That Moment You Decide to Transform with Dena Adams

Welcome back to Your Brain On Positive. All the love and support you need is residing inside of you. And we're going to make it easier to turn it on.

There's a moment of recognition. And when you get a chance to recognize that you're in the presence of somebody who gets you who's like you like you a little bit. It's such a wonderful feeling, especially when it's someone that you just met, at least that's my experience. So I'm Jackie Semmens, you're here on your brain on positive and we're going to spend some time with Dena Adams. And Dena is one of these people. She likes things that are real. She likes things that are raw, and she likes to keep things respectful. And she's ready to go, where you all love for me to go, which is wherever the conversation leads us. So take a positivity pill, take the positivity paws, decide that you are going to like this lady as much as I do. And help me welcome by staying tuned, staying in tuning in. Anyway, have fun. Hey, Dena, thank you for being on the show.

Jackie, I'm so excited to be here. I'm just I have been counting down the days. I'm so excited. And I appreciate you having me.

Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, when we first started talking because we met in a networking group online the way most people are meeting meeting and quotes nowadays, networking group online, and then it was like, Yeah, I wanted to talk to you some more. And then it was we're out of time. How did that happen? So when it comes to this whole concept of getting your brain on positive, before we're done today, you're going to share with everybody your three favorite ways of flipping things around put yourself on positive. But let's make it real and relevant. Why did you need to learn ways to put your brain on positive?

Um, I was diagnosed with massive clinical depression when I was eight years old.

Whoa, I'm sorry that there was a single digit there.

Yes, it was a single digit.

Oh, my God. Eight years? Yeah. Yeah.

I, I didn't understand positivity. I spent most of my childhood being bullied and dealing with abuse, and dealing with the negative self talk. And everyone else expressing their hurts onto me projecting their worst parts onto me as if I was, who they didn't want to be putting their lives on who I was. And so by the time I was 14, and a freshman in high school, I was so depressed, and I was so broken, and so lost and confused and, and just so disconnected from reality and the world. I didn't know how people could enjoy life. I didn't understand how can you be so happy and enjoying things when there's so much darkness happening in the world? And not just in the world, but in your own world? Right. And, you know, I think there are always people in our lives who think, you know, they're doing the best they can with where they are, and in their own reality. And we don't always express very well, what we need and how we need help, because we're so lost and angry and broken and all the things that we're going through that it can seem to somebody else that they're doing everything they can to help us and to us it can seem like they're doing absolutely nothing.

perspective and free thing. Yes, perspective is everything. The world looks very different to an eight year old, looking up at these tall people. And yet, sometimes that perspective doesn't really get it chance to change.

Right? And sometimes when it comes to perspective, someone doesn't have to say something. It's how things happen. And phrases that you hear. And you in your own mind put them together to mean

something. Oh, it is the meanings we assign.

Right? It's, it's that belief we take on of what somebody else said or did that is has completely really, honestly, a lot of times nothing to do with you.

And yet, we're dealing with the belief systems. And so this is my favorite topic. The topic is BS, guys, we're going to have at it again. All right, so let's go for your belief systems. What I believe to be true is that we make decisions about who we are, how the world works, and who we can be in the world. Before we're seven years old. I completely believe that. So if you were diagnosed with massive clinical depression at the age of eight, a brain that was one not fully formed, because you didn't have a prefrontal cortex, yet, it wasn't built, much less developed that takes till the age of 24, if we're lucky. And so here's a brain that's missing a component, and dealing with all the chemicals of depression, because that's a biochemical observable phenomenon in the brain. And this was where you made your decisions about who you were, how life worked, and who you could be in the world. What turned it around for you, what was the first ray of sunshine that broke into this belief system that both started to bust your BS?

First, it wasn't until I was a mom and married, I'm going to put that out there. This was something that just happened at some young age. For me, I battled depression, I still deal with depression and anxiety to this day, but I battled suicidal tendencies and, and behaviors and all of that all the way into my 30s. The moment that I needed to change things happened right after I got married. So my husband and I got married. I was like, now to math in my head. I should really remember these numbers. I was 2425. When we got married somewhere. I don't remember. Okay. Um, but I was sitting on the floor in the living room next to our daughter who was three months old. And it was right after we got married. We got married when she was three months. We I had my two boys that were four and five and his daughter was five at the time.

