Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Drama Free with Nedra Tawwab

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

To kick off a new season of guest interviews, Sharon sits down with the amazing Nedra Tawwab: bestselling author, relationship therapist, and boundaries expert. Nedra and Sharon talk about some of the key ideas Nedra shares in her latest book, Drama Free, and about how to navigate unhealthy family dynamics and relationships and move them into a healthier space. The change starts with us. Special thanks to our guest, Nedra Tawwab for joining us today. Find Drama Free here. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: Nedra Tawwab Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Thanks for joining me today. I am speaking with Nedra Tawwap, who is a Instagram superstar, but also a really phenomenal therapist. She's been on the show before, if you remember back in 2021. And she's a new book out that I was so eager to talk to her about. The book is called Drama Free, and it is about improving and navigating our family relationships. I think you're going to get so much out of this. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. for taking the time. I know that you're very busy with publishing your new book, doing a book tour. No way. Busy? What are you talking about? Bored. Bored. I'm sorry.

I'm so bored. Bored with publishing your new book, bored of going on a book tour, bored of being an Instagram star. All of it's so boring. Not. of being an Instagram star. All of it's so boring. I'm glad to alleviate some of your boredom, Nedra. Just call me anytime. Yes. I loved Drama Free because this is a book that I think applies to nearly everyone. It is a book about navigating tricky, sometimes dysfunctional family relationships. And I mean, honestly, who among us doesn't have somebody that we could use a little wisdom in navigating a relationship with? Some of us believe that we don't need that help. But as you know, they probably needed more. They needed more. Yes. I think in our attempts to change our families, we have to change ourselves. And I hope that's

what people get from this book. The family members who might benefit the most from this book may not read it, but you, you have the opportunity to change your relationship by just changing yourself. So there's a few things that I think would be really, I think people would really enjoy hearing from you on, Because sometimes people are left asking themselves the question, is this normal? Is it normal to feel this way when I talk to my aunt or my cousin or my grandma or my mom or my sister? Is it normal? Is it me? Am I the problem? Can you help us understand what actually is an unhealthy relationship? An unhealthy relationship is one where there is a pattern of problems that is persistent. That problem could be a hypercritical person.

It could be gossip. It could be abuse. It could be a neglect. It could be all sorts of things that we consider to be a problem. It could be a person not supporting you, not showing up to your events when they're invited. It could be a person who disrespects your home. It could be all sorts of things. I think, you know, when we think of dysfunction, we think of the big things like, oh my gosh,

no, my parents didn't stab me. I'm fine. But on a smaller scale, many of us are impacted by our parents constantly talking about our bodies and making us get on diets and all sorts of things can be impactful. It doesn't have to be something that you have an external scar for. It could just be internal damage that is very problematic. So let's say somebody realizes like I am in an unhealthy family relationship. They have a couple of choices, right? How would they make a choice between,

as you lay out in your book, managing a relationship with somebody, and you give a lot of great strategies for ways that that relationship can be managed. It does not mean just continuing to be abused by another person or continuing to exist in an unhealthy pattern, but you give strategies for how to manage a relationship with a tricky person and choosing to end a relationship with somebody. How would somebody make a choice between those two things? What kind of advice would you give to somebody standing in that crossroad? Yeah, I think it depends on the decision that you're able to live with. There are some relationships that are so important to us that we will deal with a person's behavior

forever because we're not ready to leave it. And then there are others where there is no connection, there is no sense of being, and you may decide to leave that relationship. I don't think it's easy to leave relationships with primary family members like your parents or your siblings. I do think it's easier to maybe end a relationship with cousins and uncles and that sort of thing, because the expectations there are different. But for parents and siblings, I think it's just really challenging to be in those situations where you may need to end the relationship with them. One of the things you also mentioned in your book,

that is a topic that I find very interesting and is really from my understanding, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is sort of this emerging field of research, which is about the concept of generational trauma. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about what that is and how it might affect people. Generational trauma is trauma that has been passed down, trauma that has been persistent with you, your mom, your aunties, and your cousins too. It has gone on and on. I've once had a friend who said, none of the women in my family are married, not my grandmother, not my grandmother, not my mother, not me. Isn't that a pattern? But they also had this thing of when a person got

