E124: It’s Time to Talk: Addiction, Stigma, and Breaking Free: Guest Elizabeth Kipp

Hello again, and welcome back to another episode of Adult Child of Dysfunction. Today, our guest is actually another return guest, Elizabeth Kipp. She was back with us way back in episode, I believe, 22. But I absolutely adore having her here. She talks about, she's a stress management and pain histo okay, historical trauma specialist, right? And there was a whole lot to that, and it was very cool. But she wrote a book called The Way Through Chronic Pain, Tools to Reclaim Your Healing Power. And she does a conglomerate of things. She is, she does so many different things, but I want to just welcome her back and let her tell you a little bit about herself. But again, if you want to hear more, go back to episode 22, and you can hear even more about Elizabeth. But welcome, Elizabeth. Oh, thank you so much, Tim. It's great to see you again. It's great to be on again. Really appreciate the platform, the topic dysfunctional families. And this, today, talking about stigma around mental illness I don't know what it was like for you, but for me, I grew up in a dysfunctional family, and our method of coping was to deny our experience, right? Yep. Deny and avoid. Deny and avoid. It never happened. We're not talking about that, and that's difficult as a child to navigate. You know why? Because I began to question my own senses. Did that happen? They're denying it happened. And that's a a different form of gaslighting, would you say? Just it's not like they're telling you that you're not, you didn't see that. They're just not accepting what they just experienced, right? Exactly. I tell the story about when my mom dropped her pants. She got stung by a bee, dropped her pants in a bog field in front of 150 people and was so drunk and just the mouth coming out of her. And I'm like seven years old, whatever it was, first grade, six, seven years old. And I was humiliated and ashamed to be like, that's where my shame started at six years old where. I wouldn't go to a birthday party. I wouldn't go anywhere for fear that somebody that was at that ball field would recognize me and put me together with her. But literally we got in the car, it was never even mentioned. No one said anything. And it's but it literally threw me into three years until we moved that what, what just happened? Like I had no idea, but boy, it, Instantly, that was like instant shame. Instant. And it carried me through a lot. But yeah, we don't, we didn't talk about it. And also there was the other part of, the comments from my parents don't ever talk about how things are at home. Don't ever talk. It's not important. Nobody wants to hear your sad stories. Nobody this, nobody that. So you do. You start to question, one, am I the only one? Or two what is this? What the hell is this? Is this, my imagination? Is it even real? That kind of thing. Also, in my case I was, I felt very pulled. Between two places. One, being loyal to my family. So not saying anything. And then what do I do about taking care of me? And of course, the loyalty won every time. Because, that's what we do. We as, This is something that I learned, I'm not a psychology major, but I did have some courses in psychology when I went to college, but lately I've gotten into trauma work, and we're so wired to attach to our primary caretaker, whoever our primary caretakers are. That we would rather attach in a dysfunctional, and we might have talked about this, in a dysfunctional way than and not be, lose track of our authentic self, than not attach. Like it's that strong. So now we have a crisis of consciousness, and now we're ashamed because, Oh, I'm supposed to be loyal to my family, so I'll put myself in second position. And it happens from fear, like you said, fear, but it happens from also your brain is, that's natural. Your brain is, that's why kids internalize and that's why they lose that sense of self because no way is a five year old going to think that their parents are wrong. They didn't, they depend on them a hundred percent. So it turns around and it's, it must be me. And that's how they lose, that's the very beginning of that sense of self where it can't be them. It has to be me because you depend on them for survival. So yeah, you're never going to turn on your parents, especially when they're little. When you're little, ever. Yes, and so now that becomes a pattern. So now the brain has wiring, remember they learned years ago that neurons that wire together fire together. And the more they've, the more we access that program, that, that habit, the faster the stronger the connection is and the faster it is to fire. So now we have something that's got it's got momentum. It's got strength. It's got momentum. It's got it's got this reference point that, that's our default now. So the work when we're trying to, and of course this turns in, this is the root of addiction. This is unresolved trauma and really if you listen to Dr. Gabor Maté and other trauma specialists these days, they'll say. That quote unquote mental illness is really us trying to keep ourselves safe. There are all trauma responses. There are strategies to keep us safe in, in, in this space where we've lost track of our authentic self. We don't know how to show up. We're so