The Daily - ‘Modern Love’: How to Stop Asking ‘Are You Mad at Me?’

Episode Date: August 3, 2025

“Am I in trouble?” “Am I secretly bad?” These are questions Meg Josephson, a therapist and author, grew up asking herself. She was constantly trying to anticipate other people’s needs, worried that she was letting other people down. And it wasn’t until she found herself standing in the aisle of a Bed Bath & Beyond, trying to remember her favorite color, that she realized her desire to please everyone was eroding her sense of self.On this episode of Modern Love, Josephson talks about how that realization led her to confront her tumultuous childhood, and what it took to stop “people pleasing.” She then reads the Modern Love essay “My Three Years as a Beloved Daughter” by Erin Brown, about a woman who found a type of love in her best friend’s parents that she had never experienced before, and what that taught her about her own parents.Josephson’s book, “Are You Mad At Me?,” is available Aug. 5, 2025.Find new episodes of Modern Love every Wednesday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadio Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Hi, everyone. Natalie here. As you've probably noticed, we've been sending you episodes of our colleagues' great show, Modern Love on the Weekends, on Sundays, a show about our relationships and how wonderful and also complicated they can be. I hope you've been enjoying them as much as we always do. We're going to be doing this for a few more weeks. And I just wanted to jump in to set up this week's show with Modern Love host Anna Martin. Hi, Anna. ANNA MARTON Hey, Natalie. How are you? NATALIE I'm good. Tell me what the show is this week.

ANNA MARTON So I have a question for you. Do you ever find yourself wondering about people that are close to you? Do you ever find yourself wondering, are you mad at me? NATALIE Literally every day, unfortunately. Multiple times a day. Okay, well then this is the episode for you. This week I talked to a therapist named Meg Josephson who helped me understand where that question comes from, why we ask it, and maybe

how to stop. Okay, I'm so excited for this. I'm going to be sending this to four or five of my friends. Good, good. Everyone, Anna Martin, and to four or five of my friends. Good, good. Everyone, Anna Martin and this week's episode of Modern Love. Love now and forever. Love was stronger than anything you've ever felt. You're the love of love. And I love you more than anything.

There's still love. Love. From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin. This is Modern Love. Every week we bring you stories about all the messiness of relating to other people. Anytime my boss would slack me, can we chat or do you have a sec? Immediate, sinking feeling in my stomach. Oh God. It's time.

I'm getting fired. I've done something horribly wrong and I'm about to have it. My guest today is therapist and author, Meg Josephson. Meg has a new book coming out called, Are You Mad At Me? It's a look at this nagging, sneaking suspicion that you've done something wrong, that you're letting everyone down. Meg Gould Just an immediate assumption that there is

an inherent flaw within ourselves. Am I in trouble? Is something wrong with me? Am I bad? Am I secretly bad? And it's just a matter of time before everyone finds out. Meg grew up with that question. Are you mad at me? Always at the front of her mind. She was always on the lookout, trying to keep her dad, in particular, from getting angry. Every hour was so different. Let me go downstairs and see what mood he's in,

and that will determine my strategy for the next hour. And this fear of authority was really big. Like growing up, it was fear of my dad, but now it was fear of my boss. Meg spent years doing this, trying to manage other people's reactions, trying to please them, trying to keep the peace. It wasn't until she was an adult that she realized

what she was doing wasn't helping her. And what she was doing had a name, fawning. Today, Meg Josephson tells us what it took to stop worrying about whether everyone was mad at her, and how understanding what happened in her childhood helped her make that change. Plus, she reads a modern love essay about a woman who gets a peek at what her parents could have been and how it helps her come to terms with the parents she actually has.

Meg Josephson, welcome to Modern Love. Thank you for having me. First I want to say I almost cannot express how deeply I relate to the title of your book. It's called Are You Mad At Me? This is a question I find I ask myself in so many relationships and in different contexts. Some of them very serious like, oh my gosh, is my mom mad at me for some fundamental reason? But then also I feel like, you know, after, for example, a recent night out with my friends, the morning after, I find myself texting, and I hope this is kind of a universal experience, but— I already think it is.