into a relationship, oh, you don't need him. He doesn't need to tell you. So it was like a whole culture of toxic independence where it's like, you need to do everything yourself. You need to figure it out. Girl, you don't need him. Just this generational pattern of really isolating and aloneness. And so one of the things you mentioned in the book is that researchers have uncovered things like people who are the descendants of Holocaust survivors, for example, have higher levels of stress hormones. And that's not the only example. You give other examples in the book. What can someone do if they realize, like, I'm dealing with a generational trauma situation? First of all, probably therapy, right?

Probably that might be a good idea. Just spitballing. But how do you learn to recognize that potential pattern of generational trauma? Being aware in your relationships. When you see multiple people doing something, a pattern exists. If everybody is only walking on one side of the street, guess what? There is a pattern of people walking on that certain side of the street. When do you start to ask questions? When do you try to figure out, hmm, what's going on here? Do they

know something about this other thing that I don't know something about? Is there something I want to change? Are they doing it just because the other person in front of them did it? You know, there are a lot of things we can ask. There are often times where we see that maybe in our families there is a history of unloving relationships. Unfortunately, I've seen a pattern of unloving parents play out where your mom had a terrible relationship with her mom, who had a terrible relationship with her mom, who had a terrible relationship with her mom who had a terrible relationship with her mom who had a terrible relationship with her mom and so on and so forth. And no one has stopped to say, how do I break this pattern and have a better relationship with my daughter? Because I don't want to be one of those people who also has an unhealthy relationship with my daughter. You mentioned at the top that often when we are thinking about changing relationships with our

family members, it really is about changing the relationship by changing yourself, changing how you interact inside the relationship, setting boundaries, things of that nature. And you've used the phrase, change is hard and worth it. Why is change worth it? It puts you closer to a life that you create for yourself. Many of us exist in a life created for us. We exist in a life that doesn't even feel like our own. And I remember in childhood, people telling you who they thought you should be. Yeah, because you're such a great teacher or you're such a, you know, people are really telling you like who you should be. Like you're such a good helper or it's like, I don't want to be a helper. I just want people to help me. So I think it's interesting how we do that, not realizing that

energetically we're planting seeds on who a person should become. What I'm hearing you say is that changing allows us to be in control of our own destinies. And we do not have to accept the life that is designed for us by someone else if we choose to change. Absolutely. And that can be really hard, not living a life that is what others want for you. I think that happens a lot in the LGBT community where many parents are like, wait, whoa, this is not what I wanted for you. And they have to exist in the life that they want for themselves. You know, I think that's really challenging, but in many instances, we don't even give ourselves like the

opportunity to explore what type of parent, what type of career, what type of partner, what type of shoes. I've talked to adults who are still being dressed by their parents. I also wonder how those parents have that power because I do not have any power over my nine-year-old's wardrobe. And I just want to indoctrinate my kids in the same way and it's not working. Wouldn't it be nice if parents could just indoctrinate their children with like, only use your cell phone one hour a day. Always complete your homework on time. Never hit another child.

Like if those things actually worked, we'd be sitting in a lot different position. I acknowledge that my kids challenging me or questioning rules is actually healthy. That is the thing that is going to be good for them in the future. And it's very annoying right now. I totally feel you. In the future, you should definitely dress yourself and own your own style and question stuff and figure out your own path and fight against the machine. But right now I'm the machine. So it's a little- Stop fighting me. Stop fighting me. Yes, I can absolutely understand. I have a 10 year old where I see the qualities that I think that someday she's going to take these qualities out into the world and she's

going to be the person who does not accept injustice. She's going to be the person who stands up for the people who are defenseless. But right now, it seems like a lot of arguing. You know what I mean? But I can see the writing on the wall of like, I do not want to try to parent these qualities out of you. I want you to continue to be that person, even though it's so annoying sometimes. One of the things you also talk about in your book is about stages of change. And I found that really helpful because so often we think it's just like a light switch on off change. Don't change, fix it. Don't fix it, quit smoking, don't quit smoking. We think of those same kind of examples in our own lives where it's either change or don't change. But learning

