. You be lucky at about 500 is amazing, right? I mean.

Diann [00:49:29] And it's a crap shoot no matter what you do because, you know, as you say, I had been a therapist long enough to recognize there are amazing parents that have horrible children. And the opposite is also true, though I sometimes wonder, is this some sort of a cosmic game.

Brian [00:49:44] Where we're asked to play a game and we don't have all the pieces and we don't even know that we are the pieces or the rules. And so we're just you just you're guessing. And by the way, if you happen to get any of it right for one child, it's going to be completely the opposite for the next.

Diann [00:49:56] Is so true.

Brian [00:49:57] So what you learn from the first one completely irrelevant though makes it interesting.

Diann [00:50:01] But it's probably better. Honestly, I used to. I used to like to say, wow, if only I had known this earlier. If only I'd figured this out sooner. If wish I would have known that 20 years ago. That's not how life works, right? Period for anybody. Yeah. You figure it out as you go. And if you haven't done too much damage, you're still in the conversation. And I mean, I see so many people. I mean, you see them on TikTok, Facebook everywhere talking about their toxic family and why they're going no contact and why the holidays are so hard. And, you know, so I do realize that whatever mistakes you make, if you're still in the conversation, even if it's not the conversation you feel comfortable having, if you're still in the conversation, there's always the chance for healing and repair and reinvention. And I'm grateful for that.

Brian [00:50:50] Awesome. So let me go back to another question that I had earlier. Why do you think your parents didn't tell you didn't tell anyone they were adopted? Have you have you talked to them about that or asked or been able to figure it out or any guesses?

Diann [00:51:03] Well, my parents are both deceased. My dad was quite a bit older than my mom. And, you know, I could never get a word out of that man. He part of it, I think, was just see, I think he must've really shut down very early on in life. And also, I think it was just his temperament and his personality to just be very secretive with holding private, you know, just introverted, like all the things. And also he had a top secret job, so there wasn't I mean, all he did was work and he wasn't allowed to talk about his work. So, yeah, it was kind of end of conversation. Plus he was never home. So I remember at one point I put him to the test to see if he knew what my middle name was because he was so detached from our family that I was absolutely certain he could not tell you my middle name if you put a gun to his head. My first. Amy. Okay, that's easy, but not middle name. And in fact, you didn't know it, but with my mom, you know, it's hard to say what she was thinking. I just think so much of the decisions that she made were just made very impulsively. And then she kind of needed to justify what she did. You couldn't challenge her. You couldn't. You know, I remember and I'm one of my favorite clients. Brian named me the speaker of Uncomfortable Truth, and I said, I got to tell you, I love that so hard. That is so first of all, it's super accurate. I love that. And it's not like I'm trying to be the person who talks about hard things, but I was literally the only person in my family who was asking like, Did you never start to add up the months between us? Yeah. And like, hello. And like why she has curly brown hair and brown eyes and brown skin and I look like this.

Brian [00:52:48] And no one else.

Diann [00:52:49] Does, you know? Come on. Like so nobody looked like anybody. What are their what are their family? Looks like ours. Nobody's, you know. So I was I'm very, very curious. I'm really kind of frickin relentless if if my you know, I don't I don't know. You hear the expression like something sticks in your craw. I don't know where the cross located, but mine must be overdeveloped because something's always stuck in there. And I have to know, you know, it's like I have to know. So I was always asking questions. Now, as I've said at that point in our culture, you didn't talk about being adopted. I have met many adopted adult, you know, kind of since I went through my own experience and other people had questions and I was open to talking about it and certainly had therapy clients that are adopted and most people who were adopted around that time in American culture, it was just considered distasteful. And people sort of thought, well, you know, nobody you know, teenage girls that got pregnant could just be sent away for their summer and come back unpregnant and everybody would pretend like they went to weight camp or something, you know, like and because there's so much shame about sex and there's shame about infertility and their shame about adoption and all this, at least at that time, it literally was hush hush. And I thought, what are the curious people do? Like, do you not even my my birth mother. When I met her, she had another daughter who was seven years old at the time that I was born. And I said, you? And I said, Does she know about me? Nope. She doesn't even know you exist. I said, okay, I think I'm pretty smart. You seem pretty smart. I'm going to guess your other daughter's pretty smart, too. You mean to tell me a smart seven year old does not recognize her mother? Go through an entire nine month healthy pregnancy and not notice anything like I was the kid that noticed that. Yeah, but she says nope. And I thought, you're in denial.

Brian [00:54:40] Yeah, she knows. You know, she just never admitted it. Yeah. So plus, I think there is a lot of the time that people aren't open and vulnerable. At that time, that wasn't a thing. There was. It's none of your business. And what's the what's the use of talking about it doesn't make doesn't change anything. So you don't need to know, so you just move on. I think there was a lot of that in that generation too, so.

Diann [00:54:59] Mm mm. I think it just being adopted, I don't really think about it too much anymore. Every once in a while one of my kids will say, Well, it's a good thing, you know, we're paying close attention to you because we don't really know what else to expect. Especially my daughter. She's like, What age did you get this or what age should that happen? Because she's assuming this is I'm the sole repository of her medical history. Michael, you do have a dad like you can ask him, too, but it's like you don't really realize that there's this big gaping void of knowledge, information, awareness. It's a sense of security and and predictability that you are utterly lacking and that other people take for granted. Like, to this day, I am still typical when I see a photograph of my daughter and I can see a resemblance between us after all these years, because I grew up without that. And it's not that I want her to look like me or even that I think, you know, I look that great is that when I see that resemblance, that is something that people who are not adopted have take for granted, don't even realize it's a thing. But and especially when I see like traits in one of my sons and I think they got that from me, it still is surprising to me and still a sense of curiosity and wonder because it just wasn't my frame of reference and none of my kids is planning on having children. So that's something I sometimes wonder about, like this is where the line stop, you know, like I didn't know where this like the train that passed through town, I don't know where it came from and it's not going anywhere after here. But I've accepted it. I accept that they, I, they didn't ask to be brought into this world. I decided to bring them here. They owe me nothing. And if they don't feel it's the right choice for them to have kids, then I trust that they know best. What? That's right for them. And whatever feelings I have about it are my feelings. My problem to address with myself. Period. But once in a while, I think it might be kind of fun to have a grand head bet. You know, I'll just ask someone else to pass me one of their.