Yes, with my friend after being like, was I weird? Maybe that joke was a little—was I speaking too loud? Sometimes my volume control goes out the window. I mean, at the heart of that question, I wasn't saying, are you mad at me or are they mad at me? But that's what I was asking, right? I was seeking confirmation from someone that I wasn't fundamentally, if not bad,

then like very annoying. Absolutely. And is how I'm behaving, is how I'm acting satisfying to you? Do you approve of it? Do you like it? Are people viewing me in a way that I'm acting satisfying to you. Do you approve of it? Do you like it? Are people viewing me in a way that I'm not aware of that I need to correct my behavior so that I can be approved of once again?

Tell me about when you're asking these questions about yourself, what are some other feelings that are associated with this cluster of questions that are you mad at me universe of questions? Shame is a big one as the, I think the deepest, but I think other emotions and emotions that someone, a fauner, which we can talk about what that means, but someone who relates to this question of

are you mad at me, anger and resentment are really big ones in that we don't allow ourselves to feel them. And the slight smile when you said that unpack that smile for me. Well, with, with anger, many of us usually in childhood were taught, I can't feel anger. My parents, my caregivers can feel anger and maybe they felt that anger in really extreme ways, whether it was through yelling and rage or silent treatment, but it was not dealt with in a regulated, safe and healthy way. So we learn anger is scary.

Anger means love is taken away from me. And when we felt anger growing up, a lot of us were told you're being dramatic or get over it. We were taught to shove it down. But we also learn I keep the peace the most when I'm easy and positive and happy to select and curate our emotions. However, those emotions don't go anywhere. They're still there. They just get shoved down into our bodies. And when we shove that anger down, when we shove those needs down again and again, it festers into resentment. And whenever someone's feeling resentful, it's always a sign of, okay, let's tune in a little bit and what's happening here, what needs have to be addressed. Tell me more about this sort of, you mentioned fawning.

Yeah. F-A-W-N, I feel the need to spell it out loud, but fawning, the fawn response. And you mentioned a bit like making ourselves more palatable to people, squishing our emotions down to be pleasing. Tell me more about what the fawn response is and how it relates to this question of, are you mad at me? Yeah, so our body has four responses to a threat, whether or not that threat is real or perceived. So it doesn't have to be in front of us, it could just be,

oh, my boss is being kind of standoffish to me. That feels threatening, even though there's not a lion in front of you. We have fight or flight, which a lot of us may be familiar with, freeze. And the fourth one is the fawn response. And the fawn response is about appeasing the threat, trying to be liked by it, satisfying it, trying to impress it or prove yourself to it. Really the faun response says, my safety comes from pleasing you

and I can't feel regulated until you're regulated. This is not a bad thing, it's a protective thing and it's an unconscious survival mechanism. And sometimes we need it. We need a paycheck. Sometimes we need to fawn with our boss. Sometimes in society while surviving in oppressive systems, we have to fawn in order to survive. But when we're doing it as our default way of being, when we're in a faun response, when we don't need it, when we're actually safe, that's where it leads to burnout, exhaustion, overthinking, are they mad at me, overthinking social interactions, and avoiding conflict, and inability to have hard conversations because we just, we don't want people thinking we disagree with them. And a really big consequence,

or maybe results is a better word of a chronic faun response is feeling like we don't know who we are. I want to break in because you have this example from your book about the sort of, what's the word, maybe like how thoroughly we can internalize this fawning response and this sort of need to placate other people that we can lose ourselves, as you say, right? There's this example where I think you're in a bed, bath and beyond, did I make that up?