more about the stages of changing, I found that a really helpful piece of information that it actually changing for most of us is a process. It's not an on-off switch. It's not a fall asleep or be awake kind of situation. Can you talk a little bit more about the process of changing? It's not something that happens when you think about it. Right now, I'm trying to change the way in which I look at having to complete certain tasks as a parent, as a partner, as human. I've been thinking about this all year. I've been like, you know what? I'm going to change everything today.

It's like, who could do that? Right. So it's more about the process of that and the time it takes to do that. The change first happens with the ideation that a change should be made. Right. Like, oh, my gosh, I want to do this new thing. I've been thinking about it. This is the first step. Here's the second step. Sometimes we stay at ideation mode. We don't always change like, oh my gosh, it's been a year. I need to get over this. It takes a really long time sometimes for us

to make committed change consistently. And so it starts with people sort of formulating this idea of like, I think I might want to change something. But then it's not always just a leap off of a diving board into, well, I've changed. I fixed it. There's more that goes into it than that, right? Absolutely. I think the thing that goes into it is what will happen when you make this change. Often when we make changes within ourselves, it does change our relationships, particularly with family. The thing that changes is how you

view stuff. Sometimes when I continue to have relationships with people who have unchanged behaviors that I used to engage in, it's hard to see it. You know, when I'm in relationship with a person who loves to gossip and speak poorly about people, and I'm like, I don't do that anymore. It's like, oh my gosh, oh, it hurts me to hear that about that person. You know, it's hard when you've made that personal change. That's not even saying, hey, you need to stop doing it. It's like, I can't even hear it in the same way that I used to enjoy this. And now I'm like, I can't even listen to it. Like, it's so horrible. But yeah, I think we know that about change.

Like, if I really acknowledge that this person hasn't or has been blank to me, if I really acknowledge that this thing is problematic, it will create some sort of problem in my life. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs.

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Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned that one of the fears that people have when it comes to changing or asserting a boundary, which is a type of change, deciding that you're going to set up a boundary, is that people will view them as rude. And you gave several examples in the book of things that people told you, like, I once refused to sit in the front seat of a car and people were like, you were rude. I think that is often a deep-seated fear is that people feel that they will be judged or that they'll be talked about behind their back or that people will think that holding this boundary or refusing to go along with gossiping or whatever it is, that they will

be viewed as rude. How can we get over that? Because that is a big fear of people's. Yeah. Well, Sharon, I have to tell you, I know I'm talked about behind my back. I know it. And I know it because other family members have, oh, they said this. And I'm like, hey, their perspective is their perspective. I don't even get upset about it. I haven't ended a relationship with a person who has said this stuff because their perception of my boundary is their perception. because their perception of my boundary is their perception. And I can't control how they feel about me wanting or not wanting certain things to occur. I can't control how they feel about

anything. And so I think us trying to control that narrative is really us trying to control that perception and us feeling like, you know, if I get everybody on my side, they'll believe. And it's like people are entitled to have a response to your boundary. That's tough to accept for some people. I feel like they want everyone to hear the boundary that they're asserting and be like, okay, you know what? I see that you're correct and I accept it and I support this boundary. But often that is not what actually happens when somebody asserts a boundary. And that can feel, especially when you're initially dipping your toe in that water,

that can feel really bad. It can feel like, nevermind about the boundary then. What are we supposed to do with that? I think that we have to learn to deal with our discomfort around that. It is often the case that we want people to make us feel more comfortable about a hard thing that we have to do. And so when they are like, oh, yay, your boundary, it's great. It's amazing. It's wonderful for our relationship. That's the only way we feel like we can place the boundary.

