Maya Kruger 
[00:00:00] Maya, I am so happy, Brenda to be here. I am so excited to be here on this incredible podcast I’ve been binge listening to over the past two weeks, so I love it. Thank you for having me.  You are so welcome and what I love is that we got to meet in person and somehow that always makes a difference. You know, when you get to meet somebody face to face, spend some time with them. I don’t know. I think our world has just become so screen oriented and obviously the work I do, and I’m sure the work you do, do you see clients in person or is it all virtual? It’s mostly virtual. I will occasionally do intensivess in the city. Yeah or I’ll do occasional home visits as needed. But it is mostly virtual, right? So we got to spend three days, was it three days together? It was three days or two nights. Yeah. Oh my gosh. It was so nice. A group of women and to just have that time to sit and you can see people’s 
[00:01:00] facial expressions and their body language, and it was just so nice. And I think there was a reason. I always believe this. There’s a reason why I sat next to you or you sat next to me. Yeah. And we started talking and my listeners will appreciate this. We’re like getting to know each other and Maya says, you know, I’m therapist, I do this, and I really, and I work with moms. And I was like, wait a minute. I work with mom. So those are our people. We are them. Yes. We’re like, we are the mom people. We’re the mom people. So I think that’s really cool and I wanted to have you on for so many reasons, but I would love to have you start with some background on the your story and why you do, why you did choose to focus on mothers and generational trauma and anxiety and all the things that we’re gonna get into. So pull back the covers a little bit on, I’m gonna pull back the
 [00:02:00] covers, Brenda. Okay. So my journey is not, I don’t know that there is any classical therapist journey. I also think that when therapists spend time doing non therapy based things for a few years, it gives them more juice or information or perspective to then offer their clients that they work with. So this is a long-winded way of saying, I went to grad school at age 28 to become a therapist, and the road there was twisty. So I was born to an American mother. Israeli Iraqi father. I was born in the States and we moved to Israel when I was eight, and my whole experience there was as this new kid who was very lost and very confused and very sound sensitive, and the language sounded like everyone was yelling all the time when people were just speaking passionately, which I 
[00:03:00] now completely do. Yes, but then it felt like an assault. Yeah and I’m actually so grateful that I ended up growing up there because a lot of the tools that I would need later on in my life were developed there. Being the new kid plopped in, which it took me, I don’t think I realized it was, you know, like a a lowercase T trauma to move to a place where you don’t know the language and you don’t understand anything. That it was actually a big deal on my psyche, on my nervous system, but it was, yeah, and having to adjust and make friends and adapt and find myself without getting lost in this new culture. Those were the skills that I would eventually need in order to survive what would then come, and this is at eight years old. You moved there. I know. I was eight. I was in, I was, yeah, I was in third grade. That’s incredible. I was in third grade. That sounds very traumatizing to me. I don’t know. Like,  you 
[00:04:00] know, it’s, it’s crazy that in Delaware I lived across from Kathleen, shout out to Kathleen who we were best friends, the Jewish girl and the religious Catholic girl. We lived. In front of each other and we were best, best, best friends and the most traumatic thing was being away from Kathleen. I remember on the airplane crying and fast forward 30 something years later. We live in the same neighborhood now in the States. We don’t. We sure do. That’s so crazy. Yeah. Did you stay in touch the whole time that you had moved away? We did. We did. Wow. Led completely different lives, but we maintained the string and I think that growing up in Israel taught me it’s not because it was Israel, because that’s my experience, it taught me to adapt in the importance of relationships and of friendships in particular. Mm-hmm. Now, growing up. I am the youngest of three, so I have two older brothers, 
[00:05:00] one who is 10 years older with special needs, and a brother who is eight years older. So I kind of, it was kind of like an only child Yes. Vibe. Yeah. Because by the time we were there, you know, it was, my dad was working a lot and my mom was more with me and she was my bestie, my everything. I love that woman, so I still love her and I’ll explain in a second why I used the past tense language for that. But, you know, our relationship from day one, I believe, maybe even prior to me landing on Earth. It was complex because it was rooted in so much of the complexities of her own mother-daughter relationship, where she lost her mother when she was 26, tragically from a sudden stroke, and her mother was schizophrenic. Mm. So the times where her mother was present, this is my maternal grandmother who I never met. When she was present, you know, she allegedly was the funniest, smartest, went to college at 40 in the fifties. Cool artist, 
[00:06:00] incredible woman and then there were these times where she would be very lost in her own trauma. And it makes so much sense that she would be schizophrenic, you know, if you look at the context of her life. But my mom had this very anxious attachment to her own mother, which there’s no way to not have that in that situation. Mm-hmm. Especially with not having the language that we have nowadays for kids around growing up like that. But when she had me after two boys and I was this unexpected, pregnancy after cancer, we’re never gonna get pregnant again and then I appeared there was this very special, there was a specialness attached to the relationship for both of us. I never had mothers before. So it, for her, there was something, the way that she described it that I later found in her writings was there was a lot of pressure on it almost to raise the first fixed, quote unquote fixed female in the lineage. Yeah. A very hurt women. Yeah, and my mother herself, who was 
[00:07:00] also hilarious and brilliant and wonderful and kind and open, also struggled with anxiety, with depression throughout her life, and carried the wound of her mother. Her mother wound, and her mother lost wound into our relationship. And I really didn’t know much about my grandmother till, I think I was about 10. This is just to showcase my relationship with my mom. We would go on these walks. So we went on a walk and in the evening in this little neighborhood that we lived in, we would always go on walks. We would chat. I would mostly chat, really like to chat and I just kind of stopped her. She said something about her mom and I said, your mom was crazy, right? And she looked me dead in the eye and it was like I just pulled down her pants. Yeah. In public. Yeah. She was stripped down. She was exposed and she was furious. ’cause it was like I just named, I mean, in a very offensive 10, eight, 
