Ep. 477 Breaking the Silence: Abuse, Trauma & Healing with Eamon Dolan

I am honored to connect with Eamon Dolan today. Eamon is a book editor and is currently the Vice President and Executive Editor at Simon and Schuster.

In our conversation, we discuss Eamon's book, The Power of Parting, where he explores the often-overlooked realities of abuse, shedding light on the lack of education and understanding of various types of abuse, including physical, sexual, psychological, and neglect. We explore the effects of shame, the silent conspiracy that surrounds abuse, and ways in which neuroplasticity and intentional parenting can help break generational cycles.

We examine the effects of complex PTSD, adverse childhood experiences, and the connection between early trauma and physical ailments like autoimmune disorders, reproductive challenges, and digestive issues. We also reflect on our roles in childhood, how abuse shapes the developing brain, the dangers of gaslighting, and the traits of narcissistic personality disorder.

In this candid and personal conversation, I share my childhood and what I witnessed while growing up with Eamon, hoping to offer clarity, comfort, and a sense of connection to anyone facing similar challenges. The Power of Parting is an essential read, particularly for those of us navigating the lasting effects of childhood abuse.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

• The culture of silence surrounding abuse has led to many cases going unheard and unreported 

• Neurological and psychological effects of abuse

• Humans are wired to form family bonds with strangers.

• How abusive and chaotic environments often become normalized for those living within them

• Why survivors of abuse need to reframe their family relationships

• Statistics on abuse survivors and the likelihood of breaking abuse cycles

• Traumatic stress disorder vs.PTSD?

• Gaslighting is not benign.

• How abused children tend to rationalize mistreatment, believing it comes from love

• Holding family members to the same standards as friends

• Breaking free from toxic relationships

Bio:

Eamon Dolan has worked as an editor at HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Penguin Press. He is currently Vice President & Executive Editor at Simon & Schuster. He’s also a professional photographer whose work has been shown at the International Center of Photography and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

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“It took me at least two decades to figure out that what I endured in my childhood was not my fault.”

-Eamon Dolan

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Connect with Cynthia Thurlow  

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• Submit your questions to support@cynthiathurlow.com

Connect with Eamon Dolan

• On Instagram

• Eamon’s book, The Power of Parting, can be bought from most good bookstores.

Transcript:

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:00:02] Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.

[00:00:29] Today, I had the honor of connecting with Eamon Dolan, who's actually a book editor and currently the Vice President and Executive Editor at Simon & Schuster. Today, we spoke about his new book, The Power of Parting, why there is a lack of education around abuse and a lack of familiarity with all forms of abuse and a conspiracy of silence, different types of abuse, including physical, sexual, psychological and neglect, the impact of shame and the cosmic lottery, why our chosen family is so critically important, how being a parent can help break the cycle of abuse, the third window of parenting and opportunities for neuroplasticity, what is complex PTSD, the impact of abuse in childhood and ACE scores as well as physiological ailments that can be associated with this, things like autoimmunity, reproductive issues, digestive concerns, the impact on our developing brains of abuse, why gaslighting is not benign, what a narcissistic personality disorder is, and our roles in childhood. 

[00:01:37] This is a truly personal conversation with Eamon about my own childhood and what I witnessed. I hope this will be an impactful, insightful and helpful conversation. The Power of Parting is a must read, especially for those of us that are survivors of childhood abuse. 

[00:01:58] Eamon, such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. I was just mentioning before we started recording that I have easily recommended your book to at least 10 to 15 friends of mine because there are so many of us that are impacted by the great work that you are doing bringing the issues around abuse, neglect and reconciling our relationships with those individuals and our personal lives.

Eamon Dolan: [00:02:22] Thanks so much, Cynthia, for having me on the podcast and for selling several copies of my book. [laughs]

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:02:28] Yes.

Eamon Dolan: [00:02:29] Really appreciate both and let's get at it. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:02:33] Yeah. Why do you think that there's a lack of appreciation and/or understanding of the different types of abuse? I think there is appropriate focus on physical and sexual abuse, but there's other types of abuse that in many instances are not discussed or screened sufficiently enough. You speak in the book that about 85% of cases go unreported, which to me was astounding given the fact that if you look at whether it's the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, you're looking at information that's shared by the CDC and other governmental programs, it seems like we're doing a pretty good job. I say we as individuals, as clinicians, but in actuality, there's a lot that goes unreported.

Eamon Dolan: [00:03:20] Yeah, you're right about that. And the answer takes a couple of chapters in the book to completely cover. But I will say that probably the best shorthand way to begin answering that question is to say that we, as a society and as individuals, families, communities, are beset by a conspiracy of silence. For one thing, in neurological terms, kids think that whatever happens in their home is normal. That's not just psychological. We're wired for that. And that's compounded in abusive homes by the fact that part of the abuse often entails isolation of one sort or another. Part of that is, as I say, intentional on the part of the abusers. And part of that is because kids don't often learn the social skills from parents who themselves don't have that capacity. 

[00:04:23] They are isolated in one way or another. They're shunned at school or ignored, or people are just unnerved by them. When I was a kid, I didn't really know how to socialize. You know, several of the survivors I talked to in the book said essentially the same thing. One young man, who I think he was 21 when I talked to him, he left home at 17, if I remember correctly. And before he left home, he said his closest relationships were with grandma and the cat. He had never learned, really, even up to the age of 21, to just commune and communicate with other people. So, that isolation makes people think that, as I say, whatever is going on in their home life is normal. 

[00:05:10] And even when they go, do get the opportunity to go to other people's homes, they-- as my siblings and I did, they assumed that just as my mother was nicer to us when company was over, that in these other houses we went to, that the same thing applied, and that those kids would get beaten and screamed at and neglected and not fed and all that when company wasn't around. You add to that the fact that we also are wired to essentially assume that anything that's amiss in our childhood is our fault. We have such a strong need to identify with our caregivers, who sometimes are abusers, that we'll find ways to find fault with ourselves in order to make the relationship seem like one that can actually be fixed. If we just ace that test or lose that weight or get on the team or whatever. 