Whoa, okay, so I'm getting this this cataclysmic thing all right, because I I live and breathe and was raised in blended families before blended families was something people understood. So we've got yours. My 222 Girls, right for boys, your boys, boys. I'll get this right. Two boys four and five. He has a daughter who's five. Right. And then together you have a daughter

at that point. Yes. Okay. All right, at that point.

So we've got a family of four blended.

Right. And she didn't. She didn't she was with us occasionally. But

his five year old daughter was with you occasionally, which does not make it easier. Okay, so you had Yours mine and ours. We shared custody of one of them. Right? Or? Yeah, so Okay, got this right now. Now. I've got this.

Well, visitation. I mean, for all intensive purposes. We saw her occasionally. Yeah,

yeah. Alright, so light custody and got it? Yeah. Oh, my goodness. All right. So you were sitting on the floor,

right, knew stay at home mom on top of that, because I had just stopped working my job because the company moved out east to another town and I didn't go with them. Obviously, I stayed. And I just I sat there. And I was realizing I have this amazing family, a husband who loves me and would do anything for me. He my boys just adore him. We have this brand new little girl. We I have this family who loves me. And I'm miserable. I am sitting there going God I don't understand. How can I be miserable? I don't even understand And why she wants to marry like, why would someone want to be with me forever? Purpose of all

women at that moment? Did you want to be with you forever?

No, no. All right. So

as a survivor of two bouts of clinical depression, that's why I asked the question. No, that was my reality to since I don't like who I am. And I don't want to be with me. And it's not any fun to be me. I don't get why you're here. Yeah, did you push him away?

Oh, I'm sorry, I am still a recovering control freak. To say, I feel like a lot of my behavior. I said these words to my husband, and it probably just destroyed him. My kids will always come before you. They are children. They are not self sufficient. I cannot put somebody else above them. They're my responsibility. I already know I'm not good enough for them. I already know, I'm not everything they need. And so I have to put them before somebody else who was self sufficient and can take care of themselves. Right. And that's what it meant in my mind. But I know that is nowhere near what it came across to my husband as

well, you know, depending on what he has said to you since then, I'm just gonna say I got another way of looking at that. The first one is that obviously, it didn't destroy him because he married you. Yeah. So yeah, that's BS on an in another totally different level. But the reality is that he was dealing with his own shared custody, like custody. And what you said to him is, if we have a child, I will fight for that trial. Have a very different interpretation of what he might have heard.

It was more for him, it was more, he would always be second. And he would never be as important to me as our children. That's what it was to him. I mean, now looking back and the things that we've talked about, right, so yeah,

it was you can even have those conversations is such a miracle.

Yeah, yeah, there was a point we put, we took the D word off the table, because it came up in all of our fights. It was a threat, right? Or why are we why? Why? You know, we might as well just get divorced, we might as well just this, and there was a moment, we finally took it off the table. And we stopped using the word. Okay, so let's

get clear when they talk about the D word you're not talking about. divas or talking

about divorce. Right. But, but back to back to your question. So I was sitting on the floor. And I'm asking myself God, like, why, why? How can I be so miserable? When I have family around me that loves me, I have children that light up when I walk in the room and they want to play with me and they want me in there. They want to do things with me and my husband who wants to sit and talk with me and have time with me and pushes me to be better, which this is me off because I'm still so broken. I don't understand why he's like, you don't need to be this person. Right? You're you realize, like what you're doing to yourself. And it was this, okay, God, what do I do? And I just heard it's time to change. It's time to change. And that's when I started my personal development journey. That's when I started my self discovery journey. I did a lot of personal development, and realize that the piece I needed was not what I was getting in therapy, because yes, I was in therapy. I was not getting what I needed from the personal development programs and courses and all that kind of stuff. What I really wanted, and I asked for this in therapy, and whatever reason I maybe just didn't have good therapist at the time. I was like, I don't want to just talk about what has happened. I need I need to know how to deal with this because I go home. And now I have all these feelings that I don't know how to I don't know what to do with them. I don't know how to do this. And I never had a therapist teach me about processing emotions. I didn't learn about that until probably a couple of years ago. Right? Like, there were so many things I didn't learn but I wanted someone to sit with me and get into the crap that I was ready to fix. I couldn't find anybody that would do it. Gotta and so I started asking those questions of myself. I started self discovery before I knew it was a thing. Because I just didn't know that was what I needed to get myself. I had to pull myself out of the negative self talk. Knock that told me all the lies. I believed, based on my perspective of what was going on in my world growing up. Mm hmm.

