The Cycles We’re Breaking: Abby, Amanda & Glennon
September 19, 2024
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Today, it’s just the three of us again. We’re going to talk more about the interview we just did with Dr. Mariel Buqué about intergenerational trauma, and we’re going to just talk to you about what all of that means to us because it is the juiciest most important topic in all the land. And I think that the episode got so many people thinking and talking and having a million questions. Us too. So we’re going to do that.
You’d said, sister, “I’m just looking for little ways to break cycles.” This is very on the spot. I have no idea what my answer will be, so if you guys don’t have answers, that’s fine. But when you think about cycles you are wanting to break and ones that might be tied to intergenerational trauma or you don’t even know if they are, do you two have cycles that you can identify that you are actively, even if you’re not doing the work to break them yet, that you suspect your life might be freer or better if you broke?
Abby Wambach:
Yep, 100%. Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Would you like to go first then?
Abby Wambach:
Sure. The thing that I feel most worried about is my parents dying without saying the things that I need to say. And it’s funny because as I’ve done this work through therapy, the things that I would’ve said early on are very different than what I would say now. And I think that the work of accepting them for who they are is what I am doing. And I think the thing that I thought that I needed to hear from them was like, “I’m so sorry that…” Not even specific things, just like being in a huge family, being raised Catholic, all these things that had an impact on me, I don’t even think I need an “I’m sorry” specifically, but I want to approach them when I do with, “I get it. I understand.” That is how they knew how to be people. They only did what they thought was best and what they were taught and what their parents taught them and what those parents taught them.
And it’s like I have lost the desire for a kumbaya situation to happen between me and my mom and dad. I think that what I’ve come to understand is how I first get the chance to break this generational trauma is to accept what has happened first, and to not necessarily need an apology from them, but just say, “This is what happened.” And I don’t want this to keep going on. I don’t want the silence or the secrets to keep hurting our people going forward, and I’m going to be that transitional character. I am. I know that I am that transitional character. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m sure our kids will have their own sets of trauma that they need to unwind.
Glennon Doyle:
Of course.
Abby Wambach:
But I do feel like there’s a pit in my stomach that I know that I need to have that conversation with my mom at the very least. I don’t know if I’ll ever do it with my father, but just like, “Thank you for having me.” I had a hard time. I had a hard time. And I think that that really shaped our relationship. And I think that there’s a responsibility I have and kind of the rebellion and the hardheadedness and stubbornness that I took on as a way of protecting myself throughout my life. And I understand more of why she had to be the way she was. And I understand that there is no way I can go back and fix it, but absolutely I can try my fucking damnedest now to not implement some of the things and the ways that she was taught how to be a mother on our children in the way that I am a mother.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you have answer to the question, what was the wound? What was the thing that you are trying not to pass on? When you said, “I had a hard time,” there’s no easy answer to that, but what happened that you’re trying not to repeat?
Abby Wambach:
It’s really complicated because it goes off in a lot of different ways, but I think at the root of it, it’s this confusion in this line between power and parenting. And what I know that that probably stems from is fear, like the base of it. And so being more in touch with the fear I have throughout my parenting will slice the need to be in power over our children, which I think really did come into conflict with a lot of the struggles of all of my brothers and sisters, but I can only speak for myself. That in the lines of being the oldest to the youngest, we all experienced my parents differently and we experienced that power differential very differently.
My sister Beth and my mom have a very different relationship than I do with her, and I really struggled with it. I didn’t feel seen or heard or as loved as I needed to. And I think that that fear of whether you’re a good or a bad parent makes you act in certain ways that make you, in fact, not such a great parent. So I think my mom was so afraid of keeping control and keeping the power because she didn’t want us to be hurt or bad things to happen to us or whatever. Mama bear, you want to talk about it. But it was really her inability to regulate her own inner world and her own inner fear around how the world will interact with her baby cubs. And so because of that, all of these things kind of display itself across the personalities of all of her children. And I don’t want my inability to not be able to deal with my nervous system to impact our children in any way. Does that make sense?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
Is that good or bad?
Amanda Doyle:
So good.
Glennon Doyle:
I don’t know what’s good or not.
Amanda Doyle:
It was so good, you’re so loved. I see everything about you.
Abby Wambach:
Okay, good. What did Dr. Buqué say?
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, that was really good.