[00:08:00] 10-year-old language that I know there’s something up with your mom and I can feel it, but I don’t yet understand what it is. But I know there’s something complex there and I really wanna understand ’cause I think it has to do with us mom and she said she was wonderful. That was kind of her response. She was wonderful. Yeah. And I kind of got that as a cue too. You know, STFU, right? Yes, yes. Hot topic, but that curiosity. Yep. I clearly touched something. Yeah. Yeah. But I was very attentive to my own mother’s moods, and she was a very present mother and an amazing source of comfort in my life and I was also terrified of losing her. Because that’s what I came to know about her experience of having a mom. That mothers, when they’re here, they’re this like divine, precious, wild thing to enjoy. And 
[00:09:00] then one day they can be taken out of nowhere and there’s no way to prepare and you’re left with a gaping hole in your heart and my mom kept saying to me, it took me 25 years to let her go and I always thought, that is a long ass time. Yeah. To accept someone’s death. Yeah. So my mother lost her at 26 after she was actually mentally stable then. So that’s also part of the tragedy, and I thought as a child that by me ensuring there were no open ended things in our relationships and things are always said and she knows I love her and I know she loves me, then there will be no kind of spiritual lesson to learn here, because in my mind then my young child brain. It was, God’s not gonna have anything to teach me here because we’re already close. I get it. I get it. I don’t wanna lose her, so I get it. I get it and she died when I was 18 in a car crash. Oh my gosh. Sudden on the 
[00:10:00] spot. Again, we were, our relationship was that we went hiking that day together in the morning, and then later in the evening, she and my father were in a horrible accident. He was critically injured and thank God he survived, but she was gone in a second, in a blip, like in my biggest nightmares. Wow. And my life was flipped on its head and I was this 18-year-old, kind of not fully baked human because I wasn’t done being raised and in Israel at 18, you go to the Army and then you go out about you. You continue your life. So I didn’t even give myself the benefit of thinking, wait, I’m actually a child still. So I didn’t have a lot of forgiveness or compassion for myself for not getting over it sooner and the journey of losing her and the journey of having to mother myself has become the focus of 
[00:11:00] my career. So when I was in high school, pre tragic car accident, death, I wanted to be an actress and we would speak about how, you know, I would go to Julliard and we would spend more money on the phone bill because she and I would talk all the time, would cost more than the tuition and that’s what I wanted to do. I was a theater nerd in high school. I was like an experimental theater nerd. The weird kind, the weird nerd. Beckett Breck to the, yeah, gimme the dark stuff. I’m not gonna sing numbers. No. I felt like when she died, that dream was taken away too. But I still somehow wrangled myself throughout my military two years, our mandatory service to get myself to audition in the States and take the SATs. And I did it, and I got in and I couldn’t do it. Wow.  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. Yeah. I kept imagining it was almost like, it felt so cinematic, which is very on-brand for my 
[00:12:00] very dramatic self, especially 18-year-old self. Right? That, you know, I would get out of the audition and I would get an email on my phone that says A Blackberry phone then you got accepted and then I would look to the heavens and I would say, you see it, mom? I got it. That’s how I envisioned it. In reality, I was back in Israel and I got the message and I was excited and when the more it got closer, the more it felt like I can’t take the step without her. Oh, and I eventually, I mean this worked out for the best, but I went to a wonderful conservatory, Tel Aviv, Israel, and then found myself writing plays throughout there, really discovering my artistic voice and writing for the National Theater for about five years. Creating therapeutic plays and discovering that there’s something about the creative process that is incredibly healing for me and for the people that witnessed the therapeutic piece of art and I moved to the states to get a 
[00:13:00] master’s in creative arts therapy. Where I did a thesis, which was a one woman show and a written piece called Hand-Me-Downs about the generational trauma that is transmitted through the matrilineal line. And in this show I played my maternal grandmother, my mother, and myself. Wow. Is it recorded somewhere that we could see?  It is. It is recorded. I mean, really not great quality, but it’s there. Okay. Okay. I’m dying to see it. So wait a minute, you, I’ll send it to you. Kind became a therapist before you became a therapist because it sounds like you’re writing this material for the national theater that is very therapeutic. Yeah. Yeah. But you, did you have an inkling at that point? Like, I think this is what I wanna do professionally. Or were, was it really a creative effort that was just sort of pouring out of you because of everything that had happened?  I feel like the creative force, the things that bubble up internally in me mm-hmm. Need to come out 
[00:14:00] somewhere. I can actually tell when I’m more anxious than usual, that I’m not expressing my creativity enough and when that outpour, the writing was really where things started to really come out. I made music for a while. I was kind of experimenting with different ways to almost try and excavate a feeling for me, almost like if I can put it into form, then you can understand me and then I can understand that. You know what I mean? Because the feeling was I was walking around in the world in pain that if I told you the backstory of my pain, you would be like, of course. But I kept saying I can’t wait 25 years to be okay. Mm-hmm. I don’t wanna repeat that and when I made the thesis, you know, I didn’t know I was gonna have daughters. Now I have two daughters. I mean, that’s a, and it so plot twist that I did that. Isn’t that a plot? Can you imagine if I had boys after that? Like, ah, come on, we did all that work. Yeah. I mean, it’s just so fitting. It’s like you can’t write that. 