Okay, yes, you are in a bed, bath and beyond. Tell me that story about the towels. Well, maybe some background might be helpful. I grew up in a home that was quite volatile and there was a lot of rage from my dad. And because of that, I think as my mom's way of coping, a lot of emotional absence for her. I think her way of coping was kind of

through dissociation and freezing and that's how she could make sense of it. And my dad also struggled with addiction as well. So there was just a lot going on. So are you mad at me was always in my mind. That was really helpful for me growing up. And then when I left, when I moved out, I moved to New York City and I was looking for towels

for my four by four apartment. We called a shoe box in these parts. Yeah, totally. I'm in the aisle, I'm looking for towels and there's all these colors in front of me. And I remember, and this is the maybe the first instance where I'm not the first, but I'm in an instance where I'm like, okay, I'm choosing this for myself. And I had no, I just, my first thought was, I don't even, I don't know what my favorite color is.

How did that thought come to you? It's like you were picking one up and you were like, do I like this? Like, I was thinking to, well, my, the second thought that followed that was let me, let me go on Instagram and see what other people are doing, or let me see what's, what's trendy right now. And just this immediate shame of who am I? And am I just copying people's personalities? Am I just a medley of other people's personalities and preferences? And what do I want? What do I like? What do I need? That really is such a snapshot of that deeper gap within myself. Yeah, yeah. Did you open up Instagram and look?

Like, how did you, what color towels did you leave with? I want to say blue because probably it was, it's America's favorite color, they say. It was probably the most agreeable color. It was the color that was fawning, it was complimenting your sweater. It was the same color, yeah. Whereas now I really, I love green, I love brown.

That's my favorite. Wait, I was gonna say, if Meg of now were in those aisles of Bed Bath & Beyond, what color towels are you going for? Ooh, definitely like an olive green or maybe a lighter green. I love all greens, so soothing. I've gotten so clear on my sense of style and what I like,

and I actually feel I have a very now specific preference. And that's a really cool sort of comparison. I think it's a really striking question, a really striking scene. What is my favorite color? You're like genuinely asking yourself. And behind that question, of course, is not just a question of color. It's like, who am I, right?

Have I lost myself? After you had that realization, what did you do with it? What were the next steps you took? Or was it years until you sort of began the work to figure out who you were? That was definitely the beginning of what would be lots of deep processing to come, but I always say healing starts with awareness and, you know, we really can't heal anything until we're aware of it. So that graduating college being on my own was really the beginning of

being on my own was really the beginning of having my survival patterns that did really keep me safe. I'm now out of that context and so now I'm just looking at them and they're not fitting anymore. But I'm seeing them so much more clearly because I'm seeing these anxious patterns and it manifesting in my body and but not really having a quote reason to be feeling that way anymore. I was still in relationship to my parents, but I wasn't living in that environment.

You keep mentioning or connecting these patterns in your adult life to your experience growing up. And I wonder like, as you began this sort of ongoing work of figuring out what you were doing and why, where were you tracing these behaviors back to? Like, tell me more about you as a kid and how you grew up. You know, reflecting on parental relationships is so complicated because there's nuance.

We have so many moments with our caregivers or caregiver depending on your home. And I talk about this, of the complexity of, I thought it had to be all bad all the time in order for it to impact me. And it wasn't. I felt like my dad kind of had two, I view as a child, I even had this visual,

there were two of him. You write about that in your book, I was gonna ask you about that. Yeah, I was like, he was growing up and I think we hold this fantasy of our parents. And so while I was seeing him through this fantasy lens, he was my best friend and we had so much, we're so similar and we were both really like creative

and impulsive and like, we're just always, you know, spitball ideas to each other. That was so fun and he was so hilarious. But then he would switch into this other person that was rageful and really mean and critical. And to my mom and to me, I became sort of the primary target as I became a teenager. And I think that's in part because I was starting to stand up for my mom. And I remember wishing, I wish he was all bad

so that I could just decide how I feel. It was so confusing for him to be both of these people at once. And yeah, we would have these big blowups and I remember I would just like have, be in my room crying and hoping that he would knock on my door and apologize or acknowledge what happened. And this is a really big dynamic that's important of when