Glennon Doyle:
[inaudible 00:07:24] congratulate yourself.Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, that was really good, Abby. It was really good.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you feel it come up in you? I just am so obsessed with this true fact that I’ve recently learned that you can, I can, feel it in my body when it’s happening. It’s not this weird elusive mystery that you have to go back. I mean, I experienced memories from my childhood like I experienced when I used to wake up after blackouts, which was when I was drinking, was every single morning. Literally every morning I would wake up and have absolutely no idea what happened after 4:00 PM the day before. But I would have a general feeling like, “I don’t know what happened, but I feel like I should be ashamed.” Well, I mean, that was a safe bet. That was always a safe bet, but it would often be a specific feeling like, “I don’t know what happened, but I feel the after effects of something violent or I feel the after…” And that’s how I feel about childhood. I’m like, “I don’t know what happened, but I feel like it was suboptimal.” Something. Something.
Abby Wambach:
There’s a presence, a vibe of something that you can’t put your finger on.
Glennon Doyle:
There’s a vibe of something.
Abby Wambach:
Especially because you’re young and you don’t know how to necessarily name or claim some of the feelings that you were having.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. And when you’re scared you’re shut down, you don’t remember. But what is an amazing and beautiful thing that is true is that I can tell in my body now that I know how to pay attention to my body and be in my body when I’m about to be in trauma response. So my question to you is this idea that you are trying to break the cycle of wanting to control and overpower, which is so interesting in authoritative parents because what they do is they lose control in order to gain control. That’s their strategy. I will lose control of myself so that you will be so scared that you will fall into line. How do you experience it now? Those moments, like you said, when maybe you didn’t get enough affection from your parents. So when the kids try to kiss you, you have a moment that you have to overcome to get past the trauma response into your new self. How do you experience the authoritative moment with the kids?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. I mean, this has been something I have unconsciously been working on my whole life because I have been… Interesting, in rebellion, that was my need to take control back for myself to not feel controlled. And then I think throughout the course of parenting these three children, the only way I can explain it is, this is so weird, to say this out loud, but when I feel like I have lost control, I either feel like my skin can’t go beyond itself. I am full up. It’s almost like The Incredible Hulk that I feel kind of this ragey thing. And it’s because of knowing what it feels like to be out of control as a child, because essentially your parents are in control of you.
To know what that feels like and to feel like I just need to get out of this body so that I can be in control in a different place. I have this feeling of becoming Mr. or Mrs. Hulk. And what I’ve learned over years of this is I just have to pause because the swelling goes away. I do think it’s a swelling of the ego in a way, where my ego gets outsized and I’m like, “Oh, wow. That’s definitely not the way that you want to be.” And so usually the only thing that helps is for me to do literally nothing.
Amanda Doyle:
Abby, I wonder though, you’re talking about it in the sense of your need to control mirroring your parents need to control. You are duplicating what was modeled to you. But I wonder if it could be different. I wonder if it could be their controlling of you made you invisible. No one paying attention to you, no one listening or seeing you. And what you bring to the table is what you’re doing in parenting and that big reaction, is that mirroring your parents need to control the children, or is that the exact same thing? Is that, “No one sees me, I have good wisdom for these children, I am bringing myself and I am being ignored and not being paid attention to you.”
Abby Wambach:
Same thing.
Amanda Doyle:
“And why aren’t they seeing me and what I have to offer?”
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, it’s the same thing.
Glennon Doyle:
Can I feel sorry about you?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Abby Wambach:
You can.
Glennon Doyle:
I think this is the most beautiful example of this. It’s just happened. So when you have big children, they start to just make their own big decisions.
Abby Wambach:
Do things.
Glennon Doyle:
They just start to do things and they’re out in the world and they make decisions and then things happen to them, and you can’t. It’s just so the other day, our oldest child was making some big decisions, which were beautiful and brave decisions, and still decisions that would have consequences. Our middle child is making big decisions. She’s taking a gap year, going to become a rock star. We keep saying, “What could go wrong?” Our youngest daughter had some injuries in soccer, whatever. We just had this moment where we have had a hard year. Part of the hardness is that everyone just keeps doing whatever the fuck they want, even though we have good ideas, and we have lost completely the control that we never had, okay?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, right. [inaudible 00:13:33] illusion.
Glennon Doyle:
The illusion is bust, B-U-S-T.