twisted in on ourselves that we, that we have this quote unquote aberrant behavior. But Dr. Amate's latest book, the myth of normal, what is normal. I have not read that one, but it's actually, I bought it. I have it sitting in my stack of 400 books to read. It's a huge book but the thumbnail there, one, one of the little bits is how are you going to be normal in a society that's not, right? We look at all the, we look at all the difficulty everybody's having in our current kind of Western society. Yeah, and I look at it and I think that's what triggered me to do this thing about the stigma because that's my big Thing like I want to get up on top of a mountain and just scream stop there should be no they don't call it cancer anonymous They don't call it like it just drives me crazy that there's still so much stigma behind so many different things you know and It just makes me irritate like it's one of my just it's like Taking a pencil in my side like all the time like it's just because but I love that you of when we first talked today That you approached that and you said I want to talk about it from the angle of it's Fear. So talk about that. Sure. One of the things that we just from a, we look, we can go way down into the weeds or we can look at the greater landscape from afar and we can look at it and say, it's us versus them. And so now we're suffering from the wound of separation. So you can look at it, bring that angle in, and then, you can, for me, I grew up in a household where, even though it was dysfunctional my mom had a bipolar disorder and used alcohol to deal with her crying. So that was a really untreated bipolar, they didn't even know what it was back then. I was gonna say, my mom too, like you, you knew, like looking at the diagnosis now you knew what it was, but those words, and she was a child psychiatrist and she never said those words. Yeah. Yeah. So the, what I heard in my household as a kid was. anybody that shows any sign of mental illness is going to end up in the insane asylum. I didn't have a name. That's what that was. Yeah, that was it. They had this crass name for it. So right away, there's judgment, stigma. They're those people, not us. There's this all this not taking ownership in humanity, in our flaws. Of course, there was no, again, the denial, any time, any, of course, the kids, my brother and I, we got in all kinds of trouble for our imperfections, but when their imperfections showed up, that all got pushed under the rug. So that's a very chaotic environment to grow up in but underneath all of that. is fear from misunderstanding, non understanding. Oh, that must be terrible. I don't I, and we don't have any, maybe we don't have any control over it. And interestingly enough, they stayed in that position rather than go learn more about it. Isn't that interesting? I'd rather stay in my entrenched judgmental, they're wrong. I'm afraid of that. I have no control. I don't feel like I have any control. I'm powerless over that. So I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna put it over there, push it away from me. That's not a recipe for healing. No. And it's not, it's just, in this world, like you said, I talked to my clients and when they say I didn't want to say anything. And I'm like, you don't think when you're in a room of 26 people, That probably 22 of them are suffering some from some kind of mental health issue, at least 25 percent haven't have an addicted parent. There's you just couple all of the other things and the rate of, just everything right now. I'm like, you're not alone. It is now the, like you said, what is normal. I, it's completely flipped, if I had this completely healthy, well adjusted, normal growing up, I feel like I would be such the minority, it would be unbelievable. Yeah, I get really alarmed. at the suicide rate in the teen, teens these days. That, that's been, I've, and I've been watching that go up and it's been, it's alarming. It wasn't like that when I, there were, there was the occasional suicide that we'd hear about, but, and I have certain, I've had that in my own family, but not in the teenage years. It was usually, young adult to mid adult to later thing. And I'm not saying they're, it's all a mess. It's all. A problem, but yeah, I heard a statistic that's distressing to me and it makes me feel like there's more than 25 percent of us that have an addictive parent I think addiction is a much bigger issue than 25 that's just basically have at least one addicted parent and that was one in four. That's the big number that they're using right now for adult children of alcoholics acoa and All those programs, they basically say one in four. I agree because I was, I had two alcoholic parents, but didn't, nobody knew until my mom died. So that was, she wasn't a statistic until she passed. You know what I mean? Nobody said my dad was an alcoholic until he was in the hospital for kid cancer and that he had to have an organ removed. And I literally was like, The withdrawal will kill him like you don't understand and then they were like, oh, okay We have to you know We have to factor that in now to like we can't just cut him off cold turkey because it will kill him and so that's right there no statistic right here And that's three three kids out there with two alcoholic parents