conflict is brushed under the rug, a parent doesn't take accountability. There's no repair. That is so damaging because the child, the only way the child can make sense of it is by believing they caused it to happen. And so they go from, I did something bad to make dad upset. When that happens again and again and again, it forms the belief of I am bad. I must be so bad to make my parents so unhappy. And this isn't to say, and I really wanna make this clear because I don't want it to seem like,

oh gosh, parents need to be perfect or whatever. There's no perfect parent, there's no perfect anyone. And we're gonna, it's conflict is inevitable and it's good. Like it's friction, repair is the most important thing. A parent yells, of course, how could you? Like we all have our moments. But to after the fact say, hey, I'm really sorry for yelling at you.

That was on me. That wasn't your fault. I'm really working on managing my emotions and I'm gonna try better next time. And I love you and I'm here. That is so healing for a child or anyone to hear. I'm thinking about you say the only way a child can make sense of it is to believe that they caused it. And that speaks, that connects to me to the shame we sort of opened this conversation about.

I am inherently bad. And maybe when you're feeling that way, you know, you're 31, having anxiety because you were too loud at the function. And that's at the core of it. It's like, I can't trace that back to childhood, for example, but sort of that is the thread that's connecting it. Was there a moment or a series of moments you tell me where you started to put these pieces together and you realized like,

oh, because of the life that I led as a child and a teen, this is why I'm reacting that way as an adult. Was there like a moment on your therapist couch or like, was there an aha moment for you or was it different than that? I would say there were a lot of moments, but it started with just an insufferable amount of anxiety in my body, in my mind that I felt in college.

And I actually met my husband in college. We were 19. Wow. Right off the bat, he was just such a safe, steady person, has never yelled at me, has never lied at me, has never lied to me, and that was so wild. I noticed just so much fearful thinking around him. My body, my intuition trusted that he was safe, but my thoughts were he's going to flip, just wait, you're going to say the wrong thing, and he's going to flip, just wait. You're going to say the wrong thing and he's going to turn into someone that you don't know.

He'll get drunk and something horrible will happen or something like that. And so, yeah, it just felt quite confusing at that time. But you know, I don't wanna make it sound like there's this distinct, oh, I was in childhood and then I went to adulthood and now I can see the clear because I actually, I'd say some of my most traumatic memories were actually from my 20s with my parents because that's where a lot of emotional,

the emotional neglect started to happen, which I think is in part why I was drawn to the essay that we'll read today. But I don't want the distinction to be so sharp, but rather just a point to how this anxious thinking, this are you mad at me thinking, am I in trouble thinking was helpful. And then it started to not feel so helpful when I was no longer in that environment.

I really appreciate what you're saying. It's like so much work can happen, so much healing can happen by just living in relationships that feel good. And two, to recognize the things that we that we carry, right, from early relationships in your case, you know, from the way you were raised, from your childhood. This idea of like a sort of legacy, like I said, the things we carry from our early relationships, it's reminding me a lot of the modern love essay you chose to read today.

This is an essay about our complex relationships with parents, our own, other peoples. It's called My Three Years as a Beloved Daughter by Erin Brown. Can you speak a little bit about why you were drawn to this essay and why you chose it? Yes. This essay is so, so sharply speaks to a feeling of grief for what we don't have, and longing, envy, seeing other people have what we want in a relationship. But I was also drawn to the essay because my dad actually passed away in January,

which was two days after I turned in the final manuscripts for the book, which was two days after I turned in the final manuscripts for the book, which was so confusing because I grieved the hope that he would change. And I think that comes through in the essay a lot, hope that if I'm just, and this is the faun response, hard at work, if I'm just better, if I'm just good enough, if I just achieve enough, if I'm just easy enough and pleasant enough, he'll like me more.