[00:06:08] Then as we move into adulthood, often psychological abuse continues. There are four kinds of abuse you mentioned, physical and sexual abuse. Those are the obvious kinds that people pay some attention to. Psychological abuse is more common. Neglect is the most common of all and the most neglected and possibly the most harmful. But when we reach our adulthood and we leave home, neglect and sexual abuse and physical abuse often-- almost always subside, but psychological abuse often persists. And the same things that we thought in our childhood about who's right and who's wrong and what our duties are and what our needs are, those persist as well. Unless, as in my case, we're lucky enough to come upon new information, new perspective, new framing that helps us think and feel our way out of our abusive relationships.

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:07:03] Well, and I think it's so interesting because I think you're so correct in that whatever we grew up in, we define as normal, because that's what we know. That's number one. And it probably wasn't until maybe I was in college that I realized what I grew up in. Just in talking to people that didn't know me before I got to college. Conversations you would have with girlfriends in particular. And I've been blessed despite the chaos that I grew up and I've always had wonderful female friendships. And I think in many way I credit my girlfriends for probably contributing significantly to getting me onto a path of self-awareness a whole lot earlier than I might otherwise have been. But I just recall in college conversations about “What is it like when you go home for Christmas? What is it like when you're home for the summer?”

[00:07:53] And I was shocked at the-- I think the thing that really took me aback was being at a friend's house at that stage in life and how quiet and calm the house was. I grew up in a house where there was a lot of yelling, a lot of emotional instability, poor regulation. And so, I think whatever we grew up with becomes normal to us. But I think by the same token, we all adapt to our surroundings. So, for me, my adaptation to being in the chaos was to be the good girl. I got good grades. I flew under the radar. I generally didn't get in trouble. And if I did that, then things were calmer, easier for me.

[00:08:36] I had other siblings that reacted differently and navigated things on in a different way. But what really stood out to me in college was I started having a sense that what I grew up in was not the norm. Most people didn't have an addicted parent. Most people did not have that degree of chaos. Most people did not get gaslit every time they spoke to one parent in particular, because you speak in the book about toxic traits, can include insults and humiliation and persistent criticism and the silent treatment. Oh my gosh. I have a parent that's their, like, modus operandi. They get mad and they just don't talk to you. And I'm sure we'll unpack that because I have a story from last year. 

[00:09:16] But I think for a lot of people it's very validating to know that, as a child, as we look at our caretakers, that are normal, “environmental experiences,” what we assume is normal. And then we go on to later find out that that's not what most people grew up within. And there's of course, continuums. I trained in the inner city and I always say, like, “I think for me, for a very long time, I was in denial that I grew up in a lot of chaos because I was looking at people that were IV drug addicted, HIV, dealing with significant gun violence, abject poverty.” I was like, “Oh, I didn't have that. So, I didn't grow up in a traumatic environment, but yet I did.” 

[00:09:57] So, I think for each one of us, for the people that are becoming more self-aware as they are maturing, it gives them opportunities to reflect on their personal experiences. 

Eamon Dolan: [00:10:08] There's a lot of wisdom in what you said there. If I may, I'll pick up just on a couple of points. I too had that experience that you had in college of leaving my home for the first time and finding new acquaintances, new friendships and seeing inside the homes of these people, inside the lives of these people. I remember early in my college career, I was hanging out with my roommates and I was telling them this funny story about, my mother, she's so crazy. [Cynthia laughs] She beat us with her hands, whatever was available. But she loved her weapon of choice was wooden spoon, a big wooden spoon-

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:10:52] Yes.

Eamon Dolan: [00:10:53] -which she called a beating stick. And I grew up in an Irish neighborhood in the Bronx. My parents are off the boat Irish, so whenever I quote her, I will use her accent. And my mom would be reading the paper in her recliner Tuesday nights because the sales at the grocery stores are always on Wednesdays. And she'd say, “Look, Key Food is having a sale on [unintelligible 00:11:15] bean sticks.” And she'd laugh and we were like, “Please, please don't buy anymore.” That was her idea of humor. And I told this to my roommates, expecting to get a laugh. And they were just slack jawed. They just couldn't believe it. 

[00:11:30] That to me was one of the very first glimmers that what I endured in my childhood was not normal. I will say though that it took me at least two more decades to figure out that it wasn't my fault. I was saying a few minutes ago about the conspiracies of silence. Shame just bubbles up to the surface for so many of us whenever we think about it. It's part of why we dissociate it so much. We still feel it must be our fault. We also feel that blood is thicker than water. One of the myths that I really try to explode and demolish in the book is the idea that our family of origin somehow has some exalted status. 

[00:12:17] We basically all participate in a cosmic lottery. We have no control over where we're going to land when we're born. I should say that also means that we are not to blame for how we're treated because we all just land wherever we land. But it also means that if our family can't do for us what good people do for other good people, then they don't deserve to be our family. I talk a lot in the book about chosen family. And I think chosen family is an important institution for everybody. But I think it's especially essential for survivors of abuse like the people we're talking about. I first started just gathering a chosen family around me without even realizing I didn't know the term at the time, that that's what I was doing. 

[00:13:11] And it wasn't until I was doing research for the book that I realized that not only is our family of origin not special in the ways that we are told by all these institutions, everything from religion and the law to pop culture and self-help books, not only is this institution not special, but it is in fact our family owes us more than we owe them. We're told that the relationship is asymmetrical and particularly our parents, but our parents, our siblings, anyone who's genetically connected to us, that we owe them more than we owe anybody else. And that is simply not true. We're also meant to think that this is a connection that is-- because it's biological in most cases with families of origin, that somehow, it's exalted above all other connections. 

[00:14:08] But something I realized when I was researching the book is that, in fact, we humans as a species are wired to make family out of strangers all the time. Think about band of brothers. You hear from military veterans. Those relationships are as closer, closer than any family relationship. Think about convents and monasteries and all faiths for thousands of years, college fraternities, sports teams. Some of my best friends are people that I work with. And your family of origin can be in that group. My sister is one of my best friends. I'm blessed and lucky that I've earned the right to be in my son's chosen family. There can be overlap, but your chosen family is the people. One of the survivors, I quote in the book says, who gets to be in our family? Family is people who let you be who you are. And my mother never let me be who I was, who I should have been, who I have become. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:15:04] That is so beautiful. And to kind of touch on some of the points that you just made. The beating stick was a wooden spoon in my house, but I was hit until I was 16 years old. I was recently telling my husband that. He said, “When was the last time you were hit?” Because my husband grew up in a completely different environment, which is probably one of many reasons why I married him. And he said, “How old were you?” And I said “I was 16. And I remember I was in the car, my mom got angry with me and turned around and slapped me across the face in front of friends.” And I think my friends were shocked. It speaks to this poor emotional regulation. But again, having parents that can't regulate their emotion. 

