Transcript
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All right and welcome back to Life-Changing Challengers.
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Again, I'm your host, brad Minus, and I am so very honored to have Dana Diaz with me.
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She is the author of Gasping for Air, the Stranglehold of Narcissistic Abuse, and she calls herself an author and a voice for victims' abuse.
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So welcome, dana.
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Thank you so much for joining us.
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Well, thank you so much for having me.
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I'm very excited always to have this conversation because, unfortunately, too many people can relate, so we got to help them out.
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Yes, and that's what we're here to do, right?
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And as I always said, if any of you have a connection with the content that I'm bringing you and you get one nugget out of it, I've done my job and you've got something, and you've got something to take away, and always leave comments, and I always give contact information at the end so you can keep your journey going.
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But let's start out with how this came about.
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So, dana, can you just give us a little background on your childhood, where you grew up?
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What was a compliment to your house and what was it like to grow up in the Chicago area?
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Oh well, discuss the weather.
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Anybody that lives in the Midwest knows that the weather is always a thing, but you know, I've been in it all my life, so it doesn't faze me, just you get used to it.
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But the childhood that's always been the big question, because people read my book and this toxic, awful relationship and how it grew into domestic violence.
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And then they meet me and they're like but how did you end up in that situation?
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You're strong and you're this and you're intelligent and I'm like, yeah, but it happens to the best of us.
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But I think that the core of how it happens does go back to how we were raised.
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I think that most people don't realize that children are forgive the wording, but we're hardwired by the time we're about seven years old as to family, dynamics, roles, the way the world works, generally based on what we see around us, and I had unfortunately been born to a teenage mother back in the 70s, when it wasn't okay to be a pregnant teenager.
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So life was difficult, very difficult for her, as you can imagine a lot of judgments, a lot of shame at school, in her family.
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There was a lot she dealt with.
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But the problem where it came to affect me and still affects me to this day and I'm 48 years old is that I don't think she wanted children, but she certainly made sure that I paid the price for everything she went through during her pregnancy with me.
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I was born, actually, ironically, on her 17th birthday.
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Immediately after I was born she had her tubes tied, which indicates to me she just didn't want children at all.
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So pretty much imagine a young girl.
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She has a kid.
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She didn't want Pretty sure she didn't want any kids.
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Her life was made difficult.
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She's working three jobs just trying to feed us and keep us sheltered.
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I was fortunate that my grandma decided she would get a job to pay most of my expenses and great-grandma would care for me during the days since she was home.
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So I did have that love and that nurturing and that motherly aspect.
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Where I experienced love in that way, but from my mother it was always distant and almost in a neglectful way, emotionally and physically.
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There was no soothing when I was upset or couldn't sleep at night because I did spend some time with her.
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But I eventually moved in with her when she found somebody she was going to marry.
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She got married to a man when I was seven years old it was not my biological father.
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I didn't even know I had a biological father, honestly, because it hadn't occurred to me.
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I was just a kid living my life.
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I saw other kids had mom and dads, but I just had a mom and a grandma and a great grandma and some uncles and cousins.
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It just didn't occur to me that I was missing something.
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But my life really took a turn when my mother got married.
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So she married an older man who I recognized back then.
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I mean, this man was one way in front of people, boisterous and funny and charming and giving and generous and all these things.
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But then in our house or even in the car, sometimes leaving the family holidays or whatever, he was a nasty beast.
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I never liked him from the first time I met him.
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Actually I don't want to give too much away because I actually just finished my second book and the publisher's reviewing it now and it's about my childhood.
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But even on the first time I met him there was a situation where I was physically hurt and he had no remorse.
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He just didn't care that he had done that to me, but the sad thing is neither did my mother.
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So here I am in this childhood.
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Now, in this new place, he had moved my mother into his house that was away from our family and friends outside the city of Chicago, which was all I'd ever known, and a lot of her family didn't have vehicles.
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People that live in Chicago people have to understand you usually don't have a vehicle, you rely on public transportation.
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So it was very limited in the time that I was able to see my family in Chicago because they couldn't get to us and we couldn't get to them for whatever reason, mostly because of time, because all my mother did was work.
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But it was really hard being in this house with him.
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So my mother worked constantly, I realize now.
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I think it was her distraction from, I mean, she had to know what kind of life she had chosen.
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But she had always been very concerned about wanting a house and wanting a car and wanting things because we didn't come from, we were, I shouldn't say poor.
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I mean we grew up like I didn't have a bed in the apartment that we stayed in before moving in with him and there were times when there wasn't a whole lot of food.
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I mean, love my Puerto Rican great grandma.
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She could always stir up a pot of rice and beans and I lived on that and again it's like we're not having a dad.