When in actuality, people may have a response to the boundary that is not necessarily what you would want to see. They can call you rude or talk about you behind your back. Yeah. want to see. They can call you rude or talk about you behind your back. Yeah. And what I'm hearing you say is that that's something that you have to practice for yourself. Practice sitting with that discomfort. It's not easy at all. And I think we want it to be easy and we want it to be the only way that we can place a boundary is if it's easy. If it's easy, I'll do it. But if it's tough, I don't want to do it because this other person is going to make it

hard for me. When in actuality, they have a right to do that. They don't want to respect the boundary. Do you know how hard it is for me to place boundaries with myself? I don't even want to respect my own boundaries. If I have to get up early in the morning, I don't want to go to bed at like 930. What? I'm like, that is such a whack bedtime. Who's doing that? Like 1030 at the earliest, right? So I really have to push past that and be like, girl, you will thank yourself in the morning. Your eyes will not be hurting. The way your skin gonna glow.

You'll be rested. You will not have to drink a little Celsius tomorrow. You will have all the energy. I have to really talk myself through it. But even I push back against my own boundary. I'm still like, I could just scrolling for 20 more minutes. So thinking that other people will take our boundaries and just be like, yay, yay. We don't even say yay with our own boundaries. We're fighting ourselves. So shouldn't the expectation

be that there may be some conflict there may be a problem that's a really good point i don't even respect my own boundary why would i expect anybody else to be like immediately yes ma'am totally agree definitely 100 doing that when i can't even get myself to bed on time when i can't even stop eating cookies at 8 p.m when i can't even get myself to bed on time, when I can't even stop eating cookies at 8pm, when I can't even work out five days a week, like whatever your boundary that you've set for yourself is, we don't even respect our own boundaries. But yet we expect other people to with perfect compliance or nevermind. Yeah. Isn't that an unreasonable expectation? That's unreasonable. It's super unreasonable. Like we are violating our own boundaries all over the place.

And it's like, why won't they just listen to me the first time? It's like, girl, you don't even listen to yourself. You know how many times I have to say in the morning, get out the bed, get out the bed, get out the bed. Yeah, I feel you. I get it. That's a really good point. I had not thought of that, that we don't respect the boundaries we set for ourselves, but we have an unrealistic expectation. Now that doesn't mean don't set a boundary. That doesn't mean ignore the bad behavior. That doesn't mean that it's not worth it to try to change, but going in with a

reasonable expectation of, yeah, they're going to push back on this boundary. And that is their right to push back on it. I think that mindset shift can help maybe mitigate some of that disappointment that we feel when people don't immediately hop to and immediately say, oh, absolutely, let me comply with your wishes. You talk too in the book about we cannot save people from themselves. And I think this is a really hard one as a parent. If you are a parent of an adult child who is heading down a path that is really hurtful, or you have a family member who is in an active addiction pattern, we want to save people from themselves. We desperately want to, and we can't. It's a really hard thing to navigate inside of a relationship when you can see so

clearly what the issues are, but you can't save them from themselves. What advice would you have for someone in that situation? I question that we can see so clearly what the issues are. We think we can see so clearly what the issues are. Maybe what we think is the issue is not actually the issue because we aren't their therapists. We don't even know what their issues are because they haven't even told us everything about their life. The thing that we think is someone else's problem might not actually be the problem. I learned that from being a therapist. The things that people talk about is not always the most obvious thing. So it's very hard for us to look at people and then just come up with this quick answer of, oh, this is what their problem is. And I know the

solution. Maybe I don't. I don't even know all of their problems because people have secrets and they will never tell us. People have things that they've been through and we will never know the whole story about it. People share things in a way that can conceal parts of what they're sharing. And so what we're responding to is really just what we know. And we may not know the whole story. That's a really good point. That's a very good point that we think we know. But even if we can observe from the outside, well, you have an active addiction and that's your problem. What they would tell you in therapy might be something, a very different story than you as an outside observer are

perceiving. That's such a good point. I had not thought of it that way. So let's say you are a parent and your 28 year old child is having addiction issues or is having issues with, you know, finding it challenging to be a law abiding citizen. Let's put it that way. And we know we can't save people from themselves. What is a parent or a loved one to do in that scenario? Figure out the ways in which I am able to love you. Here's the thing. I think we feel like that we have to change people in order to love them. We can love a child who is engaged in behaviors that we would rather them not be engaged in. Now, how we love them is the question. How do I show up in a loving way with a person who

