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In the midst of the chaos that seems to be almost a constant in the world, it's easy to forget that individual lives and losses are still happening every day and can be deeply affecting us or those around us, as can family mental health issues.
Sometimes those bigger global issues give us perspective, take us out of our own worries, and that can feel actually broadening and helpful and can put our lives into a perspective that brings some ease or inner peace even. Not that we're taking comfort in someone else's misery or suffering, but that there's a reminder that suffering is bigger than us and we're not alone, and that there are also major trials happening that sometimes may be even scarier in the moment than our own.
But often it's a compounding weight, and then we might also feel embarrassed for having our own feelings when there are these very big things happening. So much so that we turn inward, ashamed to share our more personal troubles for fear of seeming small or selfish, and that can create cognitive dissonance or a retreat into self that can be part of depression or create social anxiety.
In this episode I explore, through my own recent loss, a specific kind of despair and trauma that affects the lives of so many: the loss of a parent through one or another form of abandonment due to our parents going through a difficult and permanently dividing divorce, though illness, including mental health challenges, or for other reasons.
I talk about:
- What my own experience of recent loss was and what it brought up for me
- The impact of an abandonment on a young person, including potentially leading to complex attachment issues at various stages in our lives
- How paternal abandonment can put pressures on the remaining parent, usually the mother, possibly leading to mother-daughter wounds
- The impact of an abandoning parent on one’s self-concept, economic beliefs, and sense of belonging in the world
- How we are really always still children at whatever age a parent abandons one
- How I’ve been processing my loss through somatic work, meditation, and journaling
- And more
Please join me for a very personal journey today, that may have specific meaning for you as we enter the holiday season. I do talk about loss, grief, and trauma, so I invite you to listen when you have the space to feel anything that might come up for you.
Thank you for honoring my vulnerability in what I share. It’s a gift to have you on this journey with me and to be able to trust you with my heart.
Parent Wounds: The Podcast Transcript
It's good to be here with you today, everybody. This is a solo episode, and I am Dr. Aviva Romm, midwife, herbalist, Yale-trained MD, women's health and hormone expert, carer of pregnant people and women in all stages of their lives, and children as well.
When I created this new iteration of my podcast going from Natural MD Radio, which I had for several years, to On Health, which I renamed the podcast in June of 2022, it was with the knowing from 40 years of my work, and of course we know this intuitively and through our own life experiences too. You all know this as well, that there's much more to what makes up our health than herbs and how we eat and our genetics.
There is our economics, there is our stress level, there are our relationships, and there is what makes us who we are, and that for many of us includes difficult times that we've had in our lives, including difficult times that we've had in childhood.
This episode does talk about parent wounds and loss, so please listen when you have time to really feel your feelings. Should this topic be in any way very personally resonant for you or triggering, since sending this podcast topic as an email to my list, I know how resonant it can be. I've received literally hundreds of responses, I think more to that email newsletter than any other email I've sent, and some of those were simply full of love and compassion and also appreciation for being vulnerable and transparent, and many people shared their own stories of in one way or another, losing a parent whether to mental illness or to addiction or to disease or to abandonment.
I want to acknowledge that in the midst of the chaos that seems to be almost a constant in the world, with recent greater inflammation in our country and abroad, it's easy to forget that individual lives and losses are still happening every day and can be deeply affecting us or those around us, as can family mental health issues.
Sometimes those bigger global issues give us perspective, take us out of our own worries, and that can feel actually broadening and helpful and can put our lives into a perspective that brings some ease or inner peace even. Not that we're taking comfort in someone else's misery or suffering, but that there's a reminder that suffering is bigger than us and we're not alone, and that there are also major trials happening that sometimes may be even scarier in the moment than our own. But often it's a compounding weight, and then we might also feel embarrassed for having our own feelings when there are these very big things happening. So much so that we turn inward, ashamed to share our more personal troubles for fear of seeming small or selfish, and that can create cognitive dissonance or a retreat into self that can be part of depression or create social anxiety.
None of that is true, and it's been said that you can drown in an ocean or drown in a puddle. Nobody can judge the depth of one's pain or trauma, and it's not a trauma competition. It's not a suffering competition. We can hold both things in our hands, in our hearts, and we do – our own individual personal griefs and challenges that we might be going through, whatever those are, and our compassion for what's happening in the world.
Sometimes, though, we forget the compassion for ourselves and we can become our own harshest judges and harshest critics. I want to use this episode not only to honor what each of us might be going through, but I want to wipe away the veneer of perfection that so happens in email mailing lists, on social media, and in podcasts that the people you are following, listening to or learning from always seem to have it all together or even mostly together.