And grieving that, you know, his reactivity is nothing to do with me. And it's, I can't fix him, I can't change him. This is the extent of what he can give me in this lifetime. Mm-hmm. This essay encapsulates a certain, like a longing for our parents to be different. Or for the author has this hope that maybe her parents will give her something she was missing and it sounds like you're saying you resonate with that longing, that hope. Oh gosh, yeah. So much, so much. This longing of, I mean,

I remember having this feeling as a child, I would go home, I'd be at home for Christmas or whatever, and having this feeling of, I wanna go home. You'd be at home and you'd- I'm at home and I'm feeling like I wanna go home. Like it's not, this isn't it. So yeah, that longing is so strong. And I don't think we have in our society a lot of words for it.

I think we talk a lot about grief when someone has passed, but I don't think we talk about this type of grief, of grieving what we don't have, grieving what will never be as much. When we come back, Meg Josephson reads the essay, My Three Years as a Beloved Daughter by Aaron Brown. My Three Years as a Beloved Daughter by Erin Brown When I turned 29, my parents called from Boise with birthday wishes, but they soon moved on to how the wildfires in Idaho were the worst they had seen in years.

Their voices were somehow softer for the distance, and I knew they had more pressing things on their mind than their grown daughter's birthday. With the lonesome click of the telephone behind me, I thought about my other family, and the parents who wouldn't be calling. The parents who believed that no daughter is ever too old for a birthday party, for the cake and the tiara. For three years while I was living in New York, my best friend's parents loved me. They loved me because of how much they loved their daughter, a devotion I witnessed at Thanksgiving, Easter, graduation dinners, and birthdays. those occasions when I left the city with

my friend to visit them. There was even one year when I was stuck in the city with a Christmas Eve bartending shift. The next day, feeling urban and weathered and brave, I boarded the Metro North commuter train at Grand Central Terminal and headed to Westport, Connecticut, to the home that felt as if it were almost mine. I had packed a tote accordingly and had filled it with a small batch of wrapped gifts, a photo frame from a boutique in Park Slope, Brooklyn, books by Barbara Ehrenreich and Paul Bowles, silver earrings from the holiday market at Bryant Park in Manhattan, and a bottle

of wine. I knew they would tell me it was too much, that I shouldn't have, really, but I knew also that they would have gifts for me. And besides, I was grateful for the invitation, grateful to be enveloped yet again in the heavy quilt of this family's love. And they love their daughter. They love her. In trying to explain the appeal of their relationship to my other friends, I would find myself at a loss. As if I had been asked to capture in a few words the wonders of the Grand Canyon or the Costa Rican rainforests. You don't understand, I would say, widening my eyes and shaking my head. They just love her. Theirs was a family of abundance, of love, intellect, ambition, food, shrimp cocktail,

cosmos and long-stemmed martini glasses, goat cheese with cranberries, sirloin, apricots dipped in chocolate, margaritas, wine, port, I would eat until my eyes glassed over. I was sure that even my own wedding would not compare to the luxury of eating a holiday meal with my East Coast family. Pleasure was always a main course at their table, and I hungrily devoured their effortless enjoyment of one another. There was an intense loyalty in this family that I had not encountered before. I assumed it must have something to do with vacations in Hawaii, carpooling to soccer games, all the things that my childhood lacked. My best friend's father took great interest in her career.

Whenever she talked about her struggles at the office, he listened attentively, inevitably taking her side. We could see the blood rise and worry that he would make calls on her behalf. Her mother was less direct. She merely sat Shiva for every person who wronged her children, not out of mourning, but as a ceremonial acknowledgement of the fact that the person had ceased to exist. It didn't matter that she was a staunch Episcopalian. Dead to me, she would say whenever the name of an ex-boyfriend came up in conversation. I don't even know that name. I secretly wished for an ex-boyfriend came up in conversation. I don't even know that name. I secretly wished

for an ex-boyfriend worthy of her ire. In every family, there are certain roles to be filled, and my role was to offer a kind of self-deprecating comic relief. I entertained the tables with stories from the Peace Corps in which I was the star and during which I often found myself flapping my arms around or pointing ridiculously at my own head. And bless them, they laughed. I'm sure that my desperate need to be adored, my clinging vulnerability, was not lost on my friend's parents. I had jokes from Africa. I had jokes from the bar. And they laughed and loved me for it. They loved the fact that I was a bartender, possibly because it meant that their own daughter was not. Make no mistake, my own parents loved me.