has an addiction? How do I show up in a loving way with a child who may have committed a crime? It's not getting them to be sober. It's not getting them to be a law abiding citizen. It's maybe I meet them at Denny's once a month. Maybe I send them a care package. Maybe I put some money in their commissary. Maybe when they go to court, I sit there and maybe you still say to the child, what you did is not okay. I don't think that because someone is living a life that you don't agree with it, that means you collude with them in their wrongness. That's such a good way to think about it, that if you want to remain in a relationship with them, that there is a way that you can figure out to love them, that does not collude with them in their wrongness.

Your child is Jeffrey Dahmer. You don't go along with it and be like, well, you're my child. I love you. Let's do some serial killing. That's not the move. That's not the move. That's not the move. No. But it doesn't mean that his dad had to stop loving him because of what he did. Yeah, it might mean writing him letters in jail. I was just hearing something about, unfortunately, a school, maybe it was a school shooting or some, maybe it was a shooting in the workplace. And the mom called the police. She called and she said, I had information.

My son was committing this crime. That doesn't mean that she doesn't love her son. That means, hey, he's doing this thing. Let's protect these people. She may go to court with him. It doesn't mean that she supports what he did. That was recently in the Louisville bank shooting. You're exactly right,

where he was going to shoot up his workplace at the bank and his mom called the police saying, I just found this out. Yes, thank you, mom. Yes, yes. Yeah, it's not like, you know what? I'm not gonna say anything, my kid. No, it doesn't mean loyalty.

It means I love you. I'm protecting all of these other people in the world. If I can, I'm gonna, I will call a tip line on you. But I love you. And my love for you doesn't mean that I will support you in harming other people. It doesn't mean I'll support you in harming other people. It doesn't mean I'll support you in harming yourself, but it does mean that I will be there for you in healthy ways when

I can. And in a healthy way in this situation is to report you to the police because you are hurting not just others, but also yourself by doing this. It's so good that we can choose to remain in people's lives in a healthy way that does not support them in harming themselves and other people. That's so good. I love that. The Unabomber, his brother caught on him. His brother caught, he had a manifesto, maybe in the New York Times or one of these popular papers. And his brother said, hey, that sounds like the writing of my brother. He's been sending me some weird stuff. And they found him based on his brother's tip,

chose to never speak to his brother again. His brother said, I tried to reach out to him. I wasn't going to cut him off, but I was going to call the police, right? I think that's my brother. But he's like, I have to accept that he doesn't want to talk to me anymore. And I saved a lot of lives. I'm okay with that. His brother chose to do the right thing, acting out of love, saving lives. You know what? This brings me to a point that I think sometimes when we have a family member, I think harming other people is a very extreme example. I think what's more reasonable is when we are enabling people in a certain way, we see that as love. And that's what that is. When you're supporting someone in their wrongdoing because you love them,

that is enabling them. You are facilitating the harm of themselves. You are facilitating the harm of others. But when you're able to say, you know what, this is harmful and I'm not going to be a part of this. I will do what I need to. You know, sometimes parents, you know, there's a lot of stuff coming out now about adult children needing more and more parental support and needing to stay on parents insurance, needing to stay in the home longer, needing loans from parents, needing all of these things from parents. And that is okay and fine if you have a child who is working towards something. But when you have a child who's just taking advantage of that stuff and they're like, I'm fine. I never have to pay my rent. It becomes an enabling situation where you have to figure out how much are you getting in the way

of this person having a consequence. And that's what happens in the more extreme example. You're trying to protect them from the consequence of jail. You're trying to protect, which needs to happen in that situation. That is a consequence that needs to happen to save others. You're trying to protect them from the consequence of not being able to go out with their friends and pay rent. You're trying to protect them from the consequence of many things sometimes with other people, with our siblings, with our parents. We're trying to protect them from this stuff that actually might need to happen in order for them to be safe, for others to be safe, for them to maybe figure things out sometimes. And when we're doing that, it impacts other family relationships.