[00:15:00] No one could have written that. Right. You can’t write that exactly. So I have daughters now, and my therapeutic work, I don’t think I answered your question, but the, when I was writing it was more from a selfish place of not like, not bad, selfish, but a way to try and take care of myself and trying to connect with others. And when I realized. Oh wow. I actually wrote a piece of therapeutic theater, and I think I like that it’s creating a conversation with not addressing it directly. Like people witness a piece of art and then it brings up their own stuff. Mm-hmm and there’s space to explore it, and I love that notion. Yeah. And in my grad school studies, it really solidified for me the fact that this is where it’s at and it’s, you know, the clinical space has really shifted for me from working with inpatient settings. To really hyper-focused on trauma to then 
[00:16:00] working with moms and working with moms with trauma and anxiety and looking at what the motherhood experience brings up in women, because it’s going to, I think you know this as a woman and a mother yourself, that its job is to bring to the surface everything that we’ve left covered. Oh, yes. You can’t escape it. It’s like you get slapped in the face in the postpartum period. By the way, I think postpartum is for life. You know? A hundred percent. You’re not the same person. Yeah, hundred percent. Yeah. It’s so true. And I love the fact, I never really thought about what you said, that you can, sometimes sitting in a therapist office across on a couch or a chair, whatever, can be a little intimidating. Mm-hmm. From somebody who has spent a lot of time sitting in therapy. But what you just said about being able to witness art as therapy and sort of let it do its job on 
[00:17:00] you, which may be very different than the job it’s doing on the person next to you. Right? Yep. It’s so beautiful and so much less intimidating and so I think, I just think that could be an avenue for people who, and I know a lot of our moms have tried therapy traditional therapy, I would say. Mm-hmm. And so I love this idea of maybe expanding, even if it’s not an intentionally therapeutic piece of art, right? Like, you wrote this amazing thing, but maybe it’s a rock on the path that they’re walking on that’s in a specific shape or something. So that just really resonated when you said that, that I think we can heal in ways that don’t necessarily align with the, you know, DSM five or Right. The insurance and I’m saying this as a clinical psychotherapist, right? Right. I think it’s important to be armed with both but the thing is the aesthetic container that art provides whatever form of art that 
[00:18:00] may be assigns meaning to something and a wound, when we put a frame around it and context around it, we can kind of distance ourself from it in order to get perspective. Yeah. And when we have that perspective. We can suddenly think new thoughts because we’re not enmeshed with the wound. Mm-hmm. We’re separate from it. We can witness it. Yeah. Yeah. So, wow. So now you’re in Israel, you find out, you get into Julliard, right? Mm-hmm. How insane is that? Then you realize, no, I can’t do that. You stay, you do this incredible work in Israel and how is it that you then come to be where you are today in New York in a practice that you’re leading, really focusing on moms and motherhood and the generational 
[00:19:00] traumas that we all carry. Like fill in the gap there for me. Yeah. So after getting accepted to a few schools in the States that were very, the one I was most excited about, by the way, was Stella, the Stella Adler studio, which it represented something to me. I don’t know where I heard it, but somewhere like getting accepted to that studio felt. Like, like, like I was someone and after going, you know, doing, finishing the Army and then finishing conservatory, completing a degree in directing and theater. In education and then deciding to get a master’s in the States. I didn’t know what I wanted to focus on, but I felt like it was almost like the shadow of whatever typecast of mother was kept following me and he was even in an acting school, which, you know, we had these, it was a very method acting class. You know, we were very serious about ourselves. We were not. 