[00:15:41] And for me, I think for so many years, because I'm so clinical, I just find justification. Oh, they're not emotionally regulated. That's why they do that. Well, yes, that is correct, but it doesn't make it right. And I think for a lot of individuals, we have a tendency, and myself included, we have a tendency to rationalize behavior all the time instead of creating more boundaries or being clearer about what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. And I love that you speak to this chosen family, because I think that is truly what has saved me in many levels throughout my lifetime. As I mentioned, I've always had really close girlfriends, and I think about the real friends that tell you the stuff you don't want to hear kind of friends.

[00:16:25] And I actually had dinner a few weeks ago with one of my college roommates who was also a sorority sister, and I said to her, “I probably have never thanked you, But I want you to know I'm getting chills thinking about this.” When I was 21, you looked at me and said, “I think you need to go to therapy.” And she said, “I did.” And I said, “Yes.” And I said, that's a real friend. That's a friend who acknowledges you're struggling and is making a suggestion and actually making a suggestion that in some instances may not be well received but yet was so beneficial. Because once I started doing therapy, I started to unpack a lot and started to unburden myself. Although anyone that's listening that does therapy knows it's not like you do a couple sessions and you're fixed. 

[00:17:07] It's a lifelong effort to continue to work on the things that trigger you or bother you or make you upset because you realize it's like you just scratched the surface of stuff that's going on. And so, I share with listeners one story that I think gives people some perspective. I started to realize about my father. So, my parents got divorced when I was seven. And so, my father, my mother lived in two different states. So, we would spend not a lot of time with my dad because he lived several states away. But my brother and I learned very early when you have an alcoholic parent, there's certain things you don't do. So, the rules with my dad were as follows. You don't talk to dad after 8 o'clock at night because he was a fully functioning alcoholic, went to work all day long and held it together and had a well-paying job, and then drank from the moment he walked inside his house the moment he went to bed. And he was an angry, belligerent, nasty drunk who had PTSD from Vietnam.

[00:18:00] So, you can imagine the things he would say, most of which were not nice. But we learned over the years if you were staying at dad, you went to bed early or if dad called you after 8 o'clock at night, you didn't answer the phone. And that was a standard that I held to until my father's death last year. And I remember the first time I shared that with my husband. He was like, “What? You don't talk to your dad after 8 o'clock at night?” And I said “No, because it's not pleasant. It's just not pleasant.”

[00:18:27] So, you learn to create boundaries and things that you put in place for your emotional sanity because more often than not, things were said in a drunken state that you can't take back. Like things that he said to my brother and I, that were things you can- I have never even shared with my husband half of what my dad shared. But I share with listeners just to kind of give you some context of you grew up in that environment, you assume it's normal, it's your environment while you're growing up. But then as you get older, hopefully you don't recreate what you grew up in. 

[00:18:57] When you were putting the book together, I'm curious, did you explore-- because I know that you are a parent, did you have concerns about ever having children given what you grew up in? 

Eamon Dolan: [00:19:08] I did, but I also knew early on, as I was contemplating the prospect of having children, that there were some things as a parent I would never do. I knew that I would never hit my kid. I knew that I would at least try not to yell at them constantly. And indeed, I was able to follow through on that. [laughs] I knew that I would not create a chaotic household. I knew that the volume should not be at 11. So, there were certain things that made me feel like I might be able to pull this off. There's something 30% of people who were abused in childhood will go on to abuse their own relatives later in life, but that means that 70% don't. 

[00:19:56] And I think it's really important when we're thinking about having kids or not having kids to keep that in mind that the statistics. There are a lot of scary statistics in this book, as you know, but that to me was one of the more hopeful ones. I also want to say that if you decide not to have kids cause you worry that you might be unable to avoid passing on some of the trauma that was passed on to you, that is a really admirable decision. That's one way of breaking the cycle. And the other things that help break the cycle. And I'll say, by the way, there is a lot of tough stuff in this book, but I believe that it is-- I wrote it mostly in a spirit of joy. I feel so lucky that I was able to do what I did. 

[00:20:43] I feel really proud of myself. I feel that all of us survivors who even contemplate estrangement, even if we can't part or don't part, that we're really being heroic because we're told that we're cowards, we're told that we're selfish, we're told that we're impulsive if we step away. And in fact, the opposite is true, we are stepping away after much consideration and hardship and heartache. We are stepping away from selfish and impulsive people, even though so many forces in our society tell us not to. That is brave. That is really brave. And so, when I was a young dad, my son, who is spectacular but was also annoying sometimes, [Cynthia laughs] and I will say I never ever felt the urge to raise my hand to him in anger. 

[00:21:32] That was a bit of a revelation for me because it made me suddenly see the way my mother in particular treated me and my siblings as if she were another species. Like what kind of an alien creature would do that to their own child? My father didn't beat us, but he was basically an enabler. He was absent most of the time, so he wasn't around to protect us. And I often wonder if he would have protected us if he were around. But as a father, I couldn't imagine not trying to protect my son. And I'm not setting myself up, in this regard, as heroic. I was just being a decent parent. And I was able to do so in part because I suddenly saw my mother in a new and more accurate light. 

[00:22:18] Then as I was doing research for the book, I talked to this great researcher at USC, Darby Saxbe, who studies parenthood and it sort of effects and impacts. And she has this notion that-- she's established pretty well now through research, pardon me, called the third window. So, there are two windows in developmental terms that we're familiar with zero to five and adolescence. And those are the periods during which the brain has the most, what we call neuroplasticity, the most ability to learn and change and grow. And Darby says that there's a third window. And that window is when you become a parent. And if you think about it, it just makes sense. 

