Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel - Esther Calling - Is This Survivor's Guilt?

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

Esther speaks to a man struggling to live a life he can enjoy. He feels wracked with guilt over a troubled history with his birth mother and her life of suffering. She was unable to raise him, but now she needs him to be there for her. He questions what he owes her for the life she gave him. Esther Callings are a one time, 45-60 minute interventional phone call with Esther. They are edited for time, clarity, and anonymity. If you have a question you would like to talk through with Esther, send a voice memo to [e-mail]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi Esther. In a few weeks I will be moving back to Massachusetts to open my first acupuncture practice. My biological mother with whom I have very minimal contact and always through the internet messages me from time to time to describe her pain. She's experienced significant traumas through the course of her life, which affect her physically, psychologically, financially, emotionally. My life has been marked by a lot of opportunities, transformation, and a lot of help from others. And I've also worked hard to accept and integrate my own trauma, which includes being born to a meth-addicted mother. And as I move towards opening this practice, I feel an increase in what feels like a kind of survivor's guilt.

I'm afraid that this tension will prevent me from ever accepting my own success and ability to thrive. My joy feels intimately tied to how much she suffers. In the morning, I received a message from my biological mother. And she said, how are you doing this morning? I'm not well. I had a mini heart attack this morning. And it was extremely triggering. And for whatever reason, I thought of you at that particular moment.

And then I just sent a message, I guess, sent a voicemail. And what did you think of me? Well, I know your experience with your parents and your parents being Holocaust survivors. And when I was three in my adoptive family, my father committed suicide. And so I kind of went from this kind of crisis of my birth into another crisis.

And my family being a family of New Englanders, they don't really deal with their emotions that well. They tend to go, go, go and work. And so it's really only been in the last couple of years that I have really started to look at the degree to which I may have been affected by trauma and how that's shown up in my body and my experiences with the world around me. And most recently, it's like as I'm getting closer and closer to my own kind of locked in feeling and my own locked in sensations, it's like my biological mother is coming more into view.

What do you see when you look at her life? I see someone who has not had a chance for happiness and caring and love and someone who's just grasping for help. I also see someone that I don't know how to help. Meaning? I don't know what to say. I don't know how to alleviate her pain, her psychological pain, her physical pain, her financial pain.

I live at a distance from her. Have you been in touch with her throughout your life? So the first time that we were ever in touch was when I was about 12. She called my home and I happened to be the person who picked up the phone. And she said, this is your mother. And I really didn't know how to process that at that time. But ever since, I've been periodically in touch with her primarily through the internet. I've never been on a phone call with her. It's only been through either MySpace or Facebook,

and most recently through text. And that was something I was really afraid of and unsure of. And at this point, we're still more in contact through social media than we are on the phone. And she appeared when you were 12. You knew that you had a biological mother somewhere? So my adoptive mother wanted to wait until I was seven to officially adopt me so that I'd have some kind of sense of what was happening. But I've been with that family since I was seven days old. And my biological mother was the foster child of the woman who ended up adopting me.

And so there's that kind of connection. How old was she? She was 19 when she had me. But she was mentally unfit to take care of me. And essentially the state came and took me. And that's something that really was devastating to my biological mother. And I have to kind of describe this. So when my biological mother talks to me, it's usually in this very repetitive script of things that have happened to her. When I first was in contact with her, it would be like a never-ending paragraph without punctuations, like an epic poem.

And it would be a list of the things that happened to her. And including that was the story of when the state basically came and took me like took me from her arms and she hasn't seen me since and there was one one moment where i mean my adoptive mother has told me the story where all she had to do was provide a crib um and she would have gained custody of me, but she was unable to do that. And I've been with this adopted family since. But so when I speak with her, it's like I am encountering her scripts, like her trauma.

And as time has gone by, especially in the last couple of months, her health seems to be deteriorating even more. And that's usually the topic of the interaction. You know, of course it's interspersed with, you know, I love you. You're the best thing that ever happened to me. I'm so proud of you. And that's meaningful, but it's her continuing

struggles and her suffering that often make it difficult for me to kind of feel like I can enjoy my life. But you have a feeling that your joy, your success, your aliveness sits on her suffering troubles and challenges. Yeah, and she's never said, she's never made me feel bad for the life that I have. It doesn't come from her. Yeah, exactly.