[00:20:00] Insufferable. Okay. They’re all insufferable and we did a lot of work of improvisation and acting out each other’s scenes from our lives and I kept getting cast as peoples mothers of course you did. And I, Brenda, I was livid. It felt so offensive that I could act out someone’s mother, by the way really well. ’cause I somehow knew that role and was so incredibly resentful that I didn’t have that presence in my own life. Yeah, and that contrast really messed with me was that. I get even in the role of caregiver as clinician, right? Mm-hmm. There’s something very caregiving about that. Like it’s almost like a surrogate in a lot of ways. That there was a part of me that felt it’s not fair that I can offer something I’m not allowed to get. Mm-hmm. The work that you had to do yourself and I had to find ways. Exactly. Yeah. 
[00:21:00] So I had to fill in whatever, integrate whatever role mother was right in her absence, right, so that I can survive and not just survive, but be okay in the world and offer myself an experience as a whole person and not just as, not just a trauma survivor, but as a motherless daughter, which I felt like was written all over my forehead for the first 15 years of it. Wow. Motherless daughter. That’s, I think that probably represents a lot of people, even whose mothers are still alive. Exactly. Because what I have come to learn is that mother is a role. It’s a role that we play. We play it. It was played on us. The absence was maybe played on us, but it’s a role that doesn’t have to be a biological mother. And mother can be also support friend, art therapist, self. Yeah. 
[00:22:00] You, we talked earlier about generational trauma, and I think that often gets, the wrap of like big T traumas, like mm-hmm. You know, my, whatever it is, like, you know giant traumas that kind of roll downhill generation after generation and I think there are also smaller, maybe more nuanced and subtle traumas that carry forward in a family. And I’m especially thinking about our families who are listening who have substance use, mental health challenges. You know, also process addictions. Like I definitely wanna get into that with you. Mm-hmm. And so those things are being carried through and carried through and I can’t help but wonder the role that that plays. In all of these kind of maladaptive ways that we’re 
[00:23:00] trying to exist in the world. Yeah. And maybe you could help us understand that a little bit. Yeah. I think when you’re talking about generational trauma or how it was previously regarded, families of Holocaust survivors. Yes and that’s where there’s a lot of research on that, which is definitely a generational trauma. But we see that in indigenous people and people of color, that there is carried through generationally pain. That there was no time to process because of survival. So what I wanna say about maladaptive stuff that is, at some point, any maladaptive behavior was incredibly adaptive. So even if we look about, look at my grandmother as schizophrenia, it was incredibly adaptive to not be in reality at the time that her psyche went to an alternate place. Sure. Because the reality was insufferable for her and also she became 
[00:24:00] schizophrenic, during the postpartum period, which is when we can’t escape all this stuff. Any behavior when we look at the context is brilliant because it serves a purpose, doesn’t have the best consequences. No, no. Is it the best choice for No. Yeah, but it itches a scratch. That needs to be itched in the moment that maybe it didn’t feel like there were other ways to reach that. Yeah, and when we start to look at context, we start to de-stigmatize the person with addiction, mental health stuff, process addictions, parents dealing with this. When you realize you did the best that you could with what you knew in the moment. Yeah. There was no other way to go forward, so you had to stumble through it. Yeah, I’ve heard. And we’re not here to not make mistakes. Right. Go ahead.
 [00:25:00] Well, I’ve heard so many folks, you know, have had so many people on the podcast that are in long-term recovery, and they often say what you just said, like, yeah, from the outside looking in, it made no sense that I was mm-hmm using cocaine every day or heroin or whatever. But they credit that for keeping them alive long enough to be able to find a better solution. Yeah. And many of them say, you know, I probably would’ve died by Suicide ide, if I hadn’t had that crutch or that band aid or the solve, or whatever you wanna call it, until I finally found X, Y, Z, whatever it was for them, that led them out of that into recovery. So I think it’s easy as a parent to look at these quote unquote maladaptive behaviors and have a really hard time seeing them as adaptive, like you said, within the context. Within the context, and with awful 
[00:26:00] consequences and to be able to, and this is where I would start touching on anxiety a little bit to deal with the anxiety that that brings to be able to steal ourselves for the work that we have to do to help our kids, if that makes sense. Yeah. I know that was really long. No, I’m gonna, I’m gonna kind of try and decipher what I get from it. Okay. Okay. When a child is acting in ways that are maladaptive and dangerous, to be frank, like substance misuse and mm-hmm. Things in that area, yeah and dangerous behaviors. It’s hard for the parent to really recognize why they’re doing this. ’cause all they see is the danger side. You see the behavior, you don’t see the behind the scenes. You see what’s projected externally. I wanna kind of go a step deeper with that. Is the mothers that are dealing with this, that they can also judge themselves in this place, 
[00:27:00] right, that I’m focused on me you said stealing themselves from helping their kid. But the anxiety that comes up, the shame, the guilt, the embarrassment, the devastation. That terror and fear that live in a body of a parent, of a mother whose child is engaging in dangerous behaviors. It makes so much sense that the anxiety and shame would be directed inward. Yeah. And when we try to give ourselves shit for feeling the way we feel, we’re adding another layer of complexity to a situation that we just have to allow ourselves to be in so that we can finish the cycle of it and move on to the next thing because me focusing on my anxiety and being so upset about what’s happening and being concerning myself. You know, you and I spoke about this, about did I cause this, is it my fault? Is it something I did? Was it the baby food? Is it this, I think it’s, this happened. I didn’t handle it well. Yeah. Looking for the perfect little 
[00:28:00] storm that created this. Is taking way too much responsibility over someone’s entire life, and it’s the way that they digested an experience because they are maybe predisposed to something because that’s just the structure of their personality. That’s the way their soul is built and sure there is nature and nurture here, but a lot of times when we go into excessive anxiety, anxiety is incredibly adaptive when, I mean we need it biologically to survive, anxiety, it alerts us that there’s danger, but when we are excessively finding ourselves in spirals that are not allowing us to function or to support our child in the way that we want to, I would consider thinking of that as its own process addiction, which is a non substance based addiction because it steals you from the reality and dual alternative space where you are familiar with it, even though it feels like hot garbage. Wow. 