It's so easy to compare and despair, to judge ourselves because you feel like all you can do is get out of bed that day or put one foot in front of the other, or the burden you're carrying feels so heavy and everyone else seems to be able to show up and create podcasts, pretty meals on social media, etc. So, if there's a journey that you're navigating in your life right now, if there's been a meltdown, a breakdown, grief, anger loss, frustration, overwhelm, estrangement, mental health challenges, addiction – which is of course a mental health challenge – any of it,
I hope that this episode is a reminder to give yourself compassion, generosity and grace and also a reminder that no matter what is going on in the world, your personal trials are not insignificant, and if you need help that you're seeking out good support. I'm on one of those journeys at the moment and I trust all of you with my heart and my transparency and my vulnerability as I share this with you. I'm actually going to share the narrative of the email I sent out to my list, but I'm going to be adding to it as I have this conversation with you.
I am in my kitchen at the island sipping what is now my cold morning half-caf. It's almost noon, and I'd intended to start writing at eight, but in truth, I had a morning of feeling a bit lost. At one point, crying on the floor of my bedroom. Yes, it's true. Even highly productive public figures with MDs with New York Times bestselling books after their name melt down. I'd say I was ‘fugly’ crying, but I don't believe crying is ever ugly. No matter how snotty and red-face we become, and I did, I told my husband that too, and I'm sticking with it. Tears are healing and they're just a part of being human.
A few weeks ago I received a text message, not 15 minutes before dinner, guests were arriving at my house and it was word that my brother had received a call from the police in New York, on Long Island, that my dad had passed away. His passing was not an ordinary one. He died homeless, and from what it sounds like in a tragic accident in a homeless shelter outside of New York City. It's unclear whether he had fallen downstairs or had an altercation with another member of this home and might've been pushed down the stairs intentionally or unintentionally. None of us in my family knew he was destitute and homeless, not something any of our family knew because he was completely out of touch, or on the rare occasions one of us spoke with him once every few years. He said he was great. He remained emotionally closed to us until the end, and because of his treatment of some of his children, there were complete fractures, complete loss of contact.
To provide some context, some of my backstory that I grew up in a housing project in New York City with a single mom and a younger brother and left home at 15 due to the instability and lack of safety both in my home and in the housing project itself. You can read more about my story on the About page of my website and you can listen to it more in my podcast episode Perfectionism: Healing the Shadow Side.
When my husband and I were a young hippie couple starting our family, he used to brush off the notion that I'd grown up in subsidized housing, saying to me that I was simply a liberal identifying with the poor – to which I used to chuckle and say “something only an actual liberal would say.” That is until he actually drove through my childhood neighborhood with me one year on a trip home to New York City. His jaw dropped when he drove through my neighborhood and he deeply apologized and simply said, wow, you weren't kidding.
My father went AWOL from my life when I was just four years old, after some violent fights and other abuses became apparent. My mother with the help of her older brother forcibly evicted him from our apartment just eight weeks after my baby brother was born. There had been a lot of incidents apparently leading up to this, the crowning one being my mom coming home from the hospital after giving birth to my brother – and at that time you stayed in the hospital an extra couple of days – found that her bed had been slept in by my dad and apparently another woman, and her negligence had been worn. But for me, until age four, aside from some eruptions that I witnessed between my mom and dad, I loved being around my dad. To me, he was handsome, funny, creative, talented, and loved to fly kites with me. He played folk guitar, sculpted, washed his cool green Ford Mustang in the driveway at my grandparents' house, and let me held.
Then he was basically gone. This led to me, having just started kindergarten, requiring my mom to sit on a bench outside of the kindy classroom for weeks in the autumn of 1970. I remember she'd sit on this bench in a wool coat and a trendy Jackie O style headscarf, her blonde bob pulled backward, visibly chilly with my baby brother in a stroller, bundled up with some blankets just in front of her. Sometimes she'd be pushing him to and fro just to rock him and keep him asleep, and this was all just so I could settle into class. I was so afraid that when I looked out the window, she'd be gone just like that, also.
I've only seen my dad maybe a half dozen times since I was a young girl. It was on the few occasions that he actually showed up for a visitation weekend. Most weekends that he was supposed to have me, he didn't show up at all. Sometimes I'd wait for hours by the window in anticipation, sometimes in the winter sitting on the radiator to stay warm until I could feel that stinging coming up through my jeans and then I would jump off as a distraction to the waiting and the waiting and the waiting. This yearning promise for his visits that never materialized, those memories still linger. Sometimes he'd call two hours later and finally say, I'm not going to show up.