[00:23:04] If you've become a parent yourself, you know that suddenly you're on the bottom of this very steep learning curve all of a sudden and your brain just has to open up in order to learn how to do all this stuff. And that third opportunity for neuroplasticity also gives you the chance to reframe some of the aspects of your own life, to change some of your behaviors, to learn how to interact socially in a way that you haven't before. Going to soccer matches, birthday parties, sharing rides to school, all this stuff has a social component. You end up hanging out with the parents, of the other kids who go to your kid’s school. You have opportunities that in many cases people haven't had before. So, parenthood itself is often therapeutic for people like us. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:23:54] I think that is so incredible. And I think for myself, the reason why I asked the question of you initially about parenting was I was terrified to be a parent. And I recall when my husband and I got married and had our first child, the amount of love and fierce protectiveness that came out in me was just overwhelming. And I always say, “My children truly are my greatest teachers.” I have two boys. They're both teenagers. And I think that, I healed myself in many ways by being the kind of parent that I think I had hoped I would have had growing up and seeing, the lasting long effect of them growing up in a calm, quiet, well-communicative environment where they're nurtured and loved and supported.

[00:24:46] Having frank conversations with them now that they're a bit older, one's in college and one's a junior in high school. But I think the concept of that third window of parenting gives us another opportunity to not only put new connections together in our brain, but also, rewrite the history, moving forward, I always say, breaking intergenerational issues that were of issue. And so, I think for anyone listening, knowing that your childhood is not your destiny, it's like we have opportunities throughout our lifetime to heal, move forward, nurture, course correct, if you will. And I think that's a powerful way of finding a reframe around the chaos that many of us experienced in childhood. 

Eamon Dolan: [00:25:32] You're here. And again, that 70:30 number that I quoted for—[crosstalk] 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:25:35] Very important.

Eamon Dolan: [00:25:36] I think I agree with you. It is very important that means that there is a high likelihood that if you, as a survivor, contemplating parenthood or as a parent, take a certain set of approaches, you can break the cycle. So, many books on psychological topics, especially trauma, they're heavy, they're hard. And as I said before, there is some heavy, hard stuff in this book. But we, as survivors have the capacity to create a happy ending. We have a remarkable capacity to create a happy ending. And the happy-- maybe we can't, completely fix society, which is at fault, ultimately, for a lot of the stuff that we're talking about. I have a whole chapter on that early in the book. But we can break the cycle so that it never happens again in future generations. And that's probably-- I mean, I hope this book helps a lot of people, but maybe the single best thing I will have done as a person on this planet was break the cycle. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:26:44] Well, and you speak multiple times throughout the book about the fact you were trying to get others to write the book, that you work in the publishing industry and you were like, “Well, if I can't get someone else to write the book, then I'm going to write the book.” And I'm so grateful for that because for me, it really resonated. As I mentioned, I was sharing it with loved ones left and right as I was reading. Let's talk a little bit-- I think listeners are familiarized with post-traumatic stress disorder. What differentiates that from complex PTSD, where something that can actually arise from childhood, that can persist throughout our lifetime. 

Eamon Dolan: [00:27:20] So, complex, I'd say the first thing, they are similar, they overlap. That's why four of the five letters in CPTSD are PTSD but they are different in crucial ways. I think for people in this country in particular, one of the most crucial differences is the fact that PTSD is recognized psychological psychiatric community. It's in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which, as you know, is the bible of diagnoses in this country. Complex PTSD is not in the DSM. This is despite the fact that Judith Herman [unintelligible 00:27:59] psychiatry professor at Harvard. Judith Herman identified it in 1988. And there have been persistent efforts over the last, I was an English Major, 37 years to introduce complex PTSD into the DSM. They have never worked. 

[00:28:19] And the reason that I mentioned this and how crucial it is, is that it often-- it is indicative, first of all, how prejudiced psychiatric cycle-- the therapeutic community I'll call it in general, how prejudiced it is in favor of reconciliation and how often how ignorant it is of the reality of abuse in childhood, the reality of complex PTSD. There's pretty decent evidence to suggest that complex PTSD is the single most common psychological condition. And yet it's not in the DSM, which means that you can't get insurance coverage for treatment of it. You can't get research money to perform studies on it. Again, this is possibly the most common psychological condition and there's virtually no research. That's part of why I couldn't find somebody else to write a book about it.

[00:29:11] I spent three years looking for somebody and I couldn't find anybody. Now, I want to say there are people like you out there. There are people like my therapist, there's Gabor Mate, who I know you talked to recently. There are a lot of great people in this community who understand, but there still are more that don't. So that's one big difference. In terms of how these conditions present, there are a lot of similarities. Like we've been saying, hypervigilance, having your head on a swivel, walking on eggshells, feeling like another shoe might drop at any moment. That's one commonality. Flashbacks are another feature common to both. A sense of difficulty sleeping, a sense of guilt or foreboding, those are all similar.

[00:29:57] There are certain things that sets complex PTSD apart, and I should say the main in terms of how they arise. PTSD usually arises from isolated incidents, sexual assault or an IED attack in battle or a natural disaster. Complex PTSD arises from trauma that is persistent over time. So, it's the group who is most populous among those with complex PTSD are survivors of abuse in childhood. Survivors of domestic violence are in there as well. But also, people who have been enslaved, people who have been held in concentration camps, people who've been held in solitary confinement for long periods of time, people who've been sexually trafficked, people who've been kidnapped. These are all long-term forms of trauma that can cause complex PTSD.

[00:30:53] And I want to say that I had trouble equating my symptoms with those of people who survived the Holocaust or other genocides or people who've been enslaved. But all of those conditions are what Judith Herman calls authoritarian circumstances. Your parents, they have so much power over you. They have as much power over you as a kidnapper or a prison guard or anybody else. And if they wield that power in a harmful way, it has these effects on you. The reason I'm underscoring this is we need as a society to acknowledge and address the fact that there are millions of little Holocausts going on in millions of homes every day. 

[00:31:47] And John Briere, this great researcher on the subject, said that if we could somehow do away with complex PTSD, the DSM would shrink from 800 pages to a brochure in two generations. I talked with this fellow, Michael first, who's a professor of psychiatry at Columbia and one of the editors of the DSM. And I asked him if complex PTSD was real. That's a thing. And he said, “Oh, sure.” And he gave me a great indication. He said, “It changes your personality in ways that are different than PTSD.” PTSD doesn't have that fundamental effect. It affects your relationships in a way much more profoundly than PTSD does. And he mentioned a couple of other things. The guys know his stuff. And I said, “Well, why isn't it in the DSM then? 