Right? So you said part of what drew you to speak with me is because you think that maybe I have some understanding of survivor guilt. And that that is a word that you have sometimes tried to emphasize on yourself that you experience how i need to do something for her so that i kind of pay off my debt so that i feel more deserving of what I have, so that I don't feel so selfish that I have all these wonderful things while she struggles every day. I owe her, or is it a question?

What do I owe her? How much do I owe her? What makes a mother? The one who raises me or the one who had me? Yeah. the one who raises me or the one who had me yeah um so i'd say the biggest place where this comes out for me is through my work i'm an acupuncturist and it's taken me a long time to really get to a place of confidence and comfort in this practice, mainly because it's been so existentially triggering. Working with people in their suffering and their health has really put me in touch with my own pain and my own story.

And it's also helped me heal a lot of that as well. But it's my confidence and my ability as an acupuncturist, it really comes down to how effective am I in and seeing these people and being with them and helping them. And so being in a healing profession, encountering my mother's suffering, it's like I feel some sense of failure in my professional life, which connects me deep to my sense of um self and my capability and my my ability to to exist and to um to to live and to thrive successfully um Right, but just so I follow you.

If I can't help the patient, it puts into question my entire professional identity. Because on some level, while I am not helping my mother, I feel that my deep, intuitive understanding of her suffering and mine should make me able to help any patient who walks into my office. If I am the perfect healer, I know that I'm not the lifelong victim. Right. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. If I can heal anybody who comes to me,

then I know that I am not the struggler that I come from or that she is. Right. If I can't heal you, then the existential crisis is that I instantly worry that I can enter the other camp. And that is separate from the survivor guilt, that I feel like I can't just experience the joy, the success, the opportunities that life puts in front of me, knowing that she's struggling to that degree. And then I ask myself, what do I owe her? How much should I help her?

What is the boundary? Et cetera. But that's two separate things, yes? Yeah. I would add that I've felt similar things with my adopted mother as well. I only started practice about five years ago, and since then she's had a hip replacement and a knee replacement. And this year she's turned 80, which really prompted my return back to where I'm from to be closer. And she's in the winter of her life and I want to

have those experiences with her. But there's also this fear that I have that when my adoptive mother dies, that my biological mother will still be living. And the only way I can describe it is that she's my mother. My adoptive mother is my mother. And there's a sense that I don't want another mother. And I'm often feeling with my biological mother, I hate to admit it, but I sometimes wish that she didn't exist. And on top of that is the suffering that my biological mother goes through is very imminent for her. And when she is in a crisis, it's very big.

It's very loud for her, and she'll say things like, I want you to know that I told the nurses and the other medical staff that I have a DNR, and if I go under, I don't want them to resuscitate me. She doesn't want to live. And that's really hard to hear. And it's really hard to manage the, you know, my adoptive mother nearing the end of her life, it's also difficult to manage the fact that my biological mother doesn't want to live and that she's in a lot of suffering. And so... And you too. And so when I say it's hard to find joy or success, it's because these people who gave me life and like my biological mother gave me the gift of life and

I'm so grateful that she did. And it's so hard to convince her that that's enough. That my life is that the fact that I exist was enough of a gift. I don't know if you heard when I inserted, my adoptive mother is in pain, my biological mother is in pain,

and I added, and so are you. And I would hope that it's not because you became an acupuncturist or a healer that you would hope that it's not because you became an acupuncturist or a healer that you would use that to numb your own feelings. Your biological mother has often not been a mother. She wants you to parent her. Your adoptive mother has been very mothering and giving

and has never asked for much from you to take care of her and you have a it's a complicated situation that very few people know but you're not alone you live between pain and pleasure between life and death

between people who take and people who give. And that gives you a very unique perception. Yeah, my experience of my practice has evolved a lot in the last five years. And I would say it's actually helped me understand how to feel in a really powerful way. And at a distance, I mean, I can have my feeling and I can witness another person's feeling. And so I think in the long run, it's, it's helping me find, um, acceptance of, of the things that I've experienced and the things that my families have