To this day when I'm in a more serious conflict with my partner, I sometimes challenge him to leave the house. Just go, just go, just leave. And then, when he does eventually, because I've insisted for so long, I stand by the window crying, recreating a scene that's in need of healing, and one that my partner still, after almost 40 years of marriage, doesn't really know what to make of. He grew up in a generally intact home, and if you haven't lived through parental abandonment, it's hard to know what that feels like.
Despite years of healing work, some things never truly fade. One, I believe, shapes oneself around scars like a tree growing around barbed wire. One hopefully becomes a living Kintsugi vessel, those Japanese vessels that are made when a piece of pottery breaks and the seams are filled with gold, and it's thought to be even more beautiful and more special than it was originally. And it's how I like to imagine my heart and my soul, like a Kintsugi vessel, because otherwise, how can one fully heal the holes and the doubts and the confusion that a parent's abandonment leaves behind?
As I've recently discovered, this abandonment is a pattern my dad repeated with five subsequent children, born to two ensuing – and sometimes literally suing, for child support that is – wives. Seven of us completely abandoned and worse, left with a trail of wondering what we'd done wrong, why we weren't truly wanted, or that none of us ever felt like we belonged. In recent weeks since my father's death, each of our own children's responses, and we have 18 children between seven of us, to their grandfather's death was not sadness, but saying to us almost universally across all of our children and families, I'm sorry for your loss. So devoid were any of them with contact from their grandfather's presence in their lives that they didn't recognize this as a loss for anyone but us, their parents, my father's children.
I received the text about my dad's death as I mentioned, literally just 15 minutes before dinner guests were arriving for a meal I was cooking. In an ironic twist of fate, one couple coming for dinner was my neighbors, Bessel van der Kolk, the same one that wrote, The Body Keeps the Score, and Licia Sky, his partner, both trauma therapists, but I didn't share the story at dinner because I didn't want the dinner gathering focusing on me, and it was so fresh. I had just had this news for 15 minutes.
In the days after his death, I needed space to slow down and process. I just didn't feel like talking about it until I felt my feelings about it. When I eventually began to reply to some texts and emails with a quick apology, explaining my delay after the news of my father's passing, the sympathy and understanding I received were so loving. What really took me back though was that when I shared a bit about the estrangement, I was surprised by the response of several women, including some highly successful colleagues with apparently very functional families and adult marriages, who said things to the effect of, oh, you too? The responses spoke volumes revealing the commonality of parental, particularly in these cases, paternal abandonment, a shared pain that resonates deeply among so many of us, particularly as women, as we sort our ways through the world, in relationship perhaps to male partners, but also to men I've talked with, including my brothers who have struggled with their own abilities to form relationship and have commitment, and the anxiety of parenting that we might repeat the same thing.
So many have experienced the agony of a father or a parent wound. As a child of the late sixties, having divorced parents and an absent dad was a source of chronic embarrassment. Now, hearing so many stories from the hundreds of women that have written to me by email since sharing this in my newsletter, I feel like one among many, which in its own way is sad but also weirdly normalizing. I've long believed that we can't miss what we don't have. As a girl, I was sure I didn't miss having a dad because I didn't have a dad, and I didn't know what that meant. And I hope you don't judge me that I truly don't feel grief over my father's death, particularly. He really was that absent for my life for over 50 years now, even when invited to be part of it, to meet my children, to be a grandparent, he remained absent.
What I feel more is sadness and compassion for my own young abandoned self, and how that shaped my life, my relationships, my marriage, my mothering. And I feel sad for each of my young siblings all born and part of his next marriages long after I'd left my home environment as a teen. His passing has prompted me to once again to explore what it means to have parental abandonment wounds. I continue to unpack how this wound influenced my choice in a partner, how I raised my children. By trying to fill a space I thought I had healed, I created other kinds of patterns along the way, some highly successful ones and some in the shadows, not so much. So I too am trying to find tenderness and compassion and understanding for myself. I've also been contemplating how easy it is to focus on mother wounds when processing our pain as women, overlooking the fact that mothers like mine were unduly burdened in their parenting capacities by their own experiences of abandonment, and left with the magnitude of all it means to parent alone.
Healing is a unique and personal journey. For those of us with primal, early childhood wounds that sometimes translate into high ACE scores or adverse childhood event scores, the healing process reveals itself sometimes again and again through our intimate relationships, friendships, finances, self-care habits, mental health and life milestones. Sometimes we feel like we don't deserve, so we don't take risks on career, on finances, on good love. Sometimes we simmer with anxiety, depression, sadness that's so deep, deep, deep in, that we don't even remember that it's there until those moments of joy wake us up and we say, oh, right, or until these milestones happen in life that remind us that these wounds even when healed, are still there, they're still part of what we shaped ourselves and grew around.