Abby Wambach:
Right. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
And so, Abby-
Abby Wambach:
But the truth is they’re becoming young adults and there is this period of parenting time that it is confusing to know when it is your time to step in or when it is your time to just step back completely. And that’s something I’m struggling with just in terms of parenting. Anyways, go on.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. But this one night, somebody brought something to us hard and then another kid, and then Abby just, she had been keeping it together and trying to guide them and trying to for so long and just the kids weren’t here. She sat on the couch and she just started bawling. And she said, “Chase is doing this hard thing. Tish is doing this hard thing. Nobody’s making good decisions. And Emma won’t eat enough protein.” She’s bawling about protein. “I know she just needs to eat more protein.” And I just thought, I think-
Abby Wambach:
She was having muscular issues. She pulled her quad. And yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
But it was, to me, I felt like this is the difference. This is the difference. Instead of hulking it up, she’s crying. That’s transforming it because actually what it is is grief. What your mom had was grief knowing like, “I can’t protect anyone, so I will just be so controlling. I will force-feed them their protein every fucking day to make them okay.”
Abby Wambach:
And they did-
Glennon Doyle:
Is what your mom was doing.
Abby Wambach:
A glass of milk at dinner.
Glennon Doyle:
But I think you had had enough therapy and safety and a moment to just actually break down about it and admit to your powerlessness. And I don’t know-
Abby Wambach:
I just said, “Nobody will listen to me.”
Glennon Doyle:
She kept saying-
Abby Wambach:
“I have good ideas. Nobody is listening. And they keep making decisions. They keep deciding differently than I would.”
Glennon Doyle:
But I feel like, I don’t know how to explain it. I just felt like that was it, because you didn’t rage at them, you didn’t shame them. You didn’t, once again, strategize like we always do. We’re one good plan away from fixing everything. We just sat and you cried and I just kept saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” And it feels like in some ways this work is making us dumber. It’s like we finally are wise enough to know we don’t know shit.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
Or that it doesn’t matter what you know.
Abby Wambach:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
I mean, it matters what you know for you, but you know enough to know that acting on your rage is unhelpful to all parties involved, and that going to the pain or the fear under the rage is the correct thing. And that crying, mourning, and grieving your lack of control is more productive than continuing to exert the control that you never had.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, it’s the [inaudible 00:16:41] on shit that helps me so much. These little things like, “All the things happen,” and then I just say to myself, “Well, I guess we’ll see how God’s going to handle this.” And then Abby will say, “Do you believe in God?” I say, “I don’t know. I believe in that sentence I just said, let’s see how God’s going to handle this.” But it helps me instead of thinking, “Let’s see how I’m going to handle this” and strategize 4 million things. And what I’m saying is I think even when we think we’ve lost it and we think, “Oh, that was not a good moment for me,” that those are our best moments.
Abby Wambach:
I know, you took a picture of it and sent it to me and I was like, “Really?”
Glennon Doyle:
I sent you a picture of you crying on a chair, and I said, “This is how much you love our babies.” I think it’s one of my favorite pictures of you ever. I’m not going to post it. I’m just saying.
Abby Wambach:
I was so upset. It is upsetting to experience the generational trauma for the past.
Amanda Doyle:
But here’s the deal, you’re experiencing it, which I feel like is at least three quarters of the battle. For me, what I’m most afraid of is not experiencing it. I think the whole epigenetics world, these, I’ve been thinking of myself a lot lately as a mouse and trying to see how I’m living like a mouse, because they did these studies where, okay, bear with me because it’s very interesting. So they did these studies of mice where they took male mice, and eventually they replicated it with female mice, but they put them in this little cage. It’s terrible, so bad news for the mice, but just bear with me.
Glennon Doyle:
We did not conduct the experiment.
Amanda Doyle:
We did not. We are no way affiliated, nor do we condone it. I’m just telling you what happened.
Abby Wambach:
We are pro mice.
Amanda Doyle:
I am a mouse, that’s what I’m telling you. I’m a mouse. As a mouse, I reject this study, but I find the findings informative. Okay. So they put these male mice in this thing, they have a smell, that’s a fancy word. It’s like a seed of phenom or something, but it smells like cherries and almonds. Every time they put the smell into the container, they do an electric shock. Smell, electric shock. If there’s no smell, there’s no electric shock. They do it, they do it, they do it. Then eventually these mice breed. Okay. The pups of these mice never, ever, ever have a shock. There’s no actual shock experienced by them. But three generations, when they smell the smell, the mice freak the fuck out.
Abby Wambach:
What?
Amanda Doyle:
The children and grandchildren pups that have never been shocked, run around smelling the smell, freaking out, hiding on things. Their nervous systems are jacked. They’re trying to escape the cage. They also replicate this with the females. It works the same. So they’re never even living together. It’s not like the baby mice are looking at the adult mice and being like, “Oh, I learn when the smell happens, I run and hide.” Totally independent of the parents.