experienced and continue to experience. Um, um, things that my families have experienced and continue to experience. It can just be so hard in the moment with my biological mother, mostly. Mostly. I know how much she suffers. I just want peace for her. And it's like every... Do you want to be involved with her? Is your central question though, right? It is. Your question is not what you wish for her or what

she wishes for herself it's do you want to enter that arena do you want to be involved do you want to fight for her do you want to become her proxy do you want to be her guardian do you want to administer acupuncture onto her that's like do you want to take care of her and that's when you hope to invoke your compassion for her that she could not take care of you but there's a part of you there may be another part of you that is also upset and angry that she never got her act together. And so it often brings up helplessness, compassion, and anger. And many other feelings, probably. Which other ones?

Confusion, really. really you know deep existential confusion um so how have you confronted your helplessness towards your mom because survivor guilt accompanies i couldn't change your life I don't even know if you tried but in any case there's a sense that it was so all-encompassing this is

I mean you said it's the it's really the core question for me it's how do I make, how can I have a sustainable connection with her? When I go to the place of being physically in her life, it creates a lot of fear. And of?

Of the schism of my kind of who I am, the, the life that I'm living. Um, I just, I don't know how I could know her. Do you fear that if you were to see her, have you ever seen her? No. After that first time? I've never met her. You've never met her in IRL? Mm-hmm.

But even without seeing her, is your fear that if you get involved, you'll never come out of there? Yes. That it is an insatiable, infinite set of needs and problems and struggles, even if you never meet her, if you just enter in a bureaucratic way.

Yeah, and that's to some degree already happened. The interactions that I have with her just through her words are, when I have that acute experience with her, I freeze. I can't. And the other piece too is, a couple of weeks ago when she messaged me to tell me that she had had a mini heart attack, which was the fourth she's had in the last four years, I had the sense that even if I were to know her,

if I were to meet her in person, that that could, even the joy of that for her could be detrimental because of the depth of that unexpressed emotion and the so many years... But you have refused to see her all those years? No, no. It's just really a combination of the circumstances of... I mean, I've been living away from Massachusetts for the last 12 years.

And the other part of it is there's a certain nature to her, the way that she interacts with not only me, but other people because of her trauma and because of her, just who she is. And she will have a profile on, on social media and then she'll delete it. So she kind of, and then she'll come back and then she'll go away and then she'll come back and she'll go away. And so there's been a pretty prominent inconsistency of whether she's in contact or not. When I was probably 16, I looked up her name on MySpace and found her and she had a photo of me, you know, from my, like my page. So there's always been these kind of

digital interactions that have been fraught with a sense of who, you know, who are we? What are we wanting? What is the nature of our relationship? But when I look at the rest of my life... I will tell you one thing. Yeah.

There is one piece that stands out in front of me immediately. The same way that you say, she gave me the gift of life. I could imagine her saying, this is the one thing I put on this planet that didn't turn sour, that blossomed. I mean, she didn't necessarily help you with it, right. But at least something came out of her that became beautiful. You know, I've said that to her several times.

And keep in mind... No, but she should be saying that to you. Yeah. But she, when we go into that space, she goes into the story of the tremendous amount of guilt and pain that she feels that she wasn't the one who got to raise me. And you would like to say to her, I'm so glad you didn't? I mean, that's not what you would say say but that's a part of what you think pretty much i mean uh to a degree i've said that to her not in such negative terms i've i've said you know the life that that i ended up having um has probably been the the best that it could have gone. You know, and I'm so grateful for that.

And you did that, you know, like you're giving me up, gave me that opportunity. And I'm so, like, I'm so happy where I am in my life. And, but. So you turn it into a gratitude. I turn it into a gratitude i turn it into gratitude so is that your primary um dialogue with guilt um guilt with her what you call the survivor guilt how am I going to savor my life,

to experience my joy, my relationships, my practice, without constantly feeling that I can't fully settle into it because I'm being sucked on the other side? Is your question, shall I meet her? Is your question, how do I stay anchored in my life

without experiencing this pull constantly? As if I owe her when a part of me feels I don't and another part of me feels grateful of the life I had, and so therefore I feel I should. I'm giving you bits and pieces of how survivor guilt talks. Yeah. It talks to us in certain ways. I don't know which way it talks to you.