and no, not in the numbers So I agree the numbers are way more staggering. I just wonder, what is it going to take for us to really have a better understanding of what's happening with just being more interested in the education. It just doesn't seem like there's Like I didn't learn about any of that in school. It was all in hushed tones. Oh, she's like that, or so and so had this thing. And like in my time in high school, like I can remember one of my, there was like acid and LSD and all that kind of stuff was around at that time. And and I can remember coming to school one day and one of our students wasn't there and there was this. And the teachers didn't say, this is how much in the shadows they put it. The teachers didn't say anything. It was this rumor with the kids. Oh, she didn't come to school because she had a bad trip. And now she's in a, she's in a mental facility and that was it. And there's fear and there's not owning. Not educating, like the teachers, for instance, just as an example of how different it can be. We had a situation here in Lawrence maybe a year ago, year and a half, two years, a little while back. Where a a student was shot by her father and then father committed suicide. So it was this double murder, suicide. It was, yeah. And nobody was there to witness this. So that was an assumption, by the way. All of that was an assumption. Who knows what happened? I don't know. I wasn't there, but that's the story. But what happened was, this was a 13 year old girl. What happened was the teachers. gathered around the students and supported them. There wasn't any, we're not going to talk about that. There wasn't any of that. And then they took, they let the kids take off classes for, I don't know, the rest of the week, whatever it was, so that they could actually process what had happened. The whole community was just I'm still like I'm still got echoes of the fallout from that because it was so shocking and I'm, and I knew them. So it's just, yeah so that's the difference. Oh, we're not going to talk about that. And we're going to let the rumors fly, or we're going to embrace these children and we're going to help them process this and we're going to process it with them. And also we're going to understand that. All children, especially based on what they're hearing at home, are not going to process it the same, and that's a big key too, because some of these, we had, I had a, I knew someone very close to me that committed suicide when I was in school, and I went home, and there was no, oh my gosh, do you need to talk about it? It was like, just be glad it wasn't you. Like you see how much you can you complain so much about your life could be worse right buttercup like that was Yeah, so it wasn't so that you know It takes everybody and I I look at it this big picture even if we don't Understand it or even if we don't Like we're afraid to tackle it because there is fear You don't know how to deal with some things and it's ignorance and not an ignorant being in a bad way But just ignorance meaning lack of knowledge Yeah, it's understanding but if we could just get people to be more Compassionate like overall and just go okay, you know It's like I tell people stop saying what's wrong with you and ask people what's going on with you that one turn You Whether it's a friend, a family, that one turn, if everybody just thought okay, they're not in a bad mood because they're bad people, but they're in a bad mood because something's happening to them, that one turn could shift everything, but you need enough people yelling it too. You need enough people in the corporations teaching compassionate leadership or trauma informed leadership. And stop, we're walking around like everybody is starting to walk on eggshells, not just the people that are being harmed. Exactly. Yeah, I work as a betrayal recovery coach on Dr. Debbie Silver's platform, the PBT Institute, which is all dedicated to helping people recover from betrayal experience. She's done a PhD on it. There's a whole process that she uses. It's a, it's very interesting, very powerful, but what's interesting is We take our stuff into the workplace. And we pick up stuff on the workplace and we take it home. So it's working both ways. And one of the things that she's been, working on for a couple years is bringing in her work on Betrayal into corporate as a platform. as a piece of their mental illness or mental, whatever you want to call it, mental wellness is what I would call it. Mental wellness programming. But you know what? That's sitting right at the edge of the paradigm. There are not many corporations that are, jumping on that bandwagon, so Elizabeth, what do you think it's going to take for us to get the focus on back on erasing the stigma? I was, I'm thinking that because. mental illness. Look at Gabor's work on the myth of normal. That's got all the stats and studies in it. It's affecting the bottom line. So I get really nuts and boltsy here instead of focusing on compassion, I focus on the bottom line and look at how it's changing the productivity in the workplace. And so now we're like, oh, okay If that's, if people's behaviors are affecting the bottom line, maybe we better do something to to look at that. So mental wellness in corporate would be, like a no brainer to me