Brian [00:57:03] That's right. You borrow one every once in a while.

Diann [00:57:05] There's all kinds of em around, you know?

Brian [00:57:06] Yeah. So thank you for sharing that story, by the way. That's very interesting. Yeah, I have a friend who was adopted, and he doesn't want to know. Those are my parents. I don't know those people. They don't, you know. So it's just kind of interesting.

Diann [00:57:18] I think people are afraid that it's going to be like they're going to open up a can of worms. Well, that or that. But here's what I think. People have expectations of you if you're adopted. Most people who are not part of the adoption triad, they they're not part of your family. They're not adopted. They didn't adopt a kid. The average person would assume and have the expectation that you should be grateful that somebody wanted you. Someone who did not have to take you chose to take you. So you should be grateful. You should therefore honor your adoptive parents like they did you a favor. And if you were to seek out your biological for any reason other than I need a blood transfusion or an egg donor or something, that that would be disrespectful and insulting because your real parents are the ones that raised you. And I'm like, Yeah, but what about somebody like me? I think that the bets are off for somebody like me, you know, because it's not what you expect. I am. I am grateful, though, I will tell you, I am grateful that I had the childhood that I had, because even though it's pretty horrific in many ways, and I'm well aware of the permanent emotional scar tissue and deficit that I have as a result. It made me aware, it made me compassionate, it made me insightful. It gave me really good problem solving skills. I am a very good judge of character. I know how to keep myself safe and no matter what happens, I know how to survive. And I don't think the average person can say that with as much conviction as I do. And I realized it took that childhood for me to be a strong, resilient, self-sufficient human being.

Brian [00:58:58] And as hard and as painful as that that has been at times, there are benefits to that. Right.

Diann [00:59:02] Have you ever heard the expression post-traumatic growth?

Brian [00:59:06] No, I've never heard that.

Diann [00:59:07] I love that this is this this is very good. I think, given the type of work that you're telling me about doing with the foster kids, this is something you're going to want to do a little bit research on because, you know, nobody gets through life unscathed. But we know that everybody experiences some kind of trauma, big trauma, little trauma. But there's trauma that sort of scars you and wounds you and.

Brian [00:59:28] And that can be big or little trauma to write. It doesn't have to be big. It can be.

Diann [00:59:33] Correct because it's very, very individual. Right. So the the magnitude of the trauma and the magnitude of the impact, there's no predictable correlation, though. Everybody gets through life with some sort of trauma. Some people are really deeply injured, wounded, impaired, and they will remain that way to one degree or another for life. It literally changes the trajectory of their life permanently. There are other people who they get through it. They get a modicum of healing. Their open wounds turn to scabs and scar tissue. They continue to have some level of impairment, but it doesn't prevent them from enjoying life and having meaningful occupation, relationships, contribution, connection, all the things that we all seek. And then there's a small subset of people who experience post-traumatic growth, who actually become better, more evolved, more enlightened, if you will, without trying to sound religious as a direct result of the trauma. It's a rare outcome. I don't think you can orchestrate it. I don't think you can predict it or plan for it. But something that has fascinated me my entire life is resilience. Like why? Why are there people like Oprah Winfrey? Why are there people who experience like so many people experience things in childhood and most of them it it affects them in a negative way. But some people not only survive it, but go on become like a super.

Brian [01:00:59] Use it, right?

Diann [01:01:00] Yeah. Yes. That post-traumatic growth, if that could be put in a book or a pill or, you know, I mean, can you just imagine because nobody's going to get through this life without some sort of trauma? And if we we could all be enhanced by it. Oh, my goodness. We'd be a super we wouldn't have to worry about the zombie apocalypse or alien invasion anymore. We would be so ready for them.

Brian [01:01:23] The growth that would bring if it didn't kill you. Right. I mean, you know.

Diann [01:01:26] Right. Yeah, that's great. But I told you I was idealistic, right? It's a great. I told you.

Brian [01:01:33] Okay. So I think I've got most of my comments and questions about adoption answered. But do you want to deconstruct?

Diann [01:01:40] You know, I did tell you, Bryan, that I've changed her religion and because I have worked with a number of people who have left their religion or come out of their. Really. And I'm well aware of the fact that it's traumatizing for most people. And I think it's something that a lot of people don't understand. And so I would like to share with you a little bit about my deconstruct privilege. I've already told you how I got into it. Can I tell you how I got through it and where it went?

Brian [01:02:07] I'd love that. I'd also another topic that comes up frequently that we don't get to address very often I'd like your input on. Some people just leave religion. It's like, Oh, I just don't go there anymore. And there's nothing to deconstruct. Some people leave a political system or beliefs or whatever, and like me, I just don't vote that way anymore. Others just deconstruct it to the nth degree. And it changes not only the way they viewed that. It changes everything about their life because once they start deconstructing that, they deconstruct everything. I'm kind of curious your thoughts on why you think some people do that versus the other and maybe it can work out in your story or we'll come back to it. So. Hmm.

Diann [01:02:40] Well, I can. I can answer it for myself, and then we can riff on that and maybe speculate about others. I've told you that I grew up without religion. I think if we had gone to church, I'm assuming even back then, there were mandated reporters of child abuse. Somebody would have gotten a whiff of Jeff if our family was going to be a.

Brian [01:02:59] Reason why you didn't go to church.

Diann [01:03:01] It could be.

Brian [01:03:02] And nobody came over and you didn't go anywhere.

Diann [01:03:04] And we went to school. We came home. So I did go to Girl Scouts, though, and that was another place I was allowed to go to Girl Scout, long as they didn't try to bring anybody home. And here's what's funny about being an overachiever. Do you want to know? I earned every single badge, even even though. No, it's all the.

Brian [01:03:23] Channels.