When it's your sibling and you have a parent always bailing them out, it impacts your relationship with that sibling and with your parent because you're like, hey, I need help too, mom. I need help too, dad. And they're pooling their resources towards this one person. So the enabling impacts everyone. It's just not one person. It's the whole system that's impacted. So true. It is not just the relationship between the two people that is impacted. That thing has tentacles. That thing has tentacles that get itself in all the other relationships too. And it may be unintended, but it does mean it's not true. Absolutely. but it doesn't mean it's not true.

Absolutely. I love how you talk about not just, well, sometimes you have problems, relationships, and that's really terrible. And it's not just identifying the problem. It's also talking about what you can do about it, what it looks like to grow as a person. And one of the things that I wanted to mention sort of in closing was you talk about some myths that are, I think, pervasive thoughts that people have when they are learning to

deal with relationships in a more healthy way. And one of the myths you mentioned is that once you have forgiven someone, you can't talk about it anymore. And I think that is like, I think to so many people, forgiveness means forgetting. I thought you forgave me. You can never bring it up again. What actually is forgiveness? And when is it appropriate to continue to talk about something that happened? You know, I think there is a fine line between talking about something that happened and constantly throwing it in a person's face. There are times where we are bringing it up daily, weekly, moment to moment. It's like, okay, too much. Maybe you're not in a zone of forgiveness. It's still not forgiven and that's okay too. But there may be rare occasions or times

where we still feel impacted by stuff. And sometimes it's for us to internally process. And there are other times when we have to bring it up with the person, you did this and I'm still not over it. What really helps is a person's willingness to sit with someone during the discomfort of processing something. So I'm still in this space.

I'm not necessarily feeling better about it. And I love to talk to you about it, but not always putting them in the seat of having to help you with the issue that you have with them. Because sometimes we have to process the situation on our own, or we have to realize a person can't really help us with something we have to do internally. That's a really good distinction. That it doesn't mean you can never bring it up or say to somebody, I would really love to speak to you about this. I'm still not over it. And I would love to be able to talk this out.

There's a big difference between that and bringing it up every 15 minutes. Those are not the same thing. It's not the same thing. Yeah. Bringing it up constantly can be a little icky, right? It's like, is there anything that they can do to help you move past this? Or is the doing this just rubbing it in their face? And sometimes we have to acknowledge if we can't stop bringing it up to a person, maybe we aren't really ready to forgive. And that's okay. You don't have to rush to forgiveness. You can take your time getting there. What do you hope that people who read your book, Drama Free, what do you hope is one of their takeaways? I know they will probably

have about 65 takeaways, but what would be one that you'd be really happy to hear that someone took away from your book? One of the biggest takeaways that I love for people to hear is you have a lot of power to not just deal with stuff, but also to improve your relationships. Every relationship is not to be thrown away. Some of them can be preserved with the appropriate boundaries, with hard conversations, with some level of acceptance with people, things can improve. I love that. And that also speaks to what you were saying earlier, that changing allows us to be more in control of our own destinies and improving relationships is one aspect of that. We don't just have to accept what we're handed, that we can actively seek to improve our family relationships. I love that. Nedra, thank you for being here today. Such a

treat to talk to you. And I just really enjoyed your book. And I think so many people will have a lot of eye-opening moments, but also very useful strategies. This is not just a theoretical book of ideas. It also has a lot of very practical hands-on things that people can do. So thank you so much. Wonderful. You're welcome. Nedra Tawwab's book, Drama Free, is out now. You can buy it wherever you like to buy books. I highly recommend it because who among us does not have a family relationship that could be improved? And I love that her advice is not just theoretical, it's also very practical. You can also follow Nedra on Instagram. Her username is Nedra Tawwab, and I love seeing her account come up in my feed. Thanks so much for being here today. This show is researched and

hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? That helps us so much. And we always love to see your shares and tags on social media. We'll see you again soon.