[00:29:00] Mind blown right there. Anxiety. Tell me what’s coming up for you. I’m just thinking of that, of anxiety being its own process addiction. Yeah. And I think that is very true. I see. Somehow got really blessed in this life that I don’t think that I struggle with anxiety. I get anxious at times, but as a baseline in my personality, I don’t think that I have that, and at the same time I see my friends and our members and other women who do have that and it looks debilitating. Yeah. And I think it can be, if we can reframe that like you just did, as this is its own thing and I think of it as that, you know the story about the, there’s two wolves in you and they’re fighting and which one’s gonna survive the one you feed. So if we continue to feed and feed and feed the 
[00:30:00] anxiety, it’s not gonna go away. Right. But it’s also understanding because no one wants anxiety. No. Anxiety doesn’t feel, it’s not a good feeling to be anxious. No. But when we find ourselves stuck there. Sometimes it’s circumstantially appropriate to be anxious. Absolutely. You should be anxious, especially as a parent whose child is engaging in dangerous behaviors. Yeah. How would you not be anxious when it steals you away from your ability to function, I’m talking about not like for a week or two or a month for a year, that you have been out of commission, that you’re unable to show up for your other family members, for their other children, for your job when it steals you away from your own life. There’s something else going on there and the first thing of course we wanna do is, okay, so make it go away. I don’t wanna feel like this is terrible. Make it go away. Make it go away and I wish I had a magic wand, but I also think that anxiety, like any emotion, is a communication. 
[00:31:00] Something is overwhelming me. Something feels like it’s too much. If I imagine myself without the anxiety. I don’t know what would motivate me to do anything. I feel incompetent. I feel way outta my depth. I don’t know what I’m doing. It should have been me. All these thoughts that just get caught up into this little sinkhole that pulls you down when you notice that it’s not about stopping it. It’s about getting curious and creating some distance. Like we said, that we observe a piece of art. I’m looking at it. Hmm. I see that my thoughts are taking me on an effing ride right now. They’re taking me all over the place. I feel out of control and I notice that I feel very helpless, for example. Mm-hmm observing that almost like you’re reporting the weather. Yeah. There’s wind from here. There’s this from this, just looking at it from a little bit of a distance can start to separate you from the anxiety so you can start to recognize I’m not the anxiety and the 
[00:32:00] anxiety is not me. It’s something I experience, but I also experience hunger and tiredness and happiness. You know what I mean? Yeah. It’s another tool in my arsenal of emotions that I was armed with. Yeah. It’s the loudest one right now, maybe, right? Like it’s at certain, it’s calling my attention. It’s really So what’s the attention it may need? Yeah. What do you find is the attention it needs? Because I think we’re, you know, well, I shouldn’t say we’re good at identifying that, but I think if somebody’s listening, it’s like, okay, wait, I can do that. I can observe, I can mm-hmm. You know, recite the weather and then what, like what’s the step from there? Which is even that is an anxious thought right and then what? Yes. Right, because I wanna make it stop. That’s the part of the, I wanna make it stop of course you do but what if it doesn’t? If it doesn’t? So I have noticed that when anxiety is very loud, it usually is a younger part of myself that is 
[00:33:00] asking for something just like when a small child is having like an epic tantrum in a supermarket. Okay. There’s usually something else going on there. They were frustrated about something. They’re overtired. They’re cranky, they had a sugar crash. You didn’t pay attention to some. You know what? There’s something that, for them is a big deal. Yeah. When we look at the context again, it makes complete sense. But if I keep ignoring the tantrum or if I keep ignoring the child, rather not the tantrum, they’re gonna make it louder and louder until I pay attention. Now, I’m not saying the way to stop a tantrum is to pay attention ’cause that’s not it. But our communications from ourself become louder. But like with a physical symptom, if I have a sore throat and I don’t address it and I keep waiting and waiting and waiting, I’m gonna be very sick at some point, likely. Mm-hmm.  Until I have to stop and pay attention. So what is the part of me that is asking for my attention and then I zoom in even more. How 
[00:34:00] old is that part? What does that part feel? What does that part fear? What does it need from me? ’cause it never actually needs something from the external world. Anxiety will tell us, I need you to be okay so I can be okay. Oh yes. Right. That’s also the codependent part of anxious parenting, again, makes so much sense with a child that’s using. It is not something I need externally. It’s I need something from me. I need me to be with me when I’m feeling like this. I need to not self abandon. I need to offer myself soothing in a way that’s not disconnecting me from reality. I need reassurance from myself maybe I just need myself to just park next to me and say, I’ll sit with you till this feeling passes. I got you. It’s never about fixing. It’s about presence, and I think it’s for inner parenting and for outer parenting as well. Yeah, the tendency 