[00:32:34] And he said, well, there's too much chance of false positives and false negatives. It's too easy to confuse it with borderline personality disorder or chronic depression or chronic anxiety. And, okay, fine, but that really struck me, and it strikes others as something like that. The parable of the blind man and the elephant. One blind man feels his tail and says, “Oh, the elephant is like a rope.” And another one feels the elephant's leg and says, “Oh, the elephant is like a tree.” Another one feels its plank and says, “Oh, the elephant is like a wall.” And it goes around all the different parts of the elephant. All of them are right about the particular part of the elephant, but none of them is seeing the whole elephant. As I say in the book, that is the elephant in the room. For the professions, the failure to understand how much of this stuff that is being parceled out and called condition on its own is actually one of the symptoms of this more overarching condition. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:33:30] In traditional allopathic medicine, we like to put things in buckets. 

Eamon Dolan: [00:33:33] True.

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:33:33] This is the bucket, but the buckets can all be interchanged. But that traditional kind of model does not per se make those connections. I think it takes someone thinking outside the box that puts those together. What I think is interesting is we talk quite a bit about adverse childhood events and the scoring of that. And what I found interesting is you bring into the book talking about how five of the top 10 causes of death are associated with adverse childhood events. So, complex PTSD is not on the DSM. I hope it will be. I hope eventually we'll be able to convince them. 

[00:34:10] We know that those of us that experience significant trauma in childhood can go on to develop sequelae of mental and physical health issues including things like autoimmunity. I can't tell you how many women, we start putting together their history and you realize, “Oh, they got psoriasis at 16, they developed lupus at 35.” And then once you have one autoimmune condition, you beget more. And so, I think it's really interesting the impact of the effects of abuse and trauma on our brains. And maybe we can speak to this because it's the changes there that will help or hinder development or make us more susceptible to developing behavioral issues or concerns. A lot of things that we think of as being compensatory are in many ways our body's way of trying to make sense of the environment that we grew up within. 

Eamon Dolan: [00:35:08] Yes, Essentially, I think both the physical and the psychic effects, abuse in childhood, hang over into our adulthood. And they were adaptive when we’re kids. We had to dissociate. We had to tell ourselves that we were at fault. We couldn't have dealt with the enormity of what was being done to us if we didn't find these coping mechanisms. But when we grow up and we're no longer in constant danger, they become maladaptive. They become dangerous in themselves. As I say in the book, even if you weren't physically abused in childhood, and especially if another form of abuse continues into your adulthood, it will always become physical. It will always manifest in your body, ultimately. You mentioned autoimmune. Digestive issues are a big problem for a lot of people. For a lot of women, reproductive issues arise as well.

[00:36:03] And there's other stuff. There's high blood pressure. There's obesity. There's a whole gamut of physical effects. And then in terms of the neurological or the psychological effects, as you know, abuse in childhood changes the structure of our brains. Certain structures within our brains are depleted. Other structures sort of become overgrown. There are multiple effects of this, but one of them is to make it harder for us to control our emotions, to make it harder for us to relate to people. And these things, unless we are fortunate enough to be able to afford therapy and find the right therapist, find the right set of friends, people who we can consider our chosen family, and then do a lot of work on ourselves, learn how to be our own parents. Those effects will persist as well. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:37:02] Yeah, it's interesting. I just finished my second book manuscript.

Eamon Dolan: [00:37:06] Congrats. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:37:07] Yes, yes, it was like a labor of love. 

Eamon Dolan: [00:37:10] It was easy, wasn't it? 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:37:11] No, no. [Eamon laughs] This time around it wasn't. I was actually telling someone it's like having childbirth. You don't think it's that bad. And then you're in the midst of it and you're like, “Oh, it actually is painful and challenging.” And then- [crosstalk] 

Eamon Dolan: [00:37:21] Yes.

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:37:21] -you have this book baby or baby baby. And you're like, “Okay, it was all worth it.” But one of the things I found startling specifically to women, survivors of sexual abuse, if a woman experiences sexual abuse as a child, goes on to have children, and one of those children is sexually abused. She will go into menopause eight years earlier, eight years. 

[00:37:43] So you start to understand this complex interrelationship between autonomic nervous system, which is surveying for danger, but if it's chronically overactivated, how that can hasten actually ovarian senescence, which I found fascinating and also disturbing because it starts to make me bring to light a lot of the patients that I had when I was a new nurse and a new nurse practitioner that had a lot of violence in their past or a lot of traumas in their past and some of the physical manifestations of what they had experienced. And so, I think that that can never be underrepresented. And I'm grateful for opportunities like this where we can bring this information to light, especially for listeners, talk to me about gaslighting. Why is gaslighting not benign?

Eamon Dolan: [00:38:30] Sure, I will. I just want to add one little point to the excellent point that you just made. One of the things I suggest in the book and I've started doing myself, is to me, as I was working on the book and talking to other survivors, I talked to about the over 30 other survivors. This book has my story in it, but it's not a memoir. I wanted to collect as many stories as possible to give as wide a view of this phenomenon as possible. But as I was talking to all these people, I realized that I have never seen on-- I was amassing a sense of just how pervasive this phenomenon is and how the physical and psychological effects that we just talked about it. 

[00:39:09] I have never seen a medical intake form that includes the question, were you abused in childhood? They ask about whether we ever smoked or how much we drank or if there's a history of cancer. To me, that should be question number one or two. And since it's not on any of these forms, including my dentist, I have started telling them just enough about this so that they know that I may have issues that otherwise they would not be aware of and that they should be aware of. And if a medical professional pooh-poohs it, it's a good reason to find another medical professional. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:39:50] Absolutely. 

Eamon Dolan: [00:39:50] So, I just think that part of sharing our story is sharing our story with all the people who take care of us and inviting them, asking them, encouraging them, making them take it into account. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:40:05] Well, and you bring up such an excellent point because I go to a functional medicine doc and one of the things that he himself always somehow weaves into our conversations because we meet together quarterly is what am I doing for stress reduction because he knows about my family history, because we've unpacked it multiple times, because he has asked. But you are correct, it should be part of the intake form for any professional that is bringing someone into their practice because it is that pervasive. It can explain why someone reacts differently than what is anticipated. It can explain a lot about behavior in a way that encourages us to be just kinder and more understanding of one another.

[00:40:47] Because as I tell my kids, you never know what someone's going through when someone is not behaving, “right” or “doesn't seem like they've got it all together.” There could be things going on beneath the surface that we're just really unaware of. 