And that take all Yeah, well, we decided

it takes a ton of work. It takes a lot of effort, when you're doing it all alone by yourself, and you have no one to guide you and support you through that journey.

You're absolutely right there.

It didn't have to be that hard. I just couldn't find the people that could help me.

Yeah, it takes a ton of work when you're doing it by yourself. It just does.

I mean, it's not that it doesn't take a lot of work when you're working with someone to but it's just a different kind of whatever. Well,

it's half the work at least. And sometimes it's way less than that. Why? Because we know a burden shared as a cut in half, you know, enjoy shared is doubled. aboard and shared is cut in half. Yeah, it's interesting, just the way humans interact with each other. And I wish I could take credit for having said that, but it was actually you like some Buddhist monk. Yeah, that. And what I found is that it's very true. They say many hands make light work. And it's true in personal development and self discovery as well. When people are able, when they've done their own work, they walk their own path that they don't have to be far ahead of you. But even if they're one or two steps ahead of me, they are far enough ahead of me to have put some signposts on the path. Right? Yeah, right. Sometimes that's all we need.

So that was my moment.

Ah, there you go. How old is your daughter now? 21. Holy crap. You don't look old enough to have 21.

Ours, our kids are 20 to 28 right now.

Well, there you go. All right, which explains why you're out in the world, right? Because now that now you survived being a parent. Congratulations, by the way. Thank you. Yeah, it's interesting to me, because I raised three of my own, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, I survived all of that. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Emotional resilience is the ability to maintain a relationship with a toddler and a teen and 20 something. Yeah, whatever that looks like, if you've got any relationship with all congratulations.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's, there are rough patches, there are, there are moments and I even did this with my mom, where I didn't really have much to do with her for a while, right? Because let's be honest, as parents, we aren't always the greatest if we don't make good choices, and we deal with things way wrong. And because it's the best we could do in the moment based on our feelings and how we do things. And so our kids will sometimes be like, I can't I can't deal with him right now. Toxic for me, right? Yeah. And so I think it's a place in parenthood where a lot of people think that if everything isn't going great, and their kid has an issue with them, at some point, that it's the end of the potential for a relationship. And I will say it is not, there's always room for reconciliation and respect on both sides. And learning to see your child is now an adult. And learning how to be a parent to an adult is very different. And learning to give them that respect and own your stuff when they say, Hey, this happened, and it really hurt me, and you have to sit there and go. I didn't even know it would have impacted you that way. Or thank you for sharing that with me. Because I can imagine that would have been I mean, that could I can't I can imagine that's gonna be really hard to tell your parent that this was your worst moment. And you it basically determined my entire trajectory of my wife. And for a parent to be like, Oh, okay, that's something I need to own. Right. Like, that wasn't my intention, and it still happened, and I understand why it came across in that way in your perspective. And while that was definitely not one of my best moments, right, like, and we own that with them, and that is what gives us that opportunity to still potentially have the opportunity to grow our relationship with them as they get older.

I'm actually gonna take it one step easier for parents. I'm about to give everybody a bit of a pass. Here we go. You ready? We learned how to handle this when we were listening to nursery rhymes growing up. Little Bo Peep, leave them alone. What and they all come home, that when they come home wagging their tails, those tails may be spelled T A las. And they may then tell you something you don't want to hear. The reality is that if we can stop trying to change how they are or what they feel, we've got a much better shot and having a relationship that heals that becomes resilient. Yeah.

I did not do that well with our children at all. And that's okay, because I didn't know any better right at the time. I didn't know what I didn't know.