[00:35:00] to try to reach out and pull something in is so strong and also so encouraged by our culture today. Take this pill. Oh, if you take this, you know, this will help you sleep. That’s right. This will help you not be anxious. Or it could be a relationship, or like you said, our kids like, I just need you to stop doing what you’re doing right. And then I’ll be okay. Right, and that makes sense. If you kind of don’t dig too deep, like, well, of course I would feel better if my kid was not doing the crazy things that they’re doing. But I think if you dig under that a little bit. We’re actually saying that in so many different ways to our partners, our spouses, our parents, to the world, like, I just need everything around me to stop making me feel this way. And so that ability to, I like. The idea of just park 
[00:36:00] next to yourself and slow down, which is so hard to do. So hard, so hard. It’s so hard to do one, because the world’s crazy and busy and loud and all of that and also because when you do sit down, I have found, and park yourself next to yourself, you kind of look at yourself and go, huh, what are you doing? Like, mm-hmm. You know, what are you doing? Because what, you should be doing something.  Yeah or like what are you trying to achieve? Or what you know, either what are you doing or what are you not doing? Because when my son finally got through his craziest years. I started, it was the first time I’d ever meditated. I always thought up until that point, like, this is for some yahoos in, you know, India. Like, I don’t know what’s going on with all these mm-hmm people meditating. It just seemed weird to me but as you know, we went through quite a trauma with him and 
[00:37:00] so, mm-hmm. I was fairly open to trying new things, and so I started to meditate and I’ve been meditating ever since. And at first it was really uncomfortable because I’m kind of sitting there parked next to myself, having to be quiet with myself. Having to look at why is this so difficult for you to sit still for five minutes or 10 minutes? What are you thinking about? You know what I mean? Like all the things, like all of a sudden I became very clear to myself and that felt really uncomfortable. Isn’t it interesting that we live in a world where we constantly wanna be seen, but also not wanna be seen at the same time? Yes. Because the moment you were seen by your own damn self. Right. It was so uncomfortable. You did not like it. You felt called out by you. Mm-hmm. Oh, for sure. Yeah. It was so much easier. And I think that this is true of a lot of us moms, I can’t speak to the dad experience is that, we do 
[00:38:00] become addicted to our kids’ addiction. Yep. We become addicted to trying to control everything in our world around us. Make sure that this is going right and that’s going right. And I think part of the reason, at least why I did that is because it was easier to do that than to sit down and look at myself, you know? What do you think you were avoiding in yourself? I was avoiding my own sense of like, who are you? And you know, I had come through a career that really, I had built my around as like the definition of myself. So as I was starting to sort of like peel back the layers of myself. Like, huh. Why? Why was that so important to you? Why was it so important to be this person who was so successful and did all these things and flew all over the world and you know, sat in the boardrooms and pitched the $10 million, whatever, 
[00:39:00] and it got really uncomfortable and so it was easier just to like keep my focus externally and just avoid having to ask myself. What is it that I don’t wanna see here? You know? And I think a lot of us do that. It’s, yeah, it’s easier than having to say, why am I trying to control what my husband eats? Why am I trying to control where my kid goes to school? Why am I trying, you know, all of the things, like, why am I doing that? That’s not my job. Well, it’s all about trying to find, we’re chasing a feeling. Yeah.  We never actually chase the things. We chase feelings. But the shame and guilt and fear often that, that are associated with having a kid that’s engaging in dangerous behaviors. It can mirror a lot of very difficult, complex feelings in the mom, as in even some, some ones that are not, not 
[00:40:00] kosher to say sometimes. Like, I was never, I never pulled this much attention. I would never get away with that. I never did that. I never thought that behavior’s not okay. There’s a lot of judgment there and there’s a lot of feelings about the mom’s own upbringing of I was never given that leeway to mess up. That’s a big one that I hear. Yeah, and the healing has to start. The mom with herself has to start with herself, obviously get the kid all the help. Yeah. But your wellbeing and your sturdiness is not dependent on whether they figure it out or not.  No, it can’t be. Mm-hmm. It can’t be, and I do, I’m sure my listeners are sick of me saying that this can really be such a gift to experience in your life as much. It is the most painful thing. 