Also, their brains, the mice brains, have more neurons that are made to be more heightened, ability to smell things. So they have been genetically passed down in one generation, their genetics are different for multiple generations. So they’ve never experienced it and they have the fear as if it were real to them, and their brains and bodies are designed to be specially suited to smell the things that they’re afraid of that they shouldn’t be afraid of. This is why I’m a mouse and that’s why I am afraid, what is my brain looking for constantly? Because if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. What is my brain predisposed to be searching for, to be afraid of? And what is my smell reaction that if I knew, if I could assure my body and my brain that there are no shocks coming in this department, then I could stop running and jumping on top of things to hide for them every time I smell something that represents something that doesn’t exist for me?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Dr. Mariel Buqué tells a story about a woman who came in to her office, and one weird thing about her was that she could not stand the smell of coffee. She was allergic. And her daughter, same thing. They found out that her grandfather had been brutally attacked, and the man who brutally attacked him had had a huge coffee. He was like reeking of coffee. This is not a story that had ever been told to the family. Evolution helps us learn things in our bodies that will protect us, but our bodies are not wise enough to know that we are not in that generation and we’re not in that situation anymore. And so we are allergic to coffee and miss out on coffee.
Amanda Doyle:
Which when you think about it, is the biggest intergenerational tragedy I’ve ever heard.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s why it sticks with me. It’s so tragic.
Amanda Doyle:
God.
Glennon Doyle:
Sister, what do you think? What is happening? What do you believe made you this mouse, and what does it feel like? How do you experience it on a daily basis?
Amanda Doyle:
I think I experience it as not being at ease. I experience it as ease is synonymous with danger. Like, “What a foolish thing to do.” And I mean, just keeping your head on a swivel, got to know what’s around, got to know what’s happening, got to know who’s doing the right thing and who’s not doing the right thing. And I mean, always being critical, always looking for ways that things could be better instead of just being pleased with how they are. All of those feelings are reflective of a nervous system that is not at rest, that is continuing to work and work and work, and look and look and look, and monitor and monitor. I think… I don’t know.
I’m trying to figure out my categories of weirdness. And also, I’m going to stop saying things like weirdness. It exists for a reason. Probably those mice looked really fucking weird when a random smell came in and they started jumping on things to escape it. That’s weird and odd and you’d be like, “What a big weirdo.” But actually, their brains were telling them because their genetic coding said, “Fire, danger, run.” So that’s why I am trying to be compassionate to myself as a mouse, but I think that my mouse wiring is like, “It’ll always be up to you. You should not stop.” I don’t know, I’m trying to figure all of that out.
My friend V was over this week, and I was just talking about how I’m so tired of myself and the ruts that I’m in, that my patterns of thinking and my neuro pathways that are just the same all the time. And I was talking about how critical I am. I find myself looking for bad things, not thinking I am, but I think I’m looking for bad things even in being critical in my relationship and whatever. And she was like, “Do you think that you are unwilling to not give a break and not be critical in your relationship? Because look how hard you’re trying. And if you’re operating at an A, and you won’t even stop being critical of yourself ever, how are you ever going to not be critical of someone else?”
I don’t know. I am wondering if that all relates back. And my critical internal voice of myself comes from a critical externalized voice of growing up that might, out of fear, been pushing me to be the best I could be. Or maybe it was a role connected to an external voice that became an internal voice that would never let me let up. Therefore, I can never let anyone else let up either. I don’t know. But I smell the things and I react to them as if they are threats. It feels to me like a real threat.
Abby Wambach:
I believe you that that’s what is happening. And I’m sorry.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me.
Abby Wambach:
Does it?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
What about you?
Glennon Doyle:
I mean, I have a lot of that, I think.
Amanda Doyle:
Weird coincidence.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it’s so weird.
Abby Wambach:
I think that it would be really interesting for you two to do some therapy together in the same room, to talk through what each personal and collective experience through this stuff might be. I don’t know. Maybe that’s down the road, but-
Amanda Doyle:
I mean, I guess-
Glennon Doyle:
Well, first we have to separate. We have to do the work of separating.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s what it would be.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s what the therapy would be, I’m sure. Yeah. I mean, I guess how I would… I feel like that’s what I was thinking of myself a while back too, and I really felt like I, all the labels I tried to put on myself, I’m just anxious. I’m just depressed. I’m just a person who lived as a straight person and now I’m queer. It was religion, I’m just always trying to find what the problem was, what’s wrong with me. And so for me, there’s also this shame if you can’t point to something in your childhood that was this one specific thing that was so traumatic that it’s an excuse for everything, that has been confusing to me.