Eamon Dolan: [00:41:01] Exactly right. You sound like a very good mother, Cynthia, I must say.

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:41:04] I try. I try. 

[laughter]

[00:41:05] I tell my kids all the time. I try very hard. That is what I am most proud of in the world. Listeners know this and I speak very openly. I have a happy, healthy marriage and I have two happy, healthy young men. And that is the most important thing in my life. 

Eamon Dolan: [00:41:21] Well, I derailed your train of thought when I went off on that tangent, which I hope was useful, but I'm happy to answer the question you asked. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:41:30] Yes. Yes. I think-- [crosstalk]

Eamon Dolan: [00:41:32] So, you remind me what it was. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:41:33] Yes. No. So I think gaslighting is thought of as being benign, but why is it not? 

Eamon Dolan: [00:41:40] So, gaslighting as I know you know and I bet a lot of your listeners know too, it's a wide variety of behaviors, insults, humiliation, threats of violence, refusal to acknowledge certain facts, especially when we're children, all of which makes us doubt ourselves, our relationships with other people and the world. If our perception is being of pain, of relationships, of pleasure, of anything is being questioned by the people who matter most to us, our siblings, our parents, then we are on very unsteady psychological ground from the get from 4, 5, 6, 8 years old. And again, gaslighting is also one of the most persistent behaviors. It's one of the, my mother did it to me until the day I cut ties with her, in my 40 something year. It's very easy to do for the problematic people who do it. Other than neglect, it might be the most convenient form of abuse. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:42:56] Well, and it seems so innocuous, I think for people maybe that are looking outside, looking in like, “Oh, it wasn't that bad.” And I'm like, “No, no, it was exactly what it's sounded like.” And I think for a lot of individuals it doesn't necessarily have to be in your relationship of what you grew up in. There's a lot of gaslighting that goes on--[crosstalk] 

Eamon Dolan: [00:43:15] In the world at large. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:43:16] Yes, I was going to say that it is not unique to these kinds of situations. You do a really beautiful job talking about a personality disorder that I think has gotten a lot of focus over the last few years, narcissism. 

Eamon Dolan: [00:43:31] Oh yes.

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:43:31] And I think we have to see speak to this because it is so integral to chaos. I mean that it is chaos personified with a couple exclamation points. Let's talk about how narcissistic parents can contribute to not only chaos, but unhealthy relationships with their family members. 

Eamon Dolan: [00:43:57] So, I'll say first of all, narcissism, like so many things happens on a spectrum or a continuum, let's say. So, you can be diagnosed with NPD, although it doesn't happen that much for one reason, [Cynthia laughs] because people with NPD so A, because they so rarely seek psychological help, so they don't end up in clinical settings that often and B, because when they do end up in those settings, their condition is so intractable, is so untreatable that they rarely come out changed at all. So, there are a variety of estimates as to how many people there are in the general population who have full blown NPD.

[00:44:46] But I would say anecdotally, but my anecdotes are the 30+ survivors I've talked to, plus a bunch of professionals, I would say that some element of narcissism exists in most, if not almost all abusers in whether it's domestic violence or abuse in childhood. So, in terms of what narcissism is and what it does, it is a persistent focus on the self, a persistent need to be lauded, to be applauded, to be believed, to be praised. Essentially these people are black holes of attention. There is never enough attention or praise that you can give them to satisfy them. They also see other people, especially their family members, as reflections or extensions of themselves. And one of the ways it sounds like you were a golden child. If we talk about roles, so was I. 

[00:45:52] One of the ways that some of us choose to endure, to survive this situation, living as the relative of a narcissist, is we take on their aspirations. I tell the story in the book of the worst Christmas present I ever got. I wanted a set of race cars. I was nine years old and I kept telling my mom about them. And I'd bring little ads from the paper. Look, they're called accelerators. The accelerators are on sale at Caldor. And she'd take them from me and she'd say, “Ah you know what I'd be getting you for Christmas?” And I'm like, “Oh my God, this is going to be great accelerator time.” So, Christmas morning came, I come into the living room by the tree. There's a big box the size of an accelerator box. And I open it up and it's an accordion. It is a goddamn accordion. [Cynthia laughs] 

[00:46:45] So, my mother, of course, wanted me to play the accordion so that she could show me off. I couldn't bring myself to say thank you. And she said, “Well, you're a most ungrateful child.” And I quickly got the sense that this accordion would be almost a literal millstone around my neck for like the next three years. I'd had to take lessons every week. I had to learn Irish jigs and ballads, which I was terrible at it, by the way. And this was so that I could have these command performances when company would come over and I always sucked at it. So, if my kid asked me for a Christmas present and I could afford it, I'd give him that Christmas present.

[00:47:29] But no, because I was an accessory to her in this instance. And that's just one example of how they perceive us as extensions of themselves rather than our own people. And particularly for children that prevents you in an important way. It prevents you from becoming your own self.

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:47:51] I know when I read that in the book, my heart just dropped for you because I kept thinking I could just imagine a little nine-year-old boy with a very large accordion and not enjoying it and being forced to do something that they did not enjoy, which is never pleasurable. I think for myself, there are so many instances, and even in my adult life where my narcissistic parent has done or said things that even my husband, who is the kindest, nicest person you've ever met in your entire life, he's had to bite his tongue and just shake his head and say, “Oh my gosh, I didn't think this could be topped from the last instance that we went through.” 

[00:48:26] What I will say is that I have a son who's in college and I have a niece who's in college and my mother was bragging about testing scores but was getting the stories wrong about whose scores were whose and was at a family event. And my cousin actually brought this up to me and was going on and on and on about SAT scores and where so and so was applying and all these other things. And she was doing it to inflate herself. It was all about her, not about where are the kids going to best served going to school, what's in their best interests, but just like bragging rights. And I was like, “You're too old to be doing this.” [laughs] I just found it to be fascinating. And that's like one small example. 