Diann [01:03:24] I earn, dude. I earned every single badge, even the ones I was not interested in, I couldn't care less about. I looked like Rambo. I had the two. I had two sashes crisscrossed over my chest, covered with badges like Rambo with all the bullets. You know, it was ridiculous. But that was that was my being an overachiever. And I you know, each each troop I went to, I always fantasize that the troop leader was my mom, and I always tried to please and all that. And honestly, it's kind of sad, but but I also think it kept me going because I didn't have the parent I needed, I didn't have the grandparents I needed. I didn't have any of those healthy adult role models and in a family sense, and we didn't go to church. So I literally appropriated what I needed from my teachers and my Girl Scout leaders. I literally fantasized that this person is my mom and and I got some of what I needed from them. And I think I think it actually was helpful at the time. You know, now, if I had continued to fantasize about that and started stalking them after I left school, that the whole thing was hell. But that's not how it went. That's not how it went. So after time in the church, the year that I left my second marriage was also the year that I left the church. It was after I completed my master's in social work at UCLA. And I think part of the timeline was that all the benefits of the church notwithstanding for providing structure and supervision and support and security and all that for me and my family during the time I was raising my kids and really just wingin it, if it hadn't been for, you know, the church teachings and the fellowship and and all of that. But by the time I finished my MSW, I had spent 18 years in the church and then two years in social work. Go now, social work. It's not psychology, it's not marriage, family therapy. It's social work. Social work as the discipline is aligned with people that are marginalized and disenfranchized. So who were all the people that I was getting to know and learning from as professors and fellow students? There were people of color, which I never had any person of color around me growing up because my mother saw to it that that never happened. I mentioned she was raised, so I literally grew up in an all white neighborhood, sparkling white. And then I went to grad school years later and I'm like, Look at all these wonderful people who are all so different from me. And one of the other groups of people I got to know were queer people, and that was a whole new experience. Now I have some I have probably more gay friends and I have straight friends at this point in my life. But I realized I was coming out of a bubble because my childhood was a bubble and the church was a bubble. And I did not realize that I wasn't going from a bubble to the wide, wide world. I was going from one bubble to another bubble. And once I went to grad school, the bubble stretched, the bubble stretched and and became threatened because the people that I was now around, people I was learning from, the people I was literally, literally, quite literally surrounded by, were not members of either bubble. And it really challenged my thinking and it in fact, I actually got disowned because I went to grad school and I took up a career where I was going to be helping black and brown people with their problems. I got legally disowned. So I know it just it just is what it is. But but what I learned was it really forced me to to really think about what I believe. I knew what I had been raised to believe was wrong. I was smuggling Motown records into my house as a teenager because I was forbidden.

Brian [01:06:58] Oh, not if I thought you were a good kind of.

Diann [01:07:00] I mean, come on. Well, but see, this is. This is. Oh, you have not been taking notes, my friend. I gave a very good impression of being a good girl, let me tell you. Yes, but there was a lot of masking. I think that's probably the best term for it. There was a lot of masking. And I think the deconstruction process for me is I realized, you know, now I feel challenge because I kind of went from this little toxic little bubble to this big bubble. And frankly, you know, most people would at least say, yeah, I consider myself a Christian, I'm not religious, I don't go to church, but I consider myself to be whatever. And so I really had to stop and think, okay, I thought I was choosing this, but did I even was this even informed consent? Did I even understand what I was signing up for when what really drove me into the church was the fact that I had so many deficits in terms of preparation for adult life, not to mention marriage, parenting. I had so many deficits that I needed to belong to something literally bigger than myself, like a I needed to believe in something bigger than myself. And so that became the church. But did I, by that time, 20 years later, almost. Could I actually, in all honesty, with integrity today, I believe each of these things in the doctrine and the dogma. I couldn't say that. So I kind of began a process of questioning. And over time I was that that rigorous questioning, and it was mainly with myself. But I do remember during that time of questioning, I was asking more questions of people at church as well. Not in a disrespectful way, not in a confrontational way. But I wasn't as easily pacified with the superficial answers that I had been trained to accept all along. So I started being thought of as kind of a problem child kind of a challenge. And I remember at one occasion somebody knocked on the door and I was at home. I always worked through my kids, but my my former husband and I ran a business from home for a little while, so I was able to be with them when they were little. But one day some gentleman from the church came over. They told me that they I said, He's not here. He's that work. They said, No, we're here for you. They told me that they were there to pray with me and to give me some reading material. And I said, Why is something happen? And it, you know, prayer. And I swear to you, I didn't realize it until just this moment. As I'm sharing this with you, the feeling I got was just like standing on that doorstep when I was nine years old. Like, Why are you here? What have I done? What are you about to tell me is wrong with me? Because I'm literally killing myself, trying to do everything perfectly. And you would not be paying me a casual visit for no reason, right? So what, what? What's going on here? And they gave me a book that the title was something like Husbands Can't Lead When Wives Won't Follow. And they proceeded to tell me that the reason why my husband was not a more godly man was because I was not a submissive wife. I am too opinionated, too outspoken, too direct, too educated. They even said I.

Brian [01:10:10] Was too big, too much.

Diann [01:10:11] Yeah, I'm just too much. Like I have a big mouth and I just don't have the sense to keep it shut now. I never challenged any church teachings in public. I never disrespected my husband in public. What have you had?

Brian [01:10:24] You know, I mean, honestly.

Diann [01:10:26] Well, yeah, yeah.

Brian [01:10:27] We'll leave that for another discussion.

Diann [01:10:28] I think that I think that way now. But it was like we need to shut this one down because this one is a potential problem. And I remember feeling though confused and hurt. But again, like you asked me, what did I think about what was going on in my childhood? I don't know how I knew this, but when they left, I thought, this isn't logical, okay? First of all, I'm hurt, I'm offended, I'm sad, I'm scared, I'm feeling all these things. But my brain said, Wait a minute, they're holding me accountable for my husband's character. My husband was a grown ass man before I ever met him. Seems to me that he's responsible for his character, not me. So somewhere, even though I felt like, what are they going to do? Are we going to be like, Am I going to be burned at the stake? Are we going to be ousted? Like, are they going to take up a campaign or I didn't know what was going to happen, but I thought, you know what, I can't go along with this anymore because if there is that God and he made me, he knows exactly who I am. He knows exactly how I am. And if he gave me a brain to think and a mouth to speak, and he allowed me to go through the experiences that have made me very bold, doesn't he know that too? I just couldn't reconcile it anymore. And so I think I started kind of I didn't leave. I didn't make a big fuss. I think it. Is more of an internal process.