Abby Wambach:
It’s like death by a thousand cuts then.
Glennon Doyle:
And there’s a theory of that. Yeah. Well, I think the reason why the intergenerational thing happens to make me have more peace is like, “Okay, well, I wasn’t physically abused by a parent. What the fuck is wrong with me? Why am I like this?” Well, the truth is that I have a parent who was physically abused. When you are raised by someone who has extreme trauma, even if they did the best they could, they are going to pass on a worldview that came to you from their being. Their words could have said a lot, a different thing, but their body, the way they are, their energetic, their worldview that is based on real things, that they were not safe, that they had to protect themselves, that they had to be vigilant, that they had to, because they really did. That can be passed to you. That can be passed to you.
Amanda Doyle:
Look at the mice, they weren’t even living with the person. They weren’t seeing the mice jump on the things. They just knew it because of their biology. But if they had been living with the mouse and both had it inside of them and were watching their dad freak the hell out every time the smell came, that’s a double with me.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I said to Abby the other day, we were talking about something and I said something like, well, I said out loud that I don’t believe that I’m mentally ill. And that’s the first time I’ve thought that or known that since I was 10 years old. I do not in any way believe that there’s anything wrong with me inherently, or that I was born broken, which I wrote in my first memoir, or that I have this debilitating mental illness that will always… Now, that PS is not all great news for me. I find that to be more terrifying than any of the other reasons that I had for being the way I am, because what does that mean? That means I am entirely responsible for myself, for my reactions to things, for the way I am in the world. I am entirely responsible. Which-
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Amanda Doyle:
And you viewed when you were viewing yourself as having a mental illness, you didn’t view yourself as entirely responsible?
Glennon Doyle:
No, because I’m just crazy. Just like, I’m depressed, I don’t have to show up. I’m anxious. There was always this explanation, which has been given to me since I was little. When I was going around saying, “I’m broken,” nobody was saying, “No, you’re not.” Nobody in my family said, “Actually, maybe there was other things going on.” Nobody corrected my narrative. Everybody was more than happy to be like, “That sounds right. Let’s go with that.” “She’s crazy. Look at that one, that’s the crazy one. Cuckoo, cuckoo. God, if we could just figure out what’s wrong with that poor little thing, and then I am always causing the drama, so nobody else has to…” There’s just, there’s a lot which we can talk about in another episode but-
Abby Wambach:
Or in therapy.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. I already do that. So I guess my point being that it was maybe the most profound learning of my life, and it wasn’t like I had to do it all bodily. It took me two years. I don’t even explain how it happened. It had to be visceral. That actually there’s nothing inherently wrong with me. I am a little jumpy and on guard and scared because I was trained to be, and it is the work of my life to understand that I am not now in a place where I was when I was a kid, and that I don’t want to pass on that worldview, not just to my kids, which is the most important thing that I don’t, but to anyone. But changing that worldview is a fucking exorcism. It’s absolutely. I’ve never done anything harder in my entire life, and all I’m doing is sitting here.
You would think that I was running a marathon every single day. I don’t know how to explain it any differently other than it is the hardest, most confusing, most baffling, most uncomfortable, most profound, important life-changing, family-changing, world-changing work I’ve ever done. And all it is it shows up in two-second differences. It’s like getting outside of trauma… Okay. So yesterday, we’re pulling into this parking space behind our house, and there’s this poor guy who’s in the house next to us, and he’s desperately, he’s lost his keys. He needs to get out of our way because we’re in an alley. We can’t get by him. It is clear that this man is losing his mind because he has lost his keys. And so it takes 10 minutes of him running around his house, running around the car, running around the trunk. What’s amazing is that there’s two huge trash cans next to his. All he has to do is move the trash cans, and we could drive right by him.
And that is what trauma is. You are in such a heightened space that you will spend six hours trying to find your keys, and you will never see that all you have to do is walk around the car and move the trash cans. It is the gift of it is seeing everything differently. It’s this hard, hard, hard, impossible journey that makes life 50 times easier on the other side of it. So anyway, I don’t know. I love you, Sissy.
Amanda Doyle:
I love you, Sissy. I love you, Abby.
Glennon Doyle:
She loves you too. You’re such a cute little mouse. All right, loves, We Can Do Hard Things. We’ll see you back next time. Bye.
Amanda Doyle:
Bye.