[00:49:07] But you know, narcissism, as you appropriately said, it's on a spectrum. There are obviously bigger and lesser counterparts to that. But what it really speaks to is this kind of chronic need for attention-seeking behavior at any cost. And the other thing that I think is really interesting at least from my personal experiences is that you can actually become trauma bonded-

Eamon Dolan: [00:49:33] Yes. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:49:33] -with people that you've experienced extreme cruelty or extremes of behavior. I think that's the easiest way to put it and make it more in general terms. What did you find most interesting when you were putting the book together about trauma bonds? Because for me this was learning it from another perspective as a clinician. But looking at it from the perspective like, “Oh, this makes so much sense of why there's so much interplay between abuser and abusee.”

Eamon Dolan: [00:50:02] First of all, I wish that they had named trauma bond, they had given it another name because I think a lot of people are confused and think that, “Oh, that means that we're bonding over our trauma,” like you and I for example. But in fact, it is what you said it is. It is a particular, almost calculated effort on the part of the abuser to give the survivor, the victim just enough decent behavior or decent treatment to make them feel like there's a chance that this relationship might improve. So, they treat them terribly. But then the one survivor in my book, actually more than one, several survivors in my book describe situations in which their abuser would either humiliate them in front of their friends or in front of other relatives or beat them with a belt, whip them with a belt, I should say, and then later come back to them and bring them dessert or something like that. That confusing, those mixed messages keep us coming back for more. The image that I had in my mind is like, “We're yo-yo in their hands. They're pushing us away with our bad treatment and they're pulling us back with just enough good treatment.” They know how to push our buttons because they installed the buttons. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:51:26] My therapist used to call this “crumbs.” 

Eamon Dolan: [00:51:29] Huh-huh, yes. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:51:30] They're giving you crumbs. And so, I think that the first time that she said this to me many years ago, I thought, “Wow, that's profound.” It's just enough niceness to keep you like, “Oh, today they're being nice, so I'm going to stick around.” And I think I would imagine that trauma bond would be even harder for people that are in romantic relationships. I think it's different when the dynamic is parent and child versus partners. I think that would make it even more challenging. 

Eamon Dolan: [00:51:30] Yeah. And it's not good in any circumstance. The trauma bond can be the most- I wouldn't say it was easy for me to step away from my mother, but I think it was easier for me than it would be-- because my mother was just full on. On a scale of 1 to 10, she was like, 13. So, I consider myself perversely lucky that I don't have many good memories or honestly, really any good memories, except maybe hanging around with my brother Tommy, who we were very close. But other than that, I didn't have anything to cling to or to miss in my relationship with my mother. So, in that sense, it was perhaps easier for me ultimately to step away from her than it would have been for someone who is connected with their abuser via a trauma bond.

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:52:53] Absolutely. And there's a quote in the book that stood out to me. It says, “Abused children have been taught by parenting adults that love can exist with abuse.” We rationalize being hurt by other adults by insisting that they love us. That took me 10 steps back and really, for me, typifies the dynamic that we have with abusive parents, that we walk away from it saying, “Okay, this is what love is.” And at least for myself, I very transparently will share that it took me a while to figure out how I should be treated by a partner because I had such an odd dynamic with my father. And thankfully, therapy, again, providing hope and if you want to do the work, it can avail itself. But I think for a lot of people, you get those mixed messages that makes it that much harder to have healthy relationships with others. 

Eamon Dolan: [00:53:46] Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned that. And I want to give props to Bell Hooks because she's the one who put me onto this book, All About Love. She says and I think I'm actually quoting this directly because it's short enough that I could remember it, she said, “Love and abuse simply cannot coexist.” So, they think they love you, they tell you they love you, but they only love you in the way that they might love any other object that they collect, you know, a piece of jewelry or a bauble. You were talking earlier about your abusive relative showing off the accomplishments of your children. And that's, you know, we're just decorations to them at our best. And that is not love.

[00:54:31] My mother would say to me, when she was hitting me, she would sometimes say, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” Even when I was 8 or 9, and I thought that she hung the moon, I was like, “No, no, it hurts me more than it hurts you.” And yet they're convinced of it in most cases, which doesn't help us figure things out. But once you realize in this too, when I was a parent, I couldn't imagine abusing this child whom I love so much. Love and abuse cannot coexist.

[00:55:03] This is important to me to underscore, because I think it can help a lot of survivors think seriously about stepping away because you want to reciprocate love when you feel you're getting love, even if it's so-called tough love, one of the worst oxymorons in the world. But if you realize that, “Wow, they actually don't love me,” it can become a little bit easier to disentangle in psychic terms from them.

Cynthia Thurlow: [00:55:33] Absolutely. And if someone's listening to the podcast and has experiences of things that we've discussed, what are ways that they can create boundaries, get into a position or a mindset of consideration to becoming formally estranged? I know one of the things you talk about in the book is that society conditions us that estrangement is a bad thing. You mentioned that, that blood relationship, blood is thicker than water and that because it's family, we should put up and tolerate poor behaviors that we would not otherwise tolerate in any other circumstance. How can we begin to process, move forward, create boundaries and opportunities for us to heal and move forward without these toxic individuals? 

Eamon Dolan: [00:56:20] Well, I'll boil it down because of course it takes a couple of chapters in the book, but I think the place to start is by taking a break. If you're in an ongoing relationship with an abuser, your perspective is being thrown off again and again and again every time you interact with them, but also every time you think about them and you ponder this relationship. So, stepping away temporarily, I suggest try for a few weeks or a month if you can manage it. But even a couple of weeks without contact with this person you'll start to see yourself in the world in a somewhat different way. You might see that there's just another world out there, that there's another you inside of you that's been hidden from you. 

[00:57:05] And also, you're making yourself safe in a way that you haven't been before. And as Judith Herman says and others have said after her safety first. You need safety from this person for a variety of reasons. So that's thing one. Then I think to me my favorite sentence in the book is the last sentence. But I think the most important sentence in the book might be “We should hold our family to the same standards that we hold our friends.” And we talked a little bit about this earlier in terms of chosen family, but that is a really good shorthand yardstick to use. I wouldn't put up with a friend treating me for one week the way my mother treated me for 40 something years.

[00:57:50] And once you start thinking about how your abusive relative treats you in relation to how anybody else treats you, you begin to get perspective on the relationship. So, I strongly advise when you're taking this break, I was really lucky. I got to do it during a vacation and I got to go to a nice beachy little beach town. And within a few days I stopped really thinking about her that often. And it wasn't just that I was on vacation that I started feeling lighter and brighter. But during that time, I also took, and I should say Cynthia, as I do in the book, that I stumbled upon all the stuff that I'm talking about. It turned out I found out years later that I happened to do it mostly right. 