Brian [01:11:52] That started.

Diann [01:11:53] And started. Yeah, I would say. And I just started sort of internally detaching by when somebody would say something or teach something or I would observe something and normally I would be trying to figure it out, trying to work it through in my mind, trying to make sense of it. I just stopped because I realized I'm spending way too much energy trying to make this work. It's not working. So I'm just going to just be here and see what happens when I'm still here. But I'm not fighting to make sense of this. And seven years later, I left the marriage and the church literally at the same time. And I've never gotten so much hate in my entire life.

Brian [01:12:37] From the church, from.

Diann [01:12:38] Yeah. And from people at the church. I mean we literally me and my kids had to move to a different my children and I had to move to a different community because of all the things that people were saying. My ex portrayed himself as the innocent victim. And I was you know, I went to grad school, I got my education. Now I think I'm too good for him. That was the story that people were telling, which, of course, disobedient and and arrogant and, you know, very ungodly. That was the story. So I'm like, I don't want my kids to be exposed to this. But I will tell you, I my best friend at that time who didn't even go to the church, she dumped me and told me if you got more education and now think you're too good for your husband, I'm sure I'm next, so I'm going to dump you before you get a chance to dump me. I'm like, What does this have to do with it? Wow. I don't understand that when people do things like this. So it really taught me the whole process of deconstructing from the church. And you mentioned earlier, you know, people say, okay, I used to be into religion, now I'm not. I spent like a decade after that not wanting to go anywhere near anything that had anything to do with any kind of church. I'm like, nope, nope, nope. But during that ten years, you know, I like to collect art objects. I started collecting Buddhist statues. I don't know why. I just like the way they look. When I looked at them, they made me feel peaceful and calm. So I just started collecting and even realized I had so many of them. And ten years after I left the church and I at that point, I got to tell you, I felt sad that I no longer had religion. I felt sad. I felt adrift. I felt lost. I felt kind of alienated. And because I had so many people judge me, I literally lost all my friend group. I was in this bubble, so I literally lost everything. But they would say, You didn't lose anything. You threw it away. I didn't even get any support. I didn't even get any sympathy or understanding. Because you chose this, it's like you made your bed not lie lying it. I hope you're happy. You and yourself and nobody else. No one's ever going to talk to you again. So for ten years I thought, if this is what happens when you leave, I'm never going anywhere near any kind of religion again. Okay? Ten years goes by and I have all these Buddhist tensions, and by this time, I've had a pretty serious car accident. And I'm left with chronic pain in my neck that I have lived with now for many, many years, I'll have for the rest of my life. And I went through all the pills and all the procedures and all the traction. And finally it was like, this is an unacceptable quality of life. There must be something else to do. And my doctor said, Actually, we've done everything. You're not a candidate for neurosurgery because your cervical spine is so fragile that you would probably become a complete paraplegic if anybody even attempted to do surgery on you. So I went to three neurosurgeons and they all said precisely the same thing. They said, So what you're telling me is I'm not operable and I'm living in pain. That really affects my quality of life. And there's literally nothing you can do. Well, you should. I do like Dan? Yeah. He says, well, you know, some people find meditation to be helpful. I thought, Fine, great. That's the one thing I haven't tried. Let's try that. The next day I'm in Starbucks. I sit at the community board meditation classes near you, and I thought, sweet. So I take down the name of the place and the time, and I show up, sit down in the front row, don't even notice there's a Buddha statue and a candle and a shrine. I for some reason don't even see it because I'm thinking I'm going to go there for some kind of class and they're going to teach me a skill for managing my pain. By the time the room filled up with all these other Buddhists, I'm like, Oh shit, I'm in church now. I'm in church. Oh my God. How did this I'm Mike. How can I get I'm in the front row. It's not like I can, like, quietly sneak out. I said, I'm going to wait for intermission and then I'll go. But oddly enough, I it made sense to me that one of the first things they said was question everything. I almost burst into tears because I had been literally indoctrinated for two decades that my questioning was a sign of my abject disobedience to God. So I wander into this place quite by accident. I just feel to. Help with my pain. Thank you very much. And they said question everything. And I thought I stuck around. I continued to stick around. I started taking classes. I started going on retreats. Nobody told me anything. Nobody asked me to do anything to like, prove anything, to espouse anything. It was like, you're on your own journey of discovery and working with your mind. And as a cognitive therapist, it was a perfect fit, let me tell you. It was really learning how to manage my mind and learning how to relieve my own suffering by choosing the thoughts, I think, in examining the thoughts that were arising naturally in my mind. I got to tell you, the best thing that ever happened to me, and now I'm probably 20 years into it. I am not rigorously practicing every single day. I no longer think of it as a religion. I don't really think I ever thought of it as a religion. I consider it my philosophy of living. It has worked its way into almost everything I do, sort of subconsciously, because I believe that we can eliminate a great deal of unnecessary suffering by what we choose to engage with and how we choose to think about things. And I do that that that is my philosophy of living. And it's helped me a lot. And by the way, I'm still in pain, but I no longer think it's a problem that needs to be fixed. I just accept it as a condition of this existence and I do the best I can to manage it. So that was it's kind of isn't it funny? It's like it came to me as like now I'm finally do something that's going to work to get me out of this damn pain. And actually what it taught me was so much more is like how to live in this world where fear, uncertainty, doubt, disappointment. I mean, I have a very, very basic way of thinking about the Buddhist life. Here's what it is. We cause ourselves suffering because we don't get what we want and because we get what we don't want. That covers a lot of territory. If you think about it, and like all the things that have ever happened in your life that you wouldn't have asked for and all the things that you wanted to have that didn't happen, or at least didn't happen the way you thought they would or should or you desired. If you can manage that, you're like halfway to freedom. In my opinion, that's been probably one of the most transformational things of all, and probably I wouldn't have been able to see its value for me had I not gone through 20 years of Christianity. That's why I don't regret anything. First of all, I can't change it anyway. So regret is a total waste of energy, but it sort of kind of makes sense how things evolved the way they did. And what I like to have more time now that I have more knowledge and more awareness. Yeah, but I'm not going to sell my soul to the devil, even if there is one.