It's just that their love was manifested in ways that I began to see as indicative of an East-West divide. When I left home, it was as if my parents had sent me off in a covered wagon to claim my own plot of land in the valley. Everything I needed, they assumed, was already in the wagon. They respected my autonomy, thought that bartending was an adventure almost as worthwhile as the Peace Corps, and believed that it was better to be mildly poor with an abundance of vacation time and the promise of great things than to be gainfully employed and disappointed. They sent money to fill occasional holes in my budget, but they didn't lavish me with

gifts and praise, and they didn't worry about me. The time for worry had passed. My independence was something I had fought for throughout high school. Having finally won it by the twin defaults of age and distance, I was uneasy with my parents' quiet faith in my abilities. My East Coast family's love was tangible. It was fine wine and heavy cream, Coast family's love was tangible. It was fine wine and heavy cream, knitted scarves and photo albums. I envied the concern and adulation that they bestowed upon their daughter. I wanted some for myself. When I got into graduate school, I called my family in the West, but my East Coast family called me. They were so proud and said it, were so proud. I thought I might remain a member of my East Coast family forever. But families often split up, even the most attractive ones, and mine was no different. My best friend and I had often joked about the conflicting patterns of our personalities,

as though the differences between us excused the friendship from the trivial spats that other friends routinely endured. Perhaps we knew all along that there could never be a small fight between us, only a big one. And eventually, it happened. We had our big fight. We argued ourselves up to the stubborn wall of apology, and neither of us could scale it. I think it surprised both of us how tenuous our friendship really was. Bitter words, all the hurt that a too close relationship can nurture, phones turned off, and just like that, three months passed. Thanksgiving came and went with no word from my friend or her parents.

Stranded on the East Coast, I was host to my own dinner and invited all the wayward souls I knew. I pretended not to wait for my phone to ring, though I carried it in the pocket of my apron as I mistakenly prepared enough mashed potatoes for all the urchins in a Dickens novel. But Christmas, surely I would hear from them at Christmas. I knew my friend would not call, would probably never call. What I wanted was to hear from her parents. I wanted them to forgive me for my part

in losing the friendship, to tell me I was still theirs, even if they couldn't claim me. I wanted to be able to bask in their love, the same unconditional love they reserved for their children. Was this too much to desire? I knew my own parents would not judge any friend who broke with me, but I also knew that they took less notice of my relationships,

were less emotionally invested in the details of my life. My friend's parents knew the names of all of her friends since Montessori. They knew the names of the girls who had slighted her in the sixth grade, and they casually shunned those girls' parents at dinner parties and farmers markets. My parents were more egalitarian when it came to the dramas of my life. If there was a rift, they would be certain that I had done my part to widen it, and they would tilt their heads and raise their eyebrows whenever I described an argument. Why do you think she might feel this way? they would ask.

This was not the kind of support I was looking for. In a way though, it was what I wanted my friend's parents to offer her. I had mistrusted my own family's mild temperament, thinking that it indicated a lack of concern or feeling. Now I wished that my East Coast parents would adopt some aspects of my Western parents' infuriating impartiality, search for balance, look at it from my point of view. I felt like a squalling sibling tugging on their sleeves, crying, not just my fault, not just my fault.