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I didn't think anything.
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I didn't think that we had any less.
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We just we had what we had and it was enough.
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And but my mother was always obsessed with like things and wanting more.
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To her that was success and achievement and she didn't think she could have that alone.
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And looking back I realized I think she thought she could only have that with this man because he was attaining all these things if he didn't have them already.
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But it was just the constant back and forth with him and with her.
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It was like he was triangulating my mother and I against each other.
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Because I was often alone in the house with him.
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He was left to get me ready in the morning, get me to school, and it started with little stuff.
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And this is the thing about narcissists it starts with little stuff.
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Like I'd always have my hair when I was little in two pigtails and he would pull my hair I mean so tightly the kids at school and forgive me, I don't mean offense to anybody, but he would pull so tightly like it would stretch the skin on my face and my eyes back to where these ponytails were held, that the kids at school would make fun that I had Asian-looking eyes and I would get headaches and if I yelped or squealed in pain he would hit me with the hairbrush.
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And it was little stuff like that.
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But I would go to my mother and she would tell me oh stop, you're just trying to get attention, you're just jealous of my relationship with him.
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I was a kid.
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Nobody was listening to me, but then it escalated to where he would start telling me the verbal abuse I was starting to hear.
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Nobody ever wanted you.
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I shouldn't have to pay for another man's child.
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Nobody loves you, not even your mother.
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Nobody's ever going to love you.
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You're a burden.
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Basically, I was a bother.
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I was a burden.
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I was stupid as I was growing older.
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Getting on a roll wasn't enough.
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I wasn't smart enough.
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Being first chair viola in two symphonic orchestras wasn't enough.
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Teaching myself to play piano wasn't good enough.
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Writing my own music on piano wasn't like nothing was ever enough.
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And he would.
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I mean he was very overt and very direct in how he would tell me these things and I would stand up to him because I was a tenacious thing and I realized I mean, no matter how many times I went to my mother, she would just accuse me of lying or he would deny these things.
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So it was useless to go to her.
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All right, all right.
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So that seems pretty intense and I like the way you said that you were tenacious because you're D.
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Yes, you're D right, okay, exactly.
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Yes, you're d right, okay, exactly.
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But I'm interested to find out is if you feel like you were getting to the honor roll, getting to first chair, making all these amazing accomplishments for someone that young because you wanted his, his.
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Absolutely.
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I was absolutely the overachieving, desperately seeking their approval kind of a kid.
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But I wanted it more for my mother not so much for him because that was my mother and, like I said, even before him, there was always this distance between us.
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But him giving me this verbal, his words, just I internalized them, even though I knew he was mistreating me because my uncles didn't talk to me that way, my cousins didn't talk to me that way.
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I had little friends in the neighborhood.
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Their parents didn't talk to them that way, so I knew it was wrong.
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But it was my mother.
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I felt like I was always trying to convince her of my worthiness but she just wasn't interested and I in my mind, and I think most people can't comprehend that a mother just doesn't have any care or love for a child that came out of her womb.
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And it's very interesting In the 90s there was this book that came out.
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I don't know if you've read it.
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It's called A Child Called it and it was one of the worst cases of child abuse in California history.
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But the reason I bring it up I actually recently reread it it's so horrifying.
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It's actually very triggering and difficult to read, but the interesting thing about it was that it was only one of the five children in that house that was abused so severely.
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The others had a perfectly normal childhood.
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They were perfectly aware, as was the father.
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It was the mother abusing the one child.
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It was still so frustrating that how could a mother treat?
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I mean you think you have a baby.
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You're supposed to love and protect and nurture, raise this child and love it.
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And I mean we hear about cats rejecting some of their young.
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But you don't think people could do that.
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It just doesn't seem to make sense.
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So that's what I struggled with was I wanted my mother's approval, him.
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I didn't like him from day one and honestly, even when I stood up to him and even though I was internalizing all these awful things he was telling me I knew they were wrong.
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But it's just sad that come to when I was a teenager, it's hard enough being a teenager, especially a girl.
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You got your body's changing, you got hormones and you're concerned with how you look and body image issues, and I mean even that.
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I mean I remember being five, six years old because we moved in with him right before they got married and he would tell me that, oh, that toast you're having for breakfast is going to make you fat.
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I remember I actually tell this story in my next book about how I was eating a bowl of pasta after cross-country practice in high school and he came in as I was taking a second helping.
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He's like that's going to go all your hips.
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All those carbs are going to make you fat like a middle-aged woman and like your grandma.
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It was so offensive and I loathed him.
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But what did I do?
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Is I put down my spoon and I mean I've tried to purge.
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I went out for another run that night.
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After running six miles at cross country practice, I went out till after dark just running like I got to get these calories off.