Brian [01:19:37] So you're not getting that.

Diann [01:19:38] You just choose to know. It's like I'm just doing the best they can with what I figured out up until now. And I hope I stay healthy. And I hope I have I hope I have a number of years left, a part of me. But the goal with Buddhism is to live each day as though it is your life and not cling to any day is sort of like I joke around and say I'm always ready for the express check out. But I do. I do hope I'll be around a number of more years because there's so many interesting things happening in the world and I don't want to miss out. Yeah, that's sort of that's that curiosity. I don't want to miss out because there are interesting things happening in the world and I want to be a part of that.

Brian [01:20:16] And you are?

Diann [01:20:16] I am. I mean, I'm a podcaster, right? Like, that's what how many people our age are doing what we do, how many people are on Tik Tok? Brian They say it's only for the kids, but you're there.

Brian [01:20:27] Yeah, yeah. Especially during my angry phase. I was there. I'm glad I did. You stop. I haven't done any posts there for a while. I didn't get a whole lot of engagement other than the big engagement that I got was when I was angry about something and people wanted to be angry about the same thing. And I'm like, Yeah, you don't want that to become my personality. I had someone say this the other day. I had to deconstruct the church and deconstruct Mormonism, right? And then I had to deconstruct being ex-Mormon. And a lot of people don't get to that second deconstruction because they just that's how they've defined themselves now. It's like, Oh, but there's a past. There's a point beyond that. And until you ran into Buddhism, right? There was another thing too, to kind of add to a lot of people, just their ex-Mormon especially then you're Utah is very Mormon centric. Everybody they work with everybody in the neighborhood, they play ball with whoever. They're all there. So they've defined themselves as not that group. That's an unfinished. Right. What what does.

Diann [01:21:14] Actually in you, you're actually you're still in a bubble. Yes. Like yes, it's it's like, you know, people said when I was a therapist, they didn't understand why I wasn't a bigger fan of AA. It's like, no, listen, I am a fan of AA for people who need to change their relationship with alcohol and their belief that they can change their relationship with alcohol. But once they have accomplished that, there should be a great big world out ahead for them to explore. That does not involve going to a fucking meeting every day like you are. I just personally don't. I think you're still an addict. If. You are in recovery for the rest of your life. That's going to piss people off. I'm willing to take the shade for it. That is my they find themselves.

Brian [01:21:57] That they're an addict. They're a recovering alcoholic. And if they stop recovery, they're going to be an alcoholic again. I mean.

Diann [01:22:03] But but that means you're still attached every day to that identity. And so to your point about Mormonism. If you're a mormon and then you're a former Mormon, which you can't say too fast because, you know, a former one is like and all runs together. I've worked with a lot of former Mormons. Very. It's just such a fascinating thing to come out of. But then then they get stuck in that new identity of being a former Mormon. I'm like, up gets me to realize that you're still attached. Yeah. To Mormonism. Yes. Because it's still it's still on your byline. It's still on your business card. The one in your head. You're still referencing yourself vis a vis the church, like I can say. And probably to this point, I frequently talk about being a therapist for a long time. I am not a therapist anymore, but clearly I'm still attached to that part of my identity as I bring it up all the time. And I don't mind that other people bring it up all the time. I think less about being a former Christian conversation like this one. It was important and it came up, but I don't really think about it. What I think about is that and I would say I'm probably deconstructing Buddhism as well because I no longer think of it as a religion. I have incorporated the practices and the principles into my life, the ones that make sense for me, the ones that work for me, the ones that help me feel safe and secure. But it's so organic and subconscious that I don't think, Oh, I'm doing my Buddha thing now. And when people say, I dropped by your house like you have a Christmas tree and you have a wreath, and I hear like Christmas music, come, aren't you like there's a big old Buddha in your yard? Does he.

Brian [01:23:48] Ever somehow.

Diann [01:23:49] Say, no, he doesn't. I'm really trying to message people. No, not really. But it's like, you know what? Because most people who are experiencing Christmas are doing so in a secular way. I enjoy the festivities. I enjoy the gatherings. I enjoy. You know, I enjoy celebrating. I enjoy decorating. I enjoy feeling a part of something going on around me that's fun. I don't think of it as regressing or I don't think of it as like flirting with the religion. I never think, well, maybe I should just go go to a Christmas Eve service. I don't think about that. And by the same token, I've had people say, Are you sure you're a Buddhist? Mike, what a strange question there. Why do you ask? I don't. Well, I'm like, here, let me let me give you a blood sample. No, but this someone said to me, Are you sure you're Buddhist? I said, I don't know why. Tell me everything. When when I went f with people. If I ever say that too, you'll know that's what's happening. I'm going. I am being snarky a f I'm like, tell me everything. Yeah, what have you heard? But they say, well, it's just that. I mean, I'm like, Come on, you started it. Now finish it. Well, it's just that you kind of swear a lot. Oh, and you think a real Buddhist wouldn't say the F-word so much? And then they're like, Sorry, I brought it up. And I said, I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what, this will help. Why don't you just think of me as a profane Buddhist, super snarky, love it. And I and then I realized that is so good. I actually immediately changed my Reddit screen name to profane Buddhist. You can go look it up. I love it. I love it. Is that a deconstruction or am I full of it?

Brian [01:25:26] Yes, yes and yes.

Diann [01:25:27] Okay. I am full of it and. Okay, good. I accept.

Brian [01:25:30] I accept. You know, that's been another thing that's been very hard for me to handle is not looking at things as black and white.

Diann [01:25:36] Because that's dogma for.

Brian [01:25:38] So long.