When a friendship ends, you start to measure time by what your friend had missed. In the two years that have passed, I broke up with some boyfriends, I was mugged at Knife Point, my sister married, I wrote one unpublished book review, then another. Through all of the changes that a couple of years bring, both monumental and ridiculous, I missed my friend. I missed her sarcasm, her insight, her mother, her father. How they would have understood my frustrations, fed me potatoes and torts to assuage my boy grief, expressed indignation

at the rejection slips that kept piling up next to my computer. Without my East Coast family's mafioso loyalty, my achievements seemed less shiny, my disappointments more foreboding. I thought about sending them a card. Have you sat Shiva for me yet? I worry that they would not think it was funny. I worry that they would not answer.

worried that they would not answer. I imagined dinner parties, trays of canapés being passed. I imagined someone bringing my name up at the table. I could see my friend's mother stop chewing, narrow her eyes. A wagging finger. Not in this house. It was too much. I never wrote. In the end, I realized that I adored my friend's parents for the exact reason that I would not hear from them. Because they loved their daughter so fiercely, so actively, so unswervingly. Theirs was a glaring and glorious spotlight of love with a sharp, defined edge, and I had stepped out. We'll be right back. So good. Tell me what you're thinking in the immediate after reading that essay.

So I like the parts of me, just those moments were so, so resonant. What really resonates the most is just this emotional neglect of not being known by your own parents. And I actually felt this the most in my twenties when I had left where I realized I was always the one to call. It felt like if I wanted nurturing, I had to do it myself.

I would make myself soup and tea when I was sick as a child. But as I got older, when we weren't under the same roof anymore, I realized, I don't know if my dad knows me or cares to know me. And the wedding line brought up this of, I wasn't sure he would show up to my wedding, and not because he loved my husband.

I just didn't know if he thought it was worth the effort of flying. My gosh Megh that is really sad I'm so sorry to hear that he did show up and we had we did a father-daughter dance and it was sweet but You know, it's just always in the back of my mind and I share in the book My my mom started showing symptoms of Alzheimer's when I was 19 and And she was 59. She's, she's still alive. She's 70 and I'm 30, but so much of it's, it's been so weird because in many ways it feels like she's passed. Um, it felt like almost she passed the day she went into a memory care facility.

Um, I remember I just wanted to talk about my mom. I missed my mom and I called him just to hope hoping to connect. And I said, I really miss we're talking and chatting. I said, I really miss mom. And I started to cry. He said, should I let you go? Wow. Because I said, because I'm crying. He was like, yeah, it just he just didn't space. And you wanted to talk about how difficult it was to be clear to lose her, to alter, she was still alive, but to feel her memory. I wanted to connect with him about we're both grieving the same person and there aren't many people who can relate to grieving this person. And I think he hung up.

You know, when you called your dad and started crying about your mom, what did you want from him? What were you looking for in that moment? I think just to be heard or just to say, yeah, it's hard. Yeah. It is so hard, I miss her too. Yeah, for him to be there with you.

Yeah, just to be there, to be there. But I really think the essay in general, and this is an example, a sliver of that, just to not feel known. And I remember actually, oh, this really stood out to me, the essay too. I never had parents that were shaping me. I was so on my own.

Where, and it was some growing up, I was like, this is amazing. I have so much freedom and they trust me so much. And then I went to college, I remember people calling their parents being like, hey mom, I had, can I have your advice about this? Or what, like I'm thinking about getting a job in this. Like, what do you you they would get guidance from

their parents and remember just calling and never had that like I just always had to figure things out on my own and I didn't have that we've got you sort of energy from a parent. Yeah to just and and just not it's it's just it's a it's this longing feeling of not feeling Like my parents knew my life my friends what I was interested in my favorite Candy or like what they just didn't know those things and yes, they were just so It's so much suffering so much pain happening. How could they possibly have time to know my life? But to a child and to a teenager, it feels bad.

Yeah. When I'm hearing you talk about your own parents, it's really striking to me in a beautiful way. Like you are doing this holding both yourself, right? You're explaining these really painful moments and these sort of painful, heavy things that you carry, but at the same time, you have so much compassion for the pain they were going through.