[00:58:32] This was just by happy happenstance that I came upon this. I thought to myself, let me write this down. I really want to be able to keep this in mind. Like, what are the differences between the way my mother treats me and the way everybody else treats me? So, I wrote down a bunch of stuff like, my mother, for example, was cruel in a way that nobody else in my life was. And this happens a lot, I think, particularly with narcissists. She was a big fan of the 45-minute or hour-long tirade. One of the survivors I talked to for the book said that she would get off the phone after a 45-minute conversation with her father and her husband would say to her, “You said like three words in that whole conversation.” [Cynthia laughs]

[00:59:16] So, I knew exactly what that was like myself. I empathized with her. So that was like. I didn't want any tirades. Nobody else did that to me. So out of those, you might call it journaling or whatever, just lists of pros and cons of comparison, compare and contrast. Out of that list, I was able to devise rules. There were six or seven rules altogether, but the three big ones were no cruelty about me or about anyone else in my presence. Another one was no tirades. And the third big one was don't play the mother card anymore. As I said to her, “You have played that card on me for 45 years now and every time you won, you are not playing that card anymore.” I will say I had my list of all. I also made a list. 

[01:00:05] This was really important. I took some time, more than once, over several sessions, you might call it, to think, to draw up to the surface of my consciousness memories of what she had done to me. So, the accordion came up pretty quickly. But there was a whole bunch of stuff because as you know, dissociation is a huge part of how many of us--[crosstalk] 

Cynthia Thurlow: [01:00:26] Enormous. 

Eamon Dolan: [01:00:28] My childhood was a horror movie that I was just watching through my hands over my eyes, and there the scariest bits I just looked away from. And it wasn't until either in therapy or just giving it, just letting my mind wander that memories would come back to me. So, I wrote them down. I thought about how many times I had been beaten, for example, and on average it was about somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred times in the course of the 11 years that she beat me. And I thought about the other things that she did. There was a whole litany, of course. 

[01:01:06] So, one of the mistakes I made that I later realized is I decided that I made my rules. I'm going to present this to her. And I was doing it at the time not to say, you follow these rules or I'm estranging from you. I wasn't conscious of that. What I did want was I wanted the relationship to change. I thought it was unfair for me for the relationship to persist the way it was. And so, I went into it with her in that spirit. But I also wanted to explain myself. I said, you've done this, this, this, this and this and this to me. And it has been hugely harmful to me. And there are going to be new rules now. And here are the new rules. 

[01:01:46] And when I delivered the rule about not playing the mother card anymore, my mother gasped over the phone. And I thought, “Oh, maybe I'm getting through to her.” But she just fired back vitriol at me. She was like, “If anything, I spoiled you.” And I'm like, “Oh, shit,” [Cynthia laughs] This is not going the way I intended. And of course, what you should do is you should present it in terms not of what they have done to you, because, again, initially, you're hoping to salvage the relationship. You're presenting it in terms of what you mean, and you're presenting it as firmly, but also as politely as you possibly can. And you're doing it as quickly as possible. You and they are both going to need a breather. 

[01:02:31] And that thinks things would have gone a little bit more smoothly at the beginning if I had done it that way. Then once you presented your rules to them. This process for me took two years. It's not going to be-- again another myth about estrangement is that we just rush into it. We never rush into parting ever. It is always the product of months and years, decades, in many cases like mine, agony and hand wringing and hope and fear and all that stuff. So, for me, it was two years. And over the course of that two years, every time she broke a rule, I reminded her gently but firmly that was a rule, no cruelty in my presence, for example. If she couldn't keep that rule, if she couldn't abide by that rule, that I'd have to put a little distance between an come back to her when I was ready to talk again, for example.

[01:03:23] I had before the estrangement process, this process started. I talked to her every single day. And one of the things I realized or my therapist helped me realize, because I was describing these conversations to my therapist, and she said, what do you get out of them? And I'm like, “They were again, half hour-long tirades on her part.” And it was my shortcomings, how much better off I'd be if I'd gone to long school. What's wrong with my sister? How the blacks are taking over all this? You know, her favorite topics she would bring up. So, my therapist said, “What do you get out of these conversations?” "It's like, “Oh, nothing.” This is just to share the duty with Jerry, my sister.

[01:04:01] And my therapist said, “You should think seriously about continuing any relationship from which you get nothing.” And that's really what started me on the road, I should say, to where I ended up. So, I kept that in mind. I also kept in mind the notion. I wanted, like “What could she give back to me?” Every relationship that is positive, productive, safe, and good entails reciprocity. I wasn't getting anything from this woman. And over the course of that two years, I wasn't getting anything from her either. And I will say that, guilt and grief are the two most common fallouts of estrangement. It eased my guilt to have given her this amount of time to try to abide by the rules. But in the end, she could not. And one day I said, “That's it. We're done.”

Cynthia Thurlow: [01:05:01] Wow. 

Eamon Dolan: [01:05:02] But my consistency with which I enforced the rules again gently but firmly over those two years, really helped me. It helped me, it strengthened me for one thing. It changed the power balance in the relationship in a way that I had never experienced before. It also just strengthened my resolve, in the way that, it built up that muscle. And it also, like I said, eased my guilt when ultimately, I did decide that I had to step away. 

Cynthia Thurlow: [01:05:30] Well, kudos to you for creating the boundaries, enforcing the boundaries, writing the book. Thank you for the conversation because there are so much commonality between our circumstances and situation. Please let listeners know how to connect with you outside of this podcast, how to get access to your amazing book, The Power of Parting. One I highly recommend, especially for those of us that grew up in similar circumstances. 

Eamon Dolan: [01:05:57] Thank you so much, Cynthia. It was such a pleasure to talk to you. You really are a kindred spirit. I feel fortunate that we got to spend time together. Anyone who wants to keep up with my doings, the easiest way to do that is just to follow me on Instagram. It's just my name @eamondolan on Instagram. And in terms of where to get my book, where all great books are sold and where all bad books are sold too. Oh, it looks so pretty. Thank you for showing it. And it's out now. It's about now. And I hope that anyone who reads it gets the help they deserve. Thank you, Cynthia, very much.

Cynthia Thurlow: [01:06:37] Thank you for coming on the podcast. 

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