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He's right, I got.
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So people need to understand the power of their words and I don't know how to explain, but you just have to be one of these people that you can.
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You can know that somebody is saying wrongful things to you, but they still affect you.
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They still affect you because when you hear it all the time and it was every day of my life there and it was backed up by the physical abuse because that hadn't relented, there were a lot of issues it escalated from the pigtails.
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Let me tell you, before I left the house, when I was 18, the worst thing that had happened was I was strangled and thrown down a half flight of stairs and, unfortunately, child services.
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Oh, we interviewed the neighbors and the people that worked for them and everybody says they're wonderful.
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They had created this narrative, like all narcissists do.
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Anybody that knows a narcissist knows they've already told everybody behind your back about you're crazy and you're the problem.
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So I was made out to be this difficult, defiant daughter of theirs that they just did the tears at the police station.
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My mother, oh, we just don't know what to do with her.
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I mean it was reminiscent of Rooster and Lily in the movie Annie, sitting there pretending to be so forlorn and oh, they lost their daughter Annie and they needed her back.
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It was all bull.
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But you know, nobody believed me.
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Nobody believed me Nobody.
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Because out in the world they presented as these charitable, wonderful, smiley, happy people who had a business of their own and helped family and neighbors whenever they needed to.
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Nobody believed me, nobody.
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So that's so disheartening.
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I mean I can't even tell you my heart's in my throat right now.
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I do have just one quick question, just for mentality's sake.
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You mentioned that you were all symphony, you were across country and you got all these accomplishments.
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Obviously and we're going to get into this, ladies and gentlemen but this young lady over here went to DePaul University and the University of Chicago, and the University of Chicago is very hard to get into.
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You might as well call it Ivy League, but you had all these accomplishments.
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So I'm wondering what would be the first thing that would go through your mind.
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You said that you had made what all symphony is the first thing that went through your mind at that point and I know it's a ways back, but was the first thing going through your mind, yes, I did it, I was able to accomplish this.
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Or was it, yes, I did this for my mom.
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Or, yes, I did this for this narcissistic no, it was always.
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I can't wait to tell my mom.
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But over time, the best way I can explain it is that when, over time, your successes, your accomplishments, your little achievements are just, they're not even acknowledged.
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It's just dismissed like it's any other day and oh, that's all you got thing, because that's how I was treated, you begin to think that's not enough.
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So it wasn't enough to be in two symphonic orchestras and be first chair in both.
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Now I had to.
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Well, what else can I do?
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Well, maybe if I get the solo.
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Maybe if I get the solo in the next concert I can do it.
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Maybe if I and I did.
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I got a few solo performances at different cultural festivals and different performances that we did, and one of the symphonic orchestras traveled around.
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I mean, it was just endless.
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It didn't matter what I did, it wasn't enough.
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So I had to do more.
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I had to do more.
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So all I did was exhaust myself with trying to get my mother.
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I basically just wanted her to notice me at all, because even when I would try to talk to her, she was always too busy washing dishes.
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She couldn't come to any of my sporting events she never went to.
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I always was one of those kids.
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When you go to like kids things at school little recitals or whatever I just feel so bad because there's always that one kid who's like, eagerly craning at his or her neck, looking out, hoping to see mom or dad.
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And that was me, and it just it pains my heart because if the kid is doing that because they know mom and dad probably aren't going to be there, and that was me, and it's so frustrating to feel so insignificant and so unimportant when your parents are supposed to be the people encouraging you and supporting you, even if they couldn't be there, to just pat me on the back and say good job.
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But B plus was well, how come you didn't get an A?
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It was never and it's still to this day.
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We have no relationship.
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They have cut ties with me a handful of years ago for the third time in my life, but this is the final time.
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But I say now.
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I mean I could win the Nobel Peace Prize and it won't be enough.
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I will have not have earned it at a younger age, even when I graduated from college.
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Well, that's like a kindergarten education compared to somebody else who has a doctorate, okay, well.
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Oh geez, and would you consider them successful?
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And would you consider them successful?
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No, I mean, I credit them because, honestly, who wouldn't?
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He never made it past sixth grade.
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He had a very troublesome childhood.
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He was actually he and his four siblings were abandoned, like literally abandoned by both parents I don't even think he was a year old, my stepfather and so they were put into the foster system, separated.
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They are now reunited as adults, but very sad.
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And he was abused in those foster homes and my mother came out of it.
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You want to talk about a narcissist?
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My mother's father was a raging alcoholic who liked to wield a gun and bring random women home and have interactions with them in front of my grandma, and just horrific things that my mother had to witness and grow up with.
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So I feel for them.