And I wonder how you arrived there, because it is not easy. We talked about anger before, and I'm not sensing that from you, I mean, you know, in this conversation. So how did you arrive at this place of compassion for parents that in other ways you felt let you down in quite significant ways?

Yeah, you know, and I actually, I feel a little allergic to language of, it's your parents' first time time living too or something like that. I actually, I don't love that too much because while it may be true, I think it's, it can feel invalidating of if I'm working with a client who's, oh, but it's their first time living too. Maybe I shouldn't be feeling upset or angry, but it's your first time living too and you can be hurt. It's okay." And so the way I kind of view it is understanding why they did it, understanding the pain they must have been in to cause that damage. It doesn't excuse it, but it explains it.

excuse it, but it explains it. And my goal was always just arriving at neutrality, to take it a little less personally, because it felt so personal growing up. It felt so personal that- How could it not? Of course not, yeah. So just unraveling that it is about their own pain has been helpful.

And again, that's not to excuse it, but just to understand it. I think we often maybe feel we are bad if we're not feeling compassionate, or we need to rush to compassion or forgiveness, or we need to almost perform compassion to show people that, oh yeah, we are good people, and my parents did try their best.

And I think compassion arises naturally when we allow all of the parts of our inner experience to be where I couldn't be at this place of neutrality. And again, this neutrality does have waves of anger and grief and longing as well. It's important to note, yeah. But I couldn't be here if I didn't feel 10 years of anger. Like I was angry.

I was so angry and upset and raw. And it's not my default way of being anymore because I felt it. I let myself feel it. And I'm so glad I did. And I will continue to allow myself to feel it when it arises, but it just doesn't feel as present anymore.

In the process of sort of working towards this neutrality, this compassion towards really your younger self and acknowledging the pain that your parents had when they were raising you. I wonder if you ever had a kind of conversation with them, either together or separately, about this work you were doing, about these things that you're carrying from your childhood.

Did you ever directly address these feelings that you were having with them? these feelings that you were having with them? You know, with my mom, I never really got the chance. And I have this memory actually of, my dad was yelling at me and my mom was sitting there watching, which was often the case because, you know, she was just dissociating and freezing

and that's how she could cope. And I remember her coming up to my room and checking on me after the fact. How old were you doing this? I think I went home from, I was in college and I went home, or maybe it was high school, but somewhere in that area, at least, you know, teen.

And this is the first time I ever expressed this to her. I said, you are just sitting there and you're not saying anything. How are you just sitting there and not saying anything? And I really feel that that was the first moment I got through to her. It felt like the first moment where she heard me of, oh, because her mom did the same.

Wow. My mom experienced quite a lot of abuse in her childhood and her mom knew and didn't do anything. And I felt, of course, my mom was just thinking, how can I improve upon my parents? And maybe because I wasn't physically abused or anything like that, she was like, I did it. I broke the cycle and she did. She broke that cycle. And I really believe, you know, our parents' weaknesses become our own strengths because we're all just choosing something to improve upon from our parents, and we're doing that.

And if I have children one day, I'm sure they'll go to therapy for something I did, and that's okay. I only have one final question for you, which is, are you mad at me? No, just kidding. I had to try, I had to try it. Never, never. Thank you.

Meg Josephson, thank you so much for this conversation. I so appreciate it. Thank you for having me. The Modern Love team is Amy Pearl, Christina Josa, Davis Land, Elisa Gutierrez, Emily Lang, Jen Poyant, Lynn Levy, Reva Goldberg, and Sarah Curtis. This episode was produced by Elisa Gutierrez with help from Reva Goldberg and Davis Land. It was edited by Davis Land and Jen Poyant. This episode was mixed by Sonia Herrero with studio support from Maddie Masiello and Nick

Pittman. Our video team is Brooke Minters, Sophie Erickson, Alfredo Chiarappa, and Sawyer Roquet. The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones. Mia Lee is the editor of Modern Love Projects. If you'd like to submit an essay or a tiny love story to the New York Times, we have the instructions in our show notes. I'm Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.