[00:41:00] It can be such a gift because I guarantee I would not have done the hard work that I’ve had to do to examine my own self, had my son not been sort of the loudest, you know, signal flare in the family, like his response to life and everything that was going on was the loudest, scariest, most acute. And I think if he hadn’t done that, if he hadn’t gone through all of that, I would’ve just gone right on blissfully unaware that there was more work to be done, you know? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It’s often the people or the events that crack us open, that devastate us, that allow for a deeper human experience. And it doesn’t mean that they feel good or that we’re happy about them, but they break us open. And I’m thinking about in the context of my own story. Of course, I would love, 
[00:42:00] I would’ve loved for my mom to be present in my life and to meet my husband and my children, and for that gashing wound to not be a part of my existence. But it also deepened my understanding and my compassion for her, yeah,  for my grandmother, for the motherhood experience, for the ways that the events we experience, shape our lives and our internal lives, and for the incredible responsibility we carry as mothers to heal what we can in ourselves as to not pass on what we were given. We wanna pass. I mean, my whole joke is, my daughters are going to speak in therapy about other stuff that I did. Like this lady just couldn’t stop asking me how we’re feeling all the time and it was obnoxious, right? It’s annoying. She was too aware of us. I mean, the goal is to give them kind of new things, but not to continue patterns that you know mm-hmm are not helpful.  Yes, 
[00:43:00] for sure. Oh, it’s such hard work. I mean, it’s incredibly hard work. Yeah. It’s just, but what else are we doing on the planet if we’re not doing the work, what else are we doing? I don’t know. There’s a lot of things we could be doing that’s true. That we should be doing. And I wonder with the anxiety piece, ’cause I just see this so much in our moms and I think what I want to make a distinction between and hopefully you can help being the therapist and me not being a therapist, is, like I said, I don’t feel like I have an anxious personality. I definitely have felt anxiety and I feel anxiety at times, but it’s more situational. I know and see these moms who I would say have an anxious baseline like that is mm-hmm just their baseline and what the difference is between those and how 
[00:44:00] we then are pass, like what are we then passing on as we talk about generational trauma? What message are we sending? If we do have a kind of baseline anxious personality? What is that message that we’re passing to our kids? The way that you feel about your own anxiety is the message that you’re passing. So if I judge myself for being an anxious person, they’re going to witness someone who is self-critical and that’s what they absorb. So it’s not about being anxious. I actually love it when kids, even my kids, you know, that’s the whole thing about being a mom. You’re exposed. When they see me fumble and like really struggle with something because I’m not perfect. I never claim to be perfect. I’m a highly flawed human. I’m working on stuff all the time. Everyone’s working on something and how 
[00:45:00] good it is to know that you can love someone so much and know that they’re not perfect, they’re not infallible, and they struggle too. That’s the important piece. I would give it language. If you’re an anxious mom, I would tell the kid I’m feeling really anxious sometimes I have a hard time calming down, and I don’t know what to do, but I’m working on it and I’m not gonna stop working on it because I’m important. That’s an amazing message to pass through. Huge.  You’re not gonna give up on yourself. It’s hard. It’s scary. They could see you cry and they can also see you be resilient. It’s not about perfection, it’s about modeling that you can come back up. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense and I like the idea of giving it words. Giving it language. Yeah. And not letting it be the thing that is like strangling you and 
[00:46:00] holding you back or kind of that elephant in the room, which I think often happens too right of like kids know they are so brilliant from the, I mean, you know, and they’re intuitive. They don’t have words. Yeah. I didn’t know, but I said to my mother, you know, your mom was crazy. We know these things. Right. And you never met, met her, right? You never met your grandmother? No, she died way before I was born. Yeah. So that’s, but kids know. Yes. So I think it’s just better to give it words, call it out, because I think we often feel like, especially as moms, that we are supposed to have all the answers. We’re supposed to have it together. I know I was like that when my son was struggling for the, probably the first four years of his struggle. For some reason, even though I was an advertising person, I thought I should know everything about mental health and addiction. Of course 
[00:47:00] and so how would you not, how would I not, we didn’t even have AI then, so I was trying to read books and all that, and I found it so refreshing once he got into his first wilderness program and I started learning that I did not have to have all the answers, and one of the best answers I could give was, I don’t know. Mm-hmm. And I just felt this huge weight come off of me like, oh, I don’t have to have all the answers. That doesn’t make me a bad mom. It doesn’t make me a bad parent. I can just say. I don’t know, but we can figure it out. Yeah. And that was so liberating to be able to do that and probably a gift to my son because he finally saw, oh, my mom is human. She’s admitting that she’s human and there no impossible standards. Yeah. Because then those roll down to him [00:48:00] right and I still have impossible standards, and I’m trying to be better about that and not have those passed on to my kids because it’s not a fun way to live either. You know, it’s not, I’m all about, you know, challenging ourselves in setting goals and being aspirational, but also recognizing that we’re just humans who are trying our best here for the most part and we’re gonna make mistakes and we’re not here to do it perfectly. Yeah. And children, were not given to angels to raise them. They were given to mothers and to parents and our job is to go on a journey together. It’s not supposed to be seamless. Yeah. I want to rewind just briefly because mm-hmm. I know at one point you told me that you had an experience at Outward Bound and we somehow, we didn’t get to that while you were going through your road here and what, the reason I wanna talk 