Diann [01:25:39] And you and I swallowed a lot of.

Brian [01:25:41] Docs and there was one true church and one true God and one true religion and one true path and one. And you were either on it or you needed somebody help to get on it. And it's just I find myself in a lot of those areas. When I'm being snarky, it's easier to say yes and yes, but a lot of times I think that is binary thinking. Again, get rid of that. There is no proof that that that no. Done you good in the bad in the past.

Diann [01:26:05] No, but you got to admit and I'm sure you do that the Mormons have a fantastic marketing campaign. Oh, yeah. Like better than any other channel.

Brian [01:26:14] Was essentially the first multi-year marketing. Right. That's why all the MLMs are here in Utah. Yeah, because Mormons know how to do that. You build your.

Diann [01:26:20] Name for sure.

Brian [01:26:21] Do sometimes your own kids, but.

Diann [01:26:24] Right. But I'll tell you what else about binary thinking is problematic. And something else I've been deconstructing in the last decade of my life is realizing all the cultural conditioning I've had as a middle class white person, all of which I started dealing with in grad school. All the cultural conditioning I've had as a former Christian, all the conditioning I've had over my lifetime as. A straight woman and realizing how much of the feedback that I have gotten over the years that were meant to put me in line, shut me up, were because of what some people refer to as my masculine trait. Yeah, I know. Puzzled. Right. It's like because as a woman, the straight woman, I'm not supposed to be opinionated, outspoken, direct. I'm not supposed to speak my mind.

Brian [01:27:17] I'm educated to.

Diann [01:27:18] Question thing, independent, you know. Can we go on? And fortunately and to this day, Brian, to this day, I still have people say, well, don't take this the wrong way. But like, you know, you're really intimidating. Thank you.

Brian [01:27:33] I won't take that the wrong way. I think that's awesome.

Diann [01:27:35] I will just say we could get into it if you like, but. But I would just like to say that this far more about you than it does about me. Because I am not intimidating just because you're intimidated. Right. But I didn't even realize that that was something to deconstruct until my daughter, who's my youngest of three, became a teenager and she started hearing it. I'm like, This is some serious bullshit. If you are a reasonably attractive, reasonably intelligent, reasonably educated, independent thinking, human being who happens to be female.

Brian [01:28:11] You're too much.

Diann [01:28:12] And you're too. You know, it's so interesting how many women struggle with the belief that they're not enough when there are women like me who have been told their whole life that they're too much, I'm like, So what is it? Let's do some math here. Am I too much or not enough? Can't. What about the Goldilocks scenario? Why can't I just be just right? This is Goldilocks, isn't it? Goldilocks the one that's the bed was too hard. The bed, the porridge was too hot. And, like, I want to. I just want to be just right. And we just. No, apparently we can't. Because. Because the binary serves the people in power who want other people to just take the problem, drink the Kool-Aid, swallow.

Brian [01:28:49] Define the parameters question and inside. Yeah, yeah. I defined my mother. And how that makes you feel. I don't care. I'm just past that now.

Diann [01:28:58] My problem.

Brian [01:28:59] My problem.

Diann [01:28:59] Not my problem.

Brian [01:29:00] And apologize for it, though, because it's not a problem.

Diann [01:29:02] Yeah. Do you ever say sorry? Not sorry?

Brian [01:29:05] Not very often. I do apologize and I catch myself saying that more and more. Yeah, but yeah. I had a friend that posted the other day that said she raised her hand in class four times the other day and every one of her comments started with the words, I'm sorry. And she got herself like. Stop. What are you sorry for? You're paying to get an education. You're there. You have a question, raise your hand and ask the question.

Diann [01:29:23] But this is internalized because I will tell you, even as far back as the second grade, like I would think a school teacher would be an eager beaver for a kid who sat in the front row, was so eager to learn and was always raising their hand because I mean, I needed the affirmation that I had some sort of worth right, you know, outside of my household. And where I found it was that I was a good student and I loved learning. And so here I was like raising my hand not not to just get attention, but because I wanted to be challenged and I wanted to learn and I wanted the teachers to see that I was really interested in other kids in the back of the room were faffing around and pushing each other and making paper airplanes and stuff. And wouldn't, you know, as early as the second grade, I literally had a teacher say to me, Diane, put your hand down, it's time to give someone else a chance. And I felt I felt heat like I felt like my face turned red, my chest turned like I just felt like deep over my whole body. That was shame. That was like, I don't care how eager you are to learn. I'm tired of seeing your hand wave in the air. I think I was challenging her. Maybe she was intimidated, but because I was so eager that I was like. Next question. Next question. Next question. And she was like, I ain't working for you, girl. Put your hand down. It was an important lesson. And and this happens in the educational environment. It happens in the work environment, which is why so many superstars go start their own business, don't you think?

Brian [01:30:53] Yeah, I know a lot of.

Diann [01:30:54] Because you're told you're you're standing out in a bad way. We don't like you. Yeah.

Brian [01:30:57] And eventually, to me, you know what? I'll just go find myself because I'll never fit in in all of your parameters. So I'm just going to define my own set of parameters, and then I'll be fine.

Diann [01:31:05] But do you think we can really do that without feeling angry or hurt? I mean, I'm thinking about I'm referencing like the five stages of grief and loss, like when you finally really realize, oh, well, son of a gun. I have literally spent a decade trying to be accepted, trying to be approved, of trying to belong. And what do I have to show for it? Not so much. So I'm going to take my ball. I'm going to go home. I'm going to figure out what I need to do to accept and approve of myself so that I can wean myself off of this twisted little game of trying to get something from me. All that you actually don't have to give me an even wouldn't if you could. But first I had to go through shock and disbelief. Anger, depression.

Brian [01:31:51] Anger is a great motivator. We don't make changes unless we get angry about something and then we change it. Right.

Diann [01:31:56] But some people get stuck in the story, though. True. Like it's like the farmer. The farmer Mormon, who's still angry at the years they gave to the church. It's like there's something beyond that. You have to get to that last stage, that acceptance, and then. Yeah.