for my end. It just of course that we would, we need to do that, but that would also be by the way, a, that would add an element of compassion into the workplace. Yeah, which ultimately just from an economic point of view, I'm just looking at that would also positively affect the bottom line. I'm just, and not to say that it makes everybody else feel better and function better and all that kind of stuff, but you would think I would think. That, that that corporate will be jumping right on this. Now, you do see places like meditation rooms and ho and airports, which blew me away the first one I saw. It's wow, this is great, what's happening here, right? But I think we can do more. Or like Lockheed Martin has, they come in every once in a while and they do chair massages for their employees. And it's okay, that's a good start, but definitely, but it's just, but again, it's just, we, I just did a talk and I don't remember who I even did it for, but it was called trauma informed leadership in a trauma reactive world. And that's literally, like you said, dysfunction is the norm. We've got all of this subconscious programming and we're a reactive society right now. So if people understood that. And like I said, that one question, not what's wrong with you, because that immediately puts people on the defensive. Yeah, immediately. What's wrong with you, dude? I wouldn't want to walk in somewhere. And if I happen, what if I had a toothache and I looked a little sad and someone's what's wrong with you? Like immediately your head starts making up these stories. Yeah. It's your thoughts come before your emotions. So it's We need to learn to stop it at the thought and rethink and it's also, I would push back on that a little bit. I would say, just in terms of nervous system, that when when someone says what's wrong with you, the nervous system immediately disconnects. Why? Because it feels threatened. It's not safe. And so now we're back to fear. What do we have to do in our communication with one another to co regulate and keep that connection because as soon as we are in defense, we can't, the nervous system really can't connect and defend at the same time, it's not really made for that. It's it does rest and digest or it does activity. But we can't sleep and run at the same, it doesn't work like that. So it's like the same thing with this we're defended and we're not connected, or we can connect or we can defend. We can't do both. So what is it going to take for us to learn better communication skills so that we're not having this attack thing happening? And it's happening at a very. Fundamental level where we're not stimulating people's fear centers all the time, which is, the corporate environment is pretty much fear based. So I'm just saying, if we wanted to try and I'd have to, obviously I'd have to come up with numbers and stuff, but if we wanted to try and convince corporate, which is looking at the bigger picture in terms of larger groups of people that it's in their best interest to, to bring in mental wellness. It's something that that they have to understand fundamentally that it actually is part of their bottom line. The wellness universe is another place where I'm a member, it's a place with a lot of wellness practitioners and they're also looking at a corporate program, corporate wellness. And I think it goes, and I think it's like a two fold thing because I deal with a lot of people that are working to get into the schools. And I think that's huge too because emotional intelligence and kids being able to express their own emotions and everything else it's give these kids a little bit of a jump start so that if they are the Three out of four now one out of whatever it is, whatever the statistics are They're obviously almost impossible to measure those statistics as far as who's growing up Not having their needs met. Let's just put it that way Those people, that's a huge number. So if you can, go into the schools and teach teachers or, and children alike, a little bit more of emotional intelligence and how, then, I think we started talking about that statistic. I don't know where I read it, but it literally said that one of the biggest surveys just done was 25 percent of children. This might be the same one that you heard ages 13, like in the 13 year old range, 25 percent of them had already contemplated taking their own life. That is staggering. That is staggering. And again, you hear someone say that. I remember I said that to work at someone and I said, can you believe 25%? And they literally were like, no, no compassion, no empathy, no that's ridiculous. I remember when I was 13 years old, in school, had I not had the life I had at home, but in school, the biggest thing was being afraid to walk past the smoking lounge. Like I was afraid of the people in leather. Again, stigma, but, but that was my only safe, unsafe place in school was being afraid to walk through that lounge, but now it's wow, 13, 25% of teenagers of that age. It's, yeah that's really pointing to. A real fundamental something's fundamentally wrong, which we know, but the question and the thing that we're addressing here and many platforms fortunately are trying to, is what do we do to move that needle? Yeah. What do we do to move that needle? And your piece about