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I absolutely feel for them, but I know that they had a hard time.
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I know that they could only do what they could do and they did make the best of their situation.
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She had to drop out of high school because she couldn't stand the shame and judgment of being pregnant with me.
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He didn't make it past sixth grade for whatever reasons, but they did create together a business that has served them very well.
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They live in a ridiculously large and ridiculously showy home and he has Corvettes and classic cars and Harleys.
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But the thing is it's all for show and I want to honor that success.
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They literally went from rags to riches.
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I commend them for that.
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But at the same time the need to have that admiration and that praise for having attained things, that requirement for exaltation because you acquired material possessions, that just repulses me because that was just at the premise of all of that supposed success.
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But that's narcissism.
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I mean right there, that's narcissism.
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Yeah, that's a typical definition.
00:20:58.518 --> 00:20:59.980
Okay, so let's move on.
00:20:59.980 --> 00:21:08.226
All right, so at 18, you get to DePaul, you started at DePaul or you started at University of Chicago.
00:21:09.055 --> 00:21:10.057
No, I went to DePaul.
00:21:10.057 --> 00:21:12.142
So I went to DePaul.
00:21:12.142 --> 00:21:12.884
I did.
00:21:12.884 --> 00:21:14.867
I didn't even want to go to college.
00:21:14.867 --> 00:21:18.098
Honestly, I wanted to go to beauty school, but it wasn't good enough.
00:21:18.098 --> 00:21:20.361
It wasn't real school, I was told.
00:21:20.361 --> 00:21:22.344
So I went to DePaul.
00:21:22.344 --> 00:21:25.287
I grew up Catholic, I was raised Catholic.
00:21:25.287 --> 00:21:41.059
I figured I might as well go to Catholic University and I got in to be on my own and I actually lived with my boyfriend at the time, but that didn't go anywhere.
00:21:41.079 --> 00:21:45.509
Good, he treated me very well, he was older, had his own place, so it worked out really well.
00:21:45.509 --> 00:21:56.028
But I feel like, looking back, even though we cared about each other, it was, I hate to say it, but the reality was it was more of a transactional relationship.
00:21:56.028 --> 00:22:11.386
He liked the data boys from his friends for having a younger girl living with him and having that relationship, and I got a safe place to stay where I was treated like a human being and he did.
00:22:11.386 --> 00:22:15.827
I mean we were good friends, but there was a lot missing there.
00:22:15.827 --> 00:22:23.507
So when he started talking about marriage, I mean it scared me because I was nowhere near ready for that.
00:22:23.507 --> 00:22:45.209
So, yeah, we split up a few months before I was 19 and I ended up moving into a real estate community, that I was working in that management office and that is where I met my ex-husband, who walked in the office one day, and that's where my story gasping for air starts.
00:22:46.214 --> 00:22:46.315
Right.
00:22:46.315 --> 00:22:47.459
So that's Darren right.
00:22:48.561 --> 00:22:50.086
Yes, that is his name in the book.
00:22:50.835 --> 00:22:52.176
Okay, so, yeah.
00:22:52.176 --> 00:23:05.800
So it was interesting that in the book that you actually recognized Now I don't know if you were, if that was a hindsight, no, that was right then and there you make it sound just like that, like you recognize that.
00:23:05.800 --> 00:23:10.710
Wait a second, here this looks like a familiar situation.
00:23:11.170 --> 00:23:28.811
Oh yeah, the robot, and lost in space with his dangly little, coyly arms, danger Right what I pictured in my head, because it was this he was like arrogant and aloof, but I mean I, he was no Brad Pitt.
00:23:28.811 --> 00:23:34.353
Like there was no reasoning outwardly for this, like I didn't know who he thought he was.
00:23:34.353 --> 00:23:38.814
I didn't see a car that warranted this behavior.
00:23:38.814 --> 00:23:41.173
Like he was something and I don't know.
00:23:41.173 --> 00:24:00.837
Just he wanted servitude is all I felt from him and I was like, no, I know you, buddy, I don't want any part of it, but the people pleaser in me, the strange dichotomy in my head is that the people pleaser in me couldn't stand that he was keeping this distance like I.
00:24:00.837 --> 00:24:14.278
I felt like he didn't like me and I couldn't stand if people didn't like me, so I had to make him like me, okay, yeah, so that explains a lot of where that went in that first chapter oh man.
00:24:14.318 --> 00:24:28.452
So yeah, if I remember correctly, it's been a little bit, but if I remember correctly, you actually did like put your foot down and left, but you.
00:24:28.452 --> 00:24:31.238
But the problem was, is that you what you?
00:24:31.238 --> 00:24:37.267
You exchanged keys and he ended up like just showing up and pretending like it never happened.