You know, I think I've been able to gain a lot of perspective through my adoptive family, through observing how they dealt with my father's death and um and how you know despite not being really a family that experiences emotions or deals with emotions that well they've transformed that pain into into lives that they're generally enjoying and how many are there so siblings i do i have two two brothers and two sisters i had a third sister who passed away when i was 10 and um i'm by far the youngest so when i came into the family, for the most part, I grew up with all of my other siblings having kind of moved out. And so my adoptive mother, I came into her life at a very pivotal moment, a few years before her husband died. And so when I was growing up, it was like I was kind of a new lease on life for her. So we would do a lot of things

that she wasn't able to do with her other kids because she was managing them all the time. And I look back on that with a lot of fondness. And in the beginning of my kind of processing all of this stuff, we were two kind of survivors clinging to each other. But really now she's just kind of a great friend. And I have so much respect for what she ended up doing with her life. You know, when my father died, she had never had a job.

For the most part, she was a stay-at-home mom. And so she had to figure out how to survive. And she has so much pride in her children and her life. And so that, that goes back, you know, to that, that feeling that I have, like, she is my mother, you know, she is the mother that I want. And there's the guilt again. Like I can feel it back here. You know, it's like, but my other mother's suffering.

Give me a snippet of that dialogue between the part that says she's my mother and the part that says, but my bio mother is suffering and then what does the other one answer I think the voice really says I wish she would I wish she would what didn't exist I wish she would, I wish she would, what didn't exist. I wish she would die. In some way, you know, the conversations I've had with her,

that sense from her that she, in many ways, does want to die. Like I, that's the gift. But that's not the point. Right. The point is I wish I could be with one mother. Right. For a change, for a short time.

Yeah. Without having to constantly have to justify or have to pay my luck, my redemption. Yeah. And, you know, something that comes up a lot is, you know, she has a lot of mental health issues and I've been very fearful of kind of putting myself into a space where those kind of genes could get turned on you know um where you know i have my own mental health struggles um and my own difficulties as anyone does but i'm but i live with this idea that there is inside of me a part that she represents and that I am afraid could get provoked. One is the genes and one is the culture. One is in the relationship, one is in the relationship one is in the genes and that conversation often makes us think there

is a deeper layer that is the genetic piece that is invisible but it could at some point maybe you know maybe i'm not nearly as far and as different from my mother as i think i am as my biological mother as i think i am so I don't want to get contaminated yeah and all of this is heightened because you are basically moving back and they are both going to be there and now if you see one and not the other or if you help one and not the other but you may want to decide to do it in a very differentiated way. You don't owe the same thing to each person. Right. You have one person who asks all the time, but doesn't ask you often, how are you? And so the person who's going to have to ask you, how are you, is you.

That's surprisingly difficult. But I will say that, you know, in the last week I've been working on my office space and it's the first office that I've ever had as my own. And ironically, right down the street, probably 200 feet, there's a methadone clinic. And so it's kind of like, I can exist here life that I really enjoy. That's mine. And no one else's in the same way.

There's a part of you that says it. And there's a part of you that is not fully convinced that you can and that you are allowed to i think that part is a feeling part something that is yet to be felt um i think a lot of the the trauma that i experienced was really early and pre-verbal. And that was something that's taken me a really long time to realize. I have to feel it. And in your body. In my body. I wish we had more time.

I don't feel like we necessarily have arrived at a destination, but I think we have maybe put some words and clarified some pieces on the road. Absolutely. I really, really appreciate your time and your insight. Thank you. Thanks, Esther. question you'd like to explore with Esther could be answered in a 40 or 50 minute phone call. Send her a voice message and Esther might just call you. Send your question to producer at estherperel.com. Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel is produced by Magnificent Noise.

We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with New York Magazine and The Cut. Our production staff includes Eric Newsom, Eva Walchover, Destry Sibley, Hyweta Gatama, Sabrina Farhi, Eleanor Kagan, Kristen Muller, and Julianne Hatt. Original music and additional production by Paul Schneider. And the executive producers of Where Should We Begin are Esther Perel and Jesse Baker. We'd also like to thank Courtney Hamilton, Mary Alice Miller, Jen Marler, and Jack Saul.