compassion, huge. And I'll go ahead. Yeah. I was just going to say the other piece of it is this thing around historical and collective trauma. It's just why I do that work because we know from science and we you can track it energetically as well, not science y, but energetically wise that unresolved trauma travels through families. We're carrying stuff. We came in carrying unresolved, the effects of unresolved trauma. We're carrying that stuff. And we're not even talking about that. And yet, we have in the United States, just as an example, we have this racial divide. And, but in my lifetime, we've seen parts of the world, parts of corporate included, parts of the culture start to meld. And also we're having This also gender is not so segregated anymore, and the way we do that is by bringing in compassion and this understanding and this trauma informed approach to how do we talk to one another given that we're both carrying this stuff. And we're both, we both have programs that we came into this world with and then that were further reinforced by family, by community, by culture, and now we can't talk to one another. What do we do to bridge that gap? And there are people that teach that. Yeah. That's why when I went into when I already was, I was already doing ancestral work, but I went into historical trauma specifically and Tom, Thomas Huppel's work around collective trauma. Amazing. So very helpful and bringing compassion into all of it. So understanding when you walk into a room, what's the landscape I'm walking into? If we have no idea of what we're conscious, we're not conscious of what we're walking into because we don't have the education and we don't have the awareness within ourselves to feel that. We've got some work to do. And is it just more people like you and me, more people, just spreading the word, just talking, being too loud. I don't. care. I'm okay. I'll be that squeaky wheel. They say the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I'll be that person, but we just need so many more. It's not a, it's not. Yeah. You need an army. But that's, that's why you and I, you have a podcast. I go on lots of COD podcasts. You go on podcasts. We were out there spreading the word it's a mission. And like you said you have this passion. This is where I need to be putting my energy and I have the same passion in kind of the sphere that I work in, which, and we intersect, which is our audiences intersect so beautifully. Yeah, they really do. I love it. I could talk to you all day and I you know It's funny that you had that and I we were talking to my I was talking to someone the other day about this and I Was talking about and I don't know much about the past, the historical trauma and stuff I just know what i've read, but I truly believe that is why being like in a recession is so hard on people because I Didn't live with my great grandparents or grandparents when they were going through the depression You But I know many of them were close to starving and that's like that's one of the one example of that. So then all of a sudden we hit this recession slash and it invokes fear in a lot of people and they don't know why. Oh, absolutely. And when COVID hit and we all, went inside literally my client, it was amazing because I get, I've got clients from all over the world. Of course, that was all over the world kind of thing. And everybody was bringing in. The stuff that they were carrying was around plague, Spanish flu things that made us isolated separate you're, you're bad, all this kind of stuff that was all part of the zeitgeist of the COVID phenomenon. Yeah. Yeah. It's, we're still really reeling in this. In this blaming. It's them, not me. It's, what's wrong with you? I'm, that kind of thing where we're so reactive that we've forgotten that we're missing the compassion piece. Oh, yeah, we definitely are definitely Again, we've got you we've got me. We've got lots of people out there. Just people We just need to make people more aware That's all we can do just do the best we can do and hope that people listen to us and hope our voice finds a place But thank you so much. I don't want to keep everybody all day. This has been super fun I'm going to put all of your links But tell people that are listening, if they want to work with you, where do they find you? Oh, you can find me at my website, which is Elizabeth with a hyphen, and then kip, K I P dot com. You gotta put the hyphen in there to get me, otherwise you'll get the other Elizabeth Kip, who's amazing, but she's not me. And you can find all my social media there, and lots of free resources on the website. Thanks. Perfect. Perfect. And before you go, you got to leave the listeners with one little bit of advice. If you could say one words of wisdom or three words of wisdom, what would they be? What would now be a good time? That's a good one. Perfect. Perfect. Awesome. You guys, again, that was Elizabeth Kipp. Look her up. She's absolutely amazing. And we will keep you posted on the summit that we're going to do that is all around this. And You guys have a blessed day and know that just start using some more compassion teach people compassion the people you're with It will rub off the more you do it. The more people around you will do it Thank you very much, and you have a blessed day