Brian [01:32:12] Good point. Good point. There are some really interesting comments. There's ex-Mormon, Reddit. A lot of people say, this is my last time here. I'm moving on and everybody says, we're going to miss you. Congratulations. That's awesome. Whatever. But they just kind of like, I'm not going to sit here and dwell in the ex-Mormon bashing forever. And I've got my anger out and I've moved on. And there are other people that have been there for a decade that are just bitter and angry and vindictive and want to be right. And it's like, okay, but at some point, what do you want to be besides just angry and vindictive and bitter an ex?

Diann [01:32:43] Can I ask you a question, please? Because this is something I think about all the time. Something that I've come to accept about myself is that, you know, a lot of people are able to pick and stick. They know who they think they are early in life, like they pick a career, they pick a lifestyle, they pick a family style. They, you know, get there where they're going to live, who they're going to marry. Like it all started for them pretty early on and they stick with it. And I met these people. Some of them live in my neighborhood. I've met them on cruise ships, I've met them in restaurants. I've met them standing in line at Starbucks. And they tell me I, you know, worked at such and such place for 35 years. I've been married my person here for 40 years, whatever. And I always thought, how do they do that? You know, like how do they manage to remain in a straight line in all these different areas of their life for so many years? And I always thought there was something wrong with me that I was not able to do that. I mean, I've had three marriages, I've had two religions, I've had four careers. And I got a lot of feedback that, you know, I'm I lack commitment. I lack, you know, discipline, you know, whatever. It took me a lot of years to realize my path is the path of continuous personal evolution. And because I now embrace and accept that path, the hardest part about it, why it took me so long to finally acknowledge it and just work with it, is because I outgrow things every so often. It may be five years, it may maybe 25 years, but I inevitably reach a point could be with a relationship, a career, a hobby, a friend, group, a lifestyle where I've outgrown it. It now feels constricting, constraining. I feel it's I think of it like a tight pair of shoes. I can still walk, but it's painful every step of the way. And I need my little tagline for that is When it's time to grow, you need to go. And I have to let people go. I have to let things. I've spent years, decades, even investing in developing, nurturing. I have to let them go or they let me go as soon as they see that my eyes are on the next horizon. Ultimately, what I've learned is this is a solitary path. I never set out to be a lone wolf, Ryan. I never wanted to be a lone wolf. I am a hard core people person, but I had to learn how to become comfortable with being a lone wolf. Because when I'm not afraid of being alone, I know wherever I am is where I am choosing to be. I'm not here because of obligation or habit, because that no longer equals the good choice for me. But it's really hard to let people go and to let feels like it's not like a like a different chapter of a book. It's like a set of book. And that's hard. It continues to be hard. I don't feel sorry for myself. I realize this is just who I am, but I wonder if you variance that the.

Brian [01:35:38] The loss of letting things go.

Diann [01:35:40] The willingness to allow yourself to grow, to outgrow and to let go.

Brian [01:35:47] So we talked earlier about the ability to realize with with you, with your mother, that's not a relationship. It's not going to happen. It's let it go. You can sit there and wonder. You can track down your dad. You can track down your sister. You can track where does that going? And you can stagnate and worry about that and get hyper focused on that small detail. Or you can realize I've had to make a decision in my life with that, with a relationship with my father. We will never have the relationship that I would want to have. And or the longest time it pained me that we didn't have that relationship. I still see and we get along fine. We don't have a deep connected relationship and I've just come to the realization that it's never going to happen. You can spend more time with them, you can have more conversations with them. They're going to end up the same way and you're not going to move down that path. Now, you can sit down there in the middle of the path and say, This is where I'm going to stay. And or you can say I'm going to maintain that, but that's all it's going to be. I've got to stop kidding myself that one day. Out of the blue. He's just going to be open and will embrace and have this open communication where he listens and asks about my day. It's not going to happen. Right? So it makes you sad, right? Because you have this ideal of what you want. But I think that I keep coming back to this Glennon Doyle, quote, Write your goddamn cheating. Leave the dog. I know your friends. I know you get along great. And that's all that you know in life. But you're a cheetah brain. And I'm not saying that the cheetah is better than the dog. I'm saying it's not a dog. It needs to be a cheetah. And it needs to realize that being a cheetah means you are different and you will outrun the dog. And when they whistle, you won't come back.

Diann [01:37:29] Oh, that's. I forgot that part of the quote. Yeah, right. It's true.

Brian [01:37:32] So actually, I just made that part up, but.

Diann [01:37:35] Well, that then explains. And it's not my memory, remember? Thank you.

Brian [01:37:38] But I think that's kind of implied. You know, it's like but I don't like the fact that thinking, well, the cheat is better than the dog, so you need to live in my relationships. The cheetah just isn't a yes. And you're you're trained to be a dog so we can show you like you're a dog so people can see you like you're a dog. But cheetahs are in the wild, right? And they don't come when you whistle. They don't come when you need to be feed. And when they're hungry, they kill something and eat it. That's a cheetah, right? So you might work with the dog for a while. You might live in the zoo for a while until you realize this isn't my true nature. I need to move on. And one of my favorite things in trying to get around this binary thinking comes from a friend that I interviewed for this show a while ago that she adds the phrase For now in so many things and I'm Buddhist for now, I have no intention of changing. I don't know what I would change to, but I know that that's an important thought to reinforce in my head that I'm a Buddhist now because it's working for me, and at some point that may not be, and I'll change and that's fine. We have a strong relationship with this person or a relationship with this person, or now when it comes time to move on and I know it, then, then that's what we'll that's what we'll do. And it's not like you're not going to say, I'm never going to see my dad again. I didn't delete these people from my phone book. I just stopped calling them to go to lunch all the time because I wasn't getting out of that relationship. What I what I wanted out of that relationship. And nor would I ever. It's been hard as a man to replace those relationships.

Diann [01:39:01] Yes.

Brian [01:39:02] I'm sure it's hard for everybody. But men don't have those meaningful conversations.

Diann [01:39:06] Many men don't even realize the value of what they're not getting. You do.

Brian [01:39:13] Yeah, I love that.