[00:49:00] about that, if you’re willing to, is because a lot of parents are in a situation where they’ve, considered something, you know, out of the home or considered something that feels a little non-traditional and as somebody who didn’t struggle with substance use or, you know mm-hmm any of that, I am curious to know what, how that came to be and then what your experience was. I am so happy to talk about it ’cause it was such a pivotal moment in my young life. I begged my parents to let me go from Israel, mind you, on an outward bound expedition as it was called. Since I was 15. Okay. Because you, you don’t have to sign paperwork that your kid may die. You may fall in a waterfall. And they, they were, my, my mom was like, how about no. My older brother, who I really looked up to and wanted to do everything he did, did it when he was 15. So he set the standard and me being a budding feminist was like, if he can do it, and I really wanted, had something to prove. I eventually did go at 17. I just knew 
[00:50:00] it was outdoorsy. I knew I liked to hike. I knew that I liked nature, and I knew that I’m up for an adventure. That’s what I knew, right? And I finally got ’em convinced. So I’m not letting them drop this. So we found a white water rafting trip in the Green River in Utah. I had to fly on like a tiny airplane in Colorado at some point. It was a whole journey to go. That was the first time I flew by myself and my understanding from the paperwork or online was that this was an international trip, as in other people are coming from other countries. Right? Yeah. That was not so much the case. So I got there and a lot of folks were court mandated. Oh boy. Almost everyone smoked cigarettes. They had to give that up at some point there. Some people struggled with addiction, some people weren’t even in school and guess who was the only international kid? This theater nerd. Oh boy. Yeah. And you know what? 
[00:51:00] It was, I can’t speak highly enough of the experience because it was 23 days. Three of those were a solo, we called it, where you are alone with the whistle around your neck and nine crackers a day and once a day, your instructor comes to fill your bottle of water, but you’re by yourself for three days. As in sleeping by yourself in nature, eating by yourself, and you can just journal and walk around if you want to. And that’s where I became acquainted. I sat next to myself. Mm-hmm and, and I dared to ask questions. Yeah and I dared to take a look at some very maladaptive behaviors that I had then were, that were not substance related, but they are, they were very body image related. They were very socially obsessed related. There were a lot of things that I struggled with that fell under the umbrella of, you know, acceptable, but they still hurt and they 
[00:52:00] were still very distressing to me. This trip changed my life and it changed my relationship with my mother because I started to see the ways in which I was picking up on her history impacting us and there was no way it would not, but I was starting to see that, and I don’t think I would’ve survived my mom’s death without that trip. Hmm. That’s amazing. That is so interesting that experience sort of wove its way into your life when it did ’cause that sounds like it was just a year before she, summer, before even less. Yeah.  Wow. Wow. Well, thank you for sharing that. I know it’s one of those things, I personally think every young person should have some sort of a, an experience like that. I think we don’t have enough rites of passage in our culture. I agree. Here in the US I think maybe a little bit more, some Jewish friends who seem to think, 
[00:53:00] you know, that we’re crazy here, that were like, well, of course you would do this and you would do that, and then, you know. Mm-hmm. It just seems like there’s a little bit more structure to the growing up process. Yeah.  In the Jewish culture. But we don’t really have anything other than, Ooh, on your 21st birthday, go get drunk. That seems to be the only, that is so true. We do need these rites of yes. We need ceremonies. Yes. We need traditions. We need things that mark the passage of time. Yes. And that things that we can assign meaning to that mark where we are on the journey. Yeah. And if we’re just leaving that to substances and partying, we’re kind of, I mean, it’s very hard to find yourself without an extremely strong anchor internally, which who has that as an adolescent, no one, you’re gonna be easily swayed.  Yeah and that’s so I, I love that.  Yeah. Okay. Well, I cannot thank you enough. I know I need to let you go, but I just wanted to have this conversation with you. I think it’s so meaningful for mothers in 
[00:54:00] particular. I know there’s also dads listening and maybe this will help dads understand their partners or ex-partners. Mother is a role. You can be a motherly dad. Yes, yes, yes. Especially for you single dads. If you’re out there doing alone, man. Mm-hmm. We are just hats off to you. So hat, all the hats? Yes. Thank you Maya, so much. We’re gonna put a link in the show notes. Thank you for having me to you and definitely send me a link to that video so I can see your I’ll performance. I wanna see that and just appreciate you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much Brenda. Take good care. Thank you.  Thanks for having me.