And so we don't get wise because we get it right. We didn't wise because we had to learn something we learned to not get along the way. Yeah. Yeah. So cool. So what is it that you love to do with all of this? Because you have been on a journey, you've learned a few things, you know, your kids are more or less on speaking terms with you. We don't know whether it's more or less at the moment. But we've been there done that. Yeah. what lights you up now, what keeps you because the kids are grown. So your reason for change is no longer living in your home or not as engaged with you on an everyday basis, because even if they lived with me, they did not engage with me at certain ages. So mine are all now in their 40s. Or almost. We're getting close to the youngest one crop. Not a good day. So let's let's come away from that topic, Jackie, back away. Yeah, what lights you up now.

Um, one of the things that really lights me up, when it comes to my family, is just getting to spend time with Mike being in proximity with my kids, with my husband, being able to learn from them, learn the things that they're learning in life, when they get to come to me, and they're willing to share with me, this was a challenge for me, and I learned this and I'm able to do this, or we can have a conversation. And they'll be like, Yeah, that's a boundary, I'm not gonna cross or, yeah, that's not something I feel we need to discuss or like, they're willing to set those boundaries for themselves. And, you know, we can just have a conversation as adults, and just spend time together hanging out, whatever that means, is just that lights me up. That lights me up. Maybe I talked to one of my, like, one of my kids, he's been in the military. He actually just got out. But we didn't talk very often. And we had a rough relationship. So getting your response when I send a message was the highlight of my day, right? Like, yeah, we haven't talked in six months. And he responded to my message, just, I know, he's alive. I know, he's okay. I don't, I don't need to know all the intricacies of their life anymore. Like I felt like I needed to before. They taught me that, right. So being able to implement things that they taught me in our relationship that excites me. And the same with my husband, because it helps me see that and then helps them see that I can grow. And and that just because you your kids are grown and you've been married for over 20 years, and you're now in your late 40s. And you know, all this stuff. That doesn't mean that you can't grow as a person. And so I love that that in my personal life lights me up.

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Okay, you got that right. My ancestor Abraham Lincoln says, It doesn't matter how tall your grandpappy was a man has to do is growing. I realize same is true for one. Yes, we get to do our own growing. And the greatest gift is for people around us to share their growth with us. Yeah. So cool. So thank you, thank you. Thank you for sharing your growth edge your story with us. And I am really looking forward to our next conversation because I know you got a book in the works and you near you got your workbook that's already out there. But with all of the shifts and changes in the world, more, I think that we can encourage each other to go on the journey of discovering who am I? And it's not the judgment from the childhood of who am I to think that I could leave you this program? Yeah, it's more of who am I not to? Yeah, who am I have here, and where do I want to go? So I appreciate you sharing that journey with us. Do you know where do you want to go?

What's next? What is next? Um, we're in a new season in our marriage, my husband is newly and voluntarily retired due to an injury, and we're in a new season. And in in that space where I'm growing, is in my business, being able to shift my business so that I can serve more people in a more authentic way, with the types of people that I really want to serve, and really, really refining that and giving myself room for that shift. Hmm. And that gives me space to be with my husband more, since he's home full time now. And that gives me space to be there for my family and the way they need me. And it gives me the flexibility and it gives me the time I need and my faith, and to grow new friendships, and to really live the life. I really wished I could have lived for a very long time, I lived without friends. And without all these without family. And with all this without all these things that I thought I had to have to learn that I didn't have to have them. It was a privilege to be in proximity with other people who help elevate each other. And that's really where I want to be with peers and friends and family that want to grow and want to do more in life than just be stagnant. That's really what I'm excited for.

That's really an amazing story. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Because when life hands people a sudden change, you know, and it doesn't just affect the person, it affects the entire family. You know, oh, wait a minute, whoa, availability of this person. I'm not used to them being around I Yeah. So it impacts everyone. I love your willingness to share the journey, this idea of things being in flux, and that that's what lights you up is navigating the flux.

Thank you for saying that I am I like to say I'm a recovering perfectionist, I was very, very rigid and had no room for flexibility in my life. It caused so much frustration and disruption. And so that's one of the things that I've learned along this path is since Change is inevitable. I need to learn to go with the flow sometimes and know that it's not it doesn't have to just destroy everything. That is actually a great thing to learn.

Seems like you've figured that one out and they can thank you thank you for bringing that into our world and sharing your path to positivity. So thank you. Thank you, Dina. I really appreciate you being here.

Thank you for having me. It was my pleasure to share.