I recently had a session with a former therapist, which served as a reminder of the work I've done, and my dearest friend has been a great source of affirmation, reminding me that it's a significant event when a parent dies, especially when there's an emotional bank account with few good memories to draw from. In my father's case, it's become apparent that he struggled with severe mental health challenges. One of my brothers put it perfectly saying yes, he was an asshole, but it wasn't just his fault. My siblings and I are all facing the reminder that we had a parent who battled mental illness, a challenge that should not be underestimated nor ignored for anyone in our family. It's easy for mental illness to go unnoticed.
To tend to my mental health with fresh eyes. I've started something new recently: somatic dance. This practice allows me to use my body as a tool for healing and self-expression. It's a way to release what's stuck and to heal the places where the body has been keeping the score. It's been liberating and poignant. A recent class ended in a tearful release as I used my body to tell a wordless story to the other women in the class, and each woman did so in turn as we stood listening, quietly watching, listening to the story of each other's bodies.
Taking this class is important to me in so many ways. It's a way to honor my emotional and spiritual self through my body, something that's deeply important to me as a midwife. Grounding in my body, grounding in my intuition, grounding in my womb, is very, very poignant and powerful for me. And it's a moment to give myself to trust in my security enough to hit pause and give myself space and permission to take a dance class on a Friday morning.
My siblings and I in our brief conversations that we've had, through text message largely, have uncovered the depth of financial abandonment we all experienced through my dad not showing up for any of us or any of our mothers. So we've looked at the ways that financial abandonment that we experienced have shaped us variably in our lives. Having a parent who died estranged and homeless is also terrifying and triggering. In fact, one of women's fears across many different socioeconomic groups in the United States is to end up unhoused.
I've also picked my journal back up and I'm rereading a book called Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. I even went so far as to go onto Amazon and get her prompt cards, which are now sitting on my dining table, 60 cards I believe it is. There are just different prompts to sit and free write. Her classic book, for those of you who do like to write therapeutically, is an invitation to explore the healing power of writing. I do love writing and among the beauties and also complexities of my life is that I run a content-driven business and so to speak, the show must go on. Others on my tiny team also depend on me to show up, and I take being consistent for you as listeners deeply to heart. Keeping promises and being consistent in showing up, you might not be surprised is both a superpower and a shadow side for me.
So in addition to a few meltdowns on my journey over the past few weeks, I've also been producing some new works and words to share with you. As you know, empowering women through my work has not only nourished the spirits of the women that I reach, like you, and I'm so grateful for you being on the other side of this listening, but it also invigorates my own. So, if you are looking for some listening over the next few weeks and through the holiday season, I ironically recently recorded the podcast that you may have heard, actually a couple of weeks before my father's death, Going Through Grief and Its Messy Feelings, which is inspired by Kris Carr's experience of going through her father's loss. And actually as you listen to the podcast with Kris, you'll hear that that was her chosen father, to be exact.
I also recently shared a podcast on Medical Gaslighting and what you can do to advocate for yourself, shedding light on healthcare system struggles. This is also really important to listen to if you are seeking or want to seek support for your mental health care. If you're thinking about it or know somebody who's thinking about it, I did a podcast on Should I Freeze My Eggs. And last but not least if you like me, are in menopause, I did a podcast interview with Emmy Award-winning journalist Tamsen Fadal on Hot Flashes Gone Public, which is an episode in which she shares how her menopause made its television debut in her life.
Before I leave you for this week, I want to extend my deepest love and support for anyone who has listened today and found themselves resonating with feelings that are related, or related but different. For anyone going through challenges in any aspect of global conflict right now. For anyone who has been a climate refugee or climate crisis survivor. One of my dearest friends recently moved here to my region of the country after his house was the only house spared at the top of the road where they live in Oregon, from the fires. So there are a lot of different ways that challenges show up in our lives, whether that is a journey you're facing with a spouse, a partner, a child, someone's health, an elder parent, work, I welcome you on this journey to heal those parts of ourselves and to become that living Kintsugi, that vessel that even where the cracks are, the lights come through, and we fill those spaces with gold so that our hearts and our beings are strong and solid. We can see the path that we've walked, even the rents and the tears and the traumas and the damage, and we fill them with gold. We release from our body what our body's keeping score of, and we give ourselves love and compassion for the beautiful beings that we are. See you soon.