Diann [01:39:14] So yeah, but this this is so, so, so helpful because also in your answer, it's acknowledgment that sometimes when it's time to grow, you need to go and you literally need to cut ties. But sometimes you don't need to leave. You don't need to let go of the person, right? The lifestyle, the the relationship, the career, what you need to let go of is your attachment to what you think it should be. Yeah, the person can still be right there and they don't even need to know about the letting go. Right. They'll feel the difference in the way you relate to them because the tension will start to dissipate. You will just literally take them as they are and stop trying to transform them into who you think they should be or could be. Right? Yeah. And that, my friend, is actually Buddhist practice, though.

Brian [01:40:04] Well, maybe I'm Buddhist. For now.

Diann [01:40:07] For now. It's so good. I'm in. I'm going to borrow that. I love that for now.

Brian [01:40:11] Yeah, it's been very powerful for me because if I catch myself by saying a statement, it's like, just add for now. That could change it 5 seconds after you say it when you realize it's like, No, maybe I'm not great, but.

Diann [01:40:21] That's especially helpful for someone like me who tends to be very certain. And then I change my mind. I'm certain of what I'm certain of when I'm certain of it. But then later I get other information and then I change my mind. It's confusing for other people, but if you just add for now there's a hint that this could change.

Brian [01:40:41] You're holding those beliefs or your self-identity loosely.

Diann [01:40:45] Love it. Strong idea is loosely how I love my favorite expressions. Isn't that they look at us.

Brian [01:40:50] Yeah. Is that a Buddhist or something?

Diann [01:40:52] I don't know if it's a Buddhist expression, but I like it. Strong opinions loosely. How we should probably find out because we probably should credit in the show notes whoever actually said it because it probably isn't me. I just heard it latched on to it. At least you know where the four now came from. But I am definitely going to borrow that is that fits me.

Brian [01:41:11] And it gets us out of that mindset that we do have the answers. I mean, my wife has a saying that she quotes and I can't write. This is another one I should look up who said it. It is a generous gift to have been so phenomenally wrong about something that was so important to you. And it's painful when you think about it. You don't think of it as a gift, but it makes you think about so many other things and the way you hold on to other things. I don't feel like I white knuckle as many thoughts or beliefs anymore, and that's okay.

Diann [01:41:36] It also means that you have exposed yourself to things beyond your comfort zone. Because when we're in an echo chamber, right, when we're in a bubble, when we only surround ourselves with other people who think exactly. As we do, you never have the opportunity to realize you're actually probably wrong about quite a few things that you think you are absolutely right about. It's embarrassing when it happens the first few times, especially when there's witnesses, but after a while you realize it's a great burden to be relieved, to always have to be right, and to always know the answer, because that's usually ego trying to justify its existence. And it's like, Oh, you go simmer down now we got we can always learn more by being less certain of what we think we know. Yeah. Awesome. Good stuff.

Brian [01:42:24] Thank you so much for the conversation.

Diann [01:42:26] Wonderful. I absolutely loved it. Yeah.

Brian [01:42:29] One question for you before you leave and then I got a couple of other ones that I'm in a follow up with you on later. But okay, what's the what are the the one or several takeaways that you want listeners to take from this episode.

Diann [01:42:41] At whatever age you are in life, if your assessment of the situation you're in is Something's wrong here, trust your gut. I personally believe that guts don't lie. And I think one of the ways that we raise children that is the most damaging is we talk them out of their own inner knowing. We lead them away from their instincts and their intuition. We tell them that's not true. Don't think that. Don't say that. And I think your intuition and your instincts are your own. G.P.S. Yeah, that was installed for a reason. It does not malfunction. You just get talked out of relying on it. And I think that happens from a very early age. But you can recover your connection to your instincts and intuition. So if you are in a situation or somebody says something to you or someone tells you, Well, this is the way it is, and a little voice in your head says, I don't think so. Question things. You don't have to be a rebel. You don't have to be disruptive or disobedient. You can be a quiet questioner. But I think self-awareness and self-sufficiency, which we all need somewhat of, relies on you having confidence that you can trust your own internal guidance system. So I would say that and I would also say that if anything that you have heard in this conversation today, as you curious about post-traumatic growth, spend some time researching that, get to know what that's about. And chances are if you're curious about it, it's something that you have experience. And I think it is one. It's a very powerful way, even without working with a therapist, that you can help heal yourself by being a witness to how you grew beyond the things that happened to you. And the last thing I would say is all the years that I was a cognitive therapist, all the years that I have practiced meditation and mindfulness and even surviving a crazy childhood, I think the most phenomenal thing in the entire world is the human mind. I think we can change our story at any age and stage by learning to separate the facts from the drama. The facts are what happened. The drama is the story you told yourself about those facts, because we need to make sense of our lives. But chances are, unless you are deliriously happy with the life you have right now, chances are you have been recycling a story that you made up when you were like that nine year old kid. That story I made up, well, I'm adopted. That means I'm not as good as anyone else. That means I need to work ten times harder than everybody else to even deserve to be here. I had to transform that story or it would have really ruined my life. And you can change your story whenever you want. You don't have to change the facts. You can't change the fact. But you can change the story and you don't need anyone's permission to do that. I think that is one of the most powerful, but not a secret. I think we should be teaching this to kids because who doesn't need to reformat what they think is true about them and the way the world works at some point? That's what I would say.

Brian [01:45:57] That's wonderful. That's awesome.

Diann [01:45:58] You're welcome.

Brian [01:45:59] Thank you so much for your time. This has been a great conversation. It's so nice to get to know you.

Diann [01:46:03] My pleasure.

Brian [01:46:05] So many topics we could discuss from today's episode. I especially love the idea of the pain of letting go in order to further develop Diane's quote. When it's time to grow, you need to go is a good one. And so I want to ask you what you think about that quote. What is something that you've had to leave behind in order to move forward? Please join the conversation online by following the link in the show notes or visiting our Facebook community for listeners and past guests. You know, also do yourself a favor and think of several people right now who you would like to share this podcast with and then do it until next week. Thanks